Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - Navy SEAL Team 3 Operator: China, Iraq & Taking Saddam’s Palace | Mike Ritland • 215

Starting point is 00:00:00 He and I are on the rooftop, and it's in the middle of f***ing night, and from that vantage point, you can see the Tikrit Airport, which is the Air Force airstrip. And underneath it, they had had all of their munitions. I mean, not just ammo, I mean like missiles, f***ing bombs, explosives, you name it. They had all of their s*** stored underneath the airport, which to me, even not understanding anything, it seems like a dumb place to put that stuff. Cause that's generally going to be target number one is, is airfields. But so we bombed out of that. And so for like the whole time we were there, this, this airfield, this airstrip, it looks like the surface of the sun, like with solar flares, like it's just blowing up constantly for two weeks. So we're just like, like five-year-olds playing with matches, like just staring at this

Starting point is 00:00:45 carnage blowing up, being fascinated by it. And then all of a sudden, these three little blips of light from a different part of the city, a little further south and a lot closer towards us, you see, and we're just kind of sitting there and don't think much of it. And then all of a sudden, three explosions about 400 yards directly south of where we're at. And immediately I'm like, oh, and then three more blips. And then now it's like 200 yards south of where we're at. And immediately I'm like, oh, and then three more blips. And then now it's like 200 yards south of where we're at, then three more. And now it's like rattling the windows right south. So they're just walking mortars into us. And we look at each other. We're like, I guess this is it. We can't get off this rooftop. It's going to hit the roof. We're dead. We're five

Starting point is 00:01:21 stories up. So we're just like, holy and no sooner than we kind of looked at each other, like, how about a high five? You know, we're like, what the are we going to do? All of a sudden from across the river, you hear this like mechanized whirl of Optimus Prime having an orgasm, like this weird, just this crazy mechanical whizzing sound and whatever. And then all of a sudden you just hear this. 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.

Starting point is 00:02:00 But you're from Iowa, so you're not a Cowboys fan, are you? Not really. I mean, I just don't really give that much of a shit. Plus, I think it would be hard to be a Cowboys fan. Alright, yeah, that's an acceptable answer. This is an Eagles household, so it's a sensitive subject. Actually, I like the Eagles. I mean, to me, I like any team that has a good story, or even if there's a player that has a good story, I'll root for them. And I do enjoy watching football and professional sports but

Starting point is 00:02:25 i just like i refuse to get so wrapped up into it where you know if they were having a good year and then lost in the first round that it would ruin my fucking day like i just refuse to to be that wrapped up into it you know yeah when i was younger i was so much like that because it's like a religion in philadelphia but you know when i got into my career i had to kind of put that aside because it's just like it messes with your head and it's like all right let's grow men playing in Philadelphia, but when I got into my career, I had to kind of put that aside. It messes with your head, and it's like, all right, it's grown men playing sports. Let's relax a little bit here. Well, I mean, to me, the biggest thing is, do you think that they give a fuck about you?

Starting point is 00:02:53 No. They don't. You think if you're having a bad day, they give a fuck? No, they don't. You think if you lose your job, they care? No, they don't. So to me, it's like, well, fuck them then. But we care about what they do.

Starting point is 00:03:04 We care about all the latest news on them. As soon as Jerry Jones is worried about how much money I'm making and has a bad day, if something bad happens to me, then I'll worry about the Cowboys. Well, you're not missing any meals. You seem to be doing pretty well these days. Yeah, I mean, I don't have anything to complain about, that's for sure. Multiple businesses, right? And you've had the podcast for six years

Starting point is 00:03:25 yep and this is like what 15 years 16 years since you left the navy seals yeah so yeah you lived like three careers over since then that's awesome yeah i mean it's it's weird it feels uh in some ways like a lifetime ago and in some ways just yesterday uh like a lot of things i guess but yeah i mean sometimes i like if i'm driven to do something uh i forget kind of where i came from ways just yesterday, uh, like a lot of things, I guess. But yeah, I mean, sometimes I, like if I'm driven to do something, uh, I forget kind of where I came from or how much I've done before this, you know, type, type of thing. But, uh, but no, I, I mean, I, I'm happy where I'm at for sure. Well, that's great. Cause you, you've obviously had an amazing career. We're gonna talk all about it today, get into your backstory and everything. And you managed to bridge kind of right from your career, from your Navy SEAL career into your current business with dogs and training them and kind of like scratching the itch, which I think is really, really cool. Something that you're passionate about that kind of continues your work.

Starting point is 00:04:20 But for people out there who haven't seen the Mic Drop podcast or haven't heard your story before, where did you grow up, Mike? So I'm originally from Waterloo, Iowa, which is a nice little town. I mean, there's not much going on there. But to grow up there, I think, was good and beneficial for – especially for the path that I went on. You know, because there's not this, like, overstimulation of shit to do. You kind of have to self-entertain and figure out your own deal there because there's very little to do. I enjoyed my childhood. Growing up in the 80s was pretty awesome. I think about it a fair bit.

Starting point is 00:05:10 What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. A bit like from that almost depressive nostalgia, like missing the 80s and kind of how it was then. But I joined the Navy right out of high school. I swam competitively all growing up. I did martial arts for a few years, kind of before UFC was a thing. I was in this like kind of underground, uh, dojo that had, that was kind of a mixed martial arts. Like we did

Starting point is 00:05:51 karate wrestling, you know, Filipino stick fighting, um, boxing. I mean, we, we mixed a lot of different things and it was kind of tailored to each, each student's strengths and weaknesses and kind of custom developing your fight style kind of thing. So it was pretty ahead of its time. As far as that goes, it wasn't a commercial place. What was your specialty? How'd they customize you? Uh, I mean, it was, it was kind of just a little bit of everything. Cause I was, I was young enough and athletic enough to where, you know, there was nothing that I couldn't at least be proficient at. Nothing really necessarily stood out as, as being, uh, better than anything else. So I kind of just

Starting point is 00:06:30 did a jack of all trades approach, but like there were, you know, 40 year old sheriff's deputies that, you know, had a bad knee or, you know, whatever. So it was like, uh, you know, the instructor would, would kind of work with each, each student a little differently and kind of tailor stuff which uh also you know the mental uh toughness was a was a big component of it too it was a very old school kind of traditional martial arts studio where like um you know it was very respect oriented very kind of militant as far as the rules and bowing for respect and the hierarchy within the belts and, uh, you know, just doing a lot of the little kind of traditional things that I think most commercial dojos, uh,

Starting point is 00:07:11 you know, don't, don't really partake in these days, especially, but, uh, all, all of those two things combined, uh, were a huge driving force in terms of me also wanting to join the Navy. But I graduated high school at 17, joined the Navy right away and had to wait until my 18th birthday to go to boot camp and then left right after. So you said those were the forces, but is that something like as a kid, was your dad in the military or someone in your family that you looked up to and you wanted to do that? Both of my grandfathers were. My dad's dad was in the Army in World War II. And my mom's, which, you know, today being the D-Day anniversary, I don't know when this will air.

Starting point is 00:07:50 Yeah. And then my mom's dad was in the Navy. And both of them had, I wouldn't say experiences that were like, you know, they weren't at the Battle of the Bulge or, you know, at Normandy or anything. But like my mom's dad was on a fleet dad was in a fleet of minesweepers, and there were 98 of them in this fleet, and only two of them came home. And he was on one of them, obviously. Whoa. Was that Pacific? In the Mediterranean. Okay.

Starting point is 00:08:18 So kind of right at the height of in the middle of World War II when there were U-boats and mines fucking everywhere, you know, and, uh, so pretty intense experiences. He talked very little about it. Uh, I don't think it was even like a shell shock or PTSD thing. I think at least looking back on it, it's hard to kind of ascertain that I think as a child, but he never seemed like, oh, I don't want to talk about it or bothered by it. He just didn't, didn't really get into it a whole lot. And the few times that he did, he didn't seem troubled by it. I think he just had kind of moved past and what have you, but my dad's dad was, uh, was kind of a different, different cat. He, uh, grew up on a farm and like, I mean, like most guys did at that time, but it was

Starting point is 00:09:03 just, you know, it was kind of a troublemaker got got in trouble a lot and was an alcoholic and smoked you know four packs of non-filters a day and was a womanizer and like he just uh but he he was uh on the european front also but he actually got got kicked out of the army for uh he got in a in a bar fight uh with an english soldier and killed him and uh you know if that tells you how times have changed you know like nowadays you'd spend the rest of your life in leavenworth for that they just sent him home and kicked him out of the army you know but for a bar fight that's what it was like you know they were on liberty whatever and it was mixed you know english soldiers american whatever. Yeah. He got in a fight and beat him to death. So, um, both of those, uh, for sure shaped my

Starting point is 00:09:51 motivation to want to serve. Uh, I've always been, I think, fascinated and kind of looked at the world war II generation, uh, with kind of a romanticized lens. And I've just always really appreciated what the entire world went through. And that was a big inspiration for it as well. Are you a huge history guy? I mean, it's definitely something that I'm more interested in than most things. I don't know that I'd call myself a buff with it. Like if you were to give me a bunch of trivia, I'm sure I'd fail miserably. But I enjoy it.

Starting point is 00:10:25 I love history and find it fascinating. Yeah, there's this kid, Rishi Sharma, who I got to show you his channel when we're done. I don't know if you can pull it up, Alessi. Type in Rishi Sharma to YouTube. 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. But it's pretty amazing what he does. He, when he was like 17 years old and in high school,

Starting point is 00:10:51 he had been obsessed with World War II and so amazed at, you know, how close things came to falling apart that he went to like a local nursing home and asked to meet World War II veterans, like the heroes. And so then pretty soon he started like a foundation with it. And for the last seven, eight years, the kid has not had a career. He's made no money. He's had a foundation and he goes around and he interviews World War II veterans around the world. That's amazing.

Starting point is 00:11:19 And gets their history. It's like it is the most underrated channel on YouTube. Yeah. It's absolutely unbelievable, but it's crazy how many different – Experiences. Not just experiences, but the different – this is a horrible word, but like the different theaters everyone had to fight in. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 00:11:39 For sure. Like there was North Africa. There was Europe. But then there was Europe down south. And then there was the Pacific. There were the islands on the Pacific. And you just, it's almost like you start hearing these guys and you're like, oh, I forgot about that one. Yeah. Oh my God, I never even knew about that one.

Starting point is 00:11:52 Yeah. It was so insane what those guys went through. How old is this kid? He's like 25. Wow. That's amazing. He was calling me from JFK the other night because they wouldn't let him on his plane. And he had to get another ticket because he's going over to France for D-Day with these guys. He just, it's amazing. Like he really,

Starting point is 00:12:08 really lives and breathes it. But yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. It's cool to hear that like your, some of your motivation came from the greatest generation. Yeah. And you know, I, I, I think maybe even to an unnatural degree as a child, looked at, um, just the opportunity that America provides and was maybe more appreciative of it than I think most children, um, just, yeah, just, I always felt like this is the greatest country in the world and I want to do something to perpetuate it and kind of pay it forward. And I've really always been a most bang for your buck driving the decisions that I've made really throughout my entire life, even as a teenager. And no different there is that I thought, okay, I want to join the military. I want to serve to the best of my ability within the confines of the military.

Starting point is 00:13:00 What's going to give me the most impact or most bang for my buck in terms of service. And I thought, well, special operations seems like it has kind of the highest percentage chance of making a big impact. Looking back on it, a lot of it is because of the challenge, the sexiness of special operations. I read a popular mechanics article when I was in high school that really introduced me to the SEAL teams that I didn't know, really know of them other than seeing the movie with Charlie Sheen. And that really kind of laid out from soup to nuts what they were all about and really supercharged my desire to want to do it. But as I, you know, spent all the time that I did in the military, I learned very quickly that, you know, while special operations does some pretty high level missions and it's kind of that tip of the spear thing, the reality of it is, is that everybody's job in the military is equally as important because

Starting point is 00:13:54 you remove any one of them and those guys can't do their job, you know? So, um, you know, it, it gave me, I think an even bigger appreciation for the entire military machine and what it's capable of, how important it is, and not to get too far into politics quite yet, but just, you know, how important I think it is that our elected officials be diligent or use their due diligence before sending us anywhere to ensure that it's kind of a, a last ditch effort, or, um, you know, there's just, there's no other option, you know, because it's a, it's a big, big commitment. A hundred percent. And actually that's, that's a, that's something I would really like to ask you about though. You're, you're hitting on a topic that we're all thinking about, you know, with these multiple wars not happening around the world. And it's like, we are technically not sending boots on the ground right we're not we haven't deployed the military but we are we're funding both of these

Starting point is 00:14:52 wars there it's war i mean you know what it is it's it's horrible it's it should be a last resort kind of thing but it's brought up these two crowds that are obviously arguing with each other on all the time and one crowd is kind of i guess tacitly supporting military industrial complex if you will and the other crowd is isolationist and like when i study history as best i can tell it's kind of somewhere in between is where it's supposed to be more towards what you just said which is it is a necessary thing but it should be a last resort and we should try to avoid it or deescalate situations. And I feel like we're now at a point where people are either like war hungry or nothing. America has got to stay away from everything and not lead in the world at all.

Starting point is 00:15:36 Like how do you have that conversation as a veteran with people usually like me who are arguing about this who never served? I mean, for me, I don't take the approach that my opinion is more valuable or worthwhile than anybody else's. I think, you know, if you pay taxes in this country and you're an American citizen, your voice is, is just as important as anybody else's. And I do dislike to see some in the veteran community, um, kind of taking that, you know, self-entitled approach to like, you know, I served and you didn't, so shut the fuck up. I don't think that that's helpful. But having said that, I think like with most things in life, balance is the key to everything. And to your point, and I agree completely, is that I'm not an isolationist, but I'm also certainly

Starting point is 00:16:23 not a war hawk either. I think, you I think if you look at historically, just within the right and left flank of the United States in terms of its history, World War II is as good of an example as to when you get involved and why, how to conduct the actual operation itself from start to finish. And then I think at least as important, maybe even more importantly, is what you do afterwards needs to be done in a certain intentional manner. What do you mean by that? Well, if you look at Afghanistan and Iraq now, we spent way more time and money in both of those places than we did during World War II. If you look at what we did in Japan and Germany after World War II versus,

Starting point is 00:17:07 and look at how Germany and Japan are now as nations in terms of allies, in terms of productivity, in terms of a lack of terrorism or whatever the thing is that we battled, whatever you want to call Nazism and the Imperial Army in Japan, neither of those are a threat anymore we're allied with them they're productive democracies because we made a commitment both during of saying we're all going to go over there we're taking the fucking gloves off the entire country's behind it and we're not coming home until the mission is done and then even when it is done we're going to leave as many people as we need to leave there for as long as we need to leave them so that this shit doesn't happen again. And it gets completely rooted out, which it did. Yeah. When you look at Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of those are the case. And we were there

Starting point is 00:17:53 way longer, you know? So, um, again, I don't think not doing anything is the right answer. It is tough with the amount of places that exist in the world to decide which ones to get involved with. And that's never an easy solution. But I do think oftentimes some of the world's most complex problems, whether it's geopolitical, socioeconomically, what have you, actually require some of the simplest solutions. And I would equate it to a bar fight. Whether it's the micro of a bar fight or the macro of a world war is that the principles are generally the exact same in that if you're walking by and you see a bar fight taking place, you can walk in there and get involved or you can keep walking. Why you decide to walk in there and get involved is going to vary in every instance, but understand

Starting point is 00:18:43 that if you do, no matter how you conduct yourself in there, you're going to make friends and you're going to make enemies, no matter what your intentions are, no matter who you help, no matter who you try to hurt, you're creating that ripple effect, uh, you know, that the CIA studied and talked about at length, uh, in terms of the Russian involvement in Afghanistan in the eighties. And so understanding that only walk in there, if you feel like by not doing it, uh, you know, you're, you're basically either creating or allowing an existential threat to your own safety or something so egregious is happening that you, you can't live with yourself without walking in there and getting involved.

Starting point is 00:19:21 To me, it's kind of that simple. But now if I'm going to walk in there, like no matter what's going on, if I decide that the stakes are so high that I have to walk in there, I can tell you right now, there's going to be zero fucking rules as to how I conduct myself in there. And if I go in there, I'm going to stack the deck at every turn to my advantage. I'm going to cheat and I'm going to use weapons. I'm going to use the element of surprise, overwhelming force, a fucking broken bottle, a chair, a gun, a machete. I don't care. I'm not going to give them the heads up. I'm not going to give them any chance to fucking to, to fight fair. And I'm going to overwhelm them and absolutely wipe them off the fucking map. And then I'm going to leave, you know? Uh, and to me, you, you, you really have to do that.

Starting point is 00:20:03 No different than say the Tecumseh sherman approach in in the civil war of that scorched earth like i'm gonna make it so god off like we're not going to get involved unless we have to but if we do have to we're going to send the entire brunt of the united states military over there with absolutely every fucking thing we have and we're going to completely demolish that entire part of the world and, and make them regret that they fucked with us. And we're going to make every other country that's thinking about it, decide,

Starting point is 00:20:30 you know what, we're not going to fuck with those guys. Cause I don't want that happening here. I think that's the only way you can do it. Wow. That's a makes sense, but it's, it's heavy.

Starting point is 00:20:41 I mean, that's, that's what it is. Yeah. I mean, the reality of it is, is that if you, if you don't, you know, the, the Reagan speak softly, carry it's heavy. I mean, that's what it is. Yeah. I mean, the reality of it is, is that if you don't, you know, the Reagan speak softly, carry a big stick, I think, you know, he was, I would say,

Starting point is 00:20:53 pretty wise in terms of his foreign policy. You know, he wasn't a perfect president. He certainly made mistakes, but in most cases with the, and I'll leave the drug war out of it. Cause I think that was a big misstep on his part. Uh, but in terms of his foreign policy, militarily terrorist, et cetera, I think he did a bordering on masterful job, uh, at handling our foreign policy and making people understand that we're not going to fuck with you, but if you fuck with us to a certain point, like it's game over and you're going to absolutely regret having done so. Yeah. I think when you, when you look at the fact that he's the guy who essentially deescalated

Starting point is 00:21:33 the cold war, you know, results matter. And that's, that's certainly like when, when you look at, at his style, following up Jimmy Carter, who that was not his strength, you know, the ultimate symbolism of getting in there. Like when they ran, when the Iran hostages were still hostages, they get Reagan gets in there. They're not hostages anymore. There's something to be said for that for sure. But it's kind of crazy. I, I, I had been studying like some of the buildup to world war two recently. And one of the things I never knew was that we had massive isolationism thoughts in this country prior to pearl harbor yeah and it makes me think about it and i i hate this idea i want

Starting point is 00:22:14 to be clear about that but like you look at the the afghanistan iraq wars they happen after 9 11 right like a world war ii our involvement happens after pearl harbor it's like it takes this great tragedy of being attacked on your own turf and thousands of people dying and i mean they're dying but in the worst way too for us to to be like okay all right this is a problem that said there's also differences too and i'm sure we'll get into it today like i look at afghanistan and iraq differently not our soldiers who fought there but just the politicians and how they made decisions there and you bring up the afghanistan point that was so sad to watch you know as a civilian 20 years later where it's basically like the fall of saigon all over again and the taliban's back

Starting point is 00:23:02 in control when it feels like we kind of took our eye off the ball when we started Afghanistan so strong after 9-11 and then decided, all right, we're not going to put resources there anymore. Like, is it that simple or is there a lot more to it? I think it's largely that simple. What I would say in having a show myself, you know, I've interviewed a lot of Afghanistan vets and Iraq vets myself, you know, I've interviewed a lot of Afghanistan vets and Iraq vets. And one thing that I've asked just about every single one of them was that before you went on deployment, and this is, you know, the, the sled dog E4 all the way up to colonels

Starting point is 00:23:35 and everything in between is that did, did any of your leadership sit you down and explain to you why you're going there, what your goals on a micro level of that deployment are. But further is that this is the piece of the puzzle that you guys are inserting into the, into the big picture. That's going to get us to this goal and it's tangible and it's well-defined and it's clearly communicated in every single fucking case. The answer is not at all. So to me, you have a goal when you start a podcast. If you start a business, it's okay. I'm at point a, this is what point B looks like. I know what point B is right. I know what I want. I know where I know where that, that is. There are

Starting point is 00:24:15 tangible goals that I can clearly identify and explain to somebody. To me, what we went into Afghanistan with was the mentality of somebody saying, you know, to, to put a business analogy to it is that I want to be rich. It's like, what does that mean? I don't know. I want to have a lot of fucking money. It's like, you're not, you're not going to have any, if that's your definition of, of what your goal is, what do we want to do in Afghanistan? We want to fucking kick the Taliban's ass, pay back for nine 11. We want to win. Okay. Well, what does that look like? Well, I don't know. Fucking payback, you know, that was basically our strategy. And so we had no real clear definition of what winning even looks like,

Starting point is 00:24:54 you know? So if you don't know what that is, just like, if you can't define what your enemy is, you're not going to defeat it. Same token. If you don't clearly define what your goal is, what, what achieving success actually looks like, how, how are you going to do it? You're not, you know? And so, um, you know, that's Afghanistan, Iraq agreed is a totally different animal. I think, uh, it was a complete mistake, uh, in my opinion, having been there and lost a number of friends there and been in dangerous situations myself there. I, you know, our, our view, uh, and the lens with which we look at our, our combat experiences is very different than, than that macro view of, of what the government is deciding and what the country is behind or not.

Starting point is 00:25:38 For us, it's pretty simple is that, you know, I, I volunteered to give my life, if necessary, to the best of, and to serve to the best of my ability in a capacity with which my country sees the most appropriate. It's not my decision to decide whether or not they're right or not. Like I'm, by volunteering, I'm putting that level of trust in our society's ability to elect people who are going to make that decision with, with wisdom and, um, you know, and, and, you know, some caution. And, uh, and so that's really all you're focused on. You're there to do the job. You're looking at the, at the, the small details of ensuring that I'm, I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. And that the guy on either side of me, that we're all

Starting point is 00:26:19 coming home, that's kind of really only your priority. If you're trying to decide whether or not what you're doing there is right or not, you're probably going to be distracted and it's not going to pan out well. So that's not really the time to think of it. As I've gotten older and reflected on that time now, I wasn't in the war room with Bush and Condoleezza Rice and everybody else to really know what that intelligence said in terms of weapons of mass destruction and whether or not there was proof that he had them at whatever level. Obviously, he used gas on his own people and that would check that box of weapons of mass destruction. So he clearly had them to some level and was willing to use them. But especially when you look at the dynamic of

Starting point is 00:27:00 the Middle East and the role that Saddam played in that region, especially with respect to Iran and keeping them in check, I think we completely stepped on our dick by getting rid of him. And now that's why Iran has gotten to where it's gotten. You know, so not to mention the fact that they were a huge, a huge part of the IEDs and the advancement of some of the IED technology with the, um, some of the shape charges and some of their, uh, from a technological standpoint, some of their ability to, to get through MRAPs and, and have some pretty gnarly IEDs that were very advanced and, uh, and were coming over from around. So they were our biggest problem really in iraq so but we kind of started it

Starting point is 00:27:46 you know kind of we we created them as a monster not being in check now saddam was a prick it was horrible to his people but you could say that about a lot of fucking places you know yeah chinese president the russian president yep a dozen of them in sub-saharan africa that slaughter their own people that we don't do a fucking single thing about. So, you know, to me, that's not enough of a reason to go in there. And the justification of, we think there's a link to 9-11. He has WMDs. I just, I don't buy it. I mean, Pakistan, India, they have WMDs. They have factions of their government that fucking hate us and would love to use them on us. We don't go in there and get rid of them, you know? So to me, it just doesn't really line up. And, uh, and I think it was a big mistake, but, um, to your point about, uh, you know,

Starting point is 00:28:29 things leading up to certain events and it taking a catastrophe. One thing I do think in looking at the world war two historical perspective of it is that there, there's another component that I think gets glossed over often, which is the great depression, the 10 years prior to it is that my personal view is that, um, is that the isolationism had more to do with that and not so much a conscious decision of we want to stay out of it is that things are so fucking terrible here that like, we don't have the bandwidth, just like in the Philippines, they don't really give a fuck what's going on in Afghanistan. Cause you know, they're, they're just trying to fucking survive or Indonesia or, you know, wherever.

Starting point is 00:29:05 So, uh, I think that played a bigger role in us kind of burying our heads in the sand. It was kind of out of necessity, but it still ended up catching up to us. All right. That was amazing. There's a lot on the bone right there, but on that last point, have you ever read the book, the fourth turning? I haven't. So I'm not going to explain the whole thing.

Starting point is 00:29:25 And apologies to people who have heard this on the podcast like eight or nine times before. But I'll give you the basics. So these guys in the 90s, I forget their names, but they wrote – they were historian sociologists. where a huge mistake historians make in predicting the future is that they get so good at studying the past that they think they can predict it and therefore inject some biases from their studies to change how the future happens. These guys just said, yo, there's patterns.

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Starting point is 00:30:32 down, whatever. And so what they figured out is that there are roughly four generations going back to the Revolutionary War times, and they exist in 20 to 23 years, something like that, periods. And each generation exists across four different time periods that are the same length. And they are of the same ages. Each type of generation is of the same ages at the same time. As an example, the boomer generation was what was known as a prophet generation. They were born out of after we won a big war. We're on top of the world. Everything's happy, yada, yada, yada. So from there in their childhood, zero to 21, they're coming up in a great world. The next generation that they're a part of is

Starting point is 00:31:14 when they're 21 to 42. And this is called the awakening. So think like the hippie movement, think, you know, turning in against Vietnam, stuff like that. This is where, you know, society starts to question itself or things like that. Then from 41 to 63, something like that, they're in power. Those are the years where like, you're the CEO of the company, you're the president of the United States or supposed to be that kind of thing. And that's like the brewing crisis era. And then you have the full blown crisis era where, you know where at this point they're old and retired. There's three other generations after them though and each one exists in those ages at a different point. And so what we see is that, for example, you look at the 1929 stock market crash.

Starting point is 00:31:59 80 years later is 2009 where we have our depression, right? Our modern-day depression. You look at World War II happening in 41 to 45. We're right in that 80 to 85 year period right now with these wars happening around the world. 80 to 85 years before that was 61 to 65 civil war. 80 to 85 years before that was the Revolutionary War, 75 to 83. It's crazy when you look at how these things line up so when you talk about a point like isolationism is also coming out of people's needs at home they're economically needy because shit's bad like look around here right now yeah very similar people are like we can't even put

Starting point is 00:32:37 our kids through school you know everyone's in debt up to their eyeballs with with college debt and shit after being sold that whole thing and yet we're sending billions of dollars to other countries. That's kind of like, it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's what makes me worried. Like, are we going to see something really big happen here? Because we're in that pattern. I hope it's not the case, but it does make you think. Yeah, I would not be surprised. I mean, to me, the precursors that exist leading up to all of those big ticket items that you just mentioned seem to be present in a pretty similar fashion. So I think, you know, a lot of it's going to depend, some of it, maybe not even a lot, but some of it's going to depend flip of a coin, I think. You know, who knows if Biden will actually even be the nominee or if they'll pull a bait and switch with Newsom or who knows. Crazy. Two weeks ahead of time, you know, maybe Trump goes to prison.

Starting point is 00:33:31 I mean, who fucking knows? You know, I don't know. But I do think whoever it is that gets into office is going to play a role in what happens for sure. And I do worry that if we continue down the path that we've been on, that I think we're headed straight for that. With the Israel-Palestine stuff, with Ukraine and Russia, China kind of looking over the fence, watching all of this with the Dr. Evil fingers. It's like, how could it not lead to that if it just continues to happen the way that it's happening. Yeah. You also made a great point with Saddam too. That's an uncomfortable point to make, but you have to give Trump credit for this. In 2015, 2016, he was saying this. I don't know if you remember it, like every rally that guy had, he's like, Saddam, bad guy, kill terrorists. Bad guy, kill terrorists. And it's like, yeah, we don't want to see someone massacring their own people like he did he was a horrible guy to your point but yeah like he was a little bit of a from a selfish american

Starting point is 00:34:32 point of view he was a little bit of a check to the balance in that region and the the alternative of al-zakawi blowing the whole place up in the vacuum afterwards i think time has proven that's probably worse that's of course that's hindsight 2020 but there's part of it that's like couldn't couldn't we have kind of seen that coming like we're going to go in there we're going to rain hellfire on all these citizens who are going to get caught in the middle of it their leader is going to be overthrown the government's going to kick out one of the two sides of the muslim religion of the islam religion and you know that's probably not going to end well for sure and the one of the most frustrating religion and you know that's probably not going to end well for sure

Starting point is 00:35:06 one of the most frustrating parts for me is that not only did we not learn that before but we didn't learn it after either you know in the early 2010s you had the arab spring in egypt uh libya you know we're still fucking fiddle fucking around in Yemen. Like we, we continue to do the same thing over and over of force feeding toppled regimes by way of trying to implement democracy in places who one don't really want it. And two, I would say, don't even understand how to, how to deal with it or maintain it. I would equate it to freeing a super max prison and then expecting them to get along and not go fuck people up again. You know, I mean, that's, that's what happens. And it just happens over and over and over. And the reality of it is, is that, you know,

Starting point is 00:35:57 you're talking about millennia in terms of, of tyrannical dictatorships that have with an iron fist ruled regions of people for generation after generation after generation dictatorships that have, with an iron fist, ruled regions of people for generation after generation after generation. And that's what they understand. And so when you replace that with basically saying, we're just going to trust that you guys do the right thing. They don't. To be fair, neither do we.

Starting point is 00:36:20 Look at, say, the PPP loans. How many people took advantage of those that either didn't need them or completely just fucking raped the system, you know. So to me, it's just it's they have investments in Northrop Grumman or McDonald Douglas or, you know, whatever, um, purveyor of military equipment, weapon systems, et cetera, that if this happens and the U S army signs this $40 billion contract for, you know, Stinger missiles that I have a 19% stake in, and I'm going to make $67 million overnight, you shouldn't be allowed to make that fucking decision, you know, and they do. And I think it's a huge problem. And so you just,

Starting point is 00:37:12 you see it continue to happen over and over and it gets muffled by the guys of freedom and democracy and doing the right thing. And it's bullshit, you know. Do you, when you look at us not learning these lessons and still continuing to get involved in these different conflicts in the same region of the world, is there any one place and particularly within the context of government that you kind of think is to blame for that? Do you think it's more the politicians themselves or maybe the intelligence community or maybe even overzealous military generals? Like is there anywhere you look to and go that's where it's coming from? I think the symptom that is the checks and balances exist for a brilliant reason. But if you really kind of reduce it down to trying to figure out one person to blame or at least where to start, I think you have to look at Congress. And the reason you have to look at Congress is that, you know, that is the closest representation to the entire country as

Starting point is 00:38:20 a collective. The Supreme Court isn't. They're nominated and they're fed through that system. President, the same thing. As much as I would love to see 40 different people running for president, it's not realistic. So who do you have left? We have Congress. So the House of Representatives by design is supposed to reflect the pulse of the nation and it doesn't. And I think the biggest reason it doesn't is because lobbying and the fact that there's no campaign finance laws, even at the lowest level for small regions of congressional districts that are still corrupted by money where, hey, my name's Bob and I own this fucking highway construction company and I'm going to give you half a million dollars to your campaign, Jim. And I'm going to tell you something, if you get in there and we get a road project,

Starting point is 00:39:08 I'm the fucking guy who gets it. And so that's what happens at the very lowest level and all the way to the very top. So I think, you know, to me, barring a complete fucking revolution, which I don't think is the right answer and nor is it going to serve anybody, I think a hitting the what the fuck button on Congress by saying now there's no money whatsoever. And my philosophy mirrors small town, rural Texas grand jury systems. And the way that they do it, and I've served on two of them, it's a six-month period where basically in a small county, whoever is, and there's a small list of boxes that need to be checked. It's a taxpaying citizen.

Starting point is 00:39:48 You're up to date there. You're not a felon. You've lived in that county for a certain period of time. And so if you check all those boxes, they submit a questionnaire, basically. It's just basically a list where you say, I recommend 10 people for the grand jury, 10 people that I think are the best people for that position. They tally it all up and whoever the, I think they do 15 or 20 because, you know, conflicts and they may need to dismiss people or whatever, and you don't get a choice. And so they show up and they say, Hey, you're going to be on the grand jury. And you show

Starting point is 00:40:20 up and you're basically elected by people. It's anonymous. There's no money that can be contributed to it, nothing. And so to me, like taking that and trying to implement it on a larger scale, again, it's not going to work for president or even the Senate. I think it only works for congressional districts because they're small. It's scattered and it's a good collective like mean aggregate of the feeling of that area and what they want done on their behalf. So now you don't have people using money. You can't bribe them. Um, and, and they also don't get a choice. I think at this point, you know, that the type of people who are fucked up enough that would want to, to fill that position, there's something fucking wrong with you and it ought to disqualify you for wanting to do it. To me, like the, and the way it started was that it was service to the country, not a fucking lottery ticket. And that's what it's turned into. I mean, if you look at any from the lowest member of Congress all the way up to the, you know, the highest part of, I mean, the fucking president, you look at what their net worth is when they started versus what they left, even if it's one four year term and they hit the fucking lottery, every single one of them.

Starting point is 00:41:27 When you start to dig into what they actually are allowed to put money into from a financial standpoint in terms of the stock market, and you look at, again, where they can make decisions and influence those things and the insider trading that they have, it's all perfectly legal for them. You and I would go to prison for it. go to prison. I think it's total bullshit. I think, you know, you could start by saying you can't invest in the stock market. You have to, uh, every single person in Congress has to give your, your returns. It's not an option. The problem with that is even that there's a loophole. It's now, okay, well, my brother, I'm going to give him the fucking money and he's going to do it. And I still, you know, so, uh, there, there would be ways around that. And so I think, you know, again, barring a complete hard reset of, of, uh, watering the trees of Liberty with the blood of tyrants type of approach, I think just by taking that, that element out of it, where now it's, it's being

Starting point is 00:42:19 voluntold by the people that live around you. Because to me, if, if enough people in your neighborhood, community, city, town, what have you decide that I think Julian is the guy that should be representing us. If enough people think that, then you're probably the right fucking guy. You know, whereas when you're doing elections and again, it's one person versus another person, that's just not an accurate representation. It's, it's, it's what we have with the, with the president election now. It's like, so I've got fucking dumb and dumber. I've got two shitty choices that I have to decide which one is less shitty.

Starting point is 00:42:53 Whereas with this, again, I think for looking at the big scope of all of the problems that our country face, where they start, that's the simplest, least violent way to try to salvage what we have as a constitutional republic. Now, again, I'm going to say there's people that would poke holes in that and say, well, this is a problem. That's a problem. It's not fucking perfect. There would be hiccups for sure. But I think to at least try to salvage what we have, that's a good step one. Beyond that, there's certainly other things that you can try to implement within the House of Representatives as an example is by saying tax dollars being given away to any foreign entity needs to be set aside as a singular spending bill that gets passed the same way any other bill does in Congress, where if we want to give $4 billion to Ukraine, it's a standalone.

Starting point is 00:43:51 It's not on top of aid for Hawaii or fucking cell phones for homeless people and a military budget all packaged together where you see this same tit for tat nonstop in congressional hearings of like, well, they didn't vote for this. It's like, yeah, it's because there were 30 other shitty things attached to it. Like, that doesn't make me a bad guy. That means you're an asshole for putting all of those things on the same ticket. So to me, every single dime, any dime that goes overseas should be voted on as a standalone bill. And I think you really have to do that with all of them. Like, yeah, I know the logistics of that is probably either impossible or not realistic to think that you're going to have individual bills for every single thing. But at least lump them into likewise. You know, it's like one of these things is not like the other game.

Starting point is 00:44:33 You know, it's like, how the fuck are you guys lumping all of these things into one bill? Like, who the fuck decided that was a good idea? You know, so at least like if it's military spending, well, it's all military spending, you know, or whatever. And so, yeah, I mean, like at least make it fucking similar and uh i think those two things uh you know would would really uh make a a catastrophic in a good way positive change for unfucking the country because the and the reason why i like this to start with the house of representatives again on top of or dovetailing on to the point of it's a good pulse for the country, but everything has to go through them.

Starting point is 00:45:10 You know, the Supreme Court, well, they have to move through there. So if you, but the problem is, is that right now it's not really an accurate representation of the country. So if you can clean house there and actually have a legitimate, this is how the country feels, every justice that gets voted on is going to be by people who you want voting on, on whether or not that guy or girl should get put in. You know, whether it's vetoing bills that the president tries to do or that gets generated up by the House of Representatives, you have a much better chance at least for an accountability piece within that part of the government. And because they're the biggest check and balance on every other power within the United States government, I think that's our best shot. I feel like I got to put a rap beat underneath

Starting point is 00:45:56 this. My man's spitting today. I wish you would. You're ready to roll. This is good. I'm always ready to roll. I like that idea a lot. I like that House of Representatives idea a lot. And I agree with you. They're essentially the first line of defense. And we don't think of it that way. But they're the ones that are supposed to actually represent the population, meaning Rhode Island has many fewer reps than California does because there's more people in California. So it actually does speak to the local populaces. But we talk about lobbying money

Starting point is 00:46:26 and taking that out and I unfortunately agree with you it's like you're cynically not gonna be able to do things like this my my friend Andy Bustamante who is a former CIA spy if there's such thing as a former and I doubt he's former but when he was first allegedly coming out of the CIA, he was getting like his master's or something down in Florida. And the local US congressman came in to speak with them about something. And so at the end, she said, can you guys let me know as constituents anything you want me to take to congress to vote on and he goes i'd like you to impose term limits can you take that to vote and she's like i'm not gonna do that and he's like but i'm your constituent i just told you to do that what does everyone else think

Starting point is 00:47:17 they're like yeah yeah they're like we're telling you they're incentivized not to do it though because they they like the cushiness of it they get to have their nice steak dinners on K Street, feel important because people pay them. And that's just how it is. I mean, asking them to do that is like asking the fox to audit himself in the hen house. Like, this shit's not happening. And it's never going to happen. So, yeah, I agree. I mean, of course they're not going to do it. The same reason they're never going to disallow themselves from being able to invest in companies that they own and decide where, you know, government contracts go to and what have you.

Starting point is 00:47:51 That should be disbanded illegal and, you know, bribing, i.e. lobbying should be illegal and not part of the process, too. Yeah, because other countries around the world take advantage of that process obviously too with their own interests. they're using that system to get our favor because they have things like APAC, which pays all these congressmen and these senators to then vote for aid, by the way, in the middle of those same bills you talk about where they're voting on something else and then they throw in, oh yeah, 13 billion here. And I get it. They're trying to protect themselves, but we have our system set up in a way that they're literally able to do that. And then our taxpayer money just continues to go to fund bombs in Gaza. Yeah. Well, yeah. And it's, I mean, to me, the sick twisted irony of it is that we're essentially on both sides of it. You know, it's like we're sending money to both sides and, you know, paying for two groups to fight each other. You never heard

Starting point is 00:48:59 of hedging your bets? Come on. Well, I mean, it happens nonstop, but I mean, to me, that's the problem. I mean, as an 18 year old joining the military, myself included, I think most, most of us assume that our elected officials have our best interest in mind and that they're only going to send us places that check those boxes of, you know, this is a, an existential threat and it's a requirement and we need to do it. That's just not the fucking reality, you know? And, uh, the older I get, the more I realize that. And even within the military, you know, as I spent more and more time, you get to, to hire up positions, leadership wise, you start to see peaks behind the curtain and see how things really work and who answers to who. And it's, uh, it's pretty disheartening, you know? So, yeah, I mean, there, there needs to be a significant change in, in a lot of things.

Starting point is 00:49:45 Would you mind given, if you don't want to, no problem, but would you mind giving some specifics on that? Like some things you've seen without naming names? Yeah. I mean, to me, the biggest thing is, is that, you know, I don't make the rules like, okay, well, who does like, well, it's my boss. Then fucking ask him why we're doing this. Well, no, you know, it's just like the higher up you go, and I will say that that's its own problem. The biggest problem from a kind of boots on the ground standpoint in terms of why the majority of military leadership, especially now, is so fucked up is that it rewards yes men and people who are focused on checking all of the right boxes career wise. So it's a combination of, of having a, a poor setup for promotion in terms of, it doesn't really reflect who, who the good professional soldiers are. It reflects who the fucking dorks

Starting point is 00:50:39 are that know how to game the system and check every fucking leadership box. And I did that school and I did this billet and I did this fucking thing, you know, and they line all that up and they blow whoever their superior is to get a good fit rep or eval or whatever. And, and so you've got these guys who the fucking dudes don't like who are, are,

Starting point is 00:50:58 you know, basically fucking spineless in terms of war fighters who, who are just administrative geeks that know and understand how to line all of these things up to make themselves look good and get promoted. The type of guys who don't give a shit about that, who they care about the guys that they're leading, who care about being in the best shape, being the best shot, being the most Viking-like pipe hitter to go overseas and do the job and, and, and lead men in a fashion with which they need to be led so that we all come

Starting point is 00:51:29 home. Those guys aren't focusing on any of that. So they get shafted and, and either in trouble or they get stifled promotion wise. And to the point where they're just like, fuck this, I'm going to go start my own business. I'm going to go do something else.

Starting point is 00:51:43 So the higher up you get, the more you have this yes man, career politician, guy that's bucking for promotion and doing all of the things that he's doing solely focused on getting promoted, not on being the best professional soldier he is. So, you know, that that that process year after year after year is just going to continue to water down leadership and corrupt it. When you then couple that with administrations like when Obama came in, and I'm not saying everything he did was wrong. He did actually some great things for the military in terms of allowing us to do certain things and loosening the leash in some respects that even Bush had on us. But where I think he really, really took a big misstep was, was the cultural, uh, ramming of, of experimentation and social

Starting point is 00:52:33 issues into the military with, um, you know, all of the different kind of, you know, sexual orientation and trans types type things. And, uh, I would say shoving the political correctness component even further down the military's throat. And, you know, to me, one of the beauties of the military is that unlike most things, and I would say unlike almost everything else is that you're not looking at things from a bottom line standpoint, from a budget standpoint. I mean, yes, we have budgets, but they can be adjusted if they're clearly defined and you can, you know, give a justification as to why they're changing, but you can really reduce it down to one simple question, which is whatever the question is that you're asking, does that make us a better war fighting force?

Starting point is 00:53:18 Yes. Do it. Yeah. Does it not? No, don't do it. So, you know, that's, well, again, it's like, I can't think of anything else that you really have that luxury to, to be able to, to make it so simple in terms of your decision-making process. But the U S military is that, and, and, but we've, we've, uh, ruined that by, you know, doing all of these things that don't make us better warfighters, but appease certain, uh, glimpses or, or glimpses or channels of our society. And I would even say these loud minorities that tend to kick and scream and throw enough of a tantrum to get people to change their behavior in the military just isn't the place for that.

Starting point is 00:54:00 The saddest part about it too is that even before this stuff started not only does the military have men and women right but it's also like extremely diverse there's people from all different backgrounds in the military all kinds of minority communities and stuff like it was it's like you could even give the argument like if it ain't broke don't fix it like what are we doing here and i totally agree like when're worried about, let's just call it what it is, virtue signaling over people that are supposed to be job occupation warriors, like. Yeah. What's the DEI? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's stupid. And yeah, I mean, to your point of, of it's already very diverse. And to me, that's one of the beauties of the military. You know,

Starting point is 00:54:40 I've heard people say, trying to justify it within the confines of military leadership, especially at the higher echelons, you know, at the Pentagon and joint chiefs level of leadership and saying, you know, diversity is our strength. It's not, you know, the fact that we can unify out of a very diverse group of people is what our strength is. Focusing on the diversity is not what makes us strong. It's the fact that you can take people from every fucking walk of life out there and turn them into a cohesive war fighting unit that doesn't identify any of those things, that doesn't separate out each other based on any of those things. They all gel as one unit and go and fuck shit up. To focus on that diversity piece

Starting point is 00:55:26 causes problems. And I think that's why, at least from my perspective, if you look at the eight years that Obama was in office, I think our society took several steps back in terms of race relations and focusing on problems that were self-grandizing in terms of they created themselves and actually made problems worse because there was such a heavy focus on things that maybe historically were worse. But now like assuming that it's the same as it was in 1963 and it's not. It's not. You know, so when you put all those things together, I mean, that's why you see the military being, I would say, a shell of what it was even 20 years ago, 10 years ago. Do you think that that can flip back, the pendulum can swing back on that? For sure it can.

Starting point is 00:56:14 But to your point earlier on about it's going to take that huge punch in the dick, it's going to take a catastrophic ass-whooping for us to abandon those ridiculous policies. Right now, we can get away with it because of technology and the fact that, look, the reality is even in Afghanistan and Iraq, they were hardened fighters. They were motivated. But in terms of a legitimate fighting force exposed pretty significantly of them in Ukraine. And they're nowhere near as competent or significant as I think the entire world thought. Hats off to them for doing a good job at making everybody think that they were more dangerous than they were. China, on the other hand, is a whole other fucking ballgame. And if we had to go to war with China right now, I think that they would absolutely fucking destroy us.

Starting point is 00:57:07 Really? I really do. They're military. angle that they, that they choose, uh, as compared to ours and then what their government is willing to do. I'm not saying it's even right, but the Chinese government is willing to do pretty much fucking anything to gain an advantage, to get the upper hand and, or to dominate and win in, in any excursion that, uh, that they may possibly think that they're going to be a part of, and we don't. And I think if you look at kind of the overall average of what an American soldier is versus a Chinese soldier at this point, I think in many ways the Chinese soldier is going to be in better shape,

Starting point is 00:57:58 probably better funded. That's debatable by anybody. But the biggest thing is that their government is going to let them do whatever the fuck they need to do to win and ours won't. How big is their – we should Google that. I don't expect you to know. How big is China's military? I mean their budget still is not what ours is. But at this point, it's not even about money.

Starting point is 00:58:19 Again, all the money in the world, if you have feckless leaders who are spineless and don't let you go be a fucking badass, it doesn't matter how much money you have. Yeah. All right. So 2.8 million soldiers, sailors, and airmen, twice the American number. All right. That's a little scary. The one thing, I brought this up with Sean, I think on the podcast when he was here, but the one thing I do like is that when you look around the world, they don't have a lot of military bases. They've bought a lot of ports and stuff like that for trade with all the shit they're doing, basically putting countries in debt to them. So other things may be coming. But we do have – I mean our military bases are literally – you pull it up on a map, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, everywhere. I would say search submarines, ships, and fighter jets for the China-American comparison because to me at this point, that's really what matters more. You know, even, I mean, really starting with World War II and it's just gotten progressively more important to own the water, under the water, and the air.

Starting point is 00:59:22 You know, troops are important and you have to have a certain number of asks to be able to follow through and take, take ground and hold it. But, uh, well, here you go. Unless you just pulled this up for you. The Pentagon's 2023 China military power report said China's Navy had about 370 warships with the fleet expected to grow to 395 by 2025 and 435 by 2030. The current U.S. fleet is smaller with more than 280 vessels. The Secretary of the Navy expects to reach 300 in the early 2030s. So they're ahead of us there. Yeah. So they already have almost 100 more warships. Now, submarines, nukes, fighter jets, you're going to see similar numbers is that they're ahead of us now at this point. And especially with technology being what it is, there's two things, one fighter jets, submarines, and fighter jets and ships, um, I would say

Starting point is 01:00:09 aren't necessarily interchangeable, but there's a huge component to that, to your point with bases, all the bases in the world don't matter. If you're going against an opponent who has a hundred more ships than you that have planes on all of them and troops that they can put them wherever the fuck they want as fast as they want. And while they're doing it, they also design own manufacture and control all of the electronics components that we use to navigate, that we use to communicate.

Starting point is 01:00:36 You know, so, I mean, just fucking think about that for a minute, you know, China would fucking destroy us right now. And, and their numbers are bigger in every way. But again, like the fact, take Afghanistan and Iraq, like did the Taliban or ISIS have any rules? Fuck no, they didn't. That's a big part of why they were so difficult to deal with. They don't have a government saying, hey, you can't do that hey you know when you when you uh you know capture this person you got to abide by

Starting point is 01:01:06 the geneva convention you got to do this this and this nope again you know you you can debate the morality of that all day long but the reality of it is you know we're basically fighting fucking goat farmers who you know are are giving us a hard fucking time plain and simple because they have no rules hey guys if you have a, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends, whether it's Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, doesn't matter. It's all a huge help.

Starting point is 01:01:33 It gets new eyeballs on the show and it allows us to grow and survive. So thank you to all of you who have already been doing that. And thank you to all of you who are going to do so now. You know, they have no uniforms. They have no rules. They have nobody to hold them accountable and we have people breathing down

Starting point is 01:01:49 our back trying to throw our guys in fucking prison for making a split second snap judgment on fuck i thought he was armed i didn't you know whatever it's it's dark a fucking grenade just went off and this dude you know is coming at me with a machete and i fucking shot him well i didn't have a gun so we're gonna throw you in jail like you know, is coming at me with a machete and I fucking shot him. Well, I didn't have a gun. So we're going to throw you in jail. Like, you know, again, even if we had bigger numbers and more money and, and, and everything, when you have a government who's constraining you to that degree, like if you don't think for one second that every fucking guy, when he's over there doing those things, that that's not in the back of his mind of saying, dude, what's worse than worse, like what's as bad or in some cases worse than not coming home, being labeled a fucking war

Starting point is 01:02:30 criminal and being thrown in prison for the rest of my life for doing a job that you fuck wad sent me over here to do. And now are telling me to use kid gloves, you know, it's a, it's a terrible scenario. And so when you combine all of those things together, you know, we're in a bit of a fart you feel fucked either way like you are on the one hand it's like well the enemy doesn't have any rules therefore we don't need to have rules either and you can go bad right the other way is well we're better so we're gonna set the example but the enemy doesn't fucking care they're gonna use it against you i mean china uses another thing they do is they use our democracy against us, similarly to what I was talking about with lobbying, where in China, if you have an opinion they don't like, you're never seen again, right? Because they don't have good rules. They have bad, shitty communist government rules.

Starting point is 01:03:34 In America, you can scream whatever you want as long as you're not taking death threats to the president or something like that. You're going to be good in most cases. So maybe in China, for example, they can do something like, oh, let's have no free speech for our kids. TikTok's going to turn off at 9 p.m. and they're only going to watch nature and science videos while it's on. But in America, we're going to make sure they just see titties all the time. Yeah. Right? And it's on all day, all night, whatever. So they're using our freedom to then get an advantage like generationally ahead of us. No, for sure. Yeah. And, you know, to me, to be clear, like, I'm not saying that we should model ourselves

Starting point is 01:04:14 after the Taliban, ISIS or China, you know, but to me, again, going back to one of our, our earlier topics of when to get involved or not is that, you know, that's what dictates that is that you're saying, you know, we're not going to just go because, well, this guy's a tyrant and he's fucking his people up. You know, we're going to go because we have to, because we can't not do it. So if we are going to go, is that, you know, just like with say, border patrol is that like politicians dictating border patrol policy is absurd. Ask them, just say, Hey, I want you to shut the border down you guys are the experts you figure it out hey here is our goal is

Starting point is 01:04:52 is that this is taking place we need you the u.s military to go over and stop it you guys are the experts you decide how to make that happen and i think the american people are still good enough yes there are bad apples in every facet. However, there's not groups of them that are all together. And from every experience I've had in the military, like there were some guys that were a little more cowboy than others. and were raised generally right, you know, the, the, the, the sum total of what's being done is, is generally just, you know, do guys get carried away? Of course they do. But again, to me, if, if you're saying go over there and, and completely disembowel this, this enemy, there's nothing fucking great about that. You know, it's going to be horrible and that's why you only do it if it's absolutely fucking necessary. But if it is, then you have to make that example of saying that doesn't mean you need to rape women and children and set that you have mission success, that you completely eliminate that threat or enemy, and that, one, it makes them say, wish we hadn't done that. We're not going to fuck with that again.

Starting point is 01:06:14 And every country that's thinking, maybe I'll try the United States, they see that and they say, we're not going to fuck with that one. Take fucking the nuclear warfare. I mean, we're the only country who's actually done it yeah you know and i'm not saying that that that was even necessarily the right call but if you look at you know okay if we don't do it and you know we're going to spend the next nine years in in japan and we're going to lose two million american soldiers you know is that the lesser of two evils? Probably. Um, you know, those are, are debates that you can have and you can see every side till you're blue in the face. But, uh, to me that that's the, one of the, the core principles and problems that our

Starting point is 01:06:55 government and society have is, is, uh, you know, sending, sending troops and then trying to micromanage them. I mean, to me, it's like, you're an Eagles fan, right? It's like having, uh, having the Eagles offense being voted on by the fucking, by the audience, you know, or by the spectators, you know, and it's like, it just doesn't work that way, you know, and, uh, you, you've got to trust that, that they're going to do the right fucking job and you're going to go watch them. Uh, but you're not calling the fucking plays, you know? So that's just how it has to be. Well, we also live in the mass media age now which is even extending back to previous eras where we are monday morning quarterbacking everything sometimes it's good to analyze you know to figure out what's right and wrong but there's this there's this demonization that will that

Starting point is 01:07:41 will occur with people having big opinions on past decisions. I know I'm guilty of it sometimes as well. But it's like now the military is thinking about that in the present because they're thinking, oh, my God, how are people going to litigate this two months from now or two years from now or 20 years from now? Because it's easy to just be able to be mad that war happened or whatever catastrophe know catastrophe happened and then find someone to blame yeah afterwards i think we've seen that unfortunately with the the war on terror period with afghanistan and iraq like i love how you put it earlier as

Starting point is 01:08:17 a veteran i i always make sure i say this with the guys i have in here it's like the politicians and the people back home are the ones who tell you to go there it's not your fault for going there right you have a job to do when you go there so i i don't ever think we should litigate that but people will go literally litigate like the job that like veterans did you've seen it with the eddie gallagher case you even saw it with a case that sean changed my mind on the blackwater case like i followed that in the media i thought those guys were guilty as fuck you look at the actual actual case. I don't think they were, I think they were in a really tough spot and they got hung out to dry. And it's like, what is that doing to incentivize the younger generations of kids who see stuff like this and go, well, shit, I don't want to, you know,

Starting point is 01:08:58 I don't want to get involved with that. Yeah. And so to me, I would say not an easy fix, but a simple fix is, is look fix is look at the blame game. If you really want to fix that problem, stop blaming the soldiers and blame the fucking people that sent them there. Because I'll tell you right now, if you started threatening fucking the people who decide that, hey, we're going to send these guys to war, and then they do a bunch of crazy shit and say, okay. Just like this case in michigan fairly recently where the the school shooters parents got arrested yeah you know like that's going to make you it's going to make every fucking parent in the country pay way closer attention to what their kids are doing who they're talking to online all that shit you start throwing

Starting point is 01:09:39 congressmen in jail for sending us to a war where bad shit happened i bet they're going to be way less fucking likely to send us there you know i mean so to me at least start with the root of the problem which is don't send us there if you don't want horrible shit to do what is the military's fucking primary purpose it's to fuck shit up period like it's not the red cross it's not the fucking humane society like it's not anything it's not mother teresa like it's not the fucking humane society. Like it's not anything. It's not Mother Teresa. Like it's not a mission, you know, from a missionary standpoint. Like our job is to go over and neutralize this country's threats. That's really it, you know.

Starting point is 01:10:15 So if you don't want us to do that, just don't fucking send us there. That's a clean way of putting it. This part of the conversation was really good. I like this. It's a time to piss. Is that what you're saying? Actually, yeah, I could go. If you got to go right now. I mean, I can always go. Let's do it. All right. We'll be right back. But anyway, we are back. I actually just thought of something, though, in the bathroom I forgot to ask you about a few minutes ago when you were talking about it with vis-a-vis China. But like, I've had conversations with a bunch of people on this podcast about

Starting point is 01:10:45 different potential weapon threats and things like that. And without a doubt, one of the scariest ones I ever studied was in a book called Sandworm with a guy who's now a friend of mine, Andy Greenberg, who's been on the show. I was reading that book like four or five years ago and he talked about how there was a basically a test run done in russia or in ukraine by russia back in 2014 and 2015 in that area of shutting down the power grid in ukraine now he's writing about this before the ukraine war and all that but when i read about the technological capabilities of this and basically how Russia, for example, is one country was showing, oh, we can do this. No problem. That got me real scared because, you know, I start doing math, you shut down, you're able to shut down two thirds of the

Starting point is 01:11:36 power grid in the United States of America for like two weeks. Like the number of people dying is an insane number. And it's, I mean, it's i mean it's a it's a nuclear type event and so i know like i've talked with sean about this on the podcast as well he has a lot of thoughts on the power grid and a big fear of him is china with those abilities because it's like well if russia has it of course china has it my whole thing is i don't want to be complacent in thinking of this but like they haven't done any of that stuff. As far as I know, they haven't attempted to do it. Maybe intelligence knows something I don't.

Starting point is 01:12:17 Is part of it because like these countries know if they did something like that, we're going to do it 10 times as worse to them with our capabilities? Can I answer your question with a question? Yeah. What about holding your dick made you think of sandworm i gotta fuck with you if you're thinking about it in the bathroom i gotta know where the inspiration came from i was just thinking about the name of the book when i was doing that little diatribe right there but touche yeah well so there's there's actually two two things i think number one yes i share your concern with their ability to to completely fucking neutralize our power grid. I think it speaks to the archaic nature with which our power grid still exists on. I tend to lean more towards it's more of a selfish reason financially is that if you think about the amount of economic infrastructure that exists in China and how greatly they are benefiting from us using Amazon and so many manufacturers using them is that if they do that, it's kind of like a drug dealer spiking all of your customers. There's a point of that which their economy would collapse if ours did.

Starting point is 01:13:31 So to them, there's a huge financial incentive not to do it. I think arrogance-wise, they're probably more of the train of thought of like, we could fucking destroy you and you couldn't destroy us back if we wanted to because they're pretty a pretty confident arrogant fucking country but i think skin in the game financially plays a much bigger role for them as to why they're not doing anything like that i would i would say that that's the them attacking the power grid is is tied in terms of things that i i would be concerned with the other thing is is Russia and Putin's like special, um, pet project of the Poseidon missiles. I don't know if you've heard of them or not. Uh, they're, they're basically nuke powered miniature submarines. And there's from what I've heard, roughly 25 of them. And, you know, so because they're on nuke power and they're unmanned,

Starting point is 01:14:21 they have a nuclear warhead on them and they can travel like up to like fucking 90 or a hundred knots, like way faster than we can do anything about. They can just circumnavigate the globe indefinitely because they're encapsulated self-contained nuke power. And they're basically, he can just say, hit the Eastern seaboard. And one of them at a hundred knots an hour, we'll fucking just go, go demolish right where we're at and there's 25 of them you know so to me because yeah you know again somebody i'm sure will skewer my my stats on how many there are what their capabilities are but it's something to that that effect and uh so to me that's equally as terrifying because i think number one he has way less to lose economically by us being fucked because we don't depend, like he doesn't depend on us and vice versa. Um, and I think he's way

Starting point is 01:15:12 more of a fucking loose cannon. You can tell by the political opponents that he's whacked and, you know, and doesn't even try to hide it. You know, the journalists that he fucking either makes disappear or, uh, or poisons or throws in jail or whatever. So I think he's a little crazier than Xi Jinping is. And so to me, those are pretty equally terrifying as far as existential American threats. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that economic logic though on the US. Now that you say it, it seems seems very obvious but that's interesting do you think that that also prevents at least for the time being any other type of action from china until they figure out a way to be self-contained which i do they're not doing a great job of being

Starting point is 01:15:59 self-contained economically yeah no i i think that's the biggest driving force and and it's going to continue it's going to continue to i would say dictate not even influence dictate their decision to not do things beyond a certain level uh in fucking with us i think that you know the hacking of airports the hacking of yeah you know regional water and power grids and you know throwing the balloons like they're always testing the water and i think think the same thing with, you know, the tens of thousands of fighting age male Chinese men with stacks of cash who are in good shape, who aren't looking for, you know, a place to stay to get away from their country. They're here for a very obvious reason. Even with them, I've seen people, you know, kind of fear mongering of saying, oh oh, they're going to build a, you know, Chinese paramilitary and help take over the country. They don't need to do that. That's what Nick was saying, right?

Starting point is 01:16:50 Yeah, I mean, they really don't. I mean, like, could they? Sure. But, like, there's way easier ways. help facilitate EMPs or grid, you know, neutralizations or, you know, poisoning water tables or, you know, what have you, maybe, uh, I think it probably has more to do to facilitate with large scale hacking and things like that, where they're putting pop-up towers and, you know, building networks to, to help facilitate a larger scale thing. I don't think you're going to see those guys trying to acquire machine guns and doing like a conventional army kind of thing.

Starting point is 01:17:26 That's just my opinion. We just had this kid, Nick Shirley, in here who does all these videos where he's down at the border and then he'll come up to New York City and go to the migrant centers and stuff. But do we still have that picture that he airdropped you of the Chinese directions? Do you have that? I have it, yeah. All all right let's see if we can pull this up so this kid was just doing a video in san diego where i'll fuck up the name of the town but the the place where they were where there's a hole in the border or something and they're always coming across where you know you have people from south america and then

Starting point is 01:18:01 a lot of chinese people come through this area because they have like a set system of what they're going to do. And he's like, these are usually able-bodied, you know, single Chinese males. So it's like, all right, I'm not trying to be like, oh, definitely espionage, but like somewhere in there, there is like some of them have to be. And so he had this document that he was able to get. How did he say he got it do you remember i think it was a migrant that he found it on the ground or something because there were chinese coming through and i found it right so he got this document and it was all in chinese and then he had it translated via like ai and i told him get it double checked by a human but but it mostly

Starting point is 01:18:43 translates correctly i do we have it on the screen so this is it right here we're going to zoom in on it but i'm not going to go read the whole thing i read it on that podcast with nick but essentially this is like direct directions of what to do step by step when they get here that to make a long story short ends with them going wherever the fuck they want in america and doing it also by the way if they choose to follow these directions to a t which many of them probably get like a quarter of the way through and then say i'm good and disappear off the map but like if they follow it to a t they're doing it in all legal protocols as well like contact the lawyer to have this case go through when you get to this place whatever

Starting point is 01:19:23 whatever whatever and i think about this and this is where i do get scared like all right we're Like contact the lawyer to have this case go through when you get to this place, whatever, whatever, whatever. And I think about this and this is where I do get scared. Like, all right, we're making it this easy. We already see the fentanyl wars coming across from the cartels, which is coming from China, the actual fentanyl itself. It's like you got an opium war. You got a potential espionage war going on on the border. Like that is a – that is a – what's the – why am I forgetting words today? That's like a – I'm really at a blank for words. But like that's an aggressive action.

Starting point is 01:19:54 These are aggressive actions. That's not what I'm looking for, but it's going to get the job done that we're seeing from one country to another, and we don't seem to be taking that seriously enough. No, I agree. I mean you see it with, it's not just Chinese. I mean, you see people from the Middle East, Egypt. I mean, you name it. There's people coming from all over the fucking planet right now that similarly are, you know, it doesn't look like you're a refugee. You know, like they're in good shape.

Starting point is 01:20:20 They're well fed. You know, the clothes they had, like they're clean cut. So it's like, well, why are you here? I mean, yeah, I think it's pretty easy to ascertain and appropriate to do so, um, you know, to, to think that, well, they're, they're here for some specific reason. There's an intentionality to, to that many people that all look the same and are doing the same things and having directions. There's a reason that's happening.

Starting point is 01:20:41 We can debate as to why that is. And again, my, my opinion is that it's, you know, to help, to help facilitate or in case of, you know, if there needs to be a facilitation of something. But again, like when you look at that bigger picture, you know, if, if China was to completely take over the country or, or demolish it, uh, that's not going to be in their best interest. Now, you know, that could certainly lend itself to saying, well, if enough of them come over here and kind of set up shop, you know, plant their roots in and start building businesses or, you know, get elected to certain offices or, you know, what have you. Like to me, that's a smarter play. And they're a very long game country that way. So I could see them doing something like that where they're trying to influence our culture. They're trying to get into our politics. They're trying to start businesses that, you know, they're trying to not assimilate into American culture, but do

Starting point is 01:21:34 the exact opposite because you've seen such a divisive component to our, even within the confines of our government of, you know, wanting to say like, Oh, diversity is our strength. And so we need to recognize everybody. We're not Americans. It's, you know, you're Ukrainian, you're Cambodian, you're, you know, whatever. And, and, uh, that, that's a problem. So yeah, I think there it's probably more, they're just trying to take advantage of it because, you know, for them to try to, you know, infiltrate with enough people to, you know, to, to match police and military and whatever. Like, I don't think that that's that realistic in my opinion. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:22:08 Yeah. It's more, I agree. I think it's more the potential spy and information angle because we know they've been doing that for a long time. But anyway, back to your story. Yeah. We had a great, awesome tangent there to start off this podcast with all that other stuff. I'm sure some things will come up along the way but you had said you joined the navy when you were 17 but you had to like

Starting point is 01:22:29 you officially when you were 18 because you have to wait until you're that age right your parents have to sign for you or something at 17 okay so you knew you wanted to go into special operations which in that case within the navy i would imagine means going into the navy seals how far like how many years did you have to wait before you tried out for that? Or did you go like right away? Pretty much right away. So back then they, just being a SEAL, excuse me, wasn't its own job. At that time, there was what they called SEAL source ratings, which I don't want to say there was maybe 15 or so of them that were regular jobs in the Navy that the Navy kind of deemed that it had something

Starting point is 01:23:06 to do with being in the SEAL teams or, or doing that in the SEAL teams could lend itself to, you know, having some impact or what have you. So I looked at the list and the first thing I saw was, was Corman. And I was like, I want to do that. And they're like, yeah, we already have too many of them. It's basically closed right now, pick something else. And so I was like, intelligence specialist, that looks cool so i went through boot camp uh then went through like five months of intelligence specialist uh a school what did that comprise of so i mean i mean it's really big navy stuff it and you know a little bit of it maybe lent itself to being applicable in the seal teams but not much at that time. This is again in 96, 97. So it was like, you know,

Starting point is 01:23:46 identifying Russian warships and planes from, from aerial imagery. It was reading air aerial imagery from, you know, tarps pods off of F-14s. It was, it was very kind of cold war conventional carry over big military intelligence gathering. So it wasn't anything super fancy or, you know, fucking Jason Bourne-like. It was neat, but so yeah, it was five months. Probably the coolest part of it was it was actually at, in Virginia Beach, you know, Little Creek is kind of the main Navy base in Virginia Beach or in Norfolk. Dam Neck is the smaller base, which is where SEAL Team 6 is at, which is also where intelligence specialists and operational specialist A schools are at. So being there, like, you know, the SEAL Team 6 compound was right there and you would see

Starting point is 01:24:37 Team 6 guys working out in the gym or swimming in the pool or, you know, running around the base. You'd catch glimpses of them here and there, which was pretty motivating as a 18 year old wanting to become a seal. It was cool to see, you know, the dudes at the pinnacle and all their fucking gear and, you know, whatever. So that was neat. Went straight to, uh, to buds after that and, um, started with class two 14, uh, made it all the way through to third phase. And one week before the last portion, which is San Clemente Island, which is like the last five weeks of training, I, uh, pinched my sciatic nerve really bad and then just failed everything. So I got rolled for that, came back with 215 and, uh, graduated with him. Wow. So you had to go through a lot of it.

Starting point is 01:25:21 I had to go through all of third phase all over again. Whoa. Okay. So you, what time, what, what it. I had to go through all of third phase all over again. Whoa. Okay. So what age were you when you graduated? 20? 19. Oh, you're still 19. Yeah. So you're a Navy SEAL at 19.

Starting point is 01:25:34 No. So once you graduate, at that time, again, Naval Special Warfare didn't have its own air program. Now you do static line and free fall like right after you graduate BUDS. Back then you only got free fall as like a good deal school as you were a little more advanced. And it was later on, you'd go through Fort Benning's traditional static line jump school in the army at Fort Benning. And so went straight through that. Uh, and then you go through at that time, it was called STT seal tactical training. Now it's SQT seal qualification training, which is about another four, four and a half months. And then you go to your seal team. I went to seal team three and you have a six month probationary period where, um, basically

Starting point is 01:26:21 you have to show up and not get in trouble and, you know, kind of prove day in, day out that you're a hard charger and a, you know, a fast learner and, you know, mouth shut, eyes open, ears open, whatever, whatever. And, and that you're not a tool bag. from the department heads from, you know, the armory from, um, what is it? First Lieutenant, which is like boats and motors and the air ops and, you know, all the different kinds of phases. And they have to basically say like, yeah, this guy isn't a total rim job. And, uh, and then you go at this chief's board, which is, so you walk in, you're in, in uniform and there's like 20 salty fucking older seals in there. And, uh, and they can ask you anything and they can keep you in there for 20 minutes. They can keep you in there for five hours. And, uh, so some of it is like, what's the cyclic rate of an M4, you know, what's the

Starting point is 01:27:15 safe blast distance on four pounds of fucking, you know, PETN, what's the, you know, packing procedure for, you know, this parachute that, you know, we use for rubber ducks. What's the, you know, packing procedure for, you know, this parachute that, you know, we use for rubber ducks. What's the process for deflooding an outboard motor? Like they ask you all these operational questions and, and it's a lot, you know, as a 19 year old, like you kind of get force fed, you know, by the fire hose, like all of this information of weapon systems, of demolition, of diving, of jumping, of boats and motors, you name it. And you have to know your shit on all of it. And so they'll throw you some oddball questions, but then they'll throw you like some morality questions like, Hey, we're on deployment and your chief is married, but he's

Starting point is 01:27:54 banging this fucking tie hooker. Are you going to say anything about it? You know, like, or, you know, this happens in combat and, you know, there's a questionable fucking call and, you know, what are you going to do? How are you going to handle that or whatever? And so you've got to kind of navigate stuff like that. And again, they can ask you anything. I mean, they can ask you about your childhood, you know? So sometimes that's one of those things where they're, they're more than anything, just getting a feel for what kind of fucking dude you are and how you handle getting fucked with, how you handle technical questions you know pressure that way like are you going to fold if they start dog piling on you you know like it's more of kind of a psychological and

Starting point is 01:28:32 social test than it is really asking questions it's it's more kind of the vibe and how you're responding how you're carrying yourself and that kind of stuff and uh then usually if they like you they'll fuck with you towards the end like one one of the things, one of the, the last question I got was pretty funny. It was, let's say, you know, we're camping, just you and I. And, you know, we're, we're drinking one night. We're in the same tent and go to bed. We wake up the next morning and your ass is sore and you got a condom. And they're like, are you going to tell anybody?

Starting point is 01:29:02 And I'm like sitting there like, what the fuck kind of question is this? And I'm looking around. I'm like, no, I'm probably not going to fucking say anything. And he goes, you want to go camping? So just dumb shit like that. But usually they're only going to do that if they like it. And so then they're like, get the fuck out of here. And this is at the end of that six month probationary period.

Starting point is 01:29:25 Yeah. So you've been through buds. You've been through jump training. You've been through SEAL qualification training, six months of probation at the SEAL team. That's the final like yay or nay. With the actual team you're going to be with. Right. And you chose to be with three or did they assign you there?

Starting point is 01:29:40 Both. So I actually requested team two was my first choice. Eight was my second and three 8 was my second, and 3 was my third. 2 and 8 are on the East Coast, but yeah, I got them. Where's SEAL Team 2? In Little Creek. No, no, but where do they usually

Starting point is 01:29:56 deploy? Like, don't they have segments of the world each one deploys? Not anymore. So back then they did. SEAL Team 2 was Europe, basically, and some cold weather stuff. Interesting. Uh, team eight was a strike platoons. They'd go on carriers and do kind of like the, uh, fast response or quick response type stuff.

Starting point is 01:30:12 Team four was all South America. Excuse me on the, on the West coast. Team one was, um, Pacific, uh, you know, jungle, jungle training. Team three was all CENTCOM, Desert Warfare. Team five was cold weather, Alaska, North-South Korea, you know, kind of that whole contingent. So, and then you had the two SEAL delivery vehicle teams, which is all the mini sub stuff, and then SEAL team six,

Starting point is 01:30:41 which is all, you know, tier one anti-terrorism stuff. So, fast forward a few years and they kind of re redid everything to where now it's you know every team is it's kind of you know same whore different dress there's no real difference uh between them you know but uh but they always forget the evens are on the east coast odds are on the west or other way around other way around other way around yeah so yeah one i'm sorry odds are on the west coast one One, three, five, and seven are West Coast. Two, four, eight, and ten are on the East Coast. Six also, but it's not considered a regular Tier 3 SEAL team. It's a Tier 1 team.

Starting point is 01:31:14 Why is that? So as far as the tiers go, it's basically like it dictates funding and level of priority asset-wise. So SEAL Team 6 doesn't do all of the same stuff that all the regular SEAL teams do. Their primary focus is anti-terrorism and quick response, high-level mission type stuff. So the 20 years of extended combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan had basically, if you were a Navy SEAL deploying to those areas, you were doing generally the same stuff. Obviously, it varied deployment to deployment, team to team. The Team 6 guys would typically get the higher value targets. They have more funding, better assets, tighter training.

Starting point is 01:32:01 They're starting with guys who have multiple deployments, whereas at a regular SEAL team, you're always kind of going back to guys fresh out of buds. So your, your lowest common denominator is a guy that doesn't really know a whole lot. So you're kind of hamstrung by the level that you can get. Plus their, their funding is, is way fucking better. I mean, they basically have a blank checkbook and, and they get to use the TF 160 assets and, and pretty much, you know, they can, they can trump anybody. Like we're using this base, we're using this airplane where, you know, like they just kind of walk, walk wherever and can do almost whatever they want almost. But, um, so yeah, that's kind of the gist on them, but, um. But you wanted to be on it. So you got on three.

Starting point is 01:32:43 Yeah. You said you had, there were three that you like preferred, but you wanted to be on it. So you got on three, you said you had, there were three that you like preferred, but yeah, that's ranked them. Yeah. Towards, uh, the end of, or I think in, in second phase, at least for us, then they would, they would have you fill out your wishlist or whatever. And, uh, and they would come in like a guy would, would give you a brief summary of each team and what they did and where they deployed and stuff again. Cause there was a big difference at that time. And so, and then they're like, here are your wishlists. And, you know, there's classes where nobody gets what they want and it just needs the

Starting point is 01:33:12 Navy. And Hey, this team needs every one of you guys to go. And sometimes a lot of people will get what they want. Uh, just, it really depends, but so they'll, they'll try to send you where you want to go. Um, if they can, if they can't, then they'll just send you where they need you. But, um, why'd you pick Europe? Uh, so at that time, like your instructor cadre at, at buds is incredibly influential as you can probably imagine, but like these guys, you know, especially as an 18 year old showing up and, and, you know, seeing the recruiting videos and, um, you know, just the, the level of reverence that I had and respect for these guys was just like a mythic

Starting point is 01:33:51 proportion. Like these guys were just like, these dudes are fucking gods and they walk on water and like, you just, you almost idolize them, but they, they, they kind of perpetuate that, that mythic type of status and reputation because they're just so good at what they do and they're all in good shape and they're fucking hard asses and they're funny and like, they're just cool fucking guys. Like they walk around, like it's just, it's hard to even explain, but it's like every room that every one of them walks into, you're just like, holy shit. You know, like this guy just exudes fucking total bad-ass. And so at least for me at that time, like all of our first phase instructors were team two guys, you know, or at least East coast guys,

Starting point is 01:34:32 most of them were team two and keep in mind, this is prior to nine 11. So this was right after the Bosnia stuff had gone down. So like, you know, the, the East coast team, two guys, the Europe guys were actually the busiest at that time. So it was like, you know, these dudes are hard. They, you know, they've been to Bosnia, not that a whole lot happened there in terms of our involvement, but, um, yeah, it was just like, all my favorite instructors were team two guys. And so I was like, that's where I want to go, you know? And then there were a few that were teammate guys. So I was like, that's the next best choice. If I can't be on the East Coast, you know, the desert warfare stuff seems cool. You know, again, there wasn't much going on.

Starting point is 01:35:07 I mean, we were doing ship boardings a fair bit. And so like really the most consistent and predominant real world operations that were taking place at that time in naval special warfare were boarding ships that were defying the embargoes and smuggling oil. And so there was a fair bit of that going on. And so it was kind of, kind of cool to get to do VBSS and board these ships at night and take them down. And it was real world shit, you know, it wasn't like huge resistance, you know, you weren't getting in gunfights with them, but they would, you know, foul the deck with, you know, motor oil and wrap barbed wire and shit over the railings and weld doors shut and, you know, didn't make it a pain in the ass. But, uh, so that was kind of just what was

Starting point is 01:35:49 going on. And so that was my mentality at that time. So you ended up on team three after this probationary period is over, you had done the five month course on Intel. So is like, is that the specialty you're going in with as, Navy SEAL to Team 3? It was. And I would say that that was fairly rare for a fucking 20-year-old first platoon guy to be the intelligence rep. Usually it was a guy that had done multiple deployments that kind of knew how everything worked and could go into the intel shop and knew the people in there and had done multiple deployments knew how how as a platoon intelligence rep how you would gather intel for your platoon where you would get it from because he's done multiple deployments and stuff my oic uh so certainly not a credit to me i think he was just like there aren't many iss you're an is that makes sense you're the fucking intel guy don't fuck it up i was like holy, Holy shit. You know? And so,

Starting point is 01:36:49 and so I'm in charge of like night vision lenses. And, you know, at the, at this time, you know, in the late nineties, digital cameras had just kind of started to be a thing. It's like a big deal. Yeah. And they were like, you know, the size of a fucking pizza box and, and super heavy. And, and, you know, it was like 1.2 megapixel pictures. And we're, you know, so a big component of what we do is special reconnaissance, you know, so a big, uh, component of what we do is special reconnaissance, you know, whether it's in the desert, the jungle, you know, wherever. And since we were a desert team, we did a fair bit of that long range reconnaissance patrols where, you know, we'd spend two or three days hiking into a fucking, uh, a point and, you know, get, get all

Starting point is 01:37:21 of our hide sites set up with camionetting and sandbags and be all uh you know sneaky and into an area and then spend three or four days observing a fucking target that is a surface to air missile site or you know whatever and so um what do you mean surface to air missile site uh so like at the time you know again like any country that we're going to go into militarily we're going to start with air campaigns. What's the biggest threat of an air campaign? It's twofold. It's the proliferation of surface-to-air missiles that can get past our systems, or there's so many of them that it overwhelms our defense systems and we can't deal with them.

Starting point is 01:37:59 So our biggest threat initially is going to be our planes being shot down by surface-to-air missiles. So that's where kind of a classic special operations mission would be infiltrate into where aerial imagery says that there's a surface-to-air missile site in these locations. So they'll send out all these teams. We're observing these targets and for a couple days ensuring that, yes, that's a surface-to-air missile. Yes, it's active. It's being maintained. It's being monitored, what have you. And then, okay. Hey, the, the air campaign is going to kick off. So now simultaneously, all of our dudes are going to do raids on these surface to air missiles. We're going to go down and do an L shaped ambush, blow them up, fuck everybody up on target and leave. Then our planes come in and just roast

Starting point is 01:38:42 everybody. So it's, it's kind of a one, two, like the 4th of July, baby, one, two punch. So, uh, the other thing is, is GPS and communication jamming equipment now, which over the last 20 years has become a much bigger threat, uh, for our, our air force and our air campaigns. But we don't have anything to do with trying to combat that. That's all signals intelligence and, you know, E2C Hawkeyes jamming shit in the sky and things like that. It's become a bigger threat, I assume, because other countries are just getting better technology. Yeah, and just the technological advances of everything. So now we're focusing more on GPS and traditional communication, independent navigation and communication systems that aren't relying on that shit that are either, you guess, in like 98 at this point, you're 96.

Starting point is 01:39:47 It wasn't that common for them to assign basically a rookie like the Intel label. But is it more common now? I don't think so, no. I think it's still pretty – well, there's two things. One, I would say it's probably – it probably never happens at this point because now there are no intelligence specialists coming in into buds. Everybody go joins buds as, as a special operator or what you're trying to do is, is become a, anoman and you know you name it you'd have all these different rates so like when you're in uniform even though you have your seal trident pin on your your insignia that says your seal rate could be any of those things like the is is like a quill and a fucking magnifying glass crossed now it's uh it's basically the trident without the eagle it's like a flintlock a trident and uh and the anchor you know know, it's, it's just those three

Starting point is 01:40:46 components is the, is the insignia for SO or special operator. So, so now that there's not, you know, somebody with any intelligence training showing up, I can't imagine they would ever put a brand new guy as an Intel department head. But yeah, I was trying to remember our, our mutual friend, Ramanana leke he was human intel right but he maybe he didn't come in as that right so the that program is is post like after you've been in the seal teams it's kind of its own it's it's not a a rating in the navy it's a special project that exists in naval special warfare so it's totally different you guys keep track you remember all this stuff so perfectly there's so many different layers to the military i could do a million podcasts and still

Starting point is 01:41:29 be like wait what was that thing again well the neat thing about that is that you know for for any of us like it's it's second nature you know it's like you don't you don't really have to remember things it's just you live it for long enough to where you just understand it that's what baffles me about like the stolen valor stuff. Like it's so fucking easy to, to catch somebody lying about that because of that is like, if you haven't lived that and you don't know it, like it's, it's,

Starting point is 01:41:53 I would say there's a zero fucking percent chance that you're not going to fuck it up somewhere. Yeah. You know, whether it's the, or the wrong buds class or whatever, it's like, Oh,

Starting point is 01:42:00 who did you know? Like, even if they say, Oh, I was in bud class songs. I was, who was your LPO? Who was your class proctor? Who, you know who you know uh fuck i don't remember like i know you

Starting point is 01:42:09 weren't a seal then because you don't forget that shit you know so and you see it all the time i mean there was a funny joke even back when i was going through it's like there on any at any given time on average there's like 2 000 to 2 300 active duty seals, you know, and then in Vietnam, you know, cause this was, you know, again, in the, in the nineties where the Vietnam frogmen were, were probably the most stolen valor, uh, oriented group, you know, where, yeah, a lot of people would say I was a seal in Vietnam in the nineties. And so one of the jokes was like, there was, you know, over the course of the entire Vietnam war, there were, you know, 4,300 SEALs in Vietnam and I've met all 97,000 of them. Because they're just fucking everywhere, you know.

Starting point is 01:42:54 So, yeah, it's just – but it exists today, you know, they're closer to pulling it off, but it's still, I would say, woefully lacking in terms of the, the finite details that makes it easy to, to distinguish whether or not somebody actually was a SEAL or not. Yeah. It's, it's always a shame when you see that, obviously, when people are trying to say things they didn't do. My, my one thing as a civilian from the outside that does bother me though sometimes is when I see the military eat their own and jump to conclusions on stuff i mean i don't get it yeah i've seen it up close like and with people i've had in this studio and then i see the facts and i'm like guys don't you know you know why do we got to do this yeah i mean to me i would say even on a broader point um you know chad chad right i don't know if you know who he is right yeah he'd be a great guy to have have on here. He was a SEAL. He's been on my show. It's been a couple of years now, but he's an ultra marathoner and a really, really devout Christian and just a super, super interesting and good and cool guy.

Starting point is 01:43:57 He looks like Forrest Gump right before he turned around to stop running. He does. I mean, if I can pull him up, like that's exactly what he looks like. Always wearing running shorts. Oh yeah. Oh, you know what? I have seen this guy. Dude, you should a hundred percent have him on the show. He's a fucking awesome dude. Yes, I have seen this dude. Actually on the flight here, I watched a video that he put out just in the last week or so kind of addressing that. And I think he summed it up spectacularly with basically saying, you know, like by, by doing that, by criticizing and questioning and accusing fellow service members, like you're, you're part of this flawed system that the military has, has brainwashed you and made you become, which is thinking that the best part of your life was spent doing the thing in the military. And a big travesty is guys who get out and aren't willing to share their story for fear of retribution or accusations or what have you. And so you've got all this wisdom and all these really, really poignant, powerful life lessons that are not being shared because people don't want to get thrown under the fucking bus and be accused of lying or, you know, whatever. And the way that he spends like 10 minutes just in a one take rant and it's just masterfully well done.

Starting point is 01:45:12 But and, you know, maybe you start that out with him talking about that on here. But I agree completely. And it's I, you know, have kind of made a very intentional point to never, you know, publicly take a position on a guy, you know, other than just being supportive, because to me, fucking life's hard enough, you know, and, and, you know, one of the things that gets brought up quite often is, you know, guys, especially in the SEAL community, if they write books or they use the SEAL brand and kind of weave it into their brand is that they're pimping the triad and they're whoring it out and they're, and they're making money off of the SE seal teams and what have you. And to me, you know, there, there's,

Starting point is 01:45:48 there's some nuance there that I would say is really important, which is, you know, at, at what point or where do you draw that line? Because I would say, you know, if, if you're saying, if you're, if you're filling out a job application for anywhere, or you're putting a resume together and you say that you were a Navy SEAL and that contributes to you being hired, which you absolutely fucking know that it's going to, no matter what you do, even as nothing to do with special operations or what have you, is that it, it, you know, uh, it displays a certain character and a, and a caliber of, of man that, that has that on his resume is that what's the difference? At that point,

Starting point is 01:46:26 you're really just talking about levels of magnitude in terms of financial influence. So whether you write a book and you have a fucking big gold trident on it and you get, I'm a Navy SEAL tattooed on your lower back. I mean, whatever, which I don't know who the fuck would do that. I hope there's at least one guy. You're going to turn around and show us a tramp stamp with a Navy SEAL trident on it? If you put something else in this mug, I might. And you give it long enough to set in. I just might show you some all kinds of shit. But, yeah, so, but, you know, I agree with his point entirely.

Starting point is 01:46:57 And I just think, you know, A, life's hard enough. B, like, there's such a small group of dudes. C, you weren't fucking there. D, everybody has their own. I mean, you can get in a car accident, right. And,

Starting point is 01:47:08 and the two people of, of what their experience was vastly fucking different. You know, even if there's traffic cams and dash cams, you know, so to be like, this guy's full of shit, he's a fucking liar.

Starting point is 01:47:19 And he fucking, you know, like I just, you know, to me, it's like my first question would be why like a, A, who made you the fucking gatekeeper of the community? Nobody. Like nobody voted on making you the guy that's supposed to fact check people.

Starting point is 01:47:35 And two, like what's your angle with it? Like what do you gain by doing it? And, you know, where's the motivation? You know, to me, one of my favorite sayings, cause the dog industry is pretty similar that way, where a lot of, there's a lot of eat your own shit talking clicky, you know, fuck that guy. He doesn't know what he's doing. You know, there's a lot of professional jealousy or hatred or what have you. And it just drives me nuts. And one of my favorite adages in reference to both of those situations is, you know, blowing out somebody else's candle doesn't make your shine any brighter. Uh, and, and to me, like you could apply that to pretty much every

Starting point is 01:48:09 aspect of life. It's like, you know, there, there's enough out there for everybody like Jocko or Goggins or Sean or me, or, I mean, anybody being successful, there's not a finite amount of success that can be had. And by, you know, trying to drag other dudes through the mud, one, you look like a 12 year old fucking school girl. Who by, you know, trying to drag other dudes through the mud, one, you look like a 12 year old fucking school girl who's, you know, gossiping about your friends and, and two, like, it's not helping you out at all, you know? So I just don't get it. Yeah. So a couple of things there. Number one, as long as you're not lying about what you did, if you serve the country and have good lessons or examples to provide to other people from that, and you can do that through the work you do, and you can do that and make

Starting point is 01:48:50 money doing that, being a bestselling author like you are, or having a podcast like you do or things like that. I don't know why anyone has a problem with that. That blows my mind. Secondly, you make the point about how different people can experience the same thing in a different way. And then things can get twisted that way. Well, I don't remember it like that. I don't remember it like that.

Starting point is 01:49:10 You know, that's why I think what guys like you and Sean are doing is so valuable. Because essentially, you know, and you have on different guests too, but you have on a lot of veterans. And you guys both have on a lot of veterans specifically from like the global war on terror terror era and like you're getting we're getting an oral history of that era from people who were in the marines people who were in the infantry people who were in army rangers people who were in the navy seal all these different people who had different roles in afghanistan iraq and the, and like, I think that's so important and such a big service because that way at least people can maybe put things together and see like, oh, it was different for these guys and from these guys. And then they may think even like

Starting point is 01:49:56 some veterans may think when they see this stuff, like, oh, maybe I am jumping to conclusions and other people and I shouldn't be, you know, talking about this. Well, yeah, I agree. I think the one kind of tricky part there is, and I'm not saying it's okay to lie, but when one guy thinks that didn't happen, he's lying. You know, and I think that's where it's always justified is like, well, I don't have a problem with him being successful. I have a problem with him lying about what he did or didn't do or, you know, or whatever. And so that's where the tricky part is. And so, you know, for me at least, like if I wasn't there, I'm not going to have a fucking opinion on it, period. You know, like that's just the reality

Starting point is 01:50:33 of it. And by there, I don't mean like I was in country at the same time or it was our sister platoon and they were in this tent. Like if I wasn't on the fucking mission, you're not going to get an opinion from me on it in terms of what went down and whether or not it shook out the way somebody said or not. Cause it's, it's not my fucking business, you know, and it's not my story to tell. So I, yeah, I just, I don't understand why people spend so much time arguing and slinging mud at one another about it. It's, it's pretty irritating. Yeah. Hope to see it slow down. But anyway, we left off where you were getting in actually to Team 3 and coming into service. So you had mentioned this, but it was an interesting time because this is, I guess, like three – at this point, three years, four years before 9-11, give or take.

Starting point is 01:51:20 The only thing, so to speak, that had really been going down publicly was all the balkanization in in europe and at the time al-qaeda was kind of like this thing the intelligence community was tracking but a lot of people weren't making a big deal out of it and then in the late 90s some attacks overseas happened there was there was the embassy bombing and then one or two others and then i believe there was the uss coal. And that was that your, but October of 2000. And so – Yeah, can you explain to people what that was for – Sure.

Starting point is 01:52:12 If you don't know the history. Yeah, so one of our faults, I think, is that – and again, pre-9-11, I think it was a lot easier to understand why we were so complacent. Not that it's an excuse, but it's at least an understanding. I mean, whether like even take the, say the, the buds base, like there was no gate guard at night prior to nine 11. Like you, you, anybody could just drive on the fucking buds compound base. There was nobody standing guard guard duty, which is weird to think of now. It's like, it's impossible to even imagine now. Um, you know, so like that as kind of a classic example, but another, I would say equally ridiculous thing that we were doing is that

Starting point is 01:52:51 the, you know, within the confines of the military and the war machine that exists, you have USNS ships, which is United States Naval ship. It's not a USS ship. So the USS are combative vessels, USNS ships are supply vessels, tankers, et cetera. And so both USNS ships and even USS ships would pull into ports all over the world for resupply. And so that's what happened in the Gulf of Aden in Yemen, is the USS Cole was pulling in for a resupply, which again, like thinking of that now it's like, what, you know, but yeah, you, you let, you know, the, the Yemenese port of, of Aden, you know, pull two fucking tugboats up next to the, to the coal and push it into a spot where they're going to unload pallets of food and water and fuel.

Starting point is 01:53:46 And again, it's like it's impossible to even think that that was something that happened, but it did all over the world. And so, you know, Al-Qaeda being who they are and taking advantage of the things that they take advantage, saw that as an easy target. And so that's what they did. So they basically took a couple thousand pounds of explosives and laid in this little tugboat, or what looked like a tugboat, and then replaced one of the tugboats. Got up alongside it, started pushing it in, and then clacked themselves off and blew a fucking massive hole in the side of the ship and almost sunk it. It killed 19 U.S. sailors. Damage control wise, the mechanisms within the ship were competent enough and

Starting point is 01:54:26 quick acting enough to shut different things down and make it to where the ship didn't sink. How did they do that? So, I mean, going back to World War II, even with torpedoes, like there are very specific protocols for taking on water at different points of the ship. And so they can close hatches and shut things down to compartmentalize it so that it doesn't just run through the entire boat. So that's the gist of it. It's called damage control, which there's an actual job called de-semen, which that's their entire fucking job is to mitigate damage

Starting point is 01:55:02 and control it on a ship for, for instances like that. So they were Johnny on the spot, got it all under control. Now it was like half sunk and listing to one side real heavy, but it didn't sink. And, um, so the goal was for Al Qaeda was, was to sink it entirely. So the fact that they didn't sink, it was pissed them off. And then, so they kind of vowed even open the Marban open radios, uh, were threatening saying, you know, the ship is not leaving the Harbor. We will fucking sink it. After they bombed it. Right. And so we had just gone from Australia to Bahrain. So we're sitting in Bahrain waiting

Starting point is 01:55:37 to do a bunch of exercises and desert warfare training that happens. So we jump on the USS Tarawa and haul ass down there. How fast were you able to get there? training that happens. So we jump on the USS Tarawa and haul ass down there. How fast were you able to get there? It took a couple, it took like a day and a half, I think. Um, not super far, but the Tarawa is a big amphibious ship. It doesn't go terribly fast. And, um, maybe even a couple of days, I'm not even sure, but so we get down there and then, so for 63 days straight, our, our tasking is from sundown to sunup. Uh, we're going to be in two different boats that are circling the ship. And then we're going to have a 60 gunner, a law gunner,

Starting point is 01:56:10 a sniper and a comms unit, and a couple other guys that are just armed with regular M4s on the ship, uh, maintaining a security presence and not allowing them to come finish sinking it. So for 63 days, we did that. And, uh, it was a, it was an eye opener for sure. I mean, number one, like all of the power was shut down. You have 19 dead bodies that are mangled and buried in this ship that's sitting buried in the ship. Yeah. Like they're all, you know, all like in different compartments of the ship that are shut down with 90 degree saltwater submerging. Like like so you can imagine what that smelled like oh because they had to close it yeah yeah so all of those dead bodies were still compartmentalized

Starting point is 01:56:51 and some of them lodged uh you know in different different parts of the ship and uh and then you have you know an entire galley's worth of food that's now not refrigerated for two months wait so for that for 63 days had that, there wasn't a way to like, no, no. I mean like at that point, so what we were waiting on was a, a floating dry dock, which was, I think the called the Marlin spike came all the way from Mississippi. It had to get, and then we had to drag the, we as a, as a country, we had to get the, the coal out into international waters, get it loaded up onto this floating dry dock and then send it back to Mississippi and have it completely redone in which

Starting point is 01:57:30 it did. And then ended up, you know, now it's, it's back in the fleet and deploying again. And that's where they take the bodies out in Mississippi. Yep. Um, so yeah, for that two month period, uh, it was pretty dicey and there were a few different instances where they would kind of test the waters and, uh, and, you know, try to infiltrate our, you know, circle of trust, if you will. And like on a tugboat or no, like on, on little motor boats that, you know, come in or, or even like these little dong, you know, miniature fucking ships that, uh, that they would try to sail in or whatever. They're just, you know, poking and trying to see if they could get past. And we never ended up opening up on anybody. There were a few

Starting point is 01:58:09 times where we came real close, but, um, you know, if they came anywhere near our kind of invisible fence, if you will, uh, we would haul ass out there and, you know, draw down on them and what have you. But where were you usually sitting again? I was on one of the little boats that was floating around, uh, in the water. Like how close to the boat to the again? I was on one of the little boats that was floating around in the water that whole time. Like how close to the boat, to the coal? I mean, we would be right up alongside it and all the way to probably 350, 400 yards outside of it. And how many guys did you say it was again from the SEALs doing this? 16.

Starting point is 01:58:39 16. Total. So you'd have, you know, probably 10 of them on the ship and then three in each boat with our special boat unit guys driving the boat and, and a guy on either a 50 Cal or a Mark 19 grenade launcher. And doing it in shifts because you're doing it 24 seven or sundown to sunup. And so it was just one, one long shift. Like, Oh, so you weren't worried about it overnight? No, we were, uh, I'm sorry for sundown to sunup. Did I get that wrong? Yeah. So, uh, well, so you weren't worried about it overnight? No, we were. I'm sorry. From sundown to sunup. Did I get that wrong?

Starting point is 01:59:06 Yeah. Well, so during the day, the Marines did that. Got it. Okay. Daylight, the Marines had it. Nighttime, we had it. And so, yeah, we would, you know, at dusk, we would head that way. We take over the watch.

Starting point is 01:59:19 Sun comes up. They relieve us. We go back out to the boat. So, yeah, seven days a week, 63 days straight, we did that. And then they finally, finally got it out to, um, to the Marlin spike and got it loaded up. There was one instance on the way while it was being tugged out, out to sea, a, a small other boat was hauling ass straight towards it. And we thought that they were going to try to do one last ditch effort thing. And it ended up being a Yemeni patrol boat that we boarded and, uh, and almost shot

Starting point is 01:59:50 everybody on it. Like, cause they were military guys or there were a few military guys, but you weren't sure. Well, I mean, it's just like they're in military uniforms, they have weapons, you know? And so we, we take over the tug and, uh, and, you know, flood it and then taking it down. And these guys are all just like, holy shit. And there was one officer in particular who he had, they all had just had pistol belts on with pistols. So they weren't standing there with AKs or anything, but he starts to fucking put his hand on his gun. And, and myself, uh, Clint and Shane, two, two of my closest friends all just swarm him and get our guns right up in

Starting point is 02:00:24 his fucking grill and come off safe and just getting ready to fucking plug him and then he's like no you know what i'm gonna put my hands back up and so it was you know they they were they didn't recognize who it was so they were responding thinking this was some unknown whatever just basically a i don't know that i'd even call it a miscommunication we didn't really feel like it was our job to let them know that we were doing that and they saw something on the radar out there that they didn't recognize. So they were going to check it out. But so it wasn't really a big deal. Was that the first time you ever put a weapon in somebody's face?

Starting point is 02:00:55 For real? Yeah. Yeah. For real. Oh, well, I say I did it a number of times in the water prior to that boats that would come up, you know, we would draw down on them and stuff, but nothing ever happened. Did it jack your adrenaline, though? Yeah, I mean, a little bit. I wouldn't say nice thing. The thing about training to a certain level of conditioning is that it becomes like a conditioned response, really.

Starting point is 02:01:20 And so, yes, the adrenaline is there, but it's, it's kind of graduated and it does level off a fair bit. You know, it's not like the first time you jump out of an airplane or, you know, whatever it's, it's not as crazy just because you're kind of so used to doing that stuff. Still there, just not. Yeah. And during those 63 days, you have the 19 guys who perished who are still, their bodies are stuck in there. But then you had a whole ship. I would imagine the whole crew was still there now. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:01:50 How many guys approximately? A couple hundred. So, I mean, what was their vibe after that? Just like shell shock? Yeah. Yeah. And it was weird because the first couple nights we were there, we actually stayed on the ship. We stayed, like, you do the math, there's 16 of us, there's 19 dead people.

Starting point is 02:02:11 So there's 19 open racks and we're sleeping in them. Oh, my God. You know, and so it's like we're laying there and these, like, you look across and, you know, on a Navy ship, it's not very big. I mean, they'd have 18 fucking dudes in a room this size, you know, just fucking stacked on top of each other and small racks. And so, um, you know, like you're laying there and like, you can just feel this motherfucker eyeball and then you look over and he's just like, you know, staring at you with the thousand yard stare, like fucking crying or, you know, whatever. And you're just like, Jesus Christ, like throw the curtain closed. And, you know, so,

Starting point is 02:02:43 um, and of course, you know, uh, the SEAL teams being the band of Vikings that we are, there's of course some dudes jerking off in those racks and being total fucking savages, having no respect for anything. But so, yeah, that's the fucking Navy for us. I guess you weren't one of them. I was not one of them. Okay. And I would tell you if I was, but I mean, yeah, I mean, it was my first deployment. I was not one of them. Okay. And I would tell you if I was, but – Right. I mean, it was my first deployment.

Starting point is 02:03:07 I'm fucking 20, 21 years old. I mean, it was impactful. To me, that was the last thing on my mind. Yeah. But we had some dirty bastards that were a little older and just didn't give a shit. I guess so. Did you like – do you remember talking with any of those guys, though? A little bit.

Starting point is 02:03:22 Like some of the ones who lost their friends? A little bit. Like some of the ones who lost their friends? A little bit. And the humbling thing, I think, for me was how appreciative they were that we were there. Because I think a Navy ship doesn't have much by way of armament. And a ship that small doesn't have any Marines on it. There may have been a couple of MPs with pistols at most, you know, everything else is like whiz guns and Tomahawks and shit, you know, that, that you don't see anyway. So, you know, had it been on a, on an amphib where there's 1500 fucking armed Marines and it would be different, but, you know, so to see all the

Starting point is 02:04:03 sudden 16 dudes in full kit with fucking long guns show up ready to fuck people up, I think for them was, was a huge sense of relief, you know? So they were just super grateful and appreciative and, and very welcoming. And, um, you know, they didn't have much that they could offer us or, uh, you know, help us out, but they, but they did. It's like anything we can do to help, you know, we don't have much, but you know, whatever. And so that was kind of a neat, neat thing that you're, you're, it's always that way in the military and training, like you're all on the same team and it's, you know, a very uniting experience when you're, you know, going through the, the different trials and tribulations of training that are, that are tough and whatever.

Starting point is 02:04:43 But now when it's real and there's dead bodies around and stuff, it's just different, you know? So, so that like, it was kind of a, just a reassuring, um, very uniting experience, uh, interacting with those guys. And this is the Cole was, what did you say? October 2000. Is that what it was? Okay. So you guys were the desert team you had obviously been in that now for a couple years how much before the cold did you know about slash were like really read in on behind the scenes on al-qaeda very little uh you know as an intel guy, I was at least familiar with him. I would say

Starting point is 02:05:26 most of the platoon guys probably, you know, if they had heard of him, they'd heard of him and that was it, you know, had very, very little concept as to who they were, what they were trying to accomplish. And, you know, they knew that they existed, knew that they had bombed a couple embassies in Kenya and Tanzania a couple of years ago, but that was really about it, you know, so. Were you guys focused more on like countries and governments at the time? Sort of. I mean, for us, you know, strangely enough, or maybe not strangely enough after explaining it, you know, the, at that time, especially because the SEAL teams were so AO oriented areas of operational expertise, et cetera, you know, because it's like,

Starting point is 02:06:06 we're focused on the middle East. Well, what's going on in the middle East oil embargo smuggling. So that was our focus. You know, now if you were to talk to the team, one guys, what are you guys doing? We're going down to South America doing counter narcotic stuff against Columbia, you know, cartels and whatever, that's what they're focused on. So, um, if it's not directly involved in what's going on there, like you don't really need to know. And so you're not you know, cartels and whatever, that's what they're focused on. So, um, if it's not directly involved in what's going on there, like you don't really need to know. And so you're not going to really waste any bandwidth worrying about it or even learning about it. So you want to be as good as you can at whatever it is, is in the front site focus of what you're focused on. And that's

Starting point is 02:06:39 kind of the deal now on September 12th, that all changed, you know, now every fucking dude is buying, you know, any book they can, you know, reading anything that all changed. You know, now every fucking dude is buying, you know, any book they can, you know, reading anything that they can, you know, open source, even on the, on the TSSCI side of, you know, pulling intelligence on these groups. Now, now it's a whole different fucking ball game. And, and if you think of Al Qaeda as kind of the hub, you're looking at any fucking thing that, can spider web back to them uh to include in the pacific specifically the philippines you had the moral islamic liberation front which ironically is milf they don't know that which i find fucking hilarious and then the abu sayyaf group who's more prominent in the southern third of the country down in Mindanao.

Starting point is 02:07:26 And they were basically an Al-Qaeda affiliate or sympathizer and were running a lot of Islamic extremist terrorist operations against the Philippine government and going back and forth from Indonesia, which is a pretty big hotbed. And so, yeah, like as soon as that happened, now we're putting all those pieces together. But you said September 12th right there. You're referring to September 11th, obviously. But for you, though, and your guys who got there in October 2000 and you 63 days looking at the remains of what Al-Qaeda just did were you guys for sure more focused on them but but not from a spider web standpoint because it was specific to yemen you know again it's it's almost impossible or at a minimum very difficult to even try to put yourself in a mindset where your only understanding of al-qaeda is bombing one fucking uss ship in one country one time

Starting point is 02:08:24 you know so if if you can try to imagine, that's the only thing, you know, then you're going to focus on Yemen. You're going to focus on Al Qaeda, but Al Qaeda, Arabian peninsula, or AQAP versus Al Qaeda in, uh, even in Afghanistan is a big difference, you know, and, and post nine 11, it became an even bigger difference. It was almost like, I mean, it's like you're under the same franchise, but two totally different goals. It's like, yes, on paper, our methodology and our ideology is essentially the same, but what we're trying to accomplish and where we're doing it is vastly different. So, yes, the spotlight was a lot brighter on Al Qaeda,

Starting point is 02:09:07 but it was more specific to, okay, well, the coal got bombed in Yemen. What are they doing in Yemen? You know? And so, yes, there is a, okay, well, they're also operating out of Afghanistan. Looking back on it, I think my, my assumption at that time was that Afghanistan was more of the headquarters safe haven where, Hey, our hands aren't dirty. We're just hanging out here and different shits being planned from there, which, you know, was, was accurate. But, you know, our understanding of how, how deep those roots went in Afghanistan was, was pretty limited at that time. Even, even after that. Did you have any dealings with Al QQaeda or Al-Qaeda linked operations

Starting point is 02:09:45 between the coal and September 11th? No. Well, no. I mean, what I will say, after we got the coal out and on its way back to the United States, so that obviously made us adjust our policy as it relates to resupply and, and okay, now what are we going to do and how are we going to do this? So they basically shut everything down worldwide and they made one, one port, uh, you know, they kind of looked at logistically, you know, where, where can we put one spot? That's going to be the most conveniently located given all of the things that

Starting point is 02:10:20 we have going on. And it was Dubai or actually UA, uh, Jebel Ali, which was by, by Dubai in UAE. So that was now going to be the one spot that USNS and USS ships actually, and they were smart about it. So they said, okay, USS ships are not going in port anywhere. USNS ships will go into these ports. They will get all of the supplies and then they'll go do an underway replenishment with the USS ships out at sea, out in international waters. So you're never putting USS ships in, in there. There's no combatives, no active duty military personnel whatsoever. All of the USNS ships are merchant Marines. They're civilians, not that their lives aren't important, but from a juiciness of target

Starting point is 02:11:01 standpoint, they're nowhere near as valuable as, you know, an active duty fucking sailor or Marine. So, so our job was then to go, we stayed in Dubai for like five weeks. Of course it was during Ramadan when everything's fucking closed, which is probably better for us, honestly, if we're being honest, but no good food stands open. Nothing was open. But so, uh, Jabal Ali is where the port is. Um, we're staying in Dubai. So we're going back and forth. Every time a USNS ship comes into port, we go in ahead of time. We sweep the entire warehouse.

Starting point is 02:11:33 Wow. We scuba dive and dive under the tugboats and vet them. We've got sniper overwatch on the tallest tower there. We're in civilian clothes, relaxed grooming standards, concealed weapons, you know, bullshit names, uh, or stories basically while we were there. So it was a neat kind of taste of that, like, Oh, it's a little more shadowy, um, you know, more unconventional kind of special operations type of mission. Cause it was, you know, a little more secretive and, and what we were doing was fucking important, you know? So, um, we stayed there for, like I said, about six weeks while we were doing that, they were setting up basically like a, a TDY or like a, a, a temporary duty station

Starting point is 02:12:16 billeting where they would, they would send a contingent of EOD guys and supply clerks and, you know, and, and set up kind of a more permanent shop. We did it as kind of a bandaid until they could backfill and get an actual shop set up. So, you know, we would work every other day or so and, uh, it was busy, uh, but it was cool to be a part of that. And then, uh, and then that was kind of the gist of it. So it wasn't really responding to Al Qaeda because at that point, you know, they had gotten away with kicking us in the dick pretty well. And so they kind of scattered like cockroaches a little bit for a little while until 9-11, you know, which was less than a year later. So I think, you know, after they did that, it's like, okay, we can hit the dragon in the mouth. Let's do it on a higher scale.

Starting point is 02:13:03 And they kind of retracted everything, focused everything on, on September 11th and then, and then pulled it off. Where were you on September 11th? So I was being on the West coast and it was fairly early. Uh, I had, while I was getting ready, I was at SEAL team three in a platoon. It was between my first and second platoon. And, uh, I remember seeing it on the news, the first plane hitting and, and it was, it actually, there was no video. It was just like, Oh, a small plane ran into the tower. And it was like, yeah, that's fucking dumb. That sucks. Whatever I get in my car, I'm, I'm halfway to work on interstate five, uh, you know,

Starting point is 02:13:39 going down to San Diego. I was living in La Jolla at the time. And then all of a sudden over the radio, it's like, you know, interrupts and it's like a second plane just hit the other tower and we're under attack. And they're just like, Holy fuck. So I kept going to work. By the time I got there, they had had, they had the, every gate shut down. They're basically every motherfucker that was coming through the gate, pulling them out of the car, going through their car. Like it was a full narcotics traffic stop and so it took like four hours to get on base for most people oh you're just in like the traffic stop what wow this whole time yeah yeah so i'm listening to most of it on the radio so then i get into the seal

Starting point is 02:14:15 team and in the team three and it's you know to say the the tension and vibe was different is obviously a woeful misunderstanding or understatement. So it was just weird. It's hard to describe. I mean, it was, it was this, just this feeling of, of being angry and,

Starting point is 02:14:31 and I wouldn't even say nervous, but like anxious, but in a, I want to go fucking kill these fucking people type, type of way. It was like an unsettled restlessness, you know, that was just pervasive.

Starting point is 02:14:43 It was very quiet. And every, yeah, everybody just was like, it's fucking go time. Like, you know, that was just pervasive. It was very quiet. Um, and every, yeah, everybody just was like, it's fucking go time. Like, you know, shit's going to get real fucking right now and, and, uh, you know, get your shit basically. And so, you know, everybody's in their lockers, like going over their shit and sharpening knives and, you know, fucking going through their stuff and double, triple checking everything and just trying to sharpen the sword to the best of our ability and get as ready as we can without any actual direction yet. How quickly did you know it was Al Qaeda? Do you remember like when you found out? Pretty much right away.

Starting point is 02:15:13 You knew right away like yourself? I mean, all of us were like, it's them, you know, and then our intel shop is like, yeah, it's them, you know? So yeah, it was, it was immediate, you know? I mean, everybody assumed it and then they confirmed it, you know, pretty much right away. But, uh, the, the frustrating part was then it was like, you know, the, the days afterwards and the, you know, the collapse of the towers and digging through the rubble. And like, it was this, all right, let's go fucking do it. And then it was like, no, we're going to wait, you know? And then it just kind of drug on and on and on. And I think frustrated a lot of us, like we all wanted to just go there like right now and and start doing it and um and we didn't

Starting point is 02:15:50 you know so i'm not saying how we did it was wrong i think it was actually probably better than just half-ass sending us over there to see what the fuck's going on like you know would have been a lot worse had we done it that way but that's what everybody wanted yeah i'm sure that's the reaction ironically looking at the whole global war on terror and how things ended up the beginning of it was like the most genius part as it would turn out i mean they really that paramilitary operation was insane but did you get because like you didn't end up deploying to afghanistan at all right right so your team at what point did you guys find out like, you're not going there?

Starting point is 02:16:27 So the, one of the weird things about the SEAL teams, you know, weird or maybe unexpected as a better term is that, um, you know, the assumption is like, okay, well, this is the varsity fucking concern, right? Obviously. But there, there are things going on in the Philippines. There's things going on in South Americailippines there's things going on in south america like there are still other responsibilities that we have and so they're not going to send us all to one one spot the other thing is that the way that the seal teams deployed

Starting point is 02:16:55 back then and it was it was switching over to during 9-11 and between 9-11 and iraq is when it switched from each team would have two platoons deployed at a time. Uh, and so there'd be four platoons that were always home and there were two platoons always deployed is that now entire teams were deploying as a team. And so, um, that's why in between the coal and nine 11, um, I actually did a season on the Navy pentathlon team because there was, because of the rotation switch up, it was like, okay, seal team three, you guys get back in February of Oh one, you're not going to start up again as a team until January of Oh two.

Starting point is 02:17:35 So almost an entire year, like no, no, it's like going to schools and, you know, painting lines in the fucking parking lot and just, you know, being like, well, what the fuck, you know? So I tried out for the Navy pentathlon team and made it and spent a season doing that, which isn't worth talking about any further than that, but it was a neat experience. But anyway, so, um, we go, uh, or, you know, we're basically getting, getting ready to, to form back up, but now it's like, okay, well, there's already other, other guys there. They're there. This team's going to go here. You know, it's like, okay, well, there's already other guys there. They're there. This team's going to go here. It's basically the Commodore is doing this shell

Starting point is 02:18:11 game of who am I sending where, and it doesn't have anything to do with who's the best team or platoon or whatever, because they're all pretty equally competent. Some are a little better than others, but it's pretty nuanced. And so it's like, okay, well, we have this responsibility here in the Philippines. We have this responsibility in Columbia. We have these responsibilities in Afghanistan. Okay. Well now Iraq's picking up, you know, so, um, there were teams or there were put a couple of platoons from team three that went to Afghanistan relatively soon afterwards. I just wasn't in one of them. So, um, that's kind of how, kind of how it shook out. And, um, and then as the rotation started, okay, well now we're starting our workup. Now we have a year,

Starting point is 02:18:51 a little over a year of a training cycle before we were even kind of certified to deploy. So from September 11th till January 1st of 02, that period, uh, we're just waiting to, to start our workup cycle in January and then had to wait until the following, uh, you know, year to actually deploy. So. Oh, whoa. So you were chilling all the way to like the Iraq war. Sort of. Um, I, I did do a six month, I wouldn't call it a deployment. There was a six month trip to Jordan right after nine 11. I went in October of, of 2001. And normally we would do this, this October exercise every year. And, um, and, and, and in most cases up until that point, it was, it was really small. It was just a handful of dudes.

Starting point is 02:19:39 We'd go work with a Jordanian special forces and seals do a few training missions or exercises together and call it a day. Well, now 9-11 just happened. And so now they're like, well, we want to beef that up and send a big fucking group of you guys over that can kind of act as a quick reaction force or a jump off point. If we need, we can send you into Afghanistan from Jordan a lot easier than from here. So we kind of went over there with the understanding and even maybe expectation that we might end up going to Afghanistan. Obviously we didn't, but we did this, you know, exercise with the Jordanians for, for about a month and a half. And then I came home, jumped into the platoon, did about 10 months of a workup and then deployed now. So keep in mind, um, as we're getting ready to leave

Starting point is 02:20:28 in them, moving the chess pieces around seal team three golf and echo platoon, you guys are going to go to Guam and do our Southeast Asia deployment, which of course we were like, are you fucking kidding me? You know? Uh, so we were all pissed, uh, but we go to Guam and we'd been there about a month. And then Iraq, the whispers of Iraq heating up started to be told. And so SEAL Team 5 ends up coming. Basically, they're just like, you guys are going to Iraq, spray paint your shit tan. You're not going to the jungle. You're not going to Thailand. The Philippines, we're going to Iraq. We ended up, we did spend some time in the Philippines, worked, did some Operation Enduring Freedom training with the Filipino SEALs who were going and fighting the MILF and the Abu Sayyaf group. You did training or an

Starting point is 02:21:15 operation? Training with them. Their president at that time wouldn't allow U.S. forces to actually carry on or conduct operational missions. They would only let us basically get them right up to the point where they were inserting training them, helping them, equipping them, what have you. Well, what we told them about. I mean, I'll tell you straight. I'd love to tell you we got some. We didn't.

Starting point is 02:21:36 We helped train them, and that was it. So we did a little bit of that, and then Team 5 came over, and that was the most awkward turd-in-the-punch-bow bowl turnover party ever because they were supposed to go to iraq and they were like now team three still has enough time on their deployment to where you guys go to guam and backfield and we're sending them over and they're like you motherfuckers fuck you yeah i mean like we almost got in fights during the turnover party and it was fucking horrible but so we we, uh, go through Thailand, end up in Kuwait and, uh, and then spent the next couple of months getting ready to go into Iraq. And our first mission was the largest single special operations mission in us history. And still is to this day,

Starting point is 02:22:17 where we utilized the entire seal team three on one mission, which was to take down the gas and oil platforms. There were two of them. Where was this? It was like 30 miles off the coast of Iraq. So there's a manifold and metering station that had like 30 miles of 48-inch pipes, like four of them, that were full of oil going from the metering station out to the terminals. That's where Saddam had been smuggling tankers and tankers of oil over the years. So the concern was that those pipelines were going to be blown up

Starting point is 02:22:54 and flood the Gulf with all of that oil that was in the pipelines. And it was going to be a huge catastrophe. They wanted to avoid that. So they tasked us with taking down two oil rigs and the manifold and metering station all at the same time. Whoa. Just Team 3. Every platoon at Team 3, we all did it at the exact same time. Took it all down. How big is this? It's like 1,600 yards long. 16 football fields. How many people were guarding it? About 30, 16 of you on 30 coming in from the water. Right. Right. Yeah. And where do you drop in? So we, we came up alongside via

Starting point is 02:23:36 boat, you know, we had rehearsed and we spent like a month, six weeks, even staked out, like made a replica of the same size of, of the, the oil platform and, and, uh, and ran it just over and over and over. For me, that was one time where, you know, the, the amount of responsibility. And at that time now I'm 23, still young, but you know, I'm the, the Intel rep that's getting, you know, intelligence from the army, from NSA, from CIA, from DIA, from, you know, from air force, you name it. And trying to, to corroborate all these different, uh, intelligence sources about what we're going to face when we go on board there. And at one point

Starting point is 02:24:16 there was a one of the, there were several reports that were all pretty corroborated or consistent that there was over a hundred troops on, on board this oil platform and that they had explosives on every pipe, uh, every 48 inch pipe. And they were going to blow it as soon as we got on board. And it was just going to be this huge fucking massacre. And, uh, and we, you know, at that point it was like, this, this is what I'm hearing. And so I'm having to relay this to, to our guys. And we had one guy that was like,

Starting point is 02:24:45 at what point do we say we're not doing this? You know, and everybody's just like, never like, it's not, it's not up to us. Like we're going, if they tell us to go even under these circumstances and he ended up quitting, uh, which I talked about on Sean's show at, at depth or in depth. But anyway, so, um, as it would turn out, there was about 30 or so. There were a couple of Navy divers, Iraqi Navy divers. There were some Iraqi Republican Guard guys, some Saddam Fadain guys, which is like his mafia, his group of hitmen or whatever, and then a handful of workers. And they did have explosives. They weren't rigged. And the only reason we interrogated them afterwards and the reason why they didn't blow it when we got on board is because they had nowhere to go.

Starting point is 02:25:30 And they're like, we're not going to kill ourselves. Oh, so you didn't kill everyone before coming on board? We didn't. You didn't snipe them? No. In fact, we managed to get on board and captured all of them without killing any of them. You captured all 16? You captured all 30?

Starting point is 02:25:42 You didn't kill any of them? Right. Yeah. any of you captured all 16 you captured all 30 didn't kill any of them right yeah the only shots we fired were myself and my buddy shane breaching doors with a shotgun which we shot what they just white towel it like i mean it wasn't even that it was that we you know we we managed to get on board fast enough um to where you know most of them were sleeping there were a couple that were awake that we just took them completely off guard and and, and yeah, I mean, it was, it was basically zero resistance or, or almost none. And at that point, by the time we got on board and swept through and caught most of them sleeping, like

Starting point is 02:26:14 they were fucking terrified. I mean, there were guys crying and pissing and shitting themselves and, you know, uh, they were fucking terrified, you know, most of them, there were a few of them that were pissed, you know, and were eyeballing us, you know, like we were the devil and whatever. But, uh, yeah, we just got the jump on them and we had practiced diving and coming up completely stealthy. We had practiced fast roping on from, from the top. And, uh, you know, for us, it was like the fastest way we can do it without giving the fact a way that we're coming to do it i.e via helicopter is to get on the little 10 meter ribs the rigid hold inflatable boats and just haul ass up alongside and board it quick and just flood the target really fast and take it down whoa

Starting point is 02:26:56 you zip tie all of them yeah and then you brought them all back on the boat no we left them there uh took the whole thing down. We did. We did leave them there. Sitting there like, fuck! I mean, we left them there, but we waited for the Marine Fast company to come. And then they had more in-depth interrogators and set up shop. And I don't know how long they stayed, but it took us about seven hours or so to take the whole thing down i mean it was light by the time we were done taking it down and then we jumped on a on another boat and wait it took seven hours to take the whole thing down not including taking

Starting point is 02:27:34 down the 30 though that that's pretty quick no getting all 30 guys no i mean we got the first we got all 30 guys in probably five minutes that's what i was gonna say you're not lasting seven hours trying to find like where are you buddy like yeah so the the way that it's set up is if you can imagine it's like imagine a 1600 meter long row of of scaffolding and and railings and and shit where every couple hundred yards there's like a little guard shack looking station. And then there's different points at which tankers pull up next to, and then they, uh, there's outlets from these pipes that they, that they pipe the oil in. So the little stations are stations for the workers to onboard oil from,

Starting point is 02:28:19 from those pipes, which is coming from the manifold metering station, i.e. mainland, onto those, onto the ships. So at one end is a several, it was three or four tiered metal birthing and kitchens and housing and, and offices and like all of the meat and potatoes was all in a, in a building about the size of the building that we're in, like this whole, whole building, you know? So, yeah, I mean, we flooded that and took it down really quick, and that's where all of them were. And this is right before Operation Iraqi Freedom? It was the start of it.

Starting point is 02:28:53 It was like two days before we actually went across the border and went in-country. So is this like the first official mission of the Iraq War? Yeah, we for sure kicked it off yeah it was the first first thing so which was kind of neat to be a part of okay now you then took part in the actual going across the border then too so how'd that go down so we went back to the kuwaiti naval base which is where we launched from and then we ran up to al-yasim Air Force Base and loaded all of our shit up. We stole an Air Force, a green Air Force Humvee and hand painted it tan to the best of our abilities, just loaded down four Humvees with, you know, hung body armor in the doors. Like none of them were armored with bulletproof anything, you know, put rockets and ammo and

Starting point is 02:29:40 MREs and water and just fucking gypsy wagon did up across the border into Nazarea. Um, the Marines had gotten to Nazarea and that was the first, um, like significant resistance that they had encountered where they were really taken, taken heavies. Um, they had established a main supply route through Nazarea and then it was eventually going to go up into Baghdad, but that's Nazarea at that time, which is in the Southern part of the country was kind of where the front lines were, because I don't know if you remember, how old were you in 2003? Nine. Nine.

Starting point is 02:30:17 So probably not. Um, the way it was supposed to work was half of our forces were coming up through Kuwait and the other half were coming through, through the Med and we're going to come down through Turkey. They're going to meet in Baghdad, North and North South sandwich Baghdad. Well, at the last minute, Turkey said, no, you can't use our country, go fuck yourself. And so they, okay, well, we're just going to go South to North and sweep all the way through the country. And we used half of our forces that we had originally planned. And So we were on that southern front anyway. So at that time, Nazarene was kind of the front lines, if you will. So we

Starting point is 02:30:51 haul ass up there and then we stayed put for a few weeks running counter ambush operations, basically where that was really cool. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card. And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO VI Porter MasterCard.

Starting point is 02:31:23 And get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash viporter to learn more. Because it was, you had kind of the nicety or the flexibility of the Wild West of, there's no four operating bases, like it's just a fucking free-for-all, you know, so there weren't many rules, but we also, we, we had just, you know, basically the Marines, uh, 15th, uh, mu set up, like they just built this, this berm complex. And we just threw tents up and stayed in a berm and they posted guys at each corner. And so we were running operations out of there and we would just go get our own intelligence.

Starting point is 02:32:02 We would kidnap dudes you know or like you could tell like we went across we're getting ready to go across this bridge one of their tactics was they would have two or three vehicles and pop all the hoods like they're having car trouble or whatever and wait for you to stop and then they would fucking ambush or whatever and so as soon as we saw that we like you know flanked them and went you know forward back and all got out and swooped and uh take them, kidnap them, throw them in our vehicles and take them back to base and interrogate them. And then we would use that intelligence that we would get right on the spot to then go find caches or go, you know, fuck shit up or whatever. How much are you guys making decisions for yourself as to what to do in the field versus like a hundred percent a hundred percent yeah i mean it's basically so

Starting point is 02:32:48 you're not calling base like oh there's nothing none of that whatsoever and that's what was cool about is it reminded me of all the stories and in books that i had read on vietnam of when space like hey uh you know some commander is like okay. SEALs, this is your fucking grid coordinate. You stay in there. You go do whatever the fuck you want. And they would just go out and patrol trying to find shit. They'd get shot at or they'd do recon by fire. I mean, they would do whatever they want.

Starting point is 02:33:15 They'd just go ambush people. They would kidnap people. They would source and gather their intelligence however the fuck they wanted. And then they would act on it, however they wanted. So you're really only developing your concept of operations for your immediate boss, who usually is going to be one of your guys. And it's like, yep, just let me know if you need anything, you know? And so it was, it was awesome. So, you know, we would hit train stations, we'd blow up, you know, weapons caches, we would, you know, mix it up a little bit here and there. At that time,

Starting point is 02:33:45 the resistance, I wouldn't say is insignificant, but it was very tempered in that they didn't really know what to expect. So as soon as they saw us coming, like they might flood into an apartment complex again, similar to here and get in different windows and shoot a little bit. As soon as like we would start shooting back or sending grenades through windows or blowing vehicles up out, out in front or whatever, then they would just be like, fuck this, you know? And at that time it was the first time, um, that UAVs were being used, handheld UAVs. And so we had a, a UAV operator with us and it was fucking awesome because, so he's got this little screen and we're in a Humvee, he's in the fucking moon roof and just launches it while we're driving. And it goes up, it's like 200 feet above, maybe three or 400 yards up in front of us.

Starting point is 02:34:33 And now it's like, dude, we have the fucking playbook. We've got the eye in the sky. Like we see that vantage point 300 yards ahead of everywhere we're going. So you're seeing dudes setting up and behind corners, like can see everything and obviously that's a huge advantage but what was funny is that you know a uav that'll fit on this table at 200 feet in the sky looks like a fucking jet a mile up and so they they thought like they were about to get bombed so they'd start shooting at it and fucking running like diving diving behind vehicles and fucking like yeah they thought the world was ending thinking like oh that's the first jet of like 10 of them that are coming to just bomb the shit out of us not knowing that it's just a tiny little camera that's 200 feet above

Starting point is 02:35:13 them so they caught on fairly quick as you can imagine but uh even still like they would try to shoot it down and usually couldn't and so that helped us a lot so you know we kind of had to jump on everybody and and utilize that for for that several weeks. Were you around like other units from the military at this point? Or is it you guys pretty much all out on your own? So in that area in Nazarene, and again, it was only for a few weeks, but- Can we pull that up on the map, Alessi, if you don't mind? Nazarene. So we had the 1st Marine Division and the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit was who we were with. But they were running supplies.

Starting point is 02:35:49 They may have been doing more combat operations than I'm familiar with, and I just didn't know. To my knowledge, we were kind of the only show in town in terms of really going out and trying to fuck people up. And so, yeah, as you can see, we we're uh yeah we got it up on the screen nazarea so if you look where where kuwait is um so you know just a little less it was just there yep yeah so uh so yeah we we drove up highway one get into nazarea and it's fucking game on and stayed there for a while before we went up to baghdad and then ultimately up into to crete which is his hometown where we took his palace down, which is awesome. We're going to get there. Uh, but so, um, yeah, so that's all I have to say about that. Give you the Forrest, Forrest Gump one-liner. Is it time to go? Uh, so, so yeah,

Starting point is 02:36:36 it was cool. It was kind of like the textbook, like total flexibility, uh, deciding what to do, how to do it, when to do it. Uh, and we of blue-golding it where we would go out one night and we would be kind of the main assault element and our sister platoon would be our quick reaction force. And then the next night they would go do something and we would either be in Humvees waiting to respond if they needed or we'd even be in CH-46s or 47s, the big twin rotor helicopters, and we would fly around just doing racetracks

Starting point is 02:37:06 and if they said hey we're fucking taking heavies then we would come in and react or whatever but and then there were a few occasions where there was a train station in particular where we all went at at the same time so it was you know 32 guys two platoons all at once on on night vision driving, go in, take this train station down and blowing shit up. And again, little, you know, gunfire here and there, nothing, uh, really nothing crazy though. Like again, at that time they weren't really, and I would say generally speaking for most of, of the years spent in Iraq, uh, a lot of the operations were that way.

Starting point is 02:37:46 There were certainly times where they would ambush you and they would overrun bases and they would really take it to you. But if you were to put a percentage on it, I think the overwhelming majority of the time, they'd zipper you up or try pot shots here and there. They'd engage you for a little bit and then try to disappear because they knew it was probably going to be overwhelming and they wouldn't get the best of it. So similar to Vietnam with the Viet Cong, you know, not being in uniform and cutting your hair during the day and serving you fucking, you know, meals. And then at night fucking fighting you and man jammies running around and disappearing is, is kind of the same, same environment, which is a pretty tough enemy to face. But, um But so yeah, so we spent a few weeks there doing that and then went up to, I want to say a small village called Anumania.

Starting point is 02:38:34 We're there for a few days and we were in Baghdad. What was Baghdad like? It was pretty surreal, honestly. I remember being in this soccer stadium and it was reminiscent of hearing about Somalia where they kind of all mustered on a soccer stadium field. And it's like the whole world was burning around them. It was kind of similar to that where, you know, I think for me, it was like that's where it really kind of first hit me. We'd been in country for weeks and it was the first time where I was like, holy fuck, like, look at what's going on around us. You know, it's like, there's all the, you know, there's fucking tanks and army units and, and seals and fucking helicopters and all this activity. It was like a scene out of a movie, you know? And it was like the first time where it really felt like that, um, where there was all these different units,

Starting point is 02:39:23 all kind of jammed into this soccer stadium and it's daytime and you're looking around and it's like, there's, you know, just smoke billowing out of a building over here and gunfire here and shit coming up into the sky there. And it's just like, dude, we are surrounded by fucking chaos right now. And, uh, so we ended up going to the Northern part of the city and taking down, we took down a couple of targets that were kind of dry holes and there wasn't much to it. Again, just your team in this type moving north. And at that point, so now they had basically tasked us with going ahead of, of where we were supposed to go. And we were checking out the routes, making sure that certain like bridges, like, so we would look at, okay, here's our route. This would be a spot we would ambush. This is a spot, you know, and so we would go and make sure that, that, you know,

Starting point is 02:40:21 bridges weren't rigged or there weren't people setting up or whatever, and we'd kind of clear it, get out of the way quick, and then they would go ahead. So that was cool because, you know, we're essentially ahead of the front lines in a conventional war. And, and kind of similarly, I think, uh, you know, we would run into guys, you know, armed groups and whatever that it was so ridiculous that there's four unarmored Humvees and 16 dudes by themselves miles ahead that they're all just kind of looking around like that can't be just them yeah so it was like like most of the time we would get in and out relatively um unscathed you know and and so it was like just this quick in and out and what have you. But we ended up at this Scud base, which from the first Gulf War, I remember that was kind of the big terrifying thing was Saddam was launching all these Scud missiles into Saudi Arabia and I think into Israel and whatever.

Starting point is 02:41:17 He did like missiles. Yeah. So we go in this entire military base in northern Baghdad is a completely dedicated to Scud dedicated to scud missiles, you know, training, manufacturing, testing, you know, the schoolhouse, the whole thing. And, um, and we take the whole thing down and there were, um, I mean, it took us most of that day to, to do it. And again, there were pockets of shit here and there, nothing super significant. There weren't any like these big gunfights where we were battling it out or anything. It was all again, guys just kind of disappearing and running from us most of the time. But, but one of the unique things is we ran across all these murals that were like, you know, the size of the wall behind me. And it was like, uh, like Iraqi and American propaganda stuff.

Starting point is 02:42:01 Like one of them was, uh, it was like a, a, a big skull with an American flag paint painted on it. And then it had this big gnarly fist with an Iraqi flag painted on it. And the fist was coming down on the skull, cracking it. There was one where it looked like a, like a blonde Rambo, like blonde hair, blue eye, muscular dude, and just like a tunic. And the tunic was an american flag and then this you know big adonis iraqi looking dude behind him he was down on his knees with his arms or his wrist tied behind his back and this big iraqi dude with a with an iraqi flag choking him like wrapped around his neck you know yanking his fucking neck back choking him and then other really weird shit

Starting point is 02:42:42 that looked like these apocalyptic scenarios and it would say like no for usa and you know just bad english kind of translations and shit and whatever but that stuff was all over their base which you know like we don't have anything like that like there's nothing on any american military bases that's like even at the height of iraq and afghanistan like you're not going to see a painting depicting America, you know, fucking up some, some foreign country or whatever. And so just. What month are we in now? This is, I mean, right at the start, it's like April, April of 03. That's, that's pretty wild to see.

Starting point is 02:43:16 And yeah, so, you know, we take, take that whole thing down and then we make our way up to Crete and, you know, Baghdad, there was a lot of resistance there, but we had overwhelming force and managed to take Baghdad down as a city easier than I think we were expecting. Was that from like multiple angles? No. Taking that down or was that all that? It was pretty much was South to North. And so as a military intelligence wise, we kind of assumed that Tikrit would be his last stand. Like we originally assumed it would be Baghdad because that's where he spent most of his time now we're thinking okay well to create was his home that's where he's from that's where all his family is it's probably where he's hiding which which he was and uh so that that's where we're going to meet our heaviest resistance so the entire first marine division and seal team three echo platoon roll up to to create and the night

Starting point is 02:44:19 before like we get right on the outskirts of the city and the entire first Marine division is in a single column line for miles going from the Southern tip of to create way the fuck down by bag. Yeah. As far as you can see, you know, yeah. And, uh, so we get up to the very front and there's like this little sewing circle of Humvees parked around each other and we pull up and, you know, like, Hey, you know, have you guys secured the area? Everything's good. Yep. You know, everything's good. And so we let our guard down. We're like, dude, there's fucking 25,000 of us. And they just swept through the area. We're all good. It's quiet. So like a bunch of fucking idiots, we take our boots off and our helmets with night vision, set it in the vehicle and like popping out maps

Starting point is 02:45:03 on the hood of the cars and, you know, eating MREs and fucking shooting the shit. it in the vehicle and like popping out maps on the hood of the cars and you know eating mres and fucking shooting the shit and in the middle of that like if you can imagine like just a t intersection basically and and uh going you know paralleling the city but heading east is is this like gravel road and then there's this little berm and a big thick tree line, and then a bunch of fields behind it. Uh, and that tree line was like, was kind of the key thing is there was this like nest of trees and then another tree line going South. So it's kind of like a, an L angle, you know? And so we're, we're here to Crete's here, here's the L angle. And so this is all field like trees. And then it kind of disperses and gets to fields in that little clump of trees was a group of insurgents that had a little fucking nest they had a bunch of ak's and ammo

Starting point is 02:45:51 they had like a little fucking kitchen station set up they had uh rpgs they had this uh technical a truck with a fucking anti-artillery uh or anti-aircraft artillery piece. And the, in the bed of the truck was full of, of shells. And, um, so as we're fucking, Hey, you know, in the morning, we're going to take this, blah, you know, we're dirt diving tomorrow morning's assault on to Crete. And all of a sudden, dude, just all hell breaks loose and we get fucking ambushed. And, uh, so, you know, of course our, our first thing is like, dude, we got to get our shit back on. Like I'm fucking barefoot. So I'm throwing my fucking boots on my, you know, getting all my shit on my body armor,

Starting point is 02:46:31 you name it. We get all of our shit on relatively quick. And then we get into this like lazy L shaped ambush facing where we're taking rounds from. And of course we didn't know this at the time, but what had, what had happened is two Marines went, you know, the, the buddy system, like, Hey, one guy's got a shit, so take a buddy with you. He goes out into this field and stumbles upon this group of fucking dudes that were literally, literally dirt diving. Like, they're in the dirt drawing a fucking plan with slung AKs, getting ready to ambush us. Thank God those dudes walked out there and stumbled upon them before they did it

Starting point is 02:47:05 or else it probably would have gone way worse yeah um you know but so they're like what the fuck and so they just stand up and zipper these guys so they're all shot to fuck running our direction and then so that initiated so they started it from that and just started opening up and so we're here tree line is here they're shooting at us like this well this column of fucking marines realizes that there's insurgents here so what do they start doing they start shooting that way and so now we're getting ambushed by a group of insurgents and the blue on blue overspray from not 25 000 but a column of fucking LARs and LAVs is shooting our directions. They start shooting AT4 rockets. One of the rockets hit, um, that truck filled with rounds and these

Starting point is 02:47:53 are big fucking anti-aircraft rounds. So an 84 millimeter rocket hits that truck. It blows up. And all of these rounds are blowing up sympathetically, like intermittently. And so again, not knowing that the truck was even there, like we're thinking, dude, like how many fucking guys are there? There's just these, you know, it feels like artillery going off all around. And I remember when I was sitting in the front seat trying to get my shit on a round, I mean, technically didn't graze me, but I mean, it was within an inch of hitting me in the fucking head. It hit the, uh, right by the steering wheel. And I took a picture of it. I may Marines and finally say like, hey, you know, we're on night vision. You're not. Like we can see dudes in ski mask trench coats like squatting down with AKs. Like they're trying to dissolve back into the thing because now it's kind of gotten away from them.

Starting point is 02:49:00 And so we see this dude. We shoot him. He disappears. We move through and kind of go through that whole, uh, nest target wise, whatever, and see how kind of intricate. I mean, not that it was super elaborate, but it was like, how the fuck did you get, these guys were like 30 yards away and you missed them. Um, but anyway, so finally clear through that, we get them to stop shooting. Um, all of the, the sympathetic detonation rounds go finally finished going off. We sweep through the target, get everything under control. All of our guys are good. The two dudes that got shot, I don't know what ended up happening to them. They medevaced out. And one of our corpsmen, Glenn, uh, who was one of the guys

Starting point is 02:49:41 that died in Benghazi, who was a good friend of mine, he was our corpsman on that deployment. He patched those dudes up and and then they sent them packing. I don't know if they survived or not, but. Wow. That's just like. Because you said you were sitting there literally like with the maps open, just chilling. Yeah, total dick in our hand, like oblivious. I mean, that's our mistake.

Starting point is 02:50:01 Like we should have never declined our posture to that degree. We just shouldn't have or should have swept the area. But, you know, when we say, when we pull up and we're like, hey, there's 30,000 of you, you know, like is the immediate area cool? Yep. Okay. I'm going to take your word for it on that, you know. So, yeah. Lesson learned there.

Starting point is 02:50:21 Yeah. So then it was like, okay, it's 2.30 at six. We're rolling. Get some sleep. And everybody's like, fuck you. So we crawl under a fucking Humvee in a sleeping bag and try to sleep. And then, yeah, as soon as the sun's coming up, we get up and do this. I'll say flawless.

Starting point is 02:50:40 I mean, like the execution that the entire 1st Marine Division and we did taking over Tikrit was pretty fucking flawless. How'd it go down? I mean, it was basically a swarming of an entire city. I don't know if it says what the population of Tikrit is, but it's not a small fucking spot. Right, 160,000? Yeah. So how many, like, because we always have this too, like, everyone could be a potential enemy from your seat, but like Saddam's, how much of it was like guarded by Saddam's army versus just insurgents from all over the place? Like, what was the mix up there? At that point, it was pretty much all insurgents. You know, if you put yourself kind of in their shoes, you know, at that, by that point, like most of their country had been

Starting point is 02:51:25 completely fucking steamrolled in, in a few weeks. And so all of the actual uniformed military fighters, I mean, most of them were pretty much fucking in civilian clothes and running around as insurgents or they were somewhere else, you know, but so it was, it was a mixed bag. Uh, but you know, in terms of identifiable uniform is very little. Now, our plan was that, you know, each Marine entity kind of had its own area of responsibility. And they were like, OK, Saddam's palace is if he's there, that's probably where he's at. It's the highest point in the city in terms of vantage point and observation wise. Calm, sweet setup.

Starting point is 02:52:02 That's where we're going to set our leadership up. SEAL Team 3, you guys go take the palace down so we like fucking banked around and hauled ass like maneuvering through all the shit kind of like we had been doing like just blew through like didn't clear our way there we just fucking blew all the way through it's flying a little bit i mean again it was like you know like just a Well, I mean, if you think about an entire Marine division, like how slow that takes place, the footprint, the presence, action, element of surprise, you know, slow as smooth, smooth as fast. Like it's, it's going really quick doing things. And so that was kind of the methodology and the thought process, which usually works is that you get to wherever you're going so fast that they don't even have fucking time to respond. Now, if you're moving 25,000 people, like they're going to respond, they're going to set up, they're going to ambush, they're going to do all're going to do all kinds of shit so we just hauled ass straight to

Starting point is 02:53:07 the uh to the palace and kicked the door in and was he like and it was the palace literally in the middle of town or far end like how far do you have to go from first entering to creek so if you can pull it up on the map i don't know how how much you can zoom in i'll i'll zoom in onto crete see what we can do all right so you see right where the river is there yeah so his palace was on the eastern bank of the tigris yeah that's it right there so um yeah let's see if we can pull this bad boy out see what we're looking at it's crazy i mean it's like it was opulent of like biblical proportion. Was there anyone in there when you went in? Not, I mean, by the time we got in, no, everybody had completely bailed out.

Starting point is 02:53:51 Oh, so there was security around it though. Yeah. You can see how big it is. It's fucking enormous. And that building to the right is the maids quarters, the service quarters. Nice. Yeah. So we took the whole thing down.

Starting point is 02:54:03 Unless he's about to take a job over there yeah shit took uh took several hours to do it and um so you get there they have security around the perimeter like is that his army and no i mean like i said we got in as soon as we got there everybody just fucking goes down and like completely fucking ran away from us now but it still took a couple hours? To take the whole thing down. Yeah. Just because of its size, you know, cause like clearing. Yeah. I mean like looking back on it. Yeah. They all ran. I mean, you don't know that at the time. Like you don't know if they're there,

Starting point is 02:54:35 they're all one in the next room or the next room, you know, so you're doing everything very methodically, very surgical and slow and quiet. And, you know, so it took a while, but, but yeah, so we took a while, but, uh, but yeah, so we took it down and then stayed there and, uh, based out of there.

Starting point is 02:54:49 So we lived in his palace. You lived in his palace. For several weeks. Yeah. Which is pretty cool. And, uh, not,

Starting point is 02:54:54 did you get like good souvenirs from there or. I will just say if, if I did, I sure, I certainly wouldn't share that. Okay. All right. So I was sitting on the,

Starting point is 02:55:02 on the Ritland mantle at home. Maybe not. Yeah. So, uh, that okay all right so sitting on the on the ritalin mantle at home maybe not but uh yeah so there's probably a rich russian oligarch who owns it off like an ebay fucking yeah how to get caught 101 sell sell fucking war prizes on ebay um so uh it was cool i mean it was uh as you can imagine you know it's a fucking palace of a, of an Arab dictator. So it's like, I mean, it was, uh, it was,

Starting point is 02:55:28 it was obnoxious. Like it was so over the top. It was hard to even believe. Like even in the ceiling there, there were murals in, in hand painted hat, hand laid like quarter. And I mean,

Starting point is 02:55:41 I mean, imagine ceramic tiles that are hand painted, hand painted and they're quarter inch by quarter inch. They're fucking tiny. Now imagine making murals. I mean, over the entire fucking ceiling of the whole palace, it was all murals made out of quarter inch tiles. soap dishes were gold like marble everywhere fucking gold and brass and crystal everywhere i mean like the whole thing and it was that fucking big you know so it's like i can't even i mean i don't even think you could put a price tag on it because some a lot of that shit is priceless like i mean there's nazi relics there's you know imported italian marble crystal from the fucking you know chinese empires that are 3,000 years old. I mean, it was like a fucking museum.

Starting point is 02:56:28 And now you've got 16 Vikings fucking jerking off in the bathrooms and leaving double-decker dumps and toilets and totally fucking the place up. Totally just violating the entire fucking place. Anyone taking pictures of double-decker in the the toilet i don't think so i feel like that's see that's not abu grabe people would respect that one maybe they'd be like all right we're double decker and saddam's little fucking golden toilet yeah leave some dallas cowboys toilet paper in there too absolutely that's where it belongs let's be honest fucking go cowboys wow that's like just a magic because that that wasn't his only one either no no multiple yeah i mean actually so that was actually uh i mean it was one of his more

Starting point is 02:57:13 impressive ones but the main palace that he lived in and spent most of the time in was in proper baghdad and it was like i remember you know talking to guys that when they raided that place like all of his shit was still there. Like that's where he lived all the time. So he didn't have much in the palace that we took down. Like it had been either looted or moved out or whatever mostly. You slept there? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:57:36 Slept in beds there? No. I mean, we like, so we would position ourselves either on the rooftop if we had watch or down in like the, that entryway right there, like, uh, as kind of a security thing. So, um, so we, you know, like we would spend time throughout the day in different parts and whatever, but yeah, we were usually either at the very top or at the very bottom, but, um, how many days were you there? Uh, it was a few weeks. I don't remember exactly. Chilling in the world's greatest resort for a few fucking a yeah you go swimming in the little fucking moat right there i didn't uh just because i don't trust

Starting point is 02:58:10 any of the fucking water there so yeah i didn't i didn't get in the river yeah like in any natural body of water there i'm not getting in unless operationally i have to you know so probably for the best for sure yeah i don't need any uh i don't need to bring drippy dick home because of a fucking you know some some nasty pool although although you know what i probably for the best for sure yeah i don't need any uh i don't need to bring drippy dick home because of a fucking you know some some nasty pool although although you know what i went down to the amazon jungle with my buddy paul rosely who's lived there for 19 years recently and like before we were going he was saying you know he's out of his fucking mind but he's like he was saying all this shit we were going to do he's like oh yeah bring your bathing suit we're going swimming

Starting point is 02:58:42 i'm like the fuck we are i'm not going with the anacondas and piranhas and shit i'm like no he's like no we're going swimming i'm like malek i'm not doing that yeah literally the first day we walk down the one trail we get to the other side he's like all right let's go in i'm like all right let's do it we did it every day no and like no problem yeah but they're weird fucking burns when you pee kind of well that's the thing i held my dick clenched in there because there is something that it's got like a long Latin name, so they don't call it that, but they call it the penis eating fish. So you're doing the Buffalo Bill tuck the whole time? Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:59:16 It'll literally like climb up there and start eating. I don't need any of that. Yeah. No one was peeing in there, but it was like a lazy river. You're just floating down the Amazon River. It was great. You should have done it in the Tig lazy river. You're just floating down the Amazon River. It was great. You should have done it in the Tigris right here. I don't think so.

Starting point is 02:59:28 Yeah, I'm going to pass on that, and I still would today. Did he leave behind any scotch or anything for you? Anything like 600 years old that was good? No, not like that. There were really cool relics, though, like stained glass. I mean, it was essentially a window, but it was like a stained glass portrait window of him or like, there were these, you know, plates on the door that were like, you know, the, the Iraqi, uh, Eagle and the, and the green banner and like the, you know, the flag. And

Starting point is 02:59:55 so there were elements to it like that, that were, that were really cool and well done and what have you. But as far as like the guys down in baghdad that you know like dude's clothes are there and as you know one of his wives or mistresses safes full of jewelry and and like that like they ran into like that and gold-plated aks and pallets of cash and all kinds of that's what i'm talking crazy but but that was kind of gone still though that's pretty crazy you were there for a few weeks yeah Yeah. And then what made you move out? Like, what was the whole op tempo there? So basically, at that point, we had now been on deployment for over seven months. And so our rotation was coming to an end.

Starting point is 03:00:34 While we were there, though, we had 24-7 manning at least two guys on radio and just watch on top of the palace all the time. And I talk about it in the first book that I wrote, there was a going way the fuck back to where that guy quit. Uh, as we were getting ready to go into country, one guy was like, I can't do it. Fucking seal quit our Intel guy, who was like 20 hadn't been through buds. Wasn't a seal was an Intel guy, but was like a wrestler in high school and was a fucking pretty tough dude. And we were like, what the fuck? You know? And he's like, I'll go.

Starting point is 03:01:10 Oh, he just wanted to. And we were like, what? He's like, I'll fucking, I'll take his spot. We're like, you're a fucking Intel guy. He's like, fuck it. I'll go. We're like, we just kind of looked around. And I think even like that nowadays, I don't think would fly like even in, you know, a little over 20 years.

Starting point is 03:01:26 But real fast, I'm sorry to make you go back for a sec. Those podcasts you did, I believe it was Sean Ryan episode four and episode five. I listened to those a couple of years ago. Yeah. They're amazing. I remember you went through that story. But for people who haven't heard that, can you just explain the one guy who just bailed here? That comment where I said, you you know we had a guy that

Starting point is 03:01:45 was like at what point do we not go do this yeah that was him and so he he like roic grabbed him and just threw him in the back i mean he was a deer in the headlights on that go plat mission he basically just fucking couldn't do it just froze so when we went back we go up to alias we're getting ready to cross across the border and right at the last second he's like guys i can't do it i'm sorry we're just like fuck you leave then and so he was a 60 gunner which was only four of them in our platoon it's a it's a big responsibility it's the belt fed 762 machine gun that's the area weapon that gets motherfuckers head down a lot faster than an m4 how long has he been in the seals it was his first deployment. He was a new guy. So anyway, and coincidentally, his younger brother was also a SEAL and was the exact opposite of that.

Starting point is 03:02:31 Like this dude had balls that you needed to carry around in a fucking wheelbarrow. Like he was an absolute fucking badass in Iraq and did all kinds of crazy, like crazy heroic shit. And was just a total fucking monster and got his hands dirty for uncle sam like i don't know how many fucking times what does he think of that whole thing i never talked to him about it i can imagine but yeah um but anyway so this guy's like well fuck it i'll do it and we're like all right well here's how you fucking shoot this and uh sit in this seat and point the barrel out and if you see us start shooting at shit shoot at it also and that was his direction basically and so what a savage total and so after that deployment he comes back very quickly went to buds and has been a seal for like 20 years after that so he i think he may even

Starting point is 03:03:16 still be on active duty so i won't say his name but that's awesome yeah total fucking badass but um he and i are on on the rooftop um, and it's in the middle of fucking night. And from, from the, that vantage point, you can see the to create airport, uh, which is the air force airstrip and underneath it, they had had all of their munitions. I mean, not just ammo. I mean like missiles, fucking bombs, explosives, you name it. They had all of their shit stored underneath the airport, which, to me, even not understanding anything, it seems like a dumb place to put that stuff because that's generally going to be target number one is airfields. So we bombed the shit out of that. And so for, like, the whole time we were this, this airfield, this airstrip, it looks like the surface of the sun, like with solar flares, like it's just blowing up constantly

Starting point is 03:04:11 for two weeks, just shit going off all the time. And so we're just like, like five-year-olds playing with matches, like just staring at this carnage blowing up, being fascinated by it. And then all of a sudden these three little blips of light from a different part of the city, a little further South and a lot closer towards us, you see blip, blip, blip. And we're just kind of sitting there and don't think much of it. And then all of a sudden three explosions about 400 yards directly South of where we're at. And immediately I'm like, Oh fuck. And then three more blips. And then now it's like 200 yards south of where we're at. Then three more. And now it's like rattling the fucking windows right south. So they're just walking mortars into us. And we look at each other. We're like, I guess this is it. We can't get off this rooftop. It's going to hit the roof. We're fucking dead. We're five stories up so we're just like holy fucking no sooner than we kind of looked at each other like how about a high five you know or like what the fuck are we gonna do

Starting point is 03:05:10 all of a sudden from across the river you hear this like mechanized whirl of optimus prime having an orgasm like this weird uh just this crazy fucking mechanical whizzing sound and and whatever and and and then all of a sudden you just hear this and all these flashes of lights from coming over there and then where those three blips were just fucking disappeared off the face of the earth yeah i mean completely fucking evaporated them and come to find out it was an army anti uh artillery unit that like when those flashes of light go off it has you know radar and all these fucking mechanisms and i don't know how it works thank god it does like triangulates and like after so many rounds it can pinpoint exactly where it was fired from

Starting point is 03:05:58 and then it fires a bunch of fucking rounds and just fucking leveled it totally i mean there's no way i'd be sitting here had they not been there. No fucking way. So, like, right before there was going to be fire your way, they got it. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah, I mean, just literally in the fucking nick of time. Now, it's the two of you on the roof, and then the other 14 guys, some guys are taking a shift.

Starting point is 03:06:16 Yeah, they're all tipped up asleep down below. Oh, there was two of them awake. Everybody else is asleep. You can't, like, sound the alarm like, boys, get up here. Well, I mean, it didn't matter at that point. Yeah, I mean, it was just like it happened so happened so quick you know it's like we're five stories up you're taking stairs up and down there's no power you know so yeah and and even to get onto the roof it's like the the top room or level in the in the palace like you there's this hatch and a ladder

Starting point is 03:06:39 well you gotta like climb up and yeah i mean it took a couple of minutes to get up and down. So, whoa. So then what, when did you, you shipped out after like three weeks and that was because the deployment was coming to an end? Yeah. And during that time, like we would go do sniper overwatches, we would go hit targets. We would, we were doing shit during then. It was just kind of hit and miss, you know, and, and similarly, it was like by that time, you know, the insurgents weren't really doing the insurgent thing to the degree with which they ended up doing, you know, six months later, it was a lot of just pockets of shit here

Starting point is 03:07:17 and there trying things out. There was no organization, you know, the military was completely disbanded or had given up or had taken their uniforms. The ones that still wanted to fight weren't sticking around in uniform. They were just dissolving into the public. And so it was mostly that kind of stuff, was dealing with little pockets here and there. But one thing that was really cool, and I apologize for the tangent, but I had the opportunity to interview one of Saddam's pilots, uh, in the last year and getting to talk to him about while I was in Iraq, you know, explaining the story that I

Starting point is 03:07:53 just said of, we did all this, getting to hear him tell his story of what he was doing as an Iraqi air force pilot in that same window of time that I was in Iraq during that invasion was fucking incredible like what was he doing i mean so he was hiding basically like they would say hey go to this fucking base and and fly these planes over here and hide them and then do this and like they were basically scattering like cockroaches for their fucking lives you know and and was scared to death but it was so surreal to be able to sit sit here like 20 years later it's like a german and a d-day troop like yeah it's like 20 years ago you and i would would have been trying to fucking kill each

Starting point is 03:08:31 other right now and now we're doing a podcast and now we're just sitting here talking like it's nothing like holy shit how weird is that you know but it was really cool to be able to uh to get that side you know but it's interesting though because it goes to show you people, even some of the people serving, they're not necessarily their governments. They're people too. Yeah. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes, you know, if they support an evil regime, they're all about it.

Starting point is 03:08:53 But like, there's a real human side to it where people get stuck in the middle of something because leadership fails. Yeah. Yep. And I mean, that's usually the case. Like, I think I would say kind of a pretty general consensus for most of our troops that were in Iraq and Afghanistan have a healthy respect for, for our opponents in that if the rules were reversed, you know, if China said, Hey, we're

Starting point is 03:09:17 going to, we're going to hang out in Mexico and fucking this whole democratic Christian based democracy thing, isn't really panning out for us. You guys have atomic weapons. We don't really like that. So we're just going to overthrow your shit. Like rest the fuck assured we'd all be in mass running around shooting them. You know, we'd be doing exactly what these guys are doing. So it's weird because it's like, it's, it really is.

Starting point is 03:09:39 It's like, that's nothing personal. It's, it is a fucking business in that way. It's hard not to take somebody trying to take your life, not personal uh but they're just doing what they think is best you know so what's that guy doing today uh so he he wrote a book and he was on the show promoting the book and so he's a u.s citizen now and and i think he's just going around like speaking and and uh and doing the whole book speaking circuit i think that's really cool we'll put the link to that episode in the description i want to make a note of that to make sure we do that i gotta i gotta check that out that sounds awesome yeah and you did that in

Starting point is 03:10:13 the last year you said yeah it's about yeah i think in the last year so very cool so you had talked about this early on in our conversation and i kind of tabled it because i knew we were going to be talking about the iraq war but you were pointing out how there's the separation when you get there you have a job to do you've been told to go there you're trusting the process of the people who said you're supposed to be here and you're getting the job done and that's 100 the right way to look at it especially though at the beginning given the fact you're literally sleeping in this guy's palace right you just took this down everything's going pretty great to this point beginning, given the fact you're literally sleeping in this guy's palace, right? You just took this down. Everything's going pretty great to this point. In April, May, June, these times,

Starting point is 03:10:51 like, are you thinking to yourself, man, this was a really good idea? Like we got this shit on lock? Yeah. You know, and I think it's important to build a little context around it in terms of the backdrop of leading up to the justification for why we went, you could argue that, that, you know, NATO isn't really a non-biased neutral third party in terms of, you know, allowing or, or sanctioning militaries to go into other countries and topple their fucking governments. But, um, however, like we didn't do it alone. Like, you know, we, we technically, I mean, we did make our case to, to the UN, to NATO, to a lot of other countries, shared intelligence with them. And everybody was, was largely on board. I mean, yeah, there were a handful of us politicians that voted no. And

Starting point is 03:11:41 there were a few people in other countries that were like, Matt, I'm not, not on board, but overwhelmingly like all of our allies and everybody who, if we're going to fight a world war, we're going to get them on board and fight it with them. We're all kind of unanimously saying, yep, I think that's the right, right call. So, you know, for us, it, it was kind of a no brainer that way. You know, when there was that little hint of like, wow, we think there might be a 9-11 connection, I think most people are like, I don't think so. But it doesn't matter because the weapons of mass destruction, everything else, it's the right thing to do. Also, I was 23, so I wasn't thinking about it that much anyway. It was more of like, well, if our entire fucking government and NATO and and un and the allies are all kind of saying this needs to be done like probably needs

Starting point is 03:12:29 to be done i don't need to think any more of it than that you know it really wasn't until even years later where i really started to question the validity and and the excuses given and the you know maybe it was that naive that that bush and rice and cheney and and the administration at that time truly was acting on the best intelligence that they had and and were doing the best they could with what they had at the time and and they truly thought that that was the right answer maybe like who am i to say that it wasn't? Again, I wasn't there. I wasn't in the fucking war room. Does it seem like a mistake office in Dallas. And I got to sit down and talk with him for a while and, and asked him about a lot of different things. Um, I did ask him to come on the show and I, I will, I will say, I do actually really appreciate that instead of like most people who would have said, yeah, you know what, I'll put

Starting point is 03:13:41 you in touch with my comms guy and, you know, we'll see if we can work that out. He looked at me straight in the face, and he goes, yeah, I don't think I'm going to do that. Thanks, though. And I was just like, fuck, man. I respect that way more than wasting my fucking time putting me in touch with your comms guy who's going to lead me down a trail of fucking bullshit for six months until I give up.

Starting point is 03:14:04 Don't ever say he wasn't funny yeah a lot of things but yeah it's just like fuck i don't even know what to say to that thanks i guess i you know uh but anyway my my point was is that like i i think it's really easy for anybody to look at at any world leader anybody that's in charge of some pretty complex heavy shit and second guess and criticize every fucking decision they make. I'm not going to pretend to understand what the, what the weight of that office is going to put on your shoulders when you're making decisions about sending hundreds of thousands of, of young American men and women into a, into a spot where a lot of them

Starting point is 03:14:40 might not come home. Yeah. And, and many that do aren't going to be the same ever. That's a fucking heavy decision, you know? And, and, you know, while I question it, like, I'm not going to do it enough to the point where I'm going to call him a liar and a war criminal and a, and a whatever else, because I just don't know, you know I can, I can assume and, and, and guess, you know, but at the end of the day, like he's the only one that really knows why he did what he did, you know? And, uh, I think, I think he also, you know, he had the most powerful vice president in the United States history in there at the time. And that, I don't know, Kamala's got a solid second. She's close. She's still around. Yeah. Well, but like, well, allegedly, but like, you know, that 1% doctrine and the manipulation there, that's where I empathize with Bush a little bit. Obviously, Monday morning quarterback and have a lot of issues with how it went down.

Starting point is 03:15:33 But like you think about sitting in his seat where the buck stops with him and you have people coming to you telling you these things. It gets awfully interesting. And I had this guy, Jim Lawler, in here. Long time CIA spy. Probably still is. says he gets happy hour at Langley every Friday at 5, so do with that what you will. My guess is if he's telling you, then probably not, but who knows. Well, he was in there a long time. So from 1980 to 2005, he was – the English way of putting it is the anti-weapons of mass destruction proliferation spy. And by the time that, you know, he was towards the end of his run there, he was literally like, if not the guy undercover around the world, like one of the two or three main guys for that. Pretty big deal. Probably one of the most shocking moments in the history of my podcast studio, though, was when I asked him in the buildup to the Iraq war what his involvement was in the investigation of weapons of mass destruction, and he said I had none.

Starting point is 03:16:35 I was just like, see, that's where my head goes, all right, there's some weird agendas from somewhere in the government, and people are pushing odd intelligence on there. Because this guy, who was clearly a fucking unbelievable spy yeah this is that's like saying to tom brady you know sit up a super bowl don't worry about it we got it well you know maybe uh there's there's two devil's advocate count not even counterpoints but just things i would say that are worth considering number one i similarly have had a number of CIA guys and guys in different entities within intelligence within the United States government. And the recurring theme with all of them is that by design, their job is so incredibly like impressively compartmentalized to where if it's not exactly what they're focused on, then they know absolutely nothing about it on purpose. So that's number one. Number two is that, again, I think, you know, the, the backdrop with which that decision was being made from, from our country's history, specifically the two years

Starting point is 03:17:35 leading up to that is that when nine 11 happened, you know, there were a lot of people that said, what, how the fuck did this happen? How did they catch us with our guard down? How did they punch us in the mouth this bad right here at home? Where the fuck was our intelligence? Why didn't we do something preemptive to keep this from happening? You imagine again, now it's like, we can all assume what it feels like to have had that happen to you while you were the president. Oh yeah. And then now two years later, it's like, I can't like, I'm going to, I'm going to be so preemptive that if that means like we're doing the wrong thing, I'd rather do that than have nine 11 happen again. Now I'm not saying that that's a hundred percent everything, but to me that that's

Starting point is 03:18:19 a pretty significant and important thing to at least consider. So, so, you know, those two things combined, I would say, I'm not saying he's full of shit or that there wasn't heavy manipulation from Cheney and other facets of the government, because I'm sure there were, but I do think all of those things combined paint, maybe at least a less bias or at least, you know, Hey it's, it's maybe a little more open, open for interpretation than just being like, no, there's some squirrely shit going on. For sure. So that deployment, that one pretty much ended after you left the palace.

Starting point is 03:18:52 Is that right? Yeah. So we drove back down to Baghdad, got on a C-130 within a few days and had a super hasty combat liftoff of a dirt fucking airfield i don't know how we didn't get shot down honestly but we managed to make it make it into airspace got down to kuwait and then took commercial airlines back home to uh to america which was really weird we uh we went from kuwait like within two days flew from Kuwait to fucking Ireland. And you talk about a contrast of going from this color of ground to like the most shamrock laden Lucky Charms fucking green you've ever seen in your life. It was just like, dude, I think we fucking died and went to heaven.

Starting point is 03:19:41 Look at this fucking place. It was amazing. Of course, you know, we weren't there for very long, but, you know, we didn't even make it out of the airport. It's like fucking Guinness everywhere. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then made it home. And that's one of the things where, you know, getting into talking at, say, the Spartan era, kind of the most consummate textbook professional warfighters probably in history, and you look at how they decompressed, well, they had a three-month walk home after they were doing these things where it was just them, not in combat, sitting around fires, working all of this shit out amongst themselves in a relatively benign

Starting point is 03:20:27 environment over a three-month period i found myself getting pulled over for not coming to a complete stop like 36 hours after i was in baghdad by this cop running to the window like being a fucking dick and like my parents were in the fucking back seat and like i'm almost lost my fucking mind like it's not a good idea to go from that environment to just being thrown right into a civilian environment that fast it's a bad it's a bad gig so um anyway i just thought uh it was something that resonated with me then and something i still think about a little bit even now but did you have any well how many more deployments did you do that was it that was it so that was the last one into iraq it was

Starting point is 03:21:10 because um my plan after that was to go to team six and so they wanted me to go to advanced training having been to iraq and had done real world land warfare missions of blowing up surface to air missiles and counter ambush and fucking direct assaults and the whole thing. It was like, we need guys coming right from Iraq to go into the schoolhouse, teach SQT so that those guys are bringing valuable skills to the SEAL teams and, and, you know, putting that kind of knowledge and experience back into the, into the school schoolhouse which none of us were very excited about but so i was like well i'll use this as kind of a jump off point to screen and go to seal team six well while i was there is when i contracted valley fever uh in the desert and i lost 40 of

Starting point is 03:21:58 my lung capacity they tried to medically retire me i was like dude i've got a child on the way i don't have a college degree i have no idea idea what the fuck I'm going to do. How old are you? 25. And, um, so they were like, well, you know, we'll send you over to buds for three years while you either figure it out or, you know, heal up or whatever. And so I went there, I went to night school, got my degree, had both my kids started to get into the dog thing and then set up. Um, it was kind of at a crossroads where I was like, okay, I've done some, some training with these guys as they're standing up the West coast multipurpose canine program. I've always been in dogs growing up and, and it was just, I had always been heavy into it. And then now it's like,

Starting point is 03:22:41 Hey, you can stay in and be a handler or you can get out, start your own dog company and whatever. And going back to that, I've always had the most bang for your buck type of mentality. As much as I thought it would be awesome to stay in and be a handler with a dog and do more deployments as a dog handler. First and foremost, physically, I was not confident that I could do it without being a liability because of my lung issue. Is that still with you today? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's permanent, you know, so I'm running off 60% lung capacity compared to everybody else. And, um, at this point, I mean, it's been over 20 years. Like I don't notice it because it's just, it's been the norm for so long that, um, you know, I'm, I'm very used to it, but, but it's still like, you can probably even

Starting point is 03:23:24 hear me kind of breathing heavy, just talking. Um, you know, it's like, like I always feel a little bit behind the power curve breathing wise, no matter what. So like trying to train jujitsu or heavy hypoxic CrossFit workouts or whatever, like I run out of gas a lot faster than, than I would have previously. But so for me, I was like, man, I'm not going to be a fucking liability. I'm not convinced that physically I'm going to be capable of doing it. I also think I can enact more change and have a bigger and more positive influence by getting out and starting my own dog company and training lots of handlers, training lots of dogs, making a bigger footprint on both the dog industry and as it relates to

Starting point is 03:24:06 military customs, border patrol, what have you. So I'm going to get out and start my own dog company and do that. And this is 08? Yeah. When you left? End of 08, yeah. Okay. And now obviously you've run with that and everything.

Starting point is 03:24:18 And I think we mentioned this maybe way back at the very beginning, but like you've done multiple businesses with it and you're training dogs that end up in combat, used in intelligence situations, used by the government in different facets. It's really interesting stuff. I am actually looking at this though right now just on the time we're at, Alessi. How much time do you have to be here? I do have to piss like a racehorse. Yeah, okay.

Starting point is 03:24:43 I do too. So let's take a break. This is either going to be a new episode or we're going to put this episode on Patreon and members only for YouTube where we're going to get all into what you do with dogs for the military. And I also like the philanthropy with it, which is amazing. So we'll be right back, and I'll make a note right after this. Thank you guys for watching the episode. which is amazing. So we'll be right back and I'll make a note right after this.

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