Shaun Newman Podcast - #579 - Military Roundtable #2

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

They all served for the Princess Patricias Light Infantry, have a combined 78+ years of military experience and served in tours Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. This is also the first time in over 17 years these three men have been in the same room.    Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcastE-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Phone [phone] – general sales line, ask for Grahame and be sure to let us know you’re an SNP listener.

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Now, shall we get on to that tale of the tape? They all serve for the Princess Patricia's Light Infantry. Combined, they have 78 plus years of military experience with tours in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. I'm talking about Chuck Prodnick, James Sinclair, and Willie McDonald.

So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the military roundtable. Number two. We finally got all you guys in the same room together. So can somebody please answer me this? How long has it been since you three have been in a room?

Or is it since you two have seen each other? The three of us in a room? Well, we haven't been together. 17 years? 17 years, yeah. 17 years you guys haven't been back together. Yeah. What was the last time?

Again, 17 comes up. I was trying to think, you know, when I heard you were coming on, it's got to be since just after the 06 tour, maybe somewhere in between 0608. Yeah, somewhere around there. Yeah. It's been a minute. Absolutely. Yeah, it's been probably 15, 15 years anyway since Chuck and I have seen each other.

Gotcha. Well, I'm joined by Chuck Pradnik, Jamie Sinclair and Willie McDonald. So all three of you've been, I mean, these two Yahoo's have been on the podcast an awful light, but sitting to my right, Willie, you came on once. And so you're the only, I think, you know, I've had several military guys on now. But regardless, we've been trying to get this group together for a roundtable for several months. It finally happens this time. Now, a funny Patricia's story because you boys are all Patricia's, so I can throw this out here.

I had the premier in here about a week ago. And the guy who rolls in here at like 8.15 in the morning starts talking to me. And all of a sudden, he's like, you Patricia? Because he's like scanning the room. And I'm like, no, but I interviewed them all the time. Anyways, one of the, I don't know, undercovers for Daniel Smith, the Premier of Alberta, is a Patricia. So there you go. He recognized the flag as soon as it.

He knew who you were. And forgive me, but I've forgotten his name, James and Bernie were the two guys. So shout out to James and Bernie for stuff. And they're a nice guys. Hey, can you do me a favor? Grab yourself a beer because I've got, I got to give you something. Okay. And we should do it.

Cheers. You know, it's a military tradition that, you know, when you haven't seen each other, We fucking do a little cheers and say, good to see you again. Okay, so first of all, my son, okay, you got your beer? All right, let's do it. Cheers, boys.

All right, cheers. Good to see it. Good to see you guys. I can't love you, motherfuckers. Mmm. It tastes like God's vectors. Squeezed into a can. Anyways, my son plays for the arrows up in Cold Lake.

Yeah. And I told you I'd get you a hat. So you brought me that. He brought me a hat, and then he took the hat. Yeah, and left, you know. Because I was first good buddy and I didn't know and I fucked it up. But now I'm, I'm at this is actually yours.

Is Cold Lake Arrow is going to be in the H.H.L. here pretty soon. There's a, he got picked up for the, uh, he got picked up for the all star game. It's in Ebbington on the ninth. I'm going to that. I don't know who else is going to be playing. Well, I appreciate that. And also because you fuckers, uh, you're going to be first to get a Rijano Rifle Association coin.

If you didn't hear that, a Regina Rifles Association coin. Thanks, buddy. Look at this thing. Oh, boy. There you go. Thanks, brother. I don't know if anybody can see that on the old screen. That's a long ways out, folks.

Here, I'll put it up to this one. Pull it out of the package. It's like a condom you can pull it on there and use it for coining people. Look at that. So it doesn't mean you went through the Regina Rifles system and you're part of the regiment. the association is one step removed and that's the 80th anniversary of the virgina rifles landing on juno uh on the 6th of this year so on juno beach the 80th anniversary as far as i know as as far as i know you're the first ones other than maybe general walker and them guys to get them

uh see you guys and i have to assume i'm the first civilian to get one yep probably that's pretty cool well i actually know our premier got one uh mo mo yeah he's a big coin collector. Well, I'm a lot cooler than that guy, so that's just my thoughts. Now, if you look on the back, that is the statue that Willie and I went and saw in Cochran that's being made there that's going to end up on Juno Beach. On Juneau Beach, really? It's, it's eight feet tall. Okay, here's a fucking thing about Juno Beach. I has found out. The Winnipeg Rifles, great regiment and the guys that fought there are fucking honorable men. Their association, they're a bunch of fucking assholes, they've got their monument on our beach and they won't remove it.

So our monument can't go on Juno Beach. Our Colonel Ed Sadyowski, fucking great guy, he's found another place to put it in Bradville where they fought the German SS Panzer Division. So it's going to go there. But like if anybody in Winnebake's listen to this, like get a hold of the association that's running like that's in charge of that monument and have it moved on to their beach,

which is to to the side of where the rifles landed and get it in your own area. Because I'm sure those vets had died in the Winnipeg rifles would want to have their monument where they died and not claim the honor of the Regina rifles that landed where they got the monument now. So it's fucking bullshit. It's got me all worked up. Sorry, but it's, uh, it had to be said. So, well, you and, you and Willie were talking a minute before we started on air.

and about the film for August 3rd. Like, I agree with that. Yeah. So we talk with that for a minute. Yeah, it's, well, sure. I mean, it's not a film about August 3rd. It's, it's called Fallen Heroes Their Journey Home. And it's, um, it's essentially the evolution of the rap ceremony.

And so it's kind of a mockumentary and it's, it's interspersed, um, with interviews. And then those interviews cut to. like a vignette sort of thing where they're showing, you know, a reenactment of the battle where Canadian soldiers died. And then at the very end, there's a reenactment of the first ramp ceremony, which happened after the friendly fire incident in 2001. So, yeah, that's what it's all about. And it's, it's a long, the trailer's 30 minutes long almost. What do you mean the trailers? That isn't a trailer? Yeah, I know it's a, it's a mini movie. But, uh, They, they've been trying to, it took them a really long time to raise enough money and get the cooperation of the Department of National Defense to provide vehicles and equipment and stuff so that they could do the best job possible.

Yeah. To see to the realism of it all. So COVID, of course, you know, threw a wrench into that and then a whole bunch of people that they were dealing with that were still serving retired or, or. you know, left the military and all their contacts dried up. So it took them a lot of hard work in it. And it's Karen Storwick and Robert Curtin who, you know, Karen's the director and Robert is the guy that kind of, or sorry, Karen's a producer and Robert's the director. And Robert did all the camera work and stuff. Jim and I were down at Sandy Point or just outside Southfield. He's a little campground down in the River Valley. And we did a whole bunch of stuff.

that revolved around August 3rd over a two day period, man, it was hot. I remember I said to Robert like, come on just like, it wasn't six and four Celsius. No, it wasn't, but it was probably 40 degrees. Yeah, we had cold beer. It was, we made it through hot, but yeah, it was, it was a good time. Yeah. And so they're just putting the finishing touches on it's going to be released in April.

Yeah. So we, we did that. Where's opening night for this? I believe it's at the landmark cinemas in St. Albert. So can, can I, can we go? No, fucking right. I don't see why not. It's open to the public.

I'm going. Yeah. Yeah, we'll make a night of it. Why not? Yeah. Do you know when it is, Willie? Do we have a date? It's in April.

I don't remember the exact thing. Like that fucker should be sitting across from you and do like his. Robert. Robert, where are you, Robert? Because he just got back from Italy. They just got back from Italy. They just did a big thing over there about an orphan that was adopted by Canadian soldiers and, and, and the orphan's alive that, that, that that still lives in Italy now.

But yeah. It's basically a story. about, you know, the humanitarian side of World War II and how they took this orphan boy and fucking be sure you stay alive. That one really took a lot of their bandwidth. So that's kind of, you know, part of the reason why this other one has been pushed a little bit. But that one was called Gino, a child of war. And it started out really, you know, again, these are good sort of grassroots people that,

you know, hey, we'll raise some money and we'll tell this story and we'll do. the best job we can. And when they did the premiere, they did it in Italy in the village where Gino was from. And he's, of course, he's still alive, as Jamie said. So he was there. And it got all this crazy attention. And they ended up like winning awards at the Venice Film Festival. They're like rock stars.

Yeah. Yeah. And they did really, really well with it. So, you know, it tells you that they're, they're good storytellers. Yeah. And that their content is, you know, it's professional quality content. It's not, you know, it's not history channel kind of you watch it. You go, what are these guys doing?

Yeah. Yeah. Um, so it's, I'm excited to see that the finished product. Yeah. Yeah. Jamie told me about it a long time ago. So I'm kind of. Yeah.

You know, and you played Vaughn. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got, um, I got. He's way better working. He was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, I was pretty proud to be part of it. Like, my first instinct was like, okay, this is a shit show.

And then what to get like talking to Robert and, and, and, and, like, seeing like how passionate he was about putting it together and having an accurate like it was yeah it's it was like i'm so proud that i actually did it it's fucking it's super important and and the crazy thing is is uh maybe willy could talk about this more but they actually destroyed all the fucking uh historical records of our tour and fkess and because the paperwork wasn't done properly for recording it into history so These are the little things that anybody that served over there that time. This is basically all we got left to to fucking go on.

Like like all the footage of the drones and all that shit's been erased and gone. Right. The war diary. The only thing that that that people have is like the shit that we've saved ourselves. And well, you can go on YouTube and see like Bards of War is the documentary. I don't know if you've seen it, Willie. Yeah. But it's not monetized anymore.

The filmmaker did that for a while and he hosted it to download for money and stuff. Let's just get it out there for everybody. So it's on YouTube. Once again, anyone who wants to watch it, just text me your email address and I'll get it sent on the truck so you can get to it. It should still be on YouTube. It should be. Yeah. They just want to see. But if it's not, if it's been pulled for some reason, I'll get them on it. There used be some good YouTube videos of like our, of us fighting in Pangeway as well too.

Yeah. There's still, there's still, I forget who the reporters or photographers were. They've, they did a mini documentary of some of the Pangewe fighting and stuff too, but you really can't find it anymore. And you know, you're talking about how they, how they're basically suppressed, deleted, got rid of all that stuff. I don't know if you'd remember either of your, uh, Dr. Sean Maloney. Oh yeah. Over there. He was, so he stayed with our platoon for a while, maybe three weeks a month, whatever and shifted around to the different platoons. And, uh, he wrote two or three books, but the one they won't let them publish. They won't let him get that out the door because it's just too much exposure about what things

were really like there. And, um, you know, he's just a, he's a professor, he's a smart man and he's seen a lot of the world. And when he's embedded with you, he's not there asking you stupid questions all day, like most reporters. He's just experiencing things. So his, his viewpoint was more, I don't want to say it was like soldierly, but it was more our viewpoint like dirty.

And where is he? I would want to say he taught it was at RMC. RMC, yeah. So the big, the military college, like the brain trust. And he's being like shut down pretty, he'd be an interesting character. He would be. Dr. Sean Maloney. He did get two of them out.

Two of them are out. And they've been out for like rogue historian and maybe the other one is also called that. I can't remember. But the third one, Ottawa is shutting down. Ottawa is like no. And I, even he's like it, it's just more of this. it's more about Afghanistan, what your guys did. These are your guys.

I think that one's out too, check. Did he finally win and got it out? I think so. I mean, I could be wrong. Let's have a look after we're done here. And because I do have a link to a couple. There's actually, there was actually two books. There was, there was sort of the 2001 to 2005 and 2006 and beyond.

Yeah. So there was two volumes of the same book. And then they're both available now. But it was this third one that, was being held up. Oh, okay. Maybe, maybe it's out now, but as of like not long ago, it was, he was fighting to get it out.

And, uh, it's just interesting how they, even so bards of war. So CBC was using those, those little, it's a footage that were out about us and out was six and they were using them by paying the filmmaker, like, you know, for copyright. Yeah. And they were using them at like opening to like some CBC program and they'd run 30 seconds of us over there. They did that for years. But the contract ran out and they're like, well, we don't want to pay for.

We just want to use it. And they, of course, that didn't happen. But when Bards of War was being released, they were supposed to be viewings at the Regimile Museum like an opening night kind of thing. And the filmmaker was like, okay, this is good. The army was initially behind it like the powers that be in Ottawa. And then the powers of be in Ottawa said, called the museum and said, nope, you're not doing this.

We don't give you permission to host it. And all the guys at the museum who were there were like, this is like the most in-depth fighting, like the most, there's nothing out there like this. Like I don't know if you've watched it or not, but there's no other documentary with that level of combat. It doesn't matter if it's American and British. Some British stuff is pretty close. Like I'm talking like we're not shooting kilometers away. We're right. Room to room.

You were there, you know. Yeah. It was dirty. And they're like, nope. And the only explanation that either the museum. could get or the filmmaker could get was they didn't like the language we used, our descriptive language we used in certain scenarios. Right.

And I'm trying to think like, yeah, we weren't very PC, but we didn't say anything, you know, we didn't, we didn't say anything that would get you, well, canceled, I guess, is the thing I can, you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah. We said stuff you would say in combat. You mean 15 years ago? Wouldn't stand up to today's language and getting you canceled? Well, when you're hunting terrorists and they're actually shooting at you and

both trying to blow you up and you have words come out of your mouth. Sometimes you didn't use their pronouns? I didn't use their pronouns. So hey, Sean Maloney. Sean Maloney here before we move on. He has three books out that I can see chances for peace, Canadian soldiers in the Balkans, 92 to 95. Then he's got learning to love the bomb canned as nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

that was 2007, confronting the chaos, a rogue historian returns Afghanistan 2009. That's a street that are on. There's more. There's other things from Sean Maloney. Fighting for Afghanistan,

actually, a rogue historian, that was 2011. So there's a bunch in there. Okay, so I, we've talked like how Chuck and I met, right?

Yes. I want to hear how these two fucking met. I tell you what. But before that, let me tell you about when Willie and I met. Can I just so, People, hey listen, you just sit there and fucking look pretty. Can I at least get you to look at what I put in front of it?

Sure. I can't love it. One of the things that we've changed here in studio is, is guys come, you've all driven a very far way. And Silver Gold Bowl, along with, you know, now giving out, trying to give a little bit of, you know, something for you to rep is just there isn't much I can do. I wish I had the bank account. Oh, coin for a coin.

A coin. That's right. So silver gold bowl, gave you a one ounce silver coin. Thanks. Nice. That's super cool. Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah. That's pretty awesome. That's fucking cool. Yeah, that is. And as a prepper, I appreciate that. Yeah. You don't keep any silver, do you, Chuck?

Oh, yes. Chuck has silver. And lead. Okay, anyways. Fuck, I got a funny story about a coin, but I'll tell that one later. Anyways, thank you very much. awesome appreciate it I love this yeah well it's it's a it's a you know I get it you know everybody when I first started this everything wanted to be in person yeah and then COVID hit and so we had to

change that formula which probably worked up for the best because then I could have people from all over but now as I try and pull people back in I don't sit and I don't know eminton I don't think anyone wants to sit there Calgary Toronto whatever you know like so to come to Lloydminster I appreciate it Because it is a journey and I get that. And this is a way of, you know, showing a little appreciation for way. No, thank you. So thanks for making the trip, fellas. Thank you.

Thanks, buddy. Now, funny story. How did you meet? All right. So, you know, Chuck and I met? The listenership after Jamie was on last time was like, how do we get more Sinclair? No.

Don't tell me that, my, I won't get me out of this fucking room. He's not going to fit through the door. All right. Where do I start? Anyway, so Chuck and I, met in battle school. Yeah, we went through all that a long time ago.

You know, people woke up this morning and like, oh, there's that voice to sing Claire. They're just driving along like a big of the way. Smooth and soaking like an angel. You hear me at karaoke. I'm actually fucking pretty good.

Oh, God. You distracted them. So anyways. Oh, look a bird. I'm 18 years old and or 19, like when Willie got in.

So there was him and Rob Stevenson. And we were going to Wainwright for this exercise. It was like big brigade exercise. And for some reason, they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. And as a rifleman, I ended up as a section commander of one of the sections in a company. So I believe we were in the same section together. Yeah, I don't know. I can't remember either.

I remember you carrying a wheelbarrow full of C6 ammo on a patrol. Yeah. During that exercise. I remember that very clearly because I was, I was 1989. I was 16 years old. And I was looking at him. going, thank God that's not me. You were 16?

Yeah. That's what that wheelbarrel ended up on fucking Ian Gett. I had so much ammunition stacked on him because we're doing a live fire ambush. Arnold, that was a live fire defensive. Anyways, fucking Ian jumped into the trench and he almost fucking broke his back. But yeah, we fucking shot a shit, a ton of ammo. He just said he was 16. How are you 16?

Well, I'm not anymore, but I was. But how could you be 16 in the military? Uh, you could get your parents to sign a waiver. Can you still get that? Oh yeah. Yeah, I was 17 when I was in my parents signed it happily. Yeah, you can still join it. Yeah.

All right. All right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that's how we met. And then over like the last fucking 30 some years, we, we, we bumped into each other on, on, like different, different fucking things though, but the best thing never happened to me because, um, it

In 2000, when the guys went, or was that 2001 when we first went to Afghanistan? Yeah. So that was my old battalion that went there. And I ended up in Africa. And it was a monkey on my fucking back that I never got to go to Afghanistan with the third battalion. So we're sitting in my kitchen, 2005 at Christmas, he came home for Christmas leave. And we're drunk fucking singing fucking songs. And he's telling me all about the tour they're going on.

And I'm like, McDonald. if you don't get me on this fucking tour, we're no longer friends. I got a fucking posting message right after fucking Christmas leave to fucking show up in Everton to go overseas and it's because of him. So that I'll just leave it at that for right now, but I want to hear these guys fucking talk about it. I honestly don't remember how Willie and I met. I think we were in the same battalion forever,

but our orbits were always, like it's not a small place. Right. And like you have five, six hundred dudes and you can work in a spot like in a company for for years and not know everybody else that well. It's a big organization. So I was in mortar platoon for a few years too. And then, you know, I went over to this, my rifle company, A company early on in like 2002 or three or whatever it was.

And right away they were like, because you get the schedule out. Because you guys would have been in Calgary together. Yeah. Right. I was in Calgary. Yeah. I was in California in Calgary. Yeah.

I was B company in Calgary. We don't want to talk about that. Until after the tour, yeah, in the 94 tour. But the, but the funny thing is, is in Afghanistan, our two platoons, it seemed like every time there was a crossroads or an event of a fight or a moment, it was like, oh, hey, it's reconnaissance. Hey, it's two platoon. And it was, wherever there was something horribly entertaining going on, I guess, our two platoons just seemed to find each other there. And it was the weirdest thing. There's, you know, how many rifle platoons were there over there?

There was like nine different rifle platoons between the three companies. Oh, there was 12 because you got to count. Yeah, the second baton that's right. Yeah, B companies there. And then and then you add like recqy platoons and other platoon and everything else happening. And our two platoons just through fate in some of the heaviest fighting would be like, oh, well, it's them. Let's we like fighting with them. So let's go do that.

That seems fun. And it just, you know, those moments, I remember, I think we even talked over there once, like, I forget really the details, but it was something to the effect of like it just seems like our two platoons wind up in the fights together. Yeah. Yeah. It did. It really did. And I've thought about that. I've thought about that a lot over the years, like why that happened.

The documentary, like, it doesn't have August 3rd in it because the reporter got, the filmmaker got pulled after the fight and sang again because we were written off as dead. and the people in charge of him were like, you're dead so you know, you're not going back out. And that happened. So, um, but like even August 3rd, we weren't supposed to be out there, like two platoon, I mean. Right. Um, like Jamie and I talked a little bit about it, but I've always wanted to, we after those, after that tour, you know how the leadership in our battalion just blew apart. Yeah. You know, and it's something that from the American perspective, because I have friends who've served all over that.

that and they're mostly all out now. But after a tour, they'll hold their guys together. And it's for the mental health aspect. It's for all those things that you bind over, they'll hold units together for at least a year minimum. They try. They really, really do short of some circumstances. Us, you come back from a tour, you get a couple weeks, maybe three weeks, four weeks of decompression leave, you go home, get drunk, you know, do whatever you're doing. you come back to work and almost without exception, if you're a leader of some sort, you have a posting message and you're like, well, I'm being blown across the country right now. And the young guys that were working for you, they're like, well, that's the guy that I've

been following for two years of workup training and eight, nine months of overseas, those guys start to leave the door because they're like, I'm not working for the next asshole. This guy understands it. He knows it. They trust you. And you trust them. And I experienced it in any company, especially coming back because we lost Pete Leje, who you love him or hate him.

I loved the guy because he was what he was. He was big, loud and in your face, you either worked for him or you didn't and he was kind of, I appreciate that, not maybe how I would have done things or did do things, but I could appreciate it and I could work with it and we worked well together and see him as my boss for years and me working for him. And the next guy we got in after that tour formed us up and started 100 men in the company shooting on guys for the way they laced their boots and blouse their boots. And these 20 year olds have been killing dudes for eight months.

They've seen their friends die. They've been covered in their friend's blood. And you're coming on because you don't have a tour, this tour, you're coming on to them about how their boots are bloused. So this first, this is Benny Reed. And so our very first form up after the parade was him doing. this and then saying if any war heroes want to go with B company on the 08 tour, you know, let me know. So I right away, I was like, took one step forward like an asshole because I knew

that it wasn't what he wanted. And he's like, Rodnick, what are you doing? Get back to what are you doing, you fucking idiot. And I'm like, you ask for volunteers. I'm going. And he's like, loses it, of course, because I'm an asshole. And we probably lost half a company of young guys getting out. Yeah. And you didn't, and we didn't need to do that. We could have captured so much experience.

I'm not talking leadership experience. I was raised by guys in the army who had no combat experience. They had nothing other than some field experience. Not to negate that. That's important. But these guys at 20 years old, 20 years old had a lifetime worth of combat experience. IEDs, fucking clearing rooms, every kind of contact imaginable. You lived it, you lived it.

I was blown up. way by what a 20 year old could do. Because when I was a 20 year old soldier, I was, I was a shit soldier. I was not a good soldier. I was like, when do we get drunk? How much longer are we going to be at work? Like that was the extent of my life. Yeah.

These guys, it was a different game and we blew them out the door. How young were all of you when you saw a combat? Like live fire in a different country, enemy wanting to blow your head off. 21. I was 21, too. I was Croatia. Bosnia for me. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But that, I won't call that combat. No. We saw, we experienced combat events. And I know people will probably be like, well, what's the difference? We weren't, to me, combat is me or you, the three of us, guys like us pushing into an objective and taking ground, fighting our way through it, throwing grenades at bad guys. Yeah, that hasn't been seen since Korea though.

Yeah. That was, other than the back pocket, but I wasn't there. I don't think there you guys were. Well, Cyprus, 74 Cyprus too. that boys fought there, too. I just want to circle back to Chuck's point about, you know, people getting sort of, um, posted and, and I was in a unique position. So, uh, we were, we were, we were in Canada hard airfield one day and I get called

to the RSM's office in the, in the joint operation center, the tactical operation center. And, uh, I'm like, oh boy, you know, he's going to yell at me for wearing a black tuk again or whatever, um, because I, because I broke the rules. I was in a specialized platoon. Yeah. And we kind of. March to the beat of our own drum.

Anyway, I thought I was in trouble. I go there and he sits me down and, you know, gives me a coffee and he's like, how's it going on? And, you know, we kind of shoot the shit for a bit. And then he says, listen, um, you turn down your promotion, uh, before we came on tour so you could stay with Rocky Patoon. I appreciate that. He goes, I can't hold your promotion any longer.

You're going to get promoted, uh, you know, the second we're back in Canada and I don't have room for another warrant officer in the battalion. So he goes, you know, there's a posting in Wayne. right and it'd be a good fit for you and take your combat experience and you know he blew a bunch of fish kisses at me. Yeah. Um, he goes, but listen, it's, it's up to you, man, you know, I know, I know you guys are going on an operation. Just let me know when you get back, you know, what, what, how you're feeling about it. So we off we go and we're gone for two or three weeks. Come back. There's posting message on my bed. I'm going to win. Right. I'm promoted and posted. So I'm like,

okay, whatever. And, you know, at the time, I'm like, yeah, I kind of don't like this, but whatever. So I get back to Edmonton and I'm on leave and I get a phone call from the the people that take care of the moves and stuff and they're like, hey, you know, you haven't booked a move. And I'm like, no, I just, I literally just got back from Afghanistan like 10 days ago. And they're like, well, you missed your posting date. I go, no, I got emails between my RSM and the RSM of the school and, you know, it's all good. And they're like, no, it doesn't work like that because there's no official message. So you're now no longer entitled to have your effiny, your furniture and effects moved on. You got to be kidding me.

On the government money. So I didn't really go into panic stations or anything, but, you know, it was a mess. It was a mess. I didn't get a house hunting trip. I didn't get anything. I ended up saying, okay, well, I'll just live in the shacks. And then I'll figure out what I'm doing after that. And the shacks being the single living in quarters.

And I wasn't married at the time. So, again, not a huge drama. And Wainwright's only a couple hours down the road. So anyway, I go to Wainwright. I report to Wainwright, the RSM there at the time, just a terrible, terrible human being. I go to his office and I said, hey, you know, it's Warren McDonald here reporting for duty. And, you know, let's back up for a minute. When I left the first battalion, I didn't get a certificate.

I didn't get a mug out. Yeah. I had been there for 12 years in that battalion. And it was basically, don't let the door hit in the ass on the way up. You're a battery. They used you up. And so anyway, I stand in front of the Sarm and regimental sergeant major and he's like, who are you?

And I go, up, Warren McDonald reporting for duty. And the warrant officer. I'm a senior senior. Senior, NCO. Put your fucking heels together when you talk to me, young warrant. And I'm like, okay, whatever, we're going to play this game. I'm in the school.

All right. So, and he goes, where'd you come from? And I said, first battalion. And he goes, I don't need warrant officers. I need sergeants. And I go, okay, well, I'm a warrant officer. I don't know what you want me to do. So anyway, he says, okay, I'll try and get through this as quick as I can, Sean.

I get told, go report to M.W. Kehoe and B. Kevin Keough, great guy. Yeah, yeah. Fantastic guy. So I go down there and he kind of talks, you know, like, oh, hey, how's it going? And very laid back, you know, very different ends of the spectrum. Between him and the ARSem. Yeah. And he goes, all right. So yeah, you just got back. Okay.

Yeah, you're worn. Oh, yeah, I don't need any fucking worn officers. And I go, okay, well, what do you want me to do, sir? And he said, well, I don't know. Just hang out. I kind of don't care what you do. I don't have a job for you. So I'm sitting in this room.

This, it's smaller than this studio. It's half the size of this studio. I got boxes stacked all around me. There's mice running all over the place through the C-Luff. leagues and the walls. And I got nothing to do so I started drinking. You can go pro. Yeah.

And I essentially became a professional drinker. I didn't have a job. I go to the company commander. I say, sir, like I got to do something, man. I'm drinking myself to death. And I'm playing video games all day long because I got no friends because all my friends are back in Evanton or posted somewhere else. Yeah.

So anyway, um, you know, the moral of the story is like I started just staying in Edmonton and I, I would drive to Wayne Wright. on Monday morning, I would, I would show my face for five minutes and then I would jump in my truck and drive back to Edmonton and spend the whole week in Evanton. Yeah. Until finally they got me a job. But the, you know, the point of the story is that I felt very isolated. Yes.

I felt, uh, I felt abandoned by the institution. Yeah. And I was really in a, in a, in a unhappy place. And I'll tell you what my saving grace was. I got to Wainwright and there was some. absolutely stellar human beings there. Gilpaet, Billy Bolin, Oh yeah.

Al Whitehall. You know, these guys, Sean Robson was there at Sheridan Ellingson and Jerry Shaw. Ellie, yeah, yeah. Like I just, Oly Furness, we just had this rock star crew of guys, Joe Barkley, that kind of got together. Yeah.

And we kind of took care of each other. And all those guys are just really good guys. And Gil at one point, he realized it didn't have anything to do. He goes, hey man, why don't you put a presentation together? and he worked at CMTC, the Canadian maneuver training center, and come brief all the observer controllers on what it is actually like to fight in Afghanistan. Yeah, yeah.

Because their job was to deliver the training, the workup training and the gateway training to basically check the box for people to go into combat in Afghanistan. But they didn't know what they were doing. They had none of them had ever been there. So I ended up working with Gil very closely for, for a short period of time. And then through all that, I developed a program called It's Okay to Be Okay. And the whole reason that this matters is because my program was really centered on

mental health and being okay with killing people and being okay with seeing your buddies die. And what ended up happening was people were getting PTSD shoved down their throat. Yeah. And we had people saying, listen, you need to call Veterans Affairs. and every little thing that happened was like, oh, that guys got PTSD. Yeah, guys got PTSD. That guy's got PTSD. And I had guys phoning me and saying, hey, man, I'm not beating my wife.

I'm not drinking too much. I'm not having nightmares. I don't, you know, I don't go into a panic when I see a bag of garbage on the side of the road. There's something wrong with me. And I'm like, no, there's nothing wrong with you. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay to be okay.

So through that program, I got invited to Ottawa and was able to sit with the Army commander and talk about this program, which I ended up delivering in Cyprus at the third location decompression center to redeploying soldiers. And whilst I was there, I took the opportunity to say, hey, you know, I got thrown out like I was the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater. And the platoon commander got posted, the section commanders got posted, everybody was gone. And so you have this platoon of hard charging troops, just like Chuck said, that are lost. they, you know, they didn't have an opportunity to reconcile the stuff that they went through. They didn't have an opportunity to be with the folks that they needed to be with.

And so what the Army commander did, and it was Andrew Leslie at the time, is he said, okay, I'm going to push out a Canlanjin. And it basically was a direction for the Canadian military in the career shop. You cannot post anybody within a 12 month period after they redeploy. So it actually changed. It changed for the better. but unfortunately we got caught in that in that quagmire of misery and and let's just throw another facet in here the reservists I should speak about that yeah but but I'll just say this you know the reservists their contract ends and they send them home and they're like go take care of yourself now

yeah and so we treated people really poorly we did so so getting into that and that's where where I fall into that into that part of it is like once we got back like you're really You're literally fighting. You end up in Cyprus for decompression. And then like these guys that you're fucking, well, like we're brothers. And you have no idea how fucking tight you can be. Even like, you know, you run some pretty good hockey teams and how tight you are with your buddies there. It's a special bond you got.

And fucking now they send me back to Edmonton within like hours of landing in Edmonton. I'm on another plane back to Regina. So I'm totally disremove from everything that is safe to me. Right. So I'm fucking sleeping in it. Like they had me in the front of the plane. I mean, combat's because they want me to go in.

The regiment's having a welcome home thing. My mom's there, all that shit. So I'm fucking sleeping in the front row and some like 50 year old man at 10,000 feet elevations trying to open the fucking plane door. So the stewardess sees me sitting in the, like I'm in my army fatigues. She fucking wakes me up.

I almost fucking punched her right in the face. Because like, you know, when you go from combat to this, like when somebody's shaking you, like you're, you want to fight, right? So I almost punched her. She's like, somebody's trying to open a fucking plane door. You got to do something about it. And I fucking, you know, you just go into attack mode, right?

You fucking grab this dude, throw him in a chair. They fucking seatbelt them in so they can't get out. But anyway, so this is like, you know, you're still, now you're amped up. right now I get into the airport and there's all these fucking people there like you feel weird like it's like you know you don't want people close to you don't know these people like fucking everyone's taking your picture yeah and and then like within hours from that I'm on a fucking rugby field watching a rugby game with eating kid and the airplanes flying over I'm trying to crawl underneath the fucking stand stands because they're freaking me out because we had a fucking 8 10 drop a bomb on us but um you just it's hard to fucking go for from that tempo to being in a civilian part of the world where everybody's calm and relax and you're like fucking nudge pins and needles. And not to mention all the guys that you've been with are all gone.

Yeah. So yeah. And then like I end up, um, they give you drugs like to, for the malaria pills you have to to like wean you off of it. So you get crazy fucking nightmares. So I'm in, I'm in my old office at the campground sleeping and I'm just got my boxer shorts on. I feel like I'm being. mortared. So I'm running out of my fucking, I'm sleeping at the time. I'm running out of my,

out of my, uh, out of my little office at like six in a morning and I'm diving for like cover, but I just graveled the front of my fucking driveway. So I'm like skipping off the gravel, sliding on my face. I'm all cut up and I would jump up real quick like, fuck did anybody see this? Because now you're awake, right? Like, but you like literally just thought you're being mortared. So like you get all these fucking crazy. emotions and you would go to lead to go somewhere and you're always walking around looking for something well it's your gun you're looking for your fucking gun driving yeah i was always like reaching for way always always yeah you're like fucking and and and sometimes i would just take my fucking

gun and put in my truck and i would drive out into the back field and go shoot gophers or something but just having my gun with me in my vehicle like how i'd carry it overseas it would like calm me down like it would make you feel normal having your fucking gun yeah I mean all that stuff I think I think those are great points Jamie and I think everybody stays at that level of readiness for a specific amount of time yeah but the reserve is when you get back you don't have your patuna guys like right that are there well nobody left yeah nobody's there 100 percent but I mean you think about it you go back and they go okay you got to do three half days right remember that that craziness yeah you got to do three half days so we can observe you yeah yeah

sure you're not going to start digging trenches in your back here. Yeah. Right. But you go in for the first half day and they go, yeah, don't bother coming back for the rest. But they give you four weeks off. Yeah. And so now you're, you're with your family or whatever and you don't know how to communicate with them because, uh, you know, you may be not comfortable telling them some of the,

the stories because you don't know how they're going to react. But, you know, I remember my mom and I've told you this story. My mom, I was sitting in my sister's house watching a football game and I, you know, I had a pills in her beer and I'm watching the football game. I'm just kind of enjoying myself. And and my mom's like, uh, how you doing? I'm like, I'm good. Okay. She walks away and about a minute and half later. What was it like over there? And I'm like, uh, you know, it was war. Whatever. I'm just watching the game. Just, you know, bugger off. How you doing? How you doing? How are you doing? Do you need anything? Do you need anything? Do you need anything? Until finally I went,

just leave me along. I'm trying to watch the game, you know, and I raised my voice. And she, She went like, oh my God, he's got PTSD. And I said, no, you created the conditions to see what you wanted to see. Yeah. So it would fit your narrative, right? Now, the reactions that Jamie's talking about, I think those are perfectly normal and everybody experiences them. Yeah. To a certain extent.

Some people don't deal with it as well as other people. And that's okay, right? It's also okay not to be okay. There's mechanisms in place that can help people through that stuff. and, you know, I'll just say as a PSA, you know, if anybody's listening that does have problems, man, there's help out there. But it's a great point is, is that you're isolated, you know, in a different way than a regular force soldier feels isolated.

We should have been, we should have been kept there for another month. I agree. 100%. Yep. They just fucking throw you away, right? And as bad as that stuff that new isolation was, for me, I went to. So I went as part, there's a couple reasons I went back in 08. One was one was as a fuck you to like the system kind of that was already treating us like lepers.

And the second was I wasn't done doing what needed doing in my mind over there. Like there was some revenge needed happening. And, um, in my mind. Yeah, I don't blame me. I don't believe. I'm a little warped that way. I kicked and screamed for years to get back and they would not. I got to go do it again in a wait and I was quite happy.

They said you to Kabul though, didn't they? Yeah. I went. back in 2011 as a mentor for an Afghan brigade, certain major. But yeah, I mean, I never got to go back to Canada, and I always. I played in Panjwa again.

Wanted to. Yeah. They, um, but you go. So there was like me, Pat Tower, maybe two or three other guys go to B company, guys with actual combat experience. Right. From all across the battalion, not just a company guys. There's, and a couple more corporals.

Like there's a, there's a mix, right? And, um, every single portion of the, that leadership from the platoon, or sorry, the company commander on down minus the Sard Major who was Renee Keynes, who was solid. Almost the rest of it was was jealous junk. They're all school guys, not knocking them, but I mean, they all had this out of Brownie. These guys all had this attitude like, oh, this isn't going to be the 06 tour and you

war heroes can just, you know, we'll, don't worry about it. And I was like, I'm trying to teach you guys how to survive, how to survive because We've paid the price already and people before us paid this price and we still had to learn it. I'm trying to give you like a leg up. Like I'm not showing you a thing just to show it to you. This, this happens. This is what's going to happen. Yeah.

Well, this isn't 06. I'm like, this got told to me over and over again by the, our company commander was Raymond, Major Raymond. Oh yeah. Absolute junk. Anyway, over and over again in these big seminars, these company training events, he'd be like, this isn't 06 product. I don't need to hear it.

He didn't go over it. Oh yeah, he did. You know what? I'll tell you something real quick about Raymond. I'll tell you why I respect the man. He was the guy that had to do all the notifications in 06. Hard job. Yep.

Fair enough. Yeah. He should have stayed doing that because over there, I could go on forever about that, but I'm not going to. Yeah. Suffice to say he wasn't cut out for that environment, not overseas. Right. And every training event.

We had a few company commanders that should have stayed home. Oh, mine in 06. Yeah. You know, there's two people listening to this podcast right now. One is like being like, they're just trying to keep up. The other is military guy going on it. Both freaking time. They cracked a beer about 20 minutes ago.

And they're just sitting and enjoying. They're like right in on the lingo that talk, everything. Carry on. So I just wanted to throw that in there. Cause there's probably. Oh, because this is going to get good. This is going to get good. Wait till they start fucking talking about some of the good shit.

So he, he, he said, he kept saying this over and over again for months. This is no six. this is no six. And I'm like, has anybody given that memorandum to the Taliban? Because they don't care about your clock or your calendar. They're just going to fight us. They don't give a shit.

They've evolved and we're not. Like I went from the eight months I was there, they evolved. They, they learned and they got better at things and they improved how they did things. But now you're going to take these guys. And I'm saying this in front of a 130 man company. You're going to take these guys and you're not letting them learn

what needs learning because we all know that the little basic plans that we get to go overseas are okay on some level. But we all knew through our own experiences what really works, what you need to focus on, what you can kind of go, okay, that box is checked, put that away. We don't need to worry about that box. Right. This is a whole new box we don't even have. We need to check this a lot.

Those kinds of things. So at the end of it all, Keens, who was a great, a really good sergeant major, he's, he's given me the side eye, like time to shut up, Sergeant. And I'm like, okay, I'll shut up. And the last thing I'm going to say is, I'm going to train my 10 monkeys to do what I want them to do. You train the rest of your monkeys to do what you want them to do. And of course, I can't shit for all of this, but I don't care. Pat Tower, we all know Pat.

It was about a week later, he comes to me, he's like, I'm not going with these guys. They don't get it. They're not getting it. They won't get it. Doesn't matter how much you, because he used to yell with me. He used to be like the other guy who'd been, I mean, it's Pat fucking Tower, right? Like he's like, I'm not doing it with these guys. They don't understand it.

And the mindset changed. Like they're I had, for me, I couldn't back out at that point. I was like I'm, I'm dedicated to these guys are loyal to me. Yep. I'm going. I'm doing it. Not knocking Pat. Pat made his decision.

I respect him for it. But I understood it. Like these people and we got over there. They didn't understand it. We're in the same. We're still in Pangeway. Like we were patrolling Pangeway. That's where my AOR was.

Yeah. For the whole tour was going into Pangeway. with two sections and a simic team instead of a backed up company and we're still getting into ticks of troops in contact a fight and you're trying to tell these people like we can't do this with like 12 dudes yeah and they're not getting it Mike Volic you remember Mike yeah when he went on to you just retired as the RSM yeah I saw him in Warrenville not long ago um he was a PS like a little PSS commander over there in 08 like not far from Fob Wilson which you remember Fob Wilson in 06 was like no much bigger in this room. Yeah, yeah. And it became a mega base, like a base base, like a fighting base. And by the time we got there in a wait, I'm going out on a patrol, one of my first ones on that tour into, and this will lead into some of the August third stuff. But anyway, we're going out on a foot patrol. And they want us to leave our vehicles

at his PSS, his little base. And so my buddy Rob, or, uh, yeah, Rob, Roleck is in charge of like 30 Afghan soldiers and like two or three Canadian. And he can't come with this because he's going on leave, but his 2. I see is taking us out on this patrol with all these Afghan guys. And there, he's like this app, this two I see guy is like, you need to leave your vehicles here. We're walking it. It's like three clay three kilometers in three kilometers back. And I know this map. I don't even need the map. We fought we actually this is the how many times did we fight over that same piece of it? I knew it all by her. I knew. every compound by heart. And I'm like, dude, we're bringing the vehicles. He goes, you can't bring them in there. They won't fit. They won't go. I'm like, we had them down there in 06.

In 06, we made them fit. We're gonna fit him this time. And my platoon commander, young guy that he was, Jesse Van Eyck went on to become like the CEO of the second, I think, solid, listened to his NCOs. He's like, if Chuck says we're taking the fucking vehicles, we're taking the fucking vehicles. And Mike was, Mike Volick was like on his way with the door to go back on leave. he's like, take the vehicles. We got into a fight, a monster fight within half an hour of stepping off. And all those Afghan soldiers do what they always do, shot one mag and just sat down. There was six Canadians on the ground, six of us, I think were fully dismounted.

Because you got guys on leave, you got guys all over. They didn't take it seriously enough to give you a full dismounting squad or section. And I had a CIMIC vehicle with their RWS system shooting a little bit. My guy on my lav gun hammering the grape drying hut. Was that Brownie? Uh, was it Brownie? Yeah, he was Brownie. Yeah, he was Brownie.

Yeah, my guy Brownie. You know Hugh Brownie. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And uh, shout out Brownie and for not shooting at me.

And then, um, my platoon commander is like, well, what do we do, Chuck? I'm like, we're attacking. We're going to attack this thing. And he's like, there's no help here. There's a whole other half story to this that I'm not going to get into. to about my warrant at that point who is somewhere else won't touch that right now. You've had some drop-up warrants. Yeah, we're not going to touch that right now.

I was never a warrant. But no, no, no, no, no, no, not you. No, no, no, my warrant over there who, I know, I'm just joking. Who decided not to take part in that fight with half our platoon that day. From there, Chuck, been here, buddy. Yeah, we'll talk about that in a minute too. But, uh, we fought this objective with a handful of men where we should have a platoon of warriors because mindset wouldn't catch up.

And that didn't change. It frustrated me to, the frustration I felt, I was fortunate that my platoon commander over there was solid and understood it and, and grasped that this is no joke. That was our first major fight on that tour and it was a no joke fight and my guys performed like I expected they would, you know, a little kick in the ass here and there, a little, you know, pull them back a little here and there. there but for a first fight and it was no joke this is panjouet this is the devil's den they did very well but there was like six of us one of them was a medic Mike

Starker who died in yeah Mikey Mikey was my medic he's a good shit fucking solid back yeah two commando guy yeah super solid guy isn't Jesse isn't that Pete Legge's nephew could be maybe I'm thinking of a different Jesse it could be yeah um sorry but he he understood it and so when After this first fight, thank God, we all made it out of there and we dirted a bunch of savages and did what we did. We go, this is how surreal it became in 08. We fought, patrolled back, went back to Mass, um, uh, Will Faw Wilson and barbecued.

Could you imagine that in 06? We lived behind her vehicles for months at a time in 06 in the, in the dirt, which I preferred to this, to now breaking my brain to going back to this thing where they're like, okay, barbecues out. And you're like, I was about 20 minutes ago killing a guy, three kilometers that guy. Wait, it didn't make sense. And that was their attitude. And that's the compound you were staying at? Bob Wilson was a little, yeah. Was a bit of a, um, a base where you felt secure.

Yeah, you didn't have to worry about. But all, all these bases that we created, all these bases that we created actually fucking was our downfall. Yeah. Like when we were there in 06, basically we rolled around. and fought the enemy were wherever they were. Mm-hmm. We had, we, we created Martello, which is a big fucking waste of resources of manpower.

It's just fucking garbage. And what is that? It was a forward operating base on the Garrett-Cot Road. But they build it, so they built this base in a bowl at the bottom of the bowl. Yeah. So if you're a bad guy, what do you do? You could sit up on the ridge. Yeah, they would just shoot at us from the fucking mountain tops.

So who's the genius that thinks of putting something in the- General somewhere, I thought this is a brilliant type of. idea disrupt the enemy. What disrupted the enemy was driving around hunting them. Yeah. They hated that. This was just like our like there was somebody in our in our organization that fucking took this idea and figured, okay, I'll keep all my men safe by fucking having to keep them

here instead of us having to fight, which we eventually did go and fight. It was, it was just a buck and it was a terrible idea. It was, but it caught on in like after 06, like when the. RCR got there and the Van Dusk got there. They just set up all these fucking little camps all over the place. And now we stopped having the momentum of putting the enemy on their heels. The other thing we did is we went really heavy. We brought in tanks and all that shit.

So we never changed it up. Like we should have went from like fighting in our labs. And then moving into a light infantry role where we're moving around by helicopters, change it up for a few six months or whatever. till the enemy maneuvers to fight that type of environment, then hit them again with the tanks and laughs. Like, like it's like we didn't change it up enough. We,

all we did was build these little bases in the middle of like tons of them that are not much bigger than your room. You know, no bigger than your parking lot realistically. And you'd put three or four Canadians, baby 25, 30 Afghans, and they would get hit day in it. You guys remember Derek Thompson? So I used to go to his little PSS. He's a buddy of mine from 06, he's using my platoon.

Solid man, super solid man. His PSS was under contact all day every day. And we would be, we'd, we'd be, he'd be like, yeah, we're, they're pushing us over. Come help and roll and fight there. And the reason it was happening is because they're in these stupid little meaningless PSS is these little, you know, platoon station houses and they're getting smashed every day. And I mean smashed. Yeah.

I don't know how they didn't go overrun a few times. Well, it became reactive rather than proactive. And I remember having a, and Jamie's heard this story, I remember having a conversation with Colonel Hope one day. I was in Canada Hurried field and I was, I was not happy because we were doing convoy escort. We had just got back from picking up Nicola Goddard's remains after she was killed. And the opso at the time said, hey, I need Rocky Platoon to do these convoys because the, the service battalion guys keep getting lost. So you need to bring ammo and food and water to the troops that are fighting. And of course, I was beside myself because I'm a fighter and I want to be in the fight.

And so I'm walking, me and Jeff Schnur are walking to the Tim Hortons at the on the boardwalk and Colonel Hope and the RSM drive by and they stop and Colonel Hope like, hey, what do you guys do? And you guys. And I go, well, that's up to you sir. And, uh, you know, we're, we're just doing convoy and I was like, you know, I was, you know, I was. I hear you. Kind of bite my lip. Anyway, he goes, it's not up to me. It's up to your platoon commander.

He goes, my expectation, because he believed in decentralized command, is that your platoon commander brings me a con-op, a concept of operations, a one-pager, put it on my desk, I'll sign it, and you guys are gone, man. I need you guys hunting the bad guys. I need you chasing the enemy. And there is no restrictions to your freedom of movement because you have two J-TACs, joint terminal attack controllers, so you don't have to worry about artillery. You can call in fast air attack.

helicopters, whatever, hell fires off drones. He goes, go wherever you want. So man, there would have been a smoke trail behind me running back to, to grab the platoon commander, Hammy and say, like, I said to him like, spin up an operation. He's like, what are you talking about? We can't. We have another convoy. And I'm like, the convo.

I'm like, we're going out in the rhubarb. And so, you know, we spun up an op and we left. And that's from that day forward, that's what Raki Patoon did. You know, there was a couple times we got attached to A company, but, but even like Chuck said, he, he mentioned it earlier. And I don't remember if it was actually while we were live or before that, but he said, you know, Recky platoon and two platoon always seemed to end up in the same battle space in the same gunfight. Yeah. Because when we did get in trouble and there's 12 of us dismounted.

Yeah. And as Chuck mentioned earlier, we had a, uh, an NGO in the platoon who refused to help because he was, you know, rightfully scared, but, you know, wrongfully a coward. Yeah. We would get on the radio and say, like, is anybody close to us that can help us because we're in bad shit right now. And, you know, I think it was probably half a dozen times, you know, Mark Pickford and Chuck and the boys showed up and kind of pulled our asses out of the fire.

And, you know, it was a great feeling to have that, to have that ability, right? And also, you know, I mean, I, I called in, I don't know how. many, I can't even count how many live fire drops I did off of the different, you know, platforms that were in theater to include like, you know, hellfire, hellfire missiles off of, off of drones and F-15s, A-10s, even once I had some Harriers that came out of Diego Garcia, but they had very different rules of engagement. So it was weird. But, you know, like the Americans, really like fighting with the Americans. was it was it was just amazing because we had a very different mentality than they did they had

they had the mentality that hey we're going to drop mortars we're going to artillery we're going to we're going to carpet bomb this thing and then the troops are going to go in and that wasn't our mentality no our mentality was we're not calling in all that other stuff until we need it we're going to go which is awesome everybody yeah which was awesome or at least try to yeah you know And then if we get in a tough spot, then we'll call for the help. Because a lot of the time, we would corral these fuckers into an area. Like we would push the enemy into a fucking compound or whatever. Next thing you know, it's like, all right, we're not going in there.

We're going to blow the fucking thing down. And then we'll go in there to look to see who's squirming. Yeah. Like it worked out fucking great in our favor. Yeah. And I had a fucking similar conversation with Colonel Hope. He didn't know me from a fucking hole in the ground. And we ended up fucking at that little buying.

can you bars at that little thing at the talk yeah and i'm like hey sir uh when's a company gonna get a chance go and fight he goes well that's up to your uh you should go talk to your company commander and see he says i go well aren't you in charge of my company commander and he fucking looks at me fucking and then fucking walks away within like fucking two weeks we're in the fight not saying that i was the one that fucking pushed it but i was like hey fuck you're in charge of him Like fucking, I'm a corporal in his fucking company. We had a very weak company commander. Yeah.

And I'm a notoriously weak company commander. You've seen Band of Brothers where that one, the one, I think he's a company commander and he's always like, I'm going back to regiment when as soon as it gets hot, he's like, I'm going to go and do something over here. Thank God. I go and talk to the colonel. That was our. Yeah.

Colonel called. You better to see him. Well, honestly, we're like, thank God. I was, I was going to just really briefly give you the Cole's notes on this one gunfight we got into it was July the 12th. And I remember that date because it was my sister's birthday. And, uh, and we're in, uh, in Helmand province and rec, you got sent out to go, um, basically find what, what had at the time been called an IED making facility.

Hyderabad, yeah. So yeah, hydrabad. So, so we go out to a position that's about 500 meters from this bridge and we didn't know the condition of the bridge. It was very close to the objective. So we said, okay, we're going to walk in. And it's, you know, 3.30 in the morning, maybe a little bit later. So we get everybody together, you know,

we dismount and we start going. We get, uh, we get about halfway across this bridge and, of course, all hell breaks loose. Yeah. So we get, we get, there's 12 of us and we get hit by somewhere around 45, 50 guys in an elevated position that have, you know, they have all the, the initiative on their side, right? They've, they've got the high ground. We're in a, we're, we're, We're in canalizing, we're in canalizing ground, which means there's only one way across this thing is this bridge. So anyways, all hell breaks loose. So we're fighting and fighting and we're begging and begging somebody to come help us. Because, you know, we've got three Afghans with us and they had their two Americans.

They call them ETTs embedded training teams. And it got to a point where we just, you know, we had one guy that got fragged. We had another guy that got shot in the back. Mars, yeah. Mars, yeah. Luckily, he didn't penetrate his body armor. but we didn't know that because he dropped. Yeah.

He dropped down like, like he'd been hit by a sledgehammer. This is a big man. Yeah. And I thought he was, I thought he was down. So we had a medic with us, Jay Lamont, who, who ended up getting the Medal of Military Valor for this. He just jumped up and ran to him through all this massive volume of fire to make sure he was okay. Anyway, I had said, hey, listen, we have to, we have to, we have to move forward. We can't sit here to the platoon commander.

Like, we got to go. And so we put a couple machine guns on the flank. and we started advancing. And as we got maybe halfway, and this is about 30 minutes into this fight, two platoon shows up, right? With their labs and, and I remember, I think it was Derek,

he's like, can we cross this bridge with these labs? And I'm like, I just said, good luck, man. Yeah. And I think you did get them across. We did, yeah. And Chuck and his boys dismounted. And basically we turned the momentum of that fight, but we had all these guys.

in this compound, just like Jamie described. They were all in one compound. And anyway, we, we ended up winning the, winning the fight with the help of two platoon. And actually, you guys spearheaded. We kind of formed a fire base. And the rifle platoon basically bounded past us. And there's plenty of videos that Chuck thrown grenades and all sorts of stuff. It's really cool stuff. Is that one to laugh fired or smoke grenades inside and everybody caught on fire? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Derek. You didn't believe how dirt can burn, but it'll burn. Oh, yeah. And all the hay and stuff. Yeah. Anyway, you know, it ended up being, you know, not only was in an IED making factory, but we found something crazy.

$25 million in black tar heroin. Yeah, black tar heroin. Yeah, black tar heroin. Uncut. The law, but the record books of all the money of where it went. Like that that was caught too. The names of all the people that were the sort of cut out people for the, where the money and the drugs and, and the.

And the best thing we found was the propaganda. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the propaganda, you know, and I say this, you know, it sounds really weird for me to say. And, and, and, you know, there's arguably going to be some people that don't like this. But it said, it basically said if you see Canadians kill them. And we were like, yes, we made the list. Yeah. You know, we passed.

We were the top of the list. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, they hated us. Yeah. Yeah. It was fucking awesome.

This fight, I've always wondered about it from like Willie's perspective and we'll talk about a bit more. the um the the um I'll already have to pee if I keep drinking um oh Chuck why don't you try pissing like a man for let me pee we don't pee we piss yeah yeah come on so hey this this this this fight were like Willie's Willie's Ricky platoon is supposed to go in and there's there they're we were told when we got woken up so back up for two platoon rolls into this big leaguer of vehicles this big defensive thing of vehicles middle of the desert and we rolled in at like 11 at night everybody else was already in there and was sleeping and was sleeping and we're like oh we're gonna get a little bit of sleep we don't even

have to pull security tonight because there's dudes already doing it we were sleeping for about an hour and a half we got woken up and they're like recie batoons kicking off very shortly they're gonna go secure this iED factory there's supposed to be six dudes it's a hard knock which we love because it meant like we didn't have to say hey Canada's here or just go like Piu phew, like, Wakana's here kind of thing, which we were way preferred. So we're like, okay, let's do this thing. But everybody, the whole, everybody else in the battle group is here, they've been asleep for like hours.

We just rolled in. Could we maybe have some of that? And, you know, we kind of bitched about it for like a minute, you know, in our orders, getting orders. And then we're like, fuck it. Let's go get in a fight. So we get our orders. Tell the boys we're leaving.

It's only like from where we were in the league or. not even a kilometer away. Like this town was a kilometer away kind of thing. We roll up and we're in our hiding position like a little, uh, low dip in low ground. And it's like 430 or five or so and it's just starting to get light, just starting to crack light. And you can hear, you can hear and see tracers and RPGs going off everywhere. And that's when Willie and his crew were, were in it. Like they were being swamped.

And, uh, I think I talked to it last time we were on. I could hear, you can hear Hammy on the radio as joking because Hammy and Smitty, his signal we're both stuttering guys. But on the radio at that moment, Tammy didn't stutter at all. And he's like, I remember the first message was, I'm in my air sentry hatch in the lab and I could hear it on the speaker down below. I ducked down to hear him. And he's like, if you guys aren't here real quick, we're going to be overrun. This is no joke. We're getting overrun. And we were ordered to wait for a certain commander to say, go. Right. We're waiting like good little soldiers and I'm looking at Derek Thompson in the top of his lab Dave

Pickett's in his lab, um, Pickford's in his and we're all kind of like doing, we're all doing this and um, Hammy comes back. We're watching the tracers. We can hear it. It's 400 meters away and we can hear Hammy come on one more time. He goes, they're, they're in our positions now. They're pushing us. And Derek Thompson and I both looked at the platoon at the same time, who is our replacement platoon commander because our other one Johnny Croucher had been blown up earlier in the tour. And we both looked at them and gave the judo chop like we're fucking going like i don't even derrick waited for like a word he just kind of was like we're driving we're going let's get into this so i'm yelling down at the boys

who are down below in the in the back of the car i'm like we're getting into it and we're we're going to be surrounded as soon as we start because you guys are already surrounded we have to break through the ring of taliban that are surrounding our guys or friends to get into the fight to help and as we're approaching where we think the ring is based on you know, noise and, you know, battlefield just looking at it. We see your, your Zulu vehicles. They're, they're empty vehicles. And I can, Neil Thompson, one of your guys, has your warrant up against the one vehicle.

And it doesn't look like they're getting along. And I'm like, that's, well, that's curious. Because we don't know what's happening at this point. We all, all we know is our, our friends, they have known some of these guys 15 years at this point, you know, even your corpals, your corpals you had were buddies of mine from mortars a few of them. You know, like knowing these guys a long time. And even if I didn't know them, there's still our guys, but I knew these guys.

Well, we all knew each other, you know. And just for context, there was nine vehicles there. There was eight G wagons and an RG 31. And every single one of them, save for one, had a machine gun on it. Yeah. And we had been essentially begging this guy to come help us because that's a lot of firepower. Yeah. And he wouldn't come help us.

He wouldn't go help. So these guys ended up getting thrown in. We drove right past. I think our Patoon was on the other side of that river we were trying to get across. And to me, it was fucking maddening because you can see the artillery coming in to support these guys and the fucking big gun battle. But for some reason, our Patoon couldn't find a way across this river to get in there to help you. That's true.

Is there any in this world, is there a bigger rush? I'm going to use rush because I can't think of the word. Nothing. When, when you, not only are you in a fight. But you're about to go into said fight to try and help someone get out of the fight and you know them all that well. Honestly, I think there's, so there's two different for me. So a fight like that where we could see it happening. And you know how many fights we've been on the periphery of and you're like, no, no, no, you guys are holding this line.

You're not going to go in and dabble with that. If it starts here, you're doing that and you're like, oh, I want need to get into this fight. Like it's just, you just want to get into it. And we knew we were going to get into this one. So you're just, the anticipation is like through the roof. There's no describing it. It's just one of those because it's, you're waiting to get in. And then finally you're just, we're all doing this like we're not waiting for, we're not

waiting for that one particular idiot to tell us to go. We're just going. Those are our buddies dying are about to die. So we went. Then there's the other type of fight where it's almost always an ambush there. Like this, they, they, they, they, they're ground, right? Like it'd be like if they came, if anybody came to fight in Canada, we'd be ambushing the whole time.

It's just, that's the nature of this kind of warfare. It's an ambush. It doesn't matter how good you are. It doesn't matter how perceptive you are. It doesn't matter what tea leaves you read. You're going to get ambushed. I'm going to ambush all the time. Well, in Padua, fuck, I tell you how frustrating that was.

Like when we had to clear it through the killbox and kill everybody and wrecked theatoon was on the left side, like on the east side of the killbox. And somebody in their fucking wisdom put fucking Willie McDonald in charge of the section that was supposed to be keeping all the squirters from getting out. Fuck, and we'd get them all into a position where we could kill. him and he'd fucking hook in from the left side and fucking kill everybody and we could hear the fucking like these are our kills and i'm i'm like freaking out of calcics i'm like calcics you tell six wanted to say it off fuck out of our box before we have a blue on blue all fucking

day you fucking was rolling it just just like cherry picking up man fucking cherry picking we roll so we were we weren't tired of them fuckers you guys make it seem like a game of call of duty online that's it when i listen to three i'm like There's, it becomes a comfort level once you're in it. Once you understand and you hear things a few times and you're, I'm not saying you do get used to it. It's not like you lose fear because I never lost fear, but I became very comfortable with being like, fear will go over here.

Fun is now here and like, I hate to say fun, but it was fun. I was with the best dudes in the world. My, my crew was the tightest crew. The guys on my, my, the edge of my battle space were. Yeah, when push came to Chuck, sorry, add words and you knew exactly. exactly what you were getting out of all of them. Yes, I knew. Can I ask you guys a question?

Wait, I have one more thing to say. And I just, because I want Chuck to finish his version of events. At the end of that battle, I mentioned earlier there was two Americans, the embedded training team. Yeah. We, we kind of circled the wagons and we were doing an after action review and everybody was kind of being given their chance to talk. And the American major, you know, he's a second range of battalion guy, whatever.

he got up to speak and he couldn't even talk he was like I have never seen people fight like that i've been to iraq four times this is my third tour in afghanistan and the way you guys fought was unbelievable yeah and it was one of the biggest honors in my life to to have somebody with that amount of experience say something like that yeah because as i said they fight way different than we yeah right to he's like you guys were pepper potting, which is fired movement. And he's like, I don't even have words to describe how awesome it was to watch that and, and see that in my lifetime. Like he was just beside himself. That same guy to tack on to that. He, he also was a little, um, I won't say upset,

but he brought it up. He goes, you guys cannot attack like that all the time. He goes, you're not, there's not enough of you. And I said, I only have four men. I'm dismounting with me. and three guys. Like that's it. Me and three dudes. That's one section on the ground realistically in Afghanistan with everything factored in. And he's like, you needed a platoon to go into that objective. That compound was a platoon.

Like I had my vehicle. I've nosed it in. I've noseed my vehicle into the compound. Gave things a little burst with the old C6 machine gun. We fragged it. We followed up. We cleared it. And he goes, that's a platoon objective.

I go in North America, that's a platoon objective. We only have what we have here. But he, you know what? That was one of those moments, like you said, it felt like we'd made it. Because up until then, I'd done 15 years or 16 years at that point, the Americans in the British who I look upon as being like they're, they're solid soldiers, right? Like I've worked with them a lot. You guys have worked with them a lot.

Got to fight beside them both overseas. You look at them as being like the NHL version team of these guys know the business. They've paid the price. They have a professional army. They're tough dudes. And for guys like that, that major and other dudes that I ran into the Americans would want to trade badges with you and everything else because they're like, you guys are aggressive. Like you're insanely aggressive. Like you're perhaps too aggressive.

And sometimes it probably bit us that we were so aggressive. But we didn't know any better. And I wouldn't fight any other way. We, we fought hard like that. But we, we busted in through driving past your warrant being schmucked around by Neil Thompson of all guys. Like friendly little meal, you know, like the quiet as happy, well, generally a happy guy. And we bust in and the first guy I see as my ramp comes down because you're trying, as you're standing up in the back of your ramp, you're trying to get a view of everything.

So when you hop out, you can go boys there. You know, you've got to make some decision. And was Jeff Schner. And it's even on the video. He comes running up and he goes, they're fucking right here. So I grabbed who I could. I just, at that point, you're not even just grabbing your guys. you're grabbing whoever hears your voice, it's a mess, right?

And you're just grabbing and we go up to this little berm overlooking the river. And about 50 meters from there is this compound. Maybe the one Willie's talking about, I don't know, but there were dudes trying to squirt out of it. And they were like a dozen minimum of them squirting out. And I'm like, boys lay into this, get onto it. And my C9 gunner, Tony Churchill is smashing it. Uh, my other M203 gunner, um, Mark is smashing it. Ben Emery's laying into it.

And I can just remember, I wasn't even shooting. I was just using my M-203 grenade launcher because it's 50 meters away. And they're all coming out the door like gophers, you know, looking, make a little burst. And you'd be like, all right, boys. And we must have dumped better part of a dozen or 15 of them right there. And we're still taking heavy contact from everywhere. But it's like, well, I think we wrap that up. You know, none of them were peaking anymore.

Well, but we can't cross the river. Here's it. Like you said, the river was fairly extensive in spots. You know, you needed the bridge. So we ran back. And I was like, all right, let's find something else to shoot. And we kind of got into it in different spots. And that fight lasted a couple, three hours or whatever the whole totalitarian it was.

But it was, it was, it was crazy because it was one of those fights where you didn't expect it to go like that. And I remember thinking, I want to find out who told me who the intelligence guy was that passed on six dudes making IEDs. And there's 50 of them. Because when we did the battle assessment after, there's 50. Like I think we jerked or dropped like 30 something of them. And then we had blood trails for another, you know, 20, I don't know, 15, 20 plus. I'm trying to remember it all. But, you know, there were 50 plus guys being fought by 12 originally and not many more when we got there, honestly.

And we took it to them like that. And I just wanted, I always wish I could get my hands on somebody. So just, just in context, anybody that's in a defensive, like, the Taliban would have been in their compound. For every one there, you should attack with three. Yeah. So it's a three to one ratio typically is what you're looking for. Uh, so for 50 guys, there'd be 150 to attack that place, right?

So we went out with about 20. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we had 12. We had 12 on the ground and two were arguably out of action. Like Mars was out of action. He was a little bit shot. Did he get shot in the back or?

He got right back. Right. From like within 50 meters. Yeah. It was like a seven. six two round and i got a really cool video i'll show it to you later of of of would plate with people the plate out of us of his body you can you can if we show a video can you put on like on you send it to me we can put it in yeah he's got like uh he's got i got some that

are short that would potentially go over email um but if you got a memory stick i could probably just dump them on a memory stick that's there there's that uh scene with uh 500 pound bomb like we had a five pound of 500 pound bomb dropped on our pitouin when we're in Pasoie that fucking was like 20 meters from me five meters from this other guy danger like it should have killed our whole platoon you should have killed your old platoon yeah yeah we're all looking this way with our bina was waiting because we could hear it on their radio like we'd all pulled back in what happened is I've spotted an enemy mortar position and for whatever reason and and fucking you're always rethinking these things like

you think about it all the time is I couldn't shoot them because there's trees in the way. Well, for whatever reason, I was on the C6 that day, and I wanted to be on my fucking sniper rifle. And I feel that if I was on my sniper rifle, I would have been able to engage that enemy and kill them with my rifle, but instead we called in artillery.

And then this started a big chain event where eventually an A10 came in and dropped its ordinance on us without proper, you know, protocols and Willie can get into that if you, if he wants to later. But, but when that round came in, we were actually in an enemy machine gun position. We cleared out. And we used to have a camera in our platoon and you'd just set it on the ground and whatever it captured it captured. And then when you'd move, you'd put it in your bag and go because it would, it would capture

shit that helped you see what was going on on the battlefield after it was over, you know, because it's on video, right? So we'd study it like game tape. Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyway, so I did capture this. What a wild thought to have the presence of mind put down a camera. Just saying.

Yeah. Well, it was, it was given to me by the platoon commander to because I was usually in the, in the bubble work. I know you got bolts flying by your head though. It's like, make sure you get the camera down boys. We want to make sure we can study this side. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, no, you just, it was just part of your equipment, right? Like it wasn't a big deal. It was just fucking. You do get used to certain things over there. Once, once you pass like the, like I've always explained to people like the first few fights I was and it was like polarite pictures in my mind thinking back to it. Well, that's,

that's, that's, it was to like to straight high death, like, well, that's, that's what I want to talk to you guys about like, like, like my first, my first engagement were,

where I was actually in, in a fucking gun fight. It seemed like I was looking through a keyhole in the door. You know, it reminds me about my first fist fight you're ever in. Like you just fucking, you don't know, you're like seeing that much, right?

By the end of it, it was just like, you're fucking, is just, everything was, clear and like like chuck was this saying it was fucking yeah it was out of your experience as well yeah i mean those are those are physiological reactions right and there's been lots of studies about that and and tunnel vision is not uncommon um you know when when there's an event like that

that happens and police officers experience it quite frequently because they they go you know they could they could they could do a 30 35 year career never have to withdraw their pull yeah their firearm but the, but the second that they do, they get tunnel vision, right? And, and one of my, one of my favorite sayings is, is nobody actually rises to the occasion. They sink to the level of their, of their capabilities. Yep. To preparedness. Yeah.

Yeah. And, uh, Tony Duny. That tunnel vision, that tunnel vision, if you're a thinking soldier, you get rid of that fairly quickly because you're oxygenating. You're not allowing yourself to go into the black, which you're bought. starts to go into survival mode. You have auditory exclusion, you have tunnel vision, things slow down. You can't remember, you can't remember details.

Your body's basically protecting itself. And it does that on purpose. Like the human brain's amazing. But if you're a thinking soldier and you start to breathe and, and, you know, you, your immediate action drill kicks in, you do all that because it's muscle memory. but as soon as that's done you need to you need to start thinking

yeah okay what's next and if and if you're good enough and if you're trained well enough then that tunnel vision opens right up everything opens up to you so yeah well and and like what he's saying the funny thing is when we started training

back in fucking 88 or 89 or whatever like you would shoot fucking do all these these shooting exercises but they never taught you to shoot and then fucking when you're done shooting breathe and then scan look fucking reapply fire to anything that's that's out there right so our gun our gunfighter training has evolved through battle yeah but now when when you're actually teaching a young guy out of shoot that's first second thing you teach him after he engages the target first thing you tell him and you physically make him do it

in his training he's got to breathe scan look fucking reapply fire and then fucking carry on like do a bag change or whatever he's got to do, right? But you're actually teaching the guy to breathe now because that was never part of our training before. And it's part of it now because of what Willie was just saying. Well, remember we saw it was a Colonel Grossman came and did those studies for lectures for us about the, he's basically somebody who studied warfare for goes back in history, basically since there's been gunfighting warfare, but he uses examples from like old civil

war battles where, um, dudes would fire, but not do the whole application that it took the load to musket and basically have like 28, you know, musket balls rammed into a, into a rifle or a musket because he hadn't done his thing. And this was like not one or two dudes. This was like thousands of guys, you know, and then, you know, he did a study of the guys in World War II based on different units and stuff like that. I'm not really sure how they conducted it all, but I mean, he did it. And something like only 20% of guys actually engage the enemy. Like even if you're a frontline fighting guy, most guys would not shoot or they'd shoot high or shoot like just for the effect of shooting so that their friends thought they were involved.

But when they got down to like, were you trying to kill anyone? Nope. I didn't because it's a very, it's a visceral thing. You've killed men, you've killed men, I've killed men. It's a thing. It did it, but the, and training is only a part of it. You need the mindset for it. And I'm not saying those guys didn't have the mindset for.

I'm just saying we saw ourselves guys that were not capable of. going the distance and getting after it. They were fantastic if you were in Wainwright or Suffield or Shiloh or, you know, some course where you got a T-shirt and a coin out of the deal, by all means, I'm a super soldier, I'm a Garrett Trooper, you know, I'm a guy that you really want beside you. But when it's dirty and people are really trying to kill you and you can hear them screaming at you and there's grenade, I think one of the most intimidating, scary things that ever happened to me was every time a grenade was thrown at me, that's a scary goddamn thing.

Like it happened to me a handful of times. I got that grenade fight on video actually. And it's a scary. It's back and forth over the wall at each other. It feels personal. Like it's more personal than even being shot. Even if it's like you can tell he's shooting over here and you get like three feet away. I'm not going to worry about that.

Then it's like two feet away and you're like, I should, where is this guy? And then it's like snap and you're like, fucker, where is this guy? But it's a grenade and he's throwing it at you. That's real personal. And there's something that really puckers hard. You know what you're shitty about that grenade fight? I don't know how many grenades are thrown over that wall. And then you go into the compound, the fucking clear up business.

Fuck, our grenades were blowing up. They're laying on the fucking ground with the spoons off. So you're like, fuck, if I was to kick it, is it going to fucking blow up? Like your dad's around. There was a bad batch, too. Tower had that happen with his. There was a bad batch really in the tour of grenades. I was going to say, you know, you're talking about Grossman.

You know, Dave Grossman's smart guy, get all the research, never been in combat. Yeah. You know, so it doesn't have that first hand experience. Yeah. He does in one of his books and it's it's the on combat book. Yeah. Probably not the bulletproof mind one.

He talks about the evolution of targetry. And so those guys back then when they did target practice, they shot at a bullseye. And eventually, and I don't know what year it happened, all conventional military started shooting at human targets, like human looking targets. Yeah. So you were shooting a person. And they found that part of the problem was, was getting people over that, that hump of actually engaging a human target.

Yeah. Because they'd been practicing on a bullseye their entire life. Well, and you become range of fight as well. Well, because you, you wait for, and I remember reading this in a lot of the Falklands literature that came out like Goose Green Down and a few other great books on the Falcons fight with the Brits. And there are very similar army tars and how they train and think and all that stuff. More similar to us than the Americans, I believe.

in my experience with them. So I was always curious like what worked for them. Like what worked, what didn't work. It wasn't a big war, but it was a pretty intense, a little bit work. And they all talked about being rangeified. So we're used to going to a range and sitting there, you know, one through 32 of us on our firing points and be like, load, ready, fire. You'll fire five rounds and that's it. If I hear six rounds, I'll kill you, you know, whatever, you know, kind of thing.

You're dead. You're stupid asshole. You're fired sick. You can't count. No, it's women in the infantry. But anyway, so they talked about how coming under contact the Argentinian positions would be opening up on them and the guys would be like, are we allowed to shoot? Can we shoot?

And that mentality, I saw it a few times. I, you kind of had to, as a leader over there, you're kind of like, do I shoot? We're being shot at. Like, he's trying to kill me. And you're still like, there's, it's even, it's in the documentary. Shane Stackpole, remember, or don't remember him, big old Shane. And we're kind of like in that. breathing space between fights where it's we've just won a little fight and we pushed up a little

and now they're kind of figuring out do they want to play around with us some more and Shane's looking over the wall and he's beside me and he's looking through his scope on a C9, his machine gun and he's like, Chuckie, there's dudes over there. I'm like, give me more than dudes. Are they are they Canadian? Are they Canadian? Are they Canadian? He's like, no, they're Taliban. I'm like, why are you not killing them? And he's like, can I shoot? I'm like, shoot. And we because we'd been shooting for days, like days at this point. And he's like, the range of fight thing takes a minute to, it does take a moment to get out there. It was funny just to seem like, can I shoot them? Like, yes, please. Going back to what they're talking about with the targets. So in World War

1, the Americans, when they went to fight in World War I, they counted the amount of ammunition that they expended. And they, they were able to know how many, how many Germans they killed with rounds they fired. And then when they looked at the Canadian amount of rounds that we fired, and a amount of fucking Germans we killed. It was because in World War I, they knew that from the Boer War or whatever, that they actually had to have human targets. So like Canadians were one of the first to start shooting at paper targets

that were looking like a human, right? Herman and the German, yeah. Yeah. So it goes back to the whole mindset about. It's a lot of mindset. Right, right from the beginning. Yeah, and muscle memory and all that stuff. Like Ken Williams, I think his name's Ken Williams.

He's the guy that invented simulation. And he's from Winnipeg, but he lives in the U.S. now. And he was kind of laughed out of the country after he invented some munitions. He went to the Canadian Armed Forces. He went to the RCMP. He went to municipal law enforcement agencies and said, hey, I got this great idea for these little paintballs. You just replace the upper receiver and you shoot paintballs at each other. And it's a better way to train than with blank ammunition where there's no effect, right?

And so he got laughed out of the country. He went down to the U.S. the U.S. Army was like, we're in. Became a multi-gillionaire. And he runs a program called Training at the Speed of Life. And that kind of evolved from that bank robbery in L.A. The guys with all the body armor and they did the afteraction. And when they were doing their sensitive site exploitation for lack of a better term,

they found all these little piles of empty casings. They were all piled up. And they were trying to, it took. the months to figure out why all this brass had been cleaned up into a little pile. And then they realized it was the FBI agents because at the range in Quantico, the range warden at the range in Quantico after you, you fired your six, your six rounds. Yeah. Because they still had to pick up your ballers in, right? Yeah. You had to pick up your brass and scoop it into a pile. So it would be faster to clean the range when they were done. And so these FBI agents

that were involved in this gunfight at that bank robbery in LA were clean. up their brass. You have to tell them without even thinking about. I have no idea what you're talking about. Oh, it's a big gun fight. It's like they've made movies about this. Yeah. Yeah.

What year were we talking? Early 80s. Was it? No, it would have been late 80s. Late 80s. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But these two or two guys? Two or three guys. They were all body armored up. Yeah. So they, they took all kinds of body armor. I mean, from top of the head to their feet, they were body armored up. They just made their own kind of thing. And they got into this massive gun battle after a bank robbery.

And all the cops had attended initially, they stopped them in their car, fight. I don't remember what the movie's called, but it's pretty well done. They couldn't pen the armor because most of them are just dealing with handguns and it wouldn't pen their armor. And these guys were running full out of weapons and just dropping cops. Oh yeah. It wasn't until several of these cops broke into a, broken or got into a gun store and said, we need big stuff, give us. Yeah. And then they finally were able to take them down.

It was a running battle on a street for an hour or so. Yeah, it was a long one. Yeah. And at the end of it, they were going around. there are piles of brass sitting everywhere. Yeah, like empty casings from the ball. So it's this after, during the fight. During the fight, they're cleaning up their brass.

Yeah, your muscle memory. Like when you're playing hockey, your muscle memory for how you hold your stick, do your thing, whatever you're doing, it's the same for shooting. Most shooters are very regimented. Okay, I'm breathing this when they're just doing normal shooting. But when you're a rangeified and you go into combat, there's lots of cop stories of guys who would take their speed loader out, put it in their pocket. during a fight with a criminal, like just like what Willie's talking about with these guys,

they're in a gun fight and they're like, oh, just gotta scoop that over there because that's how it goes. This is how your brain works. So your brain will revert to its basic, you know, moment. Absolutely. It's muscle memory. Yeah. And I got a great example that same July 12th fight, no, it was a different day. Sorry.

We, I had Mars set up a fire base and I took a whole bunch of guys, a whole bunch, four, four guys to the right. We did a right flanking on on these guys that were advancing on a company. that you kindly scooped into the nice little box for us. Motherfucker. Anyway, I had Donnie Pike with me. He was on my right hand side. And I said, okay, we're not going to do fire and movement. We're just going to walk and shoot and we're going to annihilate these guys.

So we got up and we just slowly were walking, advancing and shooting. And Donnie ran dry and he pulled his mag and he went to put it in his dump bag. And he missed his dump bag and it fell on the ground. And he took two steps, stopped and turned around. round to go pick it up because he didn't want a range in Canada yeah if you lose a mag a magazine for your rifle it's a big deal and so in his brain he's like I can't lose that magazine and I'm screaming at him like what the are you doing like and he's oh to get my mag I'm like leave it right because we're in the middle of this gun fight you know not to pull you guys out of military

stories but hearing that and hearing the story about the LA cops you know, we're creatures of habit, right? Of all of these, right? That's muscle, muscle memory and different things. And you go, how can that be weaponized against us? Because if that's the case with, you know, we just, oh, we're going here and we're going. And just, what do you do every single day over and over and over and over and over again? And you put that in the wrong hands.

Well, look what they did with masks. How often when you would leave your car or truck to go into a grocery store, Were you like, where's my mask in the console? Like even after, you didn't wear your mask in your vehicle? No. You seem like the type they would do that, Jack? No. Well, I've got 10.

Are you sure? It's fairly. Yeah, yeah. But, um, you know. I got a mask on right now. Those kinds of things. It's a business. Those kinds of things.

Hey, fun. Those kinds of things they did weaponize. They condition you and they make you do a thing and they're like, well, now they're used to. Well, I mean, and just, you just look at that. You hear the story of cops in the middle. of a fight where cops are dropping. And then the same to a person. Your brain does revert.

And that's like, especially in a combat cop type situation or a combat combat, you're, Can you imagine if you had video of that and just being like, what the hell are they doing? Oh, there probably is video of it, not that we'd ever get to see it. But that's right. But can you imagine seeing a cop and then bullets are flying everyone. Okay, now I get to pull up my next club and shoot again. Like Willie was saying about his guy, Donnie Pike doing that with his mic,

my guy, Mark Morris, I don't know if you guys remember him. He was my, I remember Mark, yeah. A super OCD guy. And remember the ambidextrous mag catch was on our stupid, this is stupid. There's a way that you could dial the spring back so that it wouldn't release. Because most of the time your rifle's rested against your gear. Sure. And so it would dump the mag on you.

Instead of using your forefinger to dump the mag, this ambidextrous one for the three people in the army that are left handed, you know, it would catch and dump your mag. That's right. You know. So Mark Morris, my guy, we're in actual gun battle in Garmser running across this narrow little footbridge and I mark stops. That a boy. Mark stops in front of me and I'm like, what are you doing? We're on this little bridge that's like your table with and like 20 feet long across this river.

And I'm like, we can't stop here. We're under contact. And he's like, my stupid ambidextrious mag catch, Chuck. And I'm like, this is not the time for a Mark OCD rant because he's, you know, he gets like that. He's like the good doctor. He's kind of like, he's on a spectrum somewhere. Love them though, super solid fighter. But I mean, I'm like, forget the mag.

We've got hundreds of these things that we've stolen over the course of the tour. We're just, we got lots. He's like, that's my mag. I know all they may. I mean, well, and I. I. I guess what you guys are pointing out to me is I, I find like the cleaning up the, the shell casings like an insane thought, but you're saying over and over again in the middle of fire fights.

Yeah. you saw your own soldiers do the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Can I, can we go on a little bit different of a thing here? Because I just thought of this.

Oh boy. Okay. So like these two guys are good buddies. Willie and I have been friends for fucking ever. We're, you know, fucking. It's just insane how like the shit that we do out like in the army and outside

the army. Like our, we got family together. We got fucking kids that are buddies. It's just, it's just fucking awesome. But. Should we talk about fucking you fucking coming to track me down?

Sure. So we're in a situation where we're fucking four dudes just got blown up. And I happened upon to find the spot where this Taliban guy initiated the ID that killed our four guys. So I fucking got a guy with me. I forget who it is. We start tracking this guy. I measure his footprint. They got his fucking stride length.

They use my rifle for all the measurements. And we keep moving along. We have no radio fuck, although. So I got a bearing. I shoot a bearing the direction I'm roughly going. I tell him to go back and tell the warrant what I'm doing. Because fucking, we're out in bad guy country who knows what's going on. Well, I fucking eventually find the fucking the place.

I also found the guy's hat on the way. so I had a fucking Ziplog bag in my medic bag and I put the hat in there so it wouldn't get contaminated. Who to fuck out of all of Afghanistan comes the fuck and look for me? And I'll leave it in your ballpark. Yeah. Yeah. So we were rolling, we were rolling up Taryn caught. I don't remember where we were going.

But we got on, you know, we got told on the radio, hey, there was an ID event near Gombad. there's four VSA and you know you guys need to go there and help the platoon that's in that's in this situation to secure the scene and blah blah blah so we kind of redirect and we and we come driving down this wadi because we didn't want to take the the normal route because obviously it's IDD so anyway we're kind of going on a wing and a prayer but we would drive down this this dry riverbed and we eventually get there and I you know I dismount I go over to to Sinclair's warrant and I'm like hey man where's Sinclair and he goes I don't know he took off in the hills and I'm like okay well that doesn't give me much that doesn't sound like him I go

when was the last time he saw him and he's like oh I you know it's been half an hour so I'm like fuck so anyway I look at Hammy and I go hey man we got to go find Sinclair like he can't be up there by himself because we're not really helping we're kind of in the way at this point yeah because it happened like 10 minutes from gone back so we'd already cure Yeah, the QRF was there and we're just kind of, when I say getting in the way, there was really nothing for us to do. The platoon had security posted on the high features and they were, they were tagging body parts and things like that. So I said, well, let's, I said to Hammy, we got to go find Sinclair. Like he's, he's gone.

He's gone up into the mountains. So we, there was maybe four or five of us. We, we head up into the mountains. And so like Jamie was talking, tracking. you do man tracking as part of many different courses. And he did it as a sniper and I did it as advanced reconnaissance. And so we're like, okay, he obviously started here and, you know, we did the same thing. Take a bearing.

He's going down here. We can see the footprints. So we start running because I'm now I'm worried. Now I'm like, okay, he's out there by himself. There's bad guys all over the place. We got to find this guy. So I start running. And I know I don't look like it now, but this was 16.

years ago. You were pretty spilt guys. I was pretty fit. Fuck, he can still run. We had a foot race this summer. And the guys are having trouble keeping up with me. I won it though. So that's a lie.

I won't. Fuck you. Even tried to trip me and I still want. And I eventually, this other kid's coming back and I'm like, hey, like, where's Sinclair? And he's like, oh, he kept going. So the boys were having trouble keeping up with me. So I said, hey, you guys stay here.

I'll keep going. I have a radio. Don't worry about me. I'm just, I'm going to take off my own pace. I'm going to go find Sinclair. So, of course,

I found him. And, you know, he had a full, it was fucking cool, though. Range card and everything. So,

so I found the village where this fucking dude was. There was fucking shit ton of fucking bad dudes running all over the place. So I'm coming back, right? So as I'm coming back, off in a distance,

I see a fucking body coming up out of the ridge and fucking running. And literally, we're like eight, 10 clicks, from where I left. I pull on my binos and who's the fucking guy?

Like, I'm like, that's fucking McDonald's. Of course it's McDonald's. Like, fucking, who else is going to come fucking bind me out in the middle of Afghanistan? It's going to be fucking Willie McDonald's. And, you know, you're just, like when we met up, now we meet up in the fucking middle of nowhere.

And it's just like, at the time you're kind of worried I'm buying myself or whatever. But now you're like, fuck, we can do anything. Like, like, like we could do anything so I tell him everything I know he gets on the fucking radio talks back to to who'd you get who'd you get in touch with oh it's probably one-niner maybe it was hammy and he passed it on I don't remember it's been a long time I don't remember those there's fuzzy detail yeah the deep but the fucking funny thing is they

obviously trust in us because they're like okay go back and pick it the objective like they fucking just says too all right fuck let's go do it and it was it was fucking it was fucking such a cool feeling like you know you feel invincible at that point like it was it was fucking cool yeah you do the next day we took that fucking place down we actually caught the guy that killed four Canadians 12 hours earlier like it's it's a fucking crazy story because usually that stuff's done by our s f like they do a big fucking like they have fucking specter gun ships and drones and fucking it would cost 10 billion dollars the fucking do what we did for free fuck all well how often how often you're gone bad we were

i eded up there like 10 12 times i think in our company alone yeah plus that convoy was like that was um that was hilli his zoo no that was no not hilly it was fraser oh sorry Fraser's convo's convo because he choppered back out that's right yeah and that's why that's why bill got killed yeah um our simit guy but he but how often was When we were up there, they're like, you guys won't patrol today. We're going to hear some stuff in here. And it would be our SF guys or an SF team from one of their good countries going in and really putting the hurt surgically on a village or an area or a compound.

And we'd be like, man, we want to go do that. But yeah, we're more of a chainsaw than a scalpel. So it's kind of that kind of thing, but it makes sense. But you know, one of the other things too, like it's for Willie and I being in a room together is August 3rd is a big. deal to me. It's always been a big deal. I know it's a, obviously it's a big deal to you. I've heard you speak of it's funny. We're almost two hours in and I've heard August 3rd like 12 times. We still haven't got to August 3rd. We'll get to it a little bit. I don't know how much Willie

wants to get into it. Oh, I'm good. I'm good, buddy. Let me go piss first. Oh, good God. Talk about your father. I'm talking about yours. But um, we, uh, it's, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was not many of us that were there in the first place and then we got bounced across the country right like it's one of those things so it's difficult it's difficult at times to say you know how when you think back on a thing and i've got the advantage of having like a lot of video where i'm like oh shit that's a thing or guys that were in a place or a time but august third is one of those rare ones and like for us when it's for me that day started early in the morning I don't

know seven in the morning when they said to platoon you're gonna go on you know I think they put us on five minutes notice to move off the bat which in army terms doesn't happen you're normally on like half hour notice to move or 15 minutes notice to move that's just basically like if something bad happens you have this long to get to your vehicles and get out the gate kind of thing and we're actually on the big camp because we've done the fighting season. We're kind of winding down. We have still some stuff to do, but we're kind of getting a two-day break. And they put our platoon on quick reaction for us for what they were going out to do. And immediately we all had this feeling like, why are we going on five minutes

notice to move? We might as well just go hang out at the vehicles and suntan and do that. So I'll let, so I think it was about 11 o'clock. Maybe I'm, I could be off on the time. The day is a lot of fuzz, you know, obviously. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we got word at our vehicles. There's been another IED. We knew about the one IED, the first one. Yeah.

And we kind of expected we'd go for that and we didn't because they'd, they'd handled that and, uh, I'll let Willie flesh out those details, but we, we now got where you're going and you're going. It's about 20 minutes, 25 minutes away or so. And, uh, there's a fight at the white school. and nine platoon and reconnaissance platoon. I'm saying reconnaissance, recone, recon platoon, recqie platoon is in a fight.

It's a big fight. They need help. You're going now. So we rolled out with our platoon and we showed up about 25 half hour, because we're already at the vehicles. We're like, clearly something's happening. We could, we, the talk, um, the tactical operation center is right by the parking lot. We're at that point.

And so we, our platoon commander kept. running in and out of the thing going like, holy fuck, and we could hear stuff on our radio. We were tuning in, but we, he was coming in and out with like, holy shit, boys. This is like, there's a big, there's a fucking ton of them. Like they're estimating like hundreds of these bastards are out there and, you know, going on and we're like, and then he's like, mount up.

Next time he ran out of the thing, he's like, mount up. We're going. We're like, holy shit, we're in it. To back up just a moment real quick, our warrant, Mark Pickford, who'd been, I'd gone through with Mark. like basically for most of my courses and career, we'd mirrored each other. He was always a little bump ahead of me.

I'd never really cared about rank all that much, to be honest. Um, I kind of was happy being a dude most of the time until some guys, for me, getting promoted was like that asshole got promoted. I'm not working for him. I better get some right. That's how, that's on, I'm not, because I wasn't, I didn't care too much about it. It was Beetlejuice, wasn't he. He was one of them.

He was one of them, but he wasn't the only one. But, uh, you know, certain guys get promoted and you're like, fuck, I could work for that idiot. Like I carried his kit in Norway. Like anyway, I'm digressing. But so anyway, Mark and I had always had a very mere career. I think I get fucking squarely. But it's funny. I was thinking the same thing. I'm like, I go off. But Jamie's the voice of reason this time. Yeah. Interesting. Actually quite often, you just don't know it. But Mark, Mark, Mark had been our warrant for the last couple, three years or so solid guy, you know, good soldier, tough guy, smart guy in a gunfight, like he's not, he's not an idiot. He assesses things and then

attacks the shit out of it and kills it, which is how it has to be there. But he got into it with our RSM. And anyway, got removed, got removed from being our platoon warrant over this kerfuffle. And we got Cecil Paris as our, as our acting platoon warrant. So he had been Cecil solid guy, love the guy, had been our transport sergeant for our company, basically in charge of like, unfortunately there's a position where you're basically in charge of like vehicles and oil and it's a, really it's not a- Fucking wrenches. It's ranches. You're basically like a liaison to the mechanics.

It's kind of like, it's just not a fun job. Where's this story going again? We'll get there. Anyway, I'm trying to, because Cecil becomes our warrant for this particular day. who has zero combat experience. Like we all love Cecil because he's a kind of a unique character and in a battalion full of unique dude. Cecil is stands out as being quite the character and love him or hate him.

I loved him. Um, but he's kind of like, oh, fuck, you know, and he's kind of got that accent, like a little bit of a role to him. We get out there. We finally get out there. And it's, we're about 200 meters back from the contact line where the school is. The gun line for the vehicles where it's hope CP was set up was about 200 meters. Yeah, it was a little further than that, but yeah.

250, 300 maybe. And, uh, we roll the ramps down and there's contact happening. Like it's active. It's a active fight. And I'm like, boys, we're this car, our car's not good here. Because of course we're like, we got a reposition a little and get some contact. And I want to see if they want to bump us up onto where the other vehicles are shooting from or whatever. What's our pop or what, what are we doing?

We have no idea. You're, when you roll into the back of a gunfight, it's like the most chaos you could imagine, even though the guys there have a complete situational awareness of what's going on more or less. So Cecil hops out and his eyes are like, boom, and I zero on to him. And even though it's a bad day, I'm kind of like, Ciesel, we're going to have to move the cars, buddy. And he's like, you don't fucking know this product.

And I'm like, you know how he talks, eh? Like fuck, you don't think I fucking know. And I'm like, I know you know, but now you have to do. And he's like, oh yeah, I do. Because you got to, you might know a thing, but to do the thing is a whole other deal in combat. So it's like, now do it. And I wasn't trying to undermine him.

I'm just kind of be like, now we do a thing. And he's like, yeah, oh yeah, yeah. And he snapped. He just, he just, he, his gears went and he was like totally with it. And we reposition and everything was fine. At that point, um, as we arrived, I don't remember if. If it was Deleur or Keller, Willie will know, who was hit in the stomach. That's the layer.

Deleer. Yeah. I couldn't remember. But Hope's, Colonel Hope's, um, command CP, he had like a little CP station set off of his, um, his vehicle there. Uh, as we're getting the boys oriented and trying to figure out where our best cover was and what was even going on. My platoon commander had already gone in to get a briefing from him and he was like, Chuckie, get in here. You're going up. And I'm like, Jesus Christ, we just showed up.

And I'm so I'm like, okay. Colonel Hope's in there. There's a couple EOD guys on the ground like just it's 60 something that 60 plus that 63 that day. Yeah. We normally wear about 80 40. But we normally wear about 80 pounds of gear. So it's it's sapping you and these EOD guys were in full bombsuits because there'd

been five EODs on the road where they'd already hit two EOD or was it two? I. Two yeah. Two. And so I'm looking at the just, my audience. even for me on my eyes are like what in the shit is going on and hope isn't talking to me it's my platoon commander but there's a map leader on the table and I'm like don't really need a map I can see the school but whatever um it is what it is so he's like one of our guys is up there he's been

shot in the stomach you're going up and you're getting him I'm like okay no problem I'll ramp up the boys we'll go get him and he's like no you're not taking the car and I remember hope turning around because he was about to say you're not taking your car because of all the IEDs in the road that these guys have been working on, but had to give that up when the real fight started, I guess. So I'm like, you want me to run across like a couple hundred meters of, because this is all open, gunfight happening everywhere. And I'm like, we're going across the open ground up there. And he's like, yep. And I'm like, okay, we'll get at it.

We'll go now. And I'm like, I hop out and I grab my boys and like grab the Black Hawk stretch. We had folded stretchers, the Black Hawk stretchers. So I'm like, grab a couple. here we go and Cecil he sees me going up to the front where the the school is and he's like junkie i'm coming with you and i'm like you're the warrant dude you do whatever you want but i was happy to have cecil if you anybody you want anybody you know solid beside you's one of those guys where you're like i'll take cecil beside me for sure plus he's the warrant so i'm not going to say no to

him but we ran up to where we're making our progress up to the you know where i'm trying to find a way to get to this school under contact. And I see a whole bunch of nine platoon guys were down. Like they're like down like heat exhaustion, dehydration. They've been fight. You guys have been already out there for hours like hours and hours. Yeah, we get there about four in the morning. And it's already and they've been fighting pretty much nonstop.

It's the temperature it is, which is insane. These guys drop in like they're literally fighting and then falling over like they're, their, the heat's killing them. Um, So Cecil's like, I got to do medical stuff. I got to start making a casualty collection point. And I'm like, that's you dude. I got to keep going.

So we separate at that point. I get up to, um, uh, I can see a couple of nine platoon labs, vehicles parallel to me, but they weren't advancing up the road. So I was like, okay, here we go. We're going to have to run it. But as we get into that mode, they hit us with, uh, we'll 50 60 RPGs in that that burst of time. Yeah, quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah. In about a five minute period, they volley fired RPGs that are a gun line and at the school where Willie was. So we were in

this small wadi trying, I'm like, we just got to go. Like our guys are dying up there. We know that they've now been hit even harder as the volley's coming in. Um, we, we made the push. As we're making the push, my platoon commander running. up beside me again and he's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, this is fucking suicide. We're going to take the labs. Fuck it. And I'm like, I'm okay, but apparently there's like three more IEDs, five more IEDs in the road.

And so we run over to the two labs from nine platoon and we open up their big, it's full on battle. So you can't hear anything. You're screaming at each other. Their guns are firing. Can't hear nothing. I open up the, the, the, um, the ammo hatch on the side of the vehicle. I'm like, we're pushing the labs up.

We gotta get these fucking. And my platoon commander's yelling at the other one, we got to get these labs up. And between their lives and ours from our platoon, they just went up in a gaggle. Like there was a down the road up they went like like push. We, I don't know why we didn't mount up. Probably because we would have been even bigger casualties if the vehicles got blown up. Thankfully they didn't.

We, um, we ran behind them, which was. not a good time. There's just nonstop fire. It looked like it was raining. That's how much impact was happening from RPG splatter, machine gun rounds, whatever was hitting. It just no matter where you, no matter where you looked, there was an angle of fire hitting you.

And you could shoot, but it was almost not worth your time to shoot. There was just so fucking many of them. It just felt like I could dump a mag and it wasn't impacting anything. And it was just kind of like, fuck me. We get up to the school and it was, they'd been hit hard by the RPGs. And I can just, I just remember our ramps all being down as we made it up to the school finally, just panting. Like we couldn't, like, I don't know, I've been hardly ever that exhausts in my life ever

or that like done in and thinking, we're not going to make it here. Like we're, they're pushing now because they could, you could almost get a sense that the Taliban knew we've got them. Like there's almost this, you can feel a shift in the atmospherics. Most fights I went into, we were always outnumbered. Like we were always outnumbered. But that didn't bother me. It was, it, we always attacked anyway. It was, um, there was a change in them that day.

Like they had us. They really bagged us hard. We were in a very exposed position that had been hit very accurately already. And they were, they were within 10, 15 meters in spots. Like we were, we had guys dropping dudes very close and, uh, I can remember seeing Pat Tower dragging Vaughn at that point. I could, I'd seen a couple other casualties being dragged in as we were fighting. And I could remember seeing DeLare or Keller.

I don't remember which one at that point. I'm being pulled into a vehicle. And then I remember seeing Pat with Vaughn. And a guy I'd known my whole career, most of my career, you know, just, you did, it hits you hard for a minute. Well, for a long time. And you're like, it is a different thing when it is somebody, I've seen a lot of dead people. You guys have seen a lot of dead people. It is a different thing when it is one of your guys wearing the Cad Pat, the chocolate chips.

And it's a friend of yours. Not that it didn't shake you, didn't think about, oh, that young guy. I don't even know that young guy. My guys all knew that young guy, Dillard and Keller. They were good friends with them. But Vaughn, who is, and the worst, and another part of. about that is he's a rock. Like Vaughn was like the leader. You know, you think about dude to her the pinnacle. To me, Vaughn was one of those guys like just unshakable, um,

combat leader. And, um, yeah, they hits you hard. So, you know, you can. Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think I spoke, you know, I kind of gave you the reader's digest version the last time I was, I was on the show. Yeah. For the listener, if they want to go here, though. Very close to a year ago, but yeah, you know, a couple things I'll just I'll just mention one is you know when when Chuck spoke about you could feel the shift in in really it's the momentum shift. So I don't think there was any point during that fight where we actually had the initiative. You know there was 14 of us that got to the school.

Kevin was shot right away. So he was down. So so you know take him out of the fight and take the two guys out of the fight that are now trying to do first aid on him. So that brings you down to 11. And then he was talking about the RPG volley and there's been some discussion about whether that was a recoiless rifle round or if it was a volley of RPGs doesn't really matter. You know, they were explosive projectiles that that were fired very accurately, as as Chuck said.

And, you know, that, that that volley or that recoiless rifle round, whatever it was, it killed. It killed Kevin. It killed Kevin. It killed Bonn and it killed Bryce Keller. And there was another probably four or five that were injured. So, so, you know, let's say, let's just say for argument's sake that's seven out of the 11 now that are out of action plus the guys that have to do first aid on the other guys that are injured. And so, you know, you end up with four, let's say four people that are actually fighting. when when that happens and the enemy realizes hey they're not shooting back yeah the same amount of

volume that they were they go ha momentum shift let's press and so they were pressing they were coming across the field in like an arrowhead formation with let's say nine 10 guys uh in in arrowhead and we were like literally the last guy killed um was was no further than me and Chuck away, which is about six, seven feet. And, you know, I shot him twice in the face. And I, I, my drill was two to the head, two to the body. So I shot him twice in the face and twice in his body. And, and he kept continuing forward.

And it must have been just his momentum was carrying, but I'm like, how's this guy not dead? Yeah. I shot him 28 times or 27 or 28 times. And Sean Felix, who was there with me, who was also uninjured, you know, he kind of put his hand on my shoulder. He goes, hey, Sarge, I think he's dead. because the guy's at my feet and I'm still shooting. Yeah. But, uh, you know, it was and, and just to, to touch on, you know, what you said about Vaughn and, you know, we're in the, we're in the fight, you know, Vaughn gets killed.

Pat wasn't there, um, when that event happened, but he, he showed up very shortly thereafter with, with another guy and a medic. And he, he sort of comes running around the corner. He says to me, hey, where's Vaughn? And I go, Vaughn's dead, man. And it's funny because you do. I mean, I think about it a lot. Mm-hmm. But at that time, I didn't have the luxury of going, my friend is dead.

Yeah. I had a battle to fight. I had people to save. So so you cannot dwell on that stuff. You have to, you have to just get past it very quickly. Yeah. And then worry about what you're going to do once you're in a position to be safe again. Yeah.

Right. And I mean, it was, it was a blood bath. It was really a blood bath. but, you know, I think I mentioned it again last time. It was so 14 Canadians and the estimate was somewhere between, you know, 180 to 250 enemy fighters. And these weren't Taliban. No. These were not farmers with guns.

These were Al-Qaeda. These. Tier one guys. The different languages that they were, that they were hearing spoken on the ICOM, which was a radio we used to listen into their communications. I mean, there was Chechnyenne. There was African Muslims. There was, you know, like these, these are the big guys. And the reason that they were there was because there was two high value targets in the area.

So senior, senior, senior leadership guys from Al Qaeda that were directing the fight. And we didn't find out until, you know, arguably a couple years later. Yeah. And more recently when some things were, you know, published and or, you know, they took the, the security protocols or whatever, they removed all the, all the, the classified, uh, designations that that whole thing was, uh, the, the, the Taliban and Al Qaeda and the enemy saying, hey, listen, we have a chance to take Kandahar back. Um, it's considered, um, extremely important. Mm-hmm. Not just in, in a strategic sense, but in,

a historic sense. Yeah. That's where they defeated the Brits. That's where they defeated the Russians. And it all happened, you know, there, right, right there. Right. Right in that same place. And so to them, it was very, very important because they wanted to take Kandahar. They wanted, that's where, that's really where the power, it wasn't Kabul, it was Kandahar, the power of the Afghan army and the Afghan police sort of resided. And so they wanted to take Kandahar. They still didn't have a good handle on what was going on a little further north because the Northern Alliance still existed. And so there wasn't as much activity up in that part of Afghanistan. But if they got Kandahar, they were, you know, they're marching to cobbled.

They could topple everything. Right. So, um, we didn't know that. We didn't, nobody told us that. Yeah. They did tell us, hey, there's an HVT in the area and you might encounter some resistance. We didn't, we weren't expecting 200 guys. Yeah.

You know, I mean, it was a tough day. But, but at, at the end of the day. I look at it like I don't look at it as a failure. Did we lose four really good human beings? We absolutely did. Did some of those other really good human beings come back? Not completely intact, absolutely. And and I'm not just talking, you know, physical injuries.

I'm talking, you know, mental injuries as well. But I look at it this way. 14 Canadians with no support. We were begging for artillery. We were begging for fast air. We kept getting denied. Um, with no support, um, took on arguably, that's just for argument's sake, 200 guys.

And we killed probably close to 100 of them. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, we did a really good thing that day because we demonstrated to the enemy that you can't break us. Mm-hmm. You know, you can, you can throw your best 200 guys at a dozen or so Canadians. Mm-hmm. And you're going to get your ass handed to you.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it makes me proud that I was part of it. I can't change history. I can't go back in time if I could. You know, people said to me, oh, if there's anything you changing your life would it be. I said, well, I go back there and, and try and save those lives. But war is war, man. Yeah. Like, uh, we don't have an impact all the time over the outcome and we can't change it. So you have to just embrace what happened and do the best he can do. And I've always said, you know, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, I'm to honor those guys.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, you know, I, you know, I talk about what good human beings they were because I think that's important because it, when people start forgetting about those things and let's face it, Afghanistan that that whole thing happened. Yeah.

You know, 18 years ago. Yeah. Well, 17 and a half years. years ago, but you know, the point is nobody cares about it anymore. No. You never see anything on the news about Afghanistan. And I know a lot of guys and Jamie, Jamie can attest to this and I know because I've spoken to them about it, you know, we're just absolutely heartbroken that the NATO alliance, let's just put it that way, left that country in the fashion in which they did, and the speed in which they did. And we have Afghan partners. I'm sure all of us have

spoken to some of them and I've spoken to I've written letters, you know, to global affairs or whatever they're called now, um, saying, hey, like, why is this person that supported us, you know, not in Canada? Yeah. And, well, you know, they don't meet the criteria for the special visa or whatever it is. And, and it's just, it's just heartbreaking to me that we abandon them the way that we did. It's disgusting. The whole country is a whole. disgusting of like when I was there last I was working I was embedded with 40 Afghans

and like we fought every day sometimes twice a day and they were fighting for their own freedoms in their country and we left them there and what they what they're having to do is like kill their own fucking kids

before the Taliban fucking get a hold of their kid and they got them and skin them alive like it's The situations that they're in because they supported us and we left them there to fucking rot, it's horrific to even think about what's going on there now. And it's, it fucking, it really is disturbing. And going back to what Willie was saying about how they were calling for support in. And I'm glad that you, that you're moving on and you're happy.

I'm still fucking mad about that though. I still have. Well, we went from Operation and During Freedom. Yeah, but this. This is not to finish. This is not a finish this bit, though. Like, I don't give a fuck about the change of rules. Oh, I'm with you.

Like, like that, that there, like, when they did not support us to fight that fight, or you guys, I was not there. It, it's fucking disgusting that you got a bunch of fucking weenies back in an office somewhere, fucking pushing their fucking glasses up and fucking looking at the rulebook, not even knowing the fucking rule. rules because if they would have read it, they would have fucking supported you guys. And they fucking left you out there to fucking go through that. And that's fucking just, that's what kills us is our own fucking people. Like you guys would have handled that without a problem if you would have fucking been able to fucking. You know, I did a course, I did a leadership course right after that tour before the 08 tour.

Two of the guys on it were JTF guys, one of which was a sniper in the Hill was watching that. Right. And he couldn't get into a lot of, a RCR guy. still a good guy. Maybe. No, he was solid. His Van Dew buddy I didn't like. But anyway, he was in the hills during that day.

And he's like, so partway through the course, we got to talk. And I think other than me and like a couple guys, we were the only one, our first battalion guys that were there that were veterans. Everybody else was, hadn't been there yet or had only done Kabul tours at this point. So they weren't, didn't, hadn't done what we'd done. Um, and he's like, you were on there on August 3rd. I don't even know how it came up, it just came up. And I'm like, yep. And he goes, I was too.

And I'm like, I don't fucking know you and you're RCR and he's like, I know he's JTF, but I mean, like, what were you doing? Like I didn't see you on the field. He goes, I wasn't in the field, dude. We were, he didn't get into a lot of stuff because they can't because they can't, but he said, you guys fought a monstrous force. you shouldn't have been having to fight that force on your own and we tried. There was him, there was Canadians, British and Americans supposed to be tracking this high value target. We heard the couple of them. Yeah.

And he said we. I heard our JTF were spooled up and whatnot. They were they were. They were in their vehicles. Yeah. They would let them go. Yeah. And he said they were.

Yeah. And they. He said, his guys were in overwatch position like monitoring stuff doing, you know, that kind of thing. But he says our guys were, there were guys in tears, what knowing. what you guys are fighting facing. Well, because some of those guys knew some bar guys. Yeah.

Oh yeah. There were Patricia's lots of them. I think Rob was Rob. Rob wasn't there. No. No. But it's one of those, it's one of those events that it, uh, I hold a lot of resentment towards a lot of the population probably unfairly, but in my mind it's fair that they

don't have any concept of what that day even is. Or that we even did that. So I talk to Canadians all the time, regular Canadians. And they're like, oh yeah, well, that's nice. Afghanistan must have been like they don't understand that we fought there, like for one thing or fought at the level we fought there. And you can explain it to them and they still don't grasp like that while they were, you know, sipping lottes back here, nothing changed for them. And that's, if you guys had to come in here and told me all the stories, I would have zero clue, right? Yeah.

I just zero clue. Yeah. No, I get that too. That's why I mean, my resentment. is probably unfair because it's it's not like our military or our government advertised it. They suppressed a lot of it, which is a weird thing. So, so this movie coming out in April is about August. No, it's not.

There, there is an, there is an aspect of it that deals with August 3rd and it has a, it has a couple of reenactments of, you know, how that day unraveled. the movie is really about the ramp ceremony and, and, you know, how the ramp ceremony came about and how it was executed and, and, you know, the highway of heroes and all that stuff. Like you watch some of that footage of the highway of heroes and, and, you know, there's, there's one particular, um, young lady whose brother got killed and she, they do an interview with her and she's, of course, she's crying and she's talking about driving down the highway of heroes and, and being so sad, but at the same time, so,

elated that there's this entire community of people. And, and I mean, if you've ever seen any of the footage, there's thousands of people on those bridges. Yeah. And like, I can't imagine how emotional that would be for somebody who is escorting the remains of a loved one to the, you know, to the, the, the morgue in Toronto or whatever. It's just crazy.

Yeah, just a little backup about this. So when you, you know, Americans would get casualties in Iraq, let's say, or in Afghanistan. Basically, they loaded onto a fucking, onto a military cargo plane, you know, in the big fucking steel caskets and they're brought back.

When the guys got killed in, in 01, it was butters that fucking, like, basically the re-appreciation of bringing the soldiers from Afghanistan, loading them onto the cargo plane with soldiers there saluting them as they're fucking being put on there was truly a

Canadian thing like the Americans never did that the Brits never did that it was done another fucking night and nobody around to to send off their comrades so butters fucking in his fucking you know figuring this out in some fucking foxhole in the middle of fucking Candararra airfield it was a lot different when they were there there was nobody there like they're still living in fucking trenches is he figured out how to do this and send the boys back with honor. And it's, it's pretty fucking powerful.

And now I don't know how many other nations do it. Like, how we do it, but we fucking did it right. Because it changed everything else too, like even back home. Like there was, there was,

I don't know how they would notify people about, about the deaths, but it was, it wasn't a perfect process and they refined it to, you know, used to do that kind of stuff as well, Willie, it got fucking like first class like how they how they would do it and to any parent that has to

meet that and see it they're not going to say it's first class because they're fucking kids dead they're it's it's going to be upsetting but to a soldier that knowing that that your buddies are doing the right thing to get you back home and and get you buried properly it's pretty fucking cool um how how we do it now and it's it's because of you know the guys in the field figuring it out You were, you and I, I carried Vaughn's beret, but you were carrying him. Yeah. If I remember, Cecil was, I don't remember Pat was one of them. Cecil, you.

I can't remember everybody else. They, they asked me to go on back with, with Vaughn, but I stayed because I want to, like, I, I, I felt if, if I was dead and Vaughn was doing what I was doing, he'd want to stay in fight. But putting them on the plane for the ramp ceremony, that's a, that's a moment, too, like, you know. Oh, yeah. man. Yeah, that's a, that's a moment. You know, the thing that got me, because they, they took that picture of us carrying Vons, Casket, put it on the front of McLean's magazine. Yeah. And, and the headline said, what are we dying for? And it's somewhat misleading because people, people are soundbite people now. Yeah. They, they, they, they, they, they immediately jump to a conclusion without actually digging in.

And I remember being angry about that headline until I read the article. And it was, Well, because if you don't read the article, which I haven't, what is that, what is that a moment? It's like, why are we over there? Right. And that wasn't the point of the article. The article was saying, hey, this is all the good things the Canadians are doing. Yeah. But, and they took this picture just as I had looked over and I saw Mark Brownell and Curtis Qualche and John Hamilton in their wheelchairs.

Yeah. And they're bawling their eyes out. And I'm trying to bite my lip so that I don't cry. Yeah. And they snapped this picture of me and my face just, it's just anguish, you know. And it, it wasn't a true representation of my feelings. I was just trying to not be a pussy for lack of a better term. But, uh, well, you are what you know.

But that's what a photographer is paid to do. Yeah, absolutely. The absolute perfect moment for. Yeah. One picture on the front of a magazine. That's why you take eight million pictures per second, right? And in the back of my head, though, you know, I, I'm a warrior. I'm like, hey, man, we still got a,

mission we still have we still have things to do this isn't over let's do this respectfully let's let's let's get our comrades on the plane and get them sent home with dignity and then move on to the next objective yeah right and it's not until you have that sober time and I say sober because we're in Cyprus we're drunk the whole time yeah if you down and actually think about it and and try to reconcile you know you mentioned it earlier Chuck you know how did it happen why did it happened is there things I could have done better you know are there are there things that that our organization could have done better and and you have to find some meaning in that

yeah because if you don't yeah you get left in the dark right yeah and and that's a horrible place to be here right when you start secluding yourself and you know you you just can't reconcile all the different emotions and feelings and and events that occurred that led to that happening and you know like I said I like I'm not happy either Jamie that that we didn't get the support and I and I've never been happy about it and and the reason that I got it was the very next day I was at Canada airfield and I was I was at Canada house having a coffee or whatever one of the officers that was in the in the Aegis Jock at the time said oh yeah terrible day yesterday

and he was kind of aloof about it which kind of put me on edge right right off the bat and then and then I said yeah man I was there so you know just just back off and he goes oh you were there I said yeah yeah yeah I said man what a what a shit show you know we didn't we couldn't get fast air we couldn't get artillery and he's like oh well whoever was on the radio me called the target of school and I said yeah that was me and he goes oh you should have called it a taliban stronghold because the fact that you called it a school the lawyer that was standing beside the general said the rules of engagement have changed we have to avoid infrastructure collateral damage.

You cannot bomb a school. Even though it wasn't a school. We, that was just what we called it. It was built to be a school. But it ended up being a weapons cache and a strong point for the enemy. But, you know, when you're in the middle of combat and you're trying to. It's a reference point. Right.

Red barn white school. And it was a zigzag. Yeah. And so I was on the radio with, with a B1 pilot. And I'm like, it's, it's the white school that looks like a zigzag. in the, you know, wherever from Panjouet this far from the river. And, you know, the guy's like Talley Target. And then he gets back on the radio and says, I've just been given an abort by the ages

jock. Sorry, I can't help you. And, you know, now we're stuck, right? And I'm, and nobody said, are you sure it's not a Taliban strong? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Willie, it shouldn't even been an issue.

No, it should. They're 100% right. I'm just saying there was a lawyer. It wasn't a Canadian general that made that decision. Yeah. The, the, the bureaucracy that comes in all parts of life.

So my next tour. But the thing about it here is like people's lives are. I understand. But it's, but it's bureaucracy again. It isn't willing on doing his job. It's bureaucracy. It's a bureaucracy saying,

no, you can't hit that. So during my handover tour and a guarantee if that lawyer was sitting there, he'd be like, we better hit this school. If there's one of his kids in there are fucking buddies, it'd be a different fucking story.

We, uh, we're doing our handover. with a Van Du and just absolutely junk. My, my counterpart, the sergeant I was dealing with was actually really good, but overall they were typical Van Du. They were just horrible. Hadn't patrolled at all, hadn't done nothing.

They didn't even know where stuff was. And so we're a couple days into this event, we're out at Fall Wilson doing our handover with them, looking at where we're going to patrol. I'm like, oh, it's a fucking Panjua. And I've been here. And so he's like, okay, well, we're going to go out tomorrow, do our thing, walk some ground you're gonna see it again. I'm like, okay, well, we went to the white school. So there's Faw Wilson. They built this, this road, this paved road. You're good man. And then they

built Massengar, probably about four or five kilometers, I guess, from, from just on the hill overlooking the white school. Yeah. No, yeah, I've seen pictures of it. Yeah. So we, we walk there and walk through Pangeway, didn't get in a tick somehow, but come to the white school and I'm like, where's the school and it is white rubble it is the tallest part of it is inches tall. I have a piece of it. Yep, same. And, uh, like, I, it's one of those moments where I was, uh, it was surreal to be back there and to be like spinning around looking at the ground like, you know, from a perspective of not people trying to kill me for a minute. And, uh, but it was a tourist, like almost like, It's like a battlefield tourist. I felt like, you know, some Wogg cook that came out like, I'd like to get a picture of what it looks like out here.

Um, not that that ever happened, but, you know, isn't it funny. You know, I'm sitting here admiring the Titans I stand around, right? What you guys have done for the country and what you've represented. Um, but isn't it funny like a chunk of a school. If I went there now and saw the school or, you know, the rubble, it would mean the zilch to me. Not even, I would understand the story now. But like, this is.

And I try and explain it to my kids, but they'd be like, they'd have zero clue what the heck is going on. And yet, like to you guys having a chunk of that sit wherever. Oh, yeah. Even the Van Dew when I went over to it, I was like rummaging through it. Then I just took a handful of putting my dump pouch. Yeah. I didn't know what I was going to do with it at that point. I just knew I wanted it.

And, uh, he's like, we heard about this. We heard about this place. Like we, we, they knew they they they're shitty soldiers, but they knew. They got it. And my counterpart who wasn't that bad. He was like, I'm really sorry. I just think of how big some of the battles through history have had to have been that have stood the test of time.

So everybody understands how important that piece of rubble or that piece of dirt really is. And in the army world, you say 06 tour, most guys get it. Most people will go, oh, fuck. Like, that was a rough. That was a bad one. Like, well, we're a good one depending, you know, for us. We got, we got to do. Best days of my life.

Best days of my life. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, fucking loved it. But could things have gone differently or yeah? But like Willie said, it's, that's a battlefield and it is what it is. What we're going to do is we're going to pause right now. We've probably got 15 minutes left, folks. And what we're going to do is we're switch over to Substack.

So they're going to have to come join us there. Appreciate you guys making the drive and doing this for the, you know what's funny. We've done, you know what? I'm going to pause and I'll continue my thought. Follow us over to Substack.