Shawn Ryan Show - #126 Joe Kent - Gold Star Husband and Ex-Special Forces/CIA Operative Now Running for Congress

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

Joe Kent is an Army Special Forces Veteran with two decades of service. Following the tragic death of his wife, Shannon Kent, who served in intelligence operations combatting ISIS in Syria, Joe's career evolved from Special Operations into Field Operative roles in the CIA. Kent would then focus his career on institutional change, advising President Trump on national security and foreign policy. After his retirement from the military, Kent has committed to a continued life of service as a candidate for office in Washington's 3rd congressional district. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://helixsleep.com/srs https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://drinkhoist.com- USE CODE "SHAWN" https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Joe Kent Links: Campaign - https://joekentforcongress.com X - https://x.com/joekent16jan19 FB - https://www.facebook.com/joekent4congress IG - https://www.instagram.com/joekent16jan19 Book - https://www.harpercollins.com/products/send-me-marty-skovlundjoe-kent Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Ambition is on the inside. So that goal to be the ultimate soccer parent, keep chasing it. Drive your ambition. Mitsubishi Motors. Joe Kent, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me, man, I appreciate it. My pleasure, my pleasure.

You popped up on my radar and I started digging in on you a little bit and not too much though, cause I want to be surprised in the interview, but man, you have such a such a impressive career. And you've been through so much. There's so many things we need to talk about in this in this podcast. But but primarily, you know, you and your wife's story. And I'm very much looking forward to digging into that.

And I think there's gonna be a lot of wisdom that comes from this and a lot of content that's gonna help people that are going through very tough chapters in their life. So I just wanna say, man, thank you for being here. I appreciate that, man. Thanks for having me. It's gonna be a heavy interview.

And so, just like we were talking about at breakfast, this is your interview. I wanna give you the best life story interview you've ever had, best to my ability at least. And so we'll do childhood, military career, family life, and then getting into you running for Congress. Sounds great. So yeah, be a very well-rounded interview.

But I'm gonna go ahead and introduce you real quick. Hope you don't mind. But Joe, you are a 20-year veteran of Special Forces, Army Special Forces. Then you went on to a field operative job at the Central Intelligence Agency. Your first wife, Shannon, who also served, was killed while fighting ISIS in Syria. You're a widower raising your two young sons in Washington state and are now remarried to your wife, Heather Kaiser.

You served as a foreign policy advisor to former president Trump. You also served as a project manager for a tech company before retiring on your military pension in January of 2023 to devote yourself fully to your campaign. Your candidacy for US Congress is focused on restoring common sense, Republican values, and defeating the woke extremist Democrat Congresswoman, Marie Perez.

And you are the author of Send Me The True Story of a Mother at War. That's awesome. Thank you. Am I missing? I'm sure I'm missing a lot. That's great, man. But quite the career. So before we move on, everybody gets a gift.

I don't know if you're aware of this. Thank you so much. There you go. You got any guesses? I'm hoping it's gummy bears. Man, you're hot. You're hot, there they are. That's awesome.

I won't come back empty handed. My kids will be excited. Legal in all 50 states Although that doesn't matter because you know pretty much everything's legal in Washington Yeah, but yeah, you can enjoy those on the right home. I'll give you more for your kids, but Anyways, Joe like I said we kind of went over the The outline of what we're gonna talk about but, we kind of went over the outline of what we're gonna talk about,

but before we get too heavy in the weeds, I am interested in why did you decide to run for Congress? Man, the short answer is 2020. I mean, that was right after, it was about a year after Shannon was killed and I transitioned out of going overseas and getting shot at for a living. And it was probably the first time

I had really paid attention to domestic politics. I had always voted, but I was really focused on foreign policy, just with our last line of work. That's kind of where your head goes. But coming home to the city and the area that I grew up in and just seeing what happened during 2020, and then seeing what happened during COVID shocked me. The way that people were just completely accepting

of surrendering all their rights to the government, that shocked me. And then the riots. I was living actually just to the south of Portland, Oregon, when the riots happened. After my late wife was killed, I moved pretty close to where my parents are just to get my kids closer to my family.

Thinking it was still Portland of the 80s and 90s that I grew up in, but watching the riots just ravage downtown Portland. And it wasn't so much the riots, it was the fact that people were going along with it. People who should have known better were saying that, oh no, this is probably just, this is about civil rights, this is about racism.

And I was pretty quick on, I was like, that's not at all what this is about. I mean, because for those of us who've been overseas and been in hostile environments, it has a feeling, and that's very much the way it felt to me. There's this unchecked violence that's taking place right now, law and order has broken down, and whoever is the most violent and aggressive and the most organized and willing to use that violence and aggression,

they're going to rise to the top. And that's exactly what I saw for all of 2020. So moved just across the river to a more rural community. And then obviously the election went the way that it did. We can kind of get into the backstory a little bit, but I'd already kind of met the Trump administration and spoken of President Trump at Dover after my late wife was killed. I was planning on going back and working in a second Trump admin. That's a whole separate story we can get into. But then in the conservative district that I had moved to just across the river, my congresswoman voted for Trump's impeachment after January 6th.

I was mad. Everybody was mad because she was a Republican, but nobody was stepping forward. There was a lot of people who were politically active in the community who were saying, hey, we're very mad and we're going to censure her. We're going to write her a letter. And I was just like, okay, well,

who's stepping forward to actually primary her? Because that's the mechanism. If you're not happy with your elected official, you should run against them or you should support another candidate, especially in a primary. It's really key. A lot of people skip the primaries,

but that's how we enforce discipline within our own ranks as primary people. And I was pretty disappointed to see that nobody was stepping forward. And then I had a little bit of self-reflection based on my background in the military. And if you're looking around to see who's in charge, well, congratulations, it's you in absence of orders of tax.

So I just said, you know what, I'm at least going to run. I'm at least going to give her a challenge so that she knows that we, the people are not happy with her. Ultimately prevailed in the primary, but then general didn't go as planned, but we were really close, less than a percentage point than general. So here I am again, running for Congress, so keeping the fight up. Why did you, I mean, a lot of people, I'm interested in why you decided to run for Congress rather than more of a local political spot,

because I think a lot of people are starting to think that the federal government is just, it's lost, it's gone. the federal government is just, it's lost, it's gone. And people seem to be concentrating more on local elections because that's your immediate sphere of influence. That's what actually probably affects you more than anything. It does. And so I'm just curious,

did you consider running for local at all? I didn't because I had never really considered running for office until the woman I voted for, my congresswoman, voted for Trump's impeachment. She had a couple of other bad votes there that put her on my radar. But I assumed that somebody else, especially after she did something that was so against the will of her voters, I assumed that somebody else maybe that was already in local office that already had a name for themselves and a political machine built up that they would step forward. And so just seeing nobody step forward, that's why

I went for that position in particular. I think with my experience though, in the military and the intelligence community, I think I'm best served at the federal level because the way that the federal government has ran off the reins, especially the way they spend so much of our money on foreign aid, foreign wars. We see this all the time. You get representatives in the House and the Senate who have no background whatsoever in national security. Regardless of what they say on the campaign trail or the fact that their constituents,

Republican and Democrats alike, want a more restrained foreign policy, they go to DC, they get brought into the skiff at some point in time, and they get told some really compelling information, I'm sure. The next thing you know, they're voting in accordance with exactly what the military industrial complex, the foreign aid machinery wants. Whereas, I think if you have more people who are from that world and well versed in it, we can call them on their BS and say, okay, wait a second, what is this information? What's the plan?

How will sending hundreds of billions of dollars every year to Ukraine, for instance, how will that change the actual stated outcome? Ask real hard questions so that we can actually start allocating a lot more resources towards the American people. Because I think in, especially in our lifetime post 9-11, the way that we've focused exterior on the rest of the world's security,

that's put the American people last. And I think a lot of that is coming home to roost right now. But I think it's hard for folks who aren't from that world and well-versed in the national security state just to understand exactly how we, the people, are being scammed by our government. Man, that's a damn good point. I didn't think about the military industrial complex stuff.

I mean, I think about it all the time. Yeah. But to have guys in there that understand it, that makes a hell of a lot of sense. So thank you for clarifying and we'll get a lot more into the weeds on that towards the back end of the interview. But for now, let's just keep it about your life story.

And so let's start a childhood. Where did you grow up? So I was actually born in a cabin, believe it or not, in a little town called Lebanon, Oregon, which is just to the south of Eugene. My dad had gotten a job with the forest service. And so my dad was out there working as a forest ranger. So I was the first kid they had

and they decided to do it adventurous and have me at home with a midwife in a log cabin. But then after that, we moved right away. My parents both got into law school. So my first couple of years we were in Eugene. But then by the time I was five, we moved up to Portland. So I really grew up in Portland. Right on.

What were you into? So pretty much anything outdoors, anything that was related to like the military outdoor adventures, I was actually really lucky. My area had a great Boy Scout community. So I was really heavily involved in Boy Scouts pretty much until the time I joined the army. You know, they just changed the name of the Boy Scouts. Breaks my heart, man.

Is that real? It's real, yeah. What did they change it to? I think they just dropped, I think it's just Scouts now or something like that. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. They've had some hard years

and like they're not what they used to be, unfortunately. Man. Yeah. It's sad because that was an institution where you could send your sons off to and they were gonna be in an environment where boys could be boys for one, you know, you could go off and that's kind of the way

my boy scout troop was. Like nowadays, if my boy scout troop existed, the scout masters would probably like be sent to jail because they basically were like Lord of the flies. It was like the older boys run the younger boys and you know, maybe at the end of the weekend, we'll make sure that nobody gets hurt. But you know, you guys just kind of go off in the woods

and do your own thing, which is great. Cause I think little boys need that. Cause you got so much of that energy, but it's sad now that that's just like yet another institution that's been closed off to young men where a lot of character could have been formed, a lot of really good life lessons could be taught. You can go and mentor younger kids.

And now it's become something that is going to basically adhere to the whims of woke culture. Yeah. And that's what they did. They're a big corporation, they're a big organization. They said, hey, but what about girls? But what about LGBT, LMNOP? And now we have a name change

and they've destroyed yet another great institution. Man, it's sad. What caught your interest in the military as a kid? Maybe you had two attorneys as parents? Yeah, no, so I'm not from a military family. Like both my grandfathers served in World War II, kind of like everybody else, but not a military family at all. I had an uncle who was in the Marine Corps as a logistics guy,

but he lived on the East Coast. I'd see him once or twice a year. But not a military community, not a military family. Honestly, as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a commando of some sort. I don't know if it was just good programming from the 80s of GI Joe and A-Team. That's what got me. Yeah, I think it got a lot of us, right?

Yeah, so I mean, and then as I got older, obviously this is pre-internet, but I just read whatever I could get my hands on about the Vietnam era guys, reading Soldier of Fortune. And so I was pretty committed that, hey, once I can go to the recruiter's office and join that's exactly what I'm doing. Right on. Were you in any sports? Yeah I wrestled and played football. Any good? No I

was not good at all. How about academics? No I'm not good at that either. I was like good at being out in the woods. I was good enough at like academics to not getting a lot of trouble so like I learned pretty easily that I could get Cs in the classes that I hated, you know? And then if I liked it, like history or whatever, then I'd do okay. But I was, I mean, they're telling the kids in high school or my peers, you know, hey, you have to study this, that,

and the other thing for your SATs and your ASATs. And I'm like, man, I'm joining the army as soon as I can get out of here. Because the whole, you know, you need to go to college thing. I was like, wait, so you want me to go to four more years of school that I have to pay for? That is a horrible deal. The Army's got to be better.

Yeah, yeah. How did you come to the Army? Out of all the branches, you went to the Army. So I did a lot of research. And it's weird to say now, because we've been at war for so long, but back then in the mid to late 90s, there wasn't a lot of conflicts on the horizon. There had been Grenada, Panama, Mogadishu, there was these fleeting chances to get to go to combat.

And so I figured, hey, if I can go be a Green Beret, those guys are always kind of deployed, maybe not necessarily to a hot war, but they're always somewhere working with indigenous forces. So I was pretty drawn to that. But then in 93, when Mogadishu happened, Black Hawk Down incident, I know you've interviewed some of those guys,

I was 13 years old and that was the first time, cable news had just kind of come online. And that was the first time I think Americans really had like brutal combat put up in their living room on TV. And so I remember watching that and it's like, man, there's young guys out here that are in savage combat. And I'm like, man, I'm 13. Some of those guys there are probably 18.

They could have been in high school with me last year. And so I was like, who are those guys? Cause I knew you couldn't, at the time, you couldn't go right to special forces. And so it was like, oh, that's the Ranger regiment. And I was like, who are those guys? Cause I knew you couldn't, at the time, you couldn't go right to special forces. So I was like, oh, that's the Ranger regiment. And I was like, okay, cool. I'm gonna, I'm gonna try that first. I did read, I read Rogue Warrior though,

when I was in high school and I was like, oh man, this is bad ass. Like, I mean, that book is phenomenal. I'm like, man, this is, maybe I should go try to be a SEAL. Cause I was always into the water, I ended up going to dive teams and SF. But when I went and talked to the Navy recruiter, they were just like, yeah, so just join the Navy

and you'll get a chance to go to the SEAL teams. And I'm like, shouldn't it be in writing somewhere? And they're like, so you need to pick another Navy job and all the Navy jobs other than being a SEAL sounded fricking horrible. I was like, I don't know, man, it seems like a bad deal to me. And luckily I had, there was a guy who ended up

working for my dad who was a lawyer, but he had been in the army. And he gave me the best recruiter advice ever. He was like, look, just know what you want going in there, whichever branch service you pick, whichever job, he's like, get it in writing. He's like, do not sign your name on the dotted line unless you're getting exactly what you want.

And if they don't give you what you want, walk out and at least go see one of the other services. But don't just blanket sign. So his voice was in my head as the Navy recruiter was just like, yeah, yeah, they'll tell you after boot camp. And I was like, I don't know, man. The Army guy said he'd put the Ranger thing in writing. So that's the route I went.

So you went right after high school. I did. Yeah. I did the whole delayed entry thing. So I had a ship out date like my whole senior year of high school. I knew exactly when I was leaving for basic training. Nice. How did your parents I mean? Receive that but they excited for you. I think well there was no war going on So they weren't as worried I think as you know parents just a couple years later would be But I had talked about it for so long. I think that they maybe maybe when I was in early high school years, they were hoping I was

going to outgrow it. But I think by the time I actually went down to the recruiters, they were like, okay, well, I guess we don't have to worry about paying for your college. So you enlisted. Yeah. How long after high school did you ship out? It was like two weeks. Yeah.

Right on. Yeah. Yeah. And what was that like? So I loved on, man. Yeah. Yeah. What was that like? So I loved it, man. I was just, because I thought about it for so long that I was the geeky kid that was like, oh, this is super cool. They're giving us camouflage uniforms.

And what day do we get to see on M16? So I like living the dream. I thought it was great. I mean, there's parts of it that were hard or whatever, but I was just really excited to finally be doing what I had thought about for so long. What did you think about the other people that were integrated with you? After, I mean, are you 18 at this point?

Yeah, I'm 18, yeah. Okay. You're 18. You're at boot camp, getting ready to go to Ranger Battalion. I mean, what was your first impression? Was it everything you thought it was gonna be? Yeah, I mean, basic training definitely was.

Like they still, at the time, there was still one station training. So if you were infantry, you were there for whatever it is, 12, 14 weeks, and they gave you the full treatment, just like you'd see in full metal jacket or whatever, the drill sergeant, and all that. And so I thought it was great.

And it was really cool getting to meet, I don't know, just like kids that were like-minded, you know? Cause it's, there was only a handful of us. My boy scout troop actually put a lot of people in the military, but in Portland, there wasn't like a big military culture. Like I joke, but it's like, hey, if you wanted to rebel growing up in Portland,

you said that you were gonna enlist in the infantry. Like that's the most rebellious thing that you could do. And so it was cool to be around a bunch of other kids that were my age that like most of us, I mean, there was a couple of guys here and there that like had no idea how they got in the army. They're just like, you know, the judge told them they had to join the army or, you know, go to jail

or whatever, but there was a lot of us that were just like raised on GI Joe and the A team and we were, you know, finally getting to go play army. So it was neat to be around like-minded people. Were a lot of people with you going to Ranger Battalion? Yeah, there was a handful of us that had it in our contracts that we'd try out, but as time wears on in basic, you start hearing some guys

that are like, I don't know if I wanna go to Ranger Battalion because those already kinda sucks and whatever's next has to be worse. So I think we weeded out some people even before we ever saw a real Ranger. When did you get to Ranger Battalion? I got there in November of 98. Right after boot camp.

Yeah, so boot camp, you go to airborne school. And then when you're done with jump school, the Ranger team comes and picks up the guys that have Ranger contracts and takes you off to the month long. It was rep Ranger indoctrination program. When I went through, it's called, I think, Ranger Assessment Selection now. How was that? It was great, man. I went through it's called I think Ranger Assessment Selection now. How was that? It was great, man. I mean it was hard like they definitely put you through more challenges than you go through in basic training and

and obviously airborne school So it's a good gut check. We know we know a lot of guys there I think now of the wars, they do a lot more emphasis on, they actually teach the guys how to shoot, move, communicate. When I went, it was just like, we're gonna try and make you guys quit for a month. So there was some land nab here and there, but it was mostly just time runs, time rocks, a lot of beat down sessions,

obstacle course, that type of stuff. What was the attrition rate? It's pretty high, I mean, over 50%, I think. Over 50%. Yeah, over 50. Did you, I mean, did you notice a difference in the caliber of men that you were with? Yeah, right away, right away. I mean, because like you get out of basic training and already they fill your head up with a bunch of, you know, kind of bravado of like, hey, you're in the infantry now and like the infantry is the backbone in the army and you're the toughest guys in the Army.

And then you go to airborne school, and you hear like, now you're a paratrooper. And so you did see a lot of guys who were like, okay, maybe I'm good with just being, this is good enough. And so a lot of those guys were like, well, I don't wanna take the next challenge because I've already achieved this. So why would I go attempt something that's even harder?

So it was even cooler to be around guys that were like, yeah, what's next? Like let's go do the next hard thing. So that was I always found a lot of inspiration there I'm especially throughout my career, you know, were you still eight were you still 18 years old? Yeah showed up to rip Yeah, yeah, what was the average age of the of the gents that were in that it's young. Yeah, quite 18 Is it 18? Yeah, everybody's pretty young. Okay. There's an oddball here or there that joined the military later on in life, but.

So you're still with very inexperienced. Very young. Military personnel, just maybe a higher drive. Yeah, exactly. What happens after RIP? So then you go to battalion, you go to your Ranger battalion. So I was lucky, the guys in my graduating RIP class,

most of them wanted to go to either Savannah, Georgia, or wanted to go stay there at Fort Benning, because there wasn't a lot of us from the West Coast. And so- You get to pick. You can horse trade, at least I don't know how it is now. This is, you know, late nineties. So they basically came out and they were like,

you guys are all the same to us. So if you get a battalion that you don't want, and there's someone that wants to trade with you, you've got like an hour to wheel and deal. And so- An hour? Yeah, it was something like that. They like walked out.

They're like, we don't care, you're all the same to us. Like, but you've all been assigned a battalion. If you don't like it and you want to switch for buddy, tell us now and maybe we'll make it happen. And so luckily nobody wanted to go to Fort Lewis, which is pretty close to where I lived in Washington. So I'm like, yeah, absolutely. So I switched to for guy right away. I was supposed to go to Fort Lewis, which is pretty close to where I lived in Washington. So I'm like, yeah, absolutely. So I switched to a guy right away.

I was supposed to go to Third Battalion, but there was a guy that was from, I think, somewhere down south that switched with me. What's the difference between the battalions? Why would somebody want to go to one versus the other? I think when you're that young and inexperienced, it's just geography. That was for me, I was just like, I don't want to stay in Fort Benning anymore. I don't want to be down in Georgia. I want to go back up to the Pacific Northwest where I'm from.

As I mean, now when the wars are running full steam, I mean, I think every battalion was doing basically the same thing. So I don't think there was much of a difference. When the wars first kicked off, though, third battalion being next to 75th Regimental Headquarters, they got they did the initial jump into Afghanistan. So they were there closer to the flag pole, so there's a bat that comes with that for them, but then also they tended to get the,

whatever the best mission was, right off the bat. Gotcha, is there any cultural differences between battalions? There is, yeah, yeah. The first battalion guys were much more laid back because they're out there on the beach, and then the third battalion guys, I think, are the most high-strung because they're there at like I mean they live at the home of the infantry You know, so that's like a lot more I think spit and polish and then second battalion is kind of in its own little world

I'm a little more West Coast culture out there probably more laid-back. I Can't imagine a Ranger battalion being laid back but compared to the other Ranger battalions. Second battalion is still pretty Spartan. So how was it showing up to Ranger battalion? Second battalion, correct? Yeah, it's basically like you started all over again at RIP. They kind of treat you like crap for a while. I mean, they treat you like crap for pretty much your first year there.

Because the attrition continues. I mean, because Ranger battalion is pretty unique and soft, whereas they take people that have regular army MOSs, regular army jobs. So if you screw up, they can just kick you literally down the street. Like if you're an infantry guy, which most people in Ranger Battalion are, and they don't like you, they can kick you out.

And the next thing you know, you're two blocks down at the 25th Infantry. Does that happen a lot? It happens a fair amount, yeah. I'm not sure how, I think probably once the op cycle really kicked up during the war, they probably didn't do it as much, but they made it very clear to me and my peers

that you could be fired later on this afternoon if we don't like you. So as a kid, you remember watching Mogadishu go down. Yeah. And so now you're a Ranger Battalion, second Ranger Battalion, still 18 years old, correct? Yep. And do you meet anybody who was in that conflict?

Yeah, so we had, there was two guys, they were in a different company, but they were like legends, everybody knew who they were. They were like probably senior in, I guess, E7s, E6s, but they would do a lot of professional development where they talk about the Battle of Mogadishu. In particular, when we were doing like urban movement, CQB, they were definitely the subject matter experts.

And then we had a handful of guys, like my squad leader had jumped into Panama. So there was a few people, and I think for the being in the army in the late 90s, all things considered, we had a lot of combat experience just in our battalion. Yeah. What was that like for you being 18, being surrounded by men who had already been out doing what you've been fantasizing about doing?

Awesome, but intimidating. You know, you definitely like those guys, you know, later on in life, after the war has been going for a while, you know, you run into some, you're like, oh, this is just, he's just a regular dude. He's a little bit older than me. But at the time when you're a kid, you're like, oh my God, this guy's like this. He's a legend. He's absolutely amazing. So yeah, it was, it was intimidating to be around those guys, but also it was like,

I'm in the right spot. This is where I wanna be. Like we're, I'm talking with guys who actually went out and did the real, they actually went to combat. They did the real deal and they're gonna train me how to do it because this is our job, this is our profession. Which at the time in the late nineties, I think a lot of military units probably didn't have that

because it was kind of like, well, what is our mission? Like we sort of go train, we shoot blanks at each other, you know, whatever. Whereas Ranger Battalion, just because of what they had been through, in particular, Mogadishu, but, you know, Panama and Grenada before that, they were just like, hey, the balloon could go up, the call could come and you could be in combat tomorrow. Like that was the mentality there.

What kind of I mean, what was what was the daily routine for you when you got there? It's, I mean, basically what you'd expect, elite light infantry. I mean, running and rocking physical fitness was really big. And then so was marksmanship and small unit tactics. And so basically your, your life kind of revolved around that. So like group, group PT, you know, whether it was rocking or running was really big. And then we'd go through different blocks where we'd actually

shoot a lot. And again, just perspective late nineties, like us and maybe the guys from first special forces group that are also on Fort Lewis, we'd be like the only guys at the ranges. You'd every now and again, you'd see the regular army out there doing like their qual, their annual accord, I don't know, whatever. But they weren't out there at all that much. But we were out there putting rounds down range quite a bit, which was a luxury I think most units just didn't have. And then the small unit tactics piece too, just being tactically proficient at basic patrolling.

Even if we weren't out at the range with live ammo, our squad leaders would literally have us in the back 40, just doing patrolling. So you learn the basics. And then same thing, CQB. CQB obviously became a huge focal point in Iraq and some of the other places that we fought. By the time with the experience from Mogadishu, we were still doing flow drills, really heavy emphasis on urban combat, heavy emphasis on urban movement.

So yeah, it was a very serious place to be an 18 year old, you know, they definitely drill it into your head that this is life and death stuff. And we expect you to literally live up to the Ranger Creed and be the elite soldier your country needs to be. How did how long were you out Ranger Battalion? I was only there for three years. How did SF pop up on your radar?

I know when I came in, I'd always wanted to go to SF, and this is before 9-11. So I'd been in battalion. If you'd been in battalion at that time, it's totally changed now. But if you'd been in battalion at that time for about a year, a year and a half, you had done the full training cycle. You had done your individual marksmanship block, your individual small unit tactics block, you've done your airfield seizure block, because that was a core mission then. You'd spend a couple months just doing static line jump after static line jump with all

your gear, doing secure the airhead like they did in Grenada and Panama. Then you'd do a rotary wing evolution where you'd go out and train with the 160th and do fast roping and do air assaults and that type of stuff. Then that block would just kind of rinse repeat. And so I figured, I was like, okay, I've been here. I've got a solid base in soldiering. I'm gonna take it to the next level and try to go to special forces.

Did you have any combat deployments with Ranger Battalion? I did not, nope. I was actually in my first or second day of special forces selection was September 11th. first or second day of Special Forces selection was September 11th. So you used Ranger Battalion as kind of a gateway to Special Forces? I did. Yeah. And was there any animosity from? Oh, yeah. Yeah. The only accepted way to leave Ranger Battalion at the time, I don't know if it's different now, it's probably about the same. The only accepted reason to leave Ranger Battalion at the time. I don't know if it's different now. It's probably about the same. The only accepted reason to leave Battalion

was like you either got picked up for Delta or you died. Like that was... That was... If you left for any other reason, you were like a horrible trader. But it's kind of funny because Regiment follows essentially the same rank structure and career progression as the infantry does.

So really as you move up the ladder, there's less and less ability for people to stay there. So like if you're in E5, you're going to fire team, E6, you'll get a squad, but past that, there's only four platoons per company. So if you're going to get promoted, the dirty secret is a lot of Rangers end up going to SF. Like it's just not, it's not discussed, it's not talked about. So you still kind of, you know, the leadership still gives you the speech. So I got the speech before I left for Special Forces selection, which basically was,

if you don't pass, you don't have a job here anymore. So you better pass. That's pretty good motivation. That is damn good motivation, right? Yeah. So you leave Ranger Battalion and then what happens? You show up to selection. Yeah, go to selection.

Standard, you know, you get your first couple of days where you don't do a lot. Like you take a PT test there at Fort Bragg and that's where everybody shows up. Like, so if you look at Special Forces class numbers, it's like we started out with like 300 or whatever, cause they'll kind of let anybody come and take the PT test.

This again, this may have changed, but this is 2001. And so they weed out a bunch of guys on the PT test. And then they take you out to Camp McCall, which is where the majority of selection is, once they weed out that initial crop. And I think we'd only been there for a day or two, and they call us all in the classroom, and they're like, America has been attacked.

And I'm thinking like, that's weird. Like, is there a scenario? Because you know, you do training missions and they're like, here's the scenario, the country's been attacked, and now we're going to war in this country. And so they start talking to us about like how America just got attacked.

And I'm like, man, this can't be actually real. And then they actually bring in some TVs. And then they say, hey, if you're from the Washington DC area or from the New York area, the offices are open, just go grab phones and start calling your loved ones to Make sure they're okay. I was like Yeah, I was like that makes it real. Yeah. Yeah so then like the next day they bring in all the cadre and stuff like a special forces selection the cadre are

Famously very stoic like they don't say very much to you by design But after the attacks they would break rank say very much to you by design. But after the attacks, they would break rank, or break character probably like once a day where they would give us newspapers. And they're like, hey, you guys are in a bubble here. You gotta realize how the country's changing. And so they would bring in newspapers that we could read

before we got heavy in a stress phase so you could kind of understand what was going on. So this is right at the very, this is like day two. Yeah, it's like September 12th, 13th. I mean, talk about even more motivation. Yeah. If that's, I mean, you know you're gonna do what you signed up for.

How did that hit? Did that hit you at the time? I was afraid I was gonna miss it because like all the other conflicts leading up to September 11th, they had been like, if you were in the right place at the right time, you got to go to war. But if you weren't in, you know, third ranger battalion,

you know, in the right company, you missed out on Mogan issue, you know, like same thing with the Gulf War and all that. So I was like, crap, man, am I, am I going to be out here rocking around in the woods, trying to get into SF while my ranger battalion is jumping into combat? Like, and then, so I, I was like, well, I, I,

maybe that's the way it's going to go. Because there was that, it's hard to remember now, but there was that pause right after September 11. There was an initial push into Afghanistan. But it wasn't really until we kicked back up in Iraq again, in 03 when we invaded Iraq, that we were at war in two different countries. There was that pause there where it's like, OK,

are we just going to do a handful of strikes and then kind of go back to business as usual? Because that, I mean, Bin Laden already attacked the country twice. I mean, we had the embassies that got hit in Kenya and Tanzania, and we had the coal in Aden. And so there was a lot of us that were like, and I was kind of of this mindset,

I was like, I don't think we're gonna do anything. I think maybe we're gonna like launch some cruise missiles, but are we really gonna do it this time? Yeah. Yeah. Was there, I mean, was there any hesitation at all about going to war? No, I was afraid I was going to miss it. At that point, I was like, man, I'm going to be one of the, because you also, for all the combat that you met in the late nineties, you also met a lot of other guys that had

been in the army for a really long time and they had just, you know, dumb luck, they missed out on their shot to get to combat. So I was terrified of being, you know, not those guys' fault, but I was terrified of being one of those guys. I was like, crap, man, am I gonna be wrong place, wrong time for my entire damn career? Yeah.

So, I mean, that's interesting. So day two, September 11th happens, you see it, you realize it's real. How, I mean, how did that affect the attrition rate of that particular class? That's an interesting question. I don't know. I don't know if there was guys that factored that in. I don't really know.

I think there were some guys who had the same fear that I did, that they were going to miss their chance to go to combat. I think then though, it was still kind of, I think the whole idea of like everyone's going to combat was kind of abstract. I don't think the army, at least where I was serving, I don't think we really wrapped our heads around that until a couple of years later when it was like, oh, okay, now we're invading Iraq with like the entire military. This is gonna be something that everybody is more than likely gonna experience.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so, I mean, just in, and you know you're not going right away. I mean, you have to get through selection. Then I'm like, I don't know how, I mean, how long would it have been? A few courses long, yeah. Yeah, so you're talking years before you get the opportunity

to roll out. Yeah. So I get selections about a month, and I get back to Ranger Battalion in whatever it was, October. And my squad leader had just gone to Delta Selection. And so we're back there with all the rear detachment guys. And he's like, hey, we're going to go load all the ammo pallets

and we're going to go meet the rest of the battalion in Europe. And we might be the ones that jump into Afghanistan. And I was like, this is sweet. I just got selected for SF. We're going to jump into combat. But then, of course, a day later, we see the third battalion jumps in. So I'm like, I guess that we were supposed

to leave in two days. And so that didn't happen. So I'm like, I guess that, you know, we were supposed to leave in like two days. And so, so that didn't happen. So I was like, well, that's a sign. I should probably just go to the Q course and, you know, hedge my bets with special forces and maybe I'll get to, because at the time that the men on horseback thing had just happened. And I was like, okay, well, those guys were right there at the tip of the spear like right after this

happened. So I'm on the right track. Nice. Nice. So you went to selection. Yeah, what was the most challenging portion for you? Selections interesting because it's probably the only place in the military where you're alone for a lot of it There's there's a team portion, but the team portion to me coming out of battalion I was pretty familiar with if you're from a combat arms unit I think the team phase they have there it should be if you're from a decent unit It should be relatively familiar because you're with a group of unit, I think the team phase they have there, it should be, if you're from a decent unit, it should be relatively familiar because you're with a group of guys,

you're trying to solve a problem, it's hard, you're sleep deprived, all that type of stuff. It's definitely hard, it's very physically hard, the team events, but the isolation and not getting any feedback, in Ranger Battalion you get feedback all the time. It's usually negative feedback, telling you how stupid you are, but at least that's some feedback.

In Special Forces selection, like the instructors, just say, hey, take all your commands off the whiteboard. Your ruck should weigh 50 pounds, and we're going to check it. And you're going to move that direction until we tell you to stop moving. And then the land navigation portion, where you're actually having to move through

some pretty hairy terrain, and you're having to make independent decisions on your own. I thought that was pretty challenging, coming out of a very team heavy environment. I ended up liking it once I got used to it. I was like, actually, this is pretty cool. I'm just out here. It's kind of all on me, whether I succeed or fail. But I think that gets a lot of guys.

I think a lot of the attrition in Special Forces selection is that isolation portion. Interesting. Where guys are like, I'm not getting any feedback, am I doing this right? You know, I can't ask anybody anything, there's no other teammate I can lean on. It's completely all on you. This is selection or the Q course?

This is selection, yeah. Okay, how does the Q course differ from selection? The Q course is more academic, there's still cutting guys there, but you have your job phase. I was a weapons guy, because it was the easiest thing that translated from infantry. And I was like, OK, that's weapons and demo or engineers.

Those are the two shortest ways out of the Q course. If you're going to be a medic and go to the 18 delta course and then go to language school, it's basically a two-year endeavor. And then combo is just a little bit shorter, combo is like a year and a half. You can make the thing probably about an even year if your weapons are demo.

So I chose weapons. So the weapons portion isn't, it's actually pretty fun. I mean, you're getting to learn, you're getting to learn foreign weapon systems, American weapon systems, how to employ them, how to shoot them, a lot of shooting. And then there's a small unit tactics phase, which there's some, some of that is, you know,

they pour on the challenges, for sure. It's kind of like a little mini ranger school just to kind of get everybody on the same sheet of music with small unit tactics. And so there's some attrition there, but that's not bad. But the majority is your MOS phase. And then the unconventional warfare block, it has some challenges, but it's probably the most fun I had had in the military because it's unconventional warfare. You're playing it live. You're actually in a small community in North Carolina. And half of them are the resistance that you're trying

to recruit and mobilize and organize to conduct guerrilla warfare against the other half of the town that's the occupying force. And so they actually, the Special Forces school goes all out. Like they put a lot of resources into that, making that as realistic as possible. So the unconventional warfare portion is really, really fun. But then you have your not so fun stuff like six months of language school. What was your language? My language is posh to you because we had just invaded Afghanistan.

Oh, nice. Did you did you actually learn it and utilize it? Well, utilize. So of all my combat deployments, I never went to Afghanistan. So I never really utilized it. I actually ended up having to go and switch my language to Arabic because I was around Arabic so much. And SF guys have to have a language. But I actually ended up going back to language school for Arabic. Are there any similarities?

The alphabet's the same. But the Arabic alphabet has a lot more special characters. The posthum, because posthum is mostly spoken, it's phonetically the same as the Arabic alphabet with a couple different characters here and there. Did you utilize Arabic? So, yeah, when I got to Iraq, I could sound out the words. And so I had like a little bit of a leg up. I could at least, I at least knew how the words sounded.

But language school sucks. So like, it's tough. Like the rest, like when the military picks linguists, they pick people that actually have like a natural ability to speak and they have to pass that test, the D lab to say what their ability is. SF is funny. I don't know if this has changed.

I don't think it has. Cause SF basically at the end of it, and you're at the tail end of the Q course, you've already been through a lot. They pull you into the language school and they're like, hey, we don't care. Like if you can barely write your name in English, you're getting a language based on what group you go to,

not your ability to learn a language. And you're either gonna learn it or you're gonna fail and you're not gonna go to group. So it's like, yeah, so it's like, you better figure it out. Yeah, yeah, damn. Sink or swim, yeah. So you get through the Q course,

what year are we when you get done with Q course? Oh, three. So while it was language school, we launched into Iraq and I was then I was convinced I was like, Oh, I totally missed it. Like, it's all over. They're going to get Saddam tomorrow. They're going to pull out. They're going to get Bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Like, it's all done. You know, but luckily when I got to group summer of oh three, I mean, the guys from fifth group had just invaded Afghanistan, they had just invaded Iraq. Like my team sergeant was like, this is not going away anytime soon. As a matter of fact, we're going back in like two months. Before we get there, let's talk about QCORS graduation.

Do they have a big ceremony? They do, it's kind of weird. When you get out of Robin Sage, young conventional warfare part, they give you your green bray and you're like a green bray. Um, but you're still technically a student. You have to pass language school. So then the next day after you're riding high and you have your new, new cool green bray to wear, then they take you into the language school and they're like, yeah, we're going to take it away if you don't learn this language. So, so sort of welcome to the family, but not really.

Then when you get done with language and at the time, I think they go to Sear at some other portion, but we all went from language to Sear school. So basically we got like liberated out of the POW camp in Sear school. And then I think a couple of days later, we had our full on graduation where you get your special forces tab and your orders to your group. What did that sense of accomplishment feel like to you? I mean, dreaming about this from before you were 13 years old. Yeah, no, it was definitely surreal, man. It was surreal. It was like, wow, I can't believe this is, I can't believe I did this. I can't believe it's real.

Waiting for them to come tell me it's not real and they check the scores again, they're gonna take it all away. They're gonna send me back to the army. But no, it was a huge sense of accomplishment. And just because the wars had just started and I was just really chomping at the bit. It was very much a like, okay, we accomplished something here.

Let's do a toast and celebrate for a day. But then I gotta get there before I miss it. I was literally like, how fast can I leave Fort Bragg to get to Fort Campbell so I don't miss the next thing smoke into combat. Damn. What about your parents? I think at that point, it was getting real for them because they were like, okay. Were they happy for you? They were happy, but they were like, okay. Were they happy for you?

Were happy, well, they were happy, but they were like, so the Ballad of the Green Berets, the famous song by Barry Sadler, there's a line in there about like the back at home, the young wife waits her green berets met his fate. There's a whole line in there about the green beret dying. And like my parents came to graduation and I had heard the song a million times,

but my mom at the end of it's like crying and she's like, why would they play that song? I'm like, the Ballad of the Green Berets? She's like, it's absolutely horrible. I'm like, it's a bad-ass song. She's like, the guy dies in the end. I'm like, okay, now I see it from your perspective. I'm like.

How do you know which group you're going to? You can request, you can make a wish list and then it's based on numbers, which group needs which number of which MOSs. But luckily, pretty much most guys in my QCourse class wanted to go to Fort Carson out to Colorado or back to Fort Lewis first group. Just based on the way the war was heading and fifth group was like the men on horseback, I was like, man, I just want to go to fifth group.

And fifth group also, since their area is the middle of the Middle East, they have the worst languages. So because I put fifth, that's why I got posh to you. So basically when you're doing your wish list of which group you want to go to, everybody knows which languages will put you at which group. So seventh group, South America, you have to learn Spanish

and then you get to go to Columbia. So like a lot of guys want to go down there. You see fifth group and it's like, not many guys want to go to Columbia. So like a lot of guys want to go down there. You see fifth group and it's like, not many guys want to go to Fort Campbell and even less guys want to learn Arabic, Pashto or Farsi. So I didn't really have to fight guys to get fifth group. Wow. So you get to fifth group, how were you received?

Completely different than our injured battalion. I mean, SF very much, especially at the time, everybody was a seasoned, I mean, I was 23, had been in the army for like five years and I was like the juniorist of the juniors guys, you know, like there was a lot of experienced NCOs and officers that were there because SF didn't start taking guys off the street until the wars had kind of picked up.

So I was like the brand new, totally young guy, but it was a very mature, laid back environment. I mean, they had just invaded two countries. So there was a lot of that, I'd say, more calmer professionalism that you see at the upper rungs of special operations that you don't see in a more like Spartan environment like Ranger Battalion, where there's a lot of chest puffing

and guys that are kind of wearing on their sleeves How badass they are I get to SF and like nobody's in uniform Just kind of in civilian clothes like sergeant majors out like on the ride-along lawnmower like cutting the grass and they're like Oh, yeah, your team's like kind of down there and I'm like, man, this is kind of surreal like Okay, and then my team sergeant's like yeah, welcome to the team and He basically my initial counseling was like hey, this isn't Ranger Battalion. This is big boy rules. Like, you're going to be on your own a lot.

If you have a question, ask, and we'll tell you what you need to know. But we're not going to be here to hold your hand. And your stuff can be put in the hallway at any minute because nobody really cares that you finished the Q course because we all did. So it's not a big deal. And by the way, we're going back to combat here in two months. So you report in to Fifth Group and you're leaving in two months.

Yeah, it's like two months. Got there in June and we were leaving like at the end of August for Iraq. For Iraq. Yeah. How did that make you feel? Now you're getting what you asked for. I was really excited.

Yeah, I was pretty stoked. Not nervous at all? No, not really. I was nervous of like, hey, if I get there, if I screw something up, you know, that was probably the biggest anxiety that I had going into combat was like, will I not live up to the expectations? But again, it was still like, man, I hope that they, it sounds stupid to say now, but I'm like, man, I hope in these couple months, they don't solve all the problems in Iraq and I get there and there's nothing to do. But luckily, we had pretty experienced guys on my first team and they were like, oh yeah,

it's an absolute disaster there. We're going to be, I don't know how they had that insight in those early months of 03, but they're like, yeah, this is not going to go the way we think it's going to go. We're going to be there for a minute. I mean, two months. I mean, when I showed up to the SEAL team, it was a year and a half before I got the opportunity to deploy. How do they, I mean, how did these guys get you up

to speed to their standard in two months. What did you guys focus on? What were those conversations like? Yeah, it was pretty interesting. So Fifth Group really had been focused. They had the unconventional warfare fight in Afghanistan. But prior to that, Fifth Group, since the end of the Gulf War, had been focused on special reconnaissance

against the Scud missiles. So mounted desert mobility special reconnaissance. And that's what they did during the ground war. My battalion did the ground war while I was in language school. And then they came back, refit, and basically got a Frago to a completely different mission. They're like, hey, you guys are going to go in the center of Baghdad,

and you're either gonna be at a team house, collecting intel and actioning it, or you're gonna be unilateral direct action, just waiting for targets, and then going after the deck of cards, and the Al-Qaeda guys, because our Cali had just kind of popped up on the radar. So my team basically, in that short period of time,

had to transition from being focused on desert mobility, special reconnaissance to direct action. So my team sergeant had just gotten to the team as well, but he came from our direct action company, the In Extremis Force. And then we found out, I think about halfway through our workup

that the fifth group SIF, the fifth group In Extremis Force, at the time the theater commanders controlled those, the group didn't. And so the sitcom commander pulled our SIF to Djibouti to be on alert because there was, I don't remember exactly what happened, there was someone having an Africa. So either way, our team got pegged to be unilateral direct action. So we were going to go to Baghdad, to the airport, we had air assets and we were to get fed targets and go after them. So pretty awesome mission. And so I was lucky because I was familiar with direct

action coming out of Ranger Battalion. So it gave me a little bit more, I think, credibility as a new guy. There was actually something I could contribute, whereas most of these other guys had been focused on a completely different mission set. So for me, it was overall, I'd say a positive thing that we kind of got a brand different mission set. So for me, it was overall, I'd say a positive thing that we kind of got a brand new mission. Were you the only new guy there? There was me and one other guy, one of the two weapons guys. So we both got there at the same time.

So yeah, we were the brand new guys on the team, but everybody else, man, just these guys were incredibly impressive. Like they had just invaded Afghanistan. Like they had just done the ground war. Most of them didn't say much. Most of them were pretty laid back, but like they had that confidence of we've just invaded

and toppled two different countries. You know? And most of them had been in the army for a while too. Like my team sergeant had been a private in the first Gulf War, you know? Wow. You know, like, so. Some big shoes to fill.

Big shoes to fill. Some of them had done the PIFWC mission in Bosnia where they were going out and snatching up guys, kind of low-vis. So like just a lot of experience, you know, a high standard to meet, but not a lot of like bravado about it. Just sort of like, hey, show up and do your job.

Wow. Well, Joe, show up and do your job. Wow. Well, Joe, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll get into your first deployment. Okay. You've heard me talk about them before and I'm excited to talk about them again. Hoist is IV level hydration that's made right here in the USA.

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That's helixsleep.com slash SRS. This is their best offer yet and it's not going to last long with Helix. Better Sleep starts now. All right, Joe, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to dive in to your first deployment. Let's start right there. Yeah, so we got orders to go and be the unilateral direct action team so me and Two of the other guys on my team actually volunteered to go over early and the the pre-deployment team to start handover with the guys

That were already there So as we're flying we get delayed or we do our stop in Spain we end up having an extra day and that ends up actually being kind of kind of critical because the As we are delayed in Spain our team the two teams that we're replacing We end up having an extra day and that ends up actually being kind of critical because as we are delayed in Spain, our team, the two teams that we're replacing, they go out and they're prosecuting a Zarqawi target because this is two days after Zarqawi bombed the UN headquarters in Baghdad. They go after the guys who actually bombed the compound.

They get into a huge gunfight. We lose two green berets, Bill Bennett and Kevin Moorhead. Many casualties on that mission. Had the plane not been delayed, we'd have been on that hit with them. So we get there. We get to the team house where we're supposed to start the replacement procedures

and doing left seat, right seat ride. But most of the team's been medevacked out. There's still blood in the Tacomas that were taken over from the team. Their team leader stays. He's been shot. He got shot in the calf, kind of like through and through. So he's like limping around with a bandage that still got blood from the night or two before on him.

And so it's very much real. It's surreal and it's real because we're there. We're living at the Baghdad International Airport, the Rabwaniah Palace complex. So we're like living in an old opulent Saddam Palace that we've taken over. But there's literally still blood in the trucks. And we've got targets to get after right away.

Where year is this? This is 03. 03. Wow. Yeah, so very much real, very much up in our face. The guys that were on security, 10th Mountain guys have been sliced over to fifth group. So those guys actually ended up kind of being our continuity because most of the team ends up leaving.

So those guys kind of help us get settled in and we immediately start just doing rehearsals for missions that are coming up. The rest of our team gets there, we integrate them, and we're right in the mix, going after the deck of cards and going after Zarqawi's guys. Very interesting. I mean, how does, I mean, talk about getting thrown into the mix right into the middle of it.

I mean, how do you feel now that you're there? I feel great. I mean, there was like nowhere else I wanted to be. And again, man, it's just surreal because we're living at this palace that has like a pool. And then you step one room over and you got your ready room full of your kit, your trucks out front, just waiting to get a mission for the next night or that for even some daytime that's what you're doing. Well, let's talk about the very first op. Yeah. Yeah. So very first op was probably a couple days after we initially got there.

We go into just the outskirts of Sadr City. And this is summer of 03, so the IED threat is sort of there, but it's not sophisticated. And most of the military still didn't have up armored vehicles. So we're rolling around in no armored Tacomas. That's what some of the guys invaded the country and they just stayed there. We kind of modified them. You could put a 240 on them or you take the 240 off and you can make it more low profile. But we get a mission to go hit some hit a house on the outskirts of Sadr city.

I think he was a deck of cards guy. I don't remember if he was an al-Qaeda guy or a deck of cards guy, but a pretty nice house, pretty big gated compound and all that. Excuse me, and literally our plan is like, we're loading up on the trucks, like, and we're just hauling ass to this target, like SWAT team style. So there I am on the back of a Tacoma with the beds down

and we're just sitting there on the bed, like hauling ass down by, down the Baghdad International Airport road down Route Irish, you know going 70 miles per hour. I'm like this is pretty cool but it's really gonna suck if I fall out of the truck on the way to Target. So I'm like death grip on that thing like it matters you know. But man we get there and we do a we have one of our guys get up on the ladder to kind of clear the courtyard.

And then we ended up ramming the gate and then the front door is pretty beefy. So we had already made the decision ahead of time. We were just gonna explicitly breach it. So slap a half block of C4 on it and blow it in. I was the first guy in the house as the, that was my job. So ran in and from that target man, I was the first guy in the house, that was my job. So ran in and from that target man, I was so focused. Like I literally still, when I think of that,

I remember seeing like the red dot on my EOTech because I'm like, you know, scanning my sector and like, it's just super intense, like trying to clear everything. I remember pretty much everything from clearing that house still to this day because it was just so ingrained in my head. We didn't get into a big gunfight or anything.

We got the guy we were after, did the whole sense of site exploitation and tactical questioning and all that. But doing a real, actually putting an explosive block on someone's front door and blowing it in and then running through the house and doing my job, I was like, well, this is pretty big. This is a bigger accomplishment than anything I've done up to this point in the military. This is the first real thing I did. How do you feel that you performed on your first operation? I felt good because I ran towards the sound of the guns, essentially.

You blow in that breach and it's confusing. You don't know what's on the other side of the door. There's all that smoke and confusion. And I wanted to be in that room, getting into a fight if there was one to have. So I felt good about that. But then I look, this on subsequent targets has happened too. I look at like how amped up I am

compared to like my team sergeant, you know, who might not even have, he probably didn't have like an elevated pulse at the time. And I'm like, all right, I need to kind of be more on his level because he's noticing way more things than I'm noticing. Much later on, we ended up going on a hit and a guy, not in my sector,

but I see this kind of out of my periphery, a guy comes up out of the room that we're in and he's got an AK like this. And my team sergeant just casually reaches over, like it's a child, and grabs the AK and just punches the dude. And later on, once we get everything under control, I'm like, why didn't you shoot that guy?

And he's like, oh, because I looked. AK, the selector lever was up, and his hand was on the buttstock. It wasn't anywhere near the trigger. And I was like, I didn't even think about that. I saw the shape of the gun. And had I been close enough, I probably would have put half a magazine in that dude. Wow.

And I was just like, that's actually pretty cool. That's pretty switched on right there. I was like, that's what you want to be at. You want to be the guy that's assessing everything. Wow. So that was definitely my first takeaway from my first, I don't know, 10 targets. That is some serious target ID.

Yeah. And so that was my team sergeant. He was really big on that stuff. He was like, hey, anybody can go into these places and just shoot the crap out of it. He's like, if that's what was needed, we could call the regular army and they could just shoot tank rounds at the place.

Who cares? Whatever. He's like, but they're sending us in here for a reason. We want to get these guys alive. We want to get intel. This is all going to tie into a much bigger piece. It's going to help us take down the remnants of Saddam's cronies, and then it's also going to help us run down the Al-Qaeda guys. So we're here for a very specific mission and

we got to do our jobs like professionals. Let's rewind back to your first op. How did the team, was there a, were they critiquing you after your first operation? Oh, definitely. How was it? For sure. What was their impression of you? I ran aggressively into there,

so they were like, hey, his heart's in the right spot. You might want to amp it down a little bit, be a little bit calmer, assess the situation a little more. We definitely did a full AAR, did rehearsals again the next day, tried to implement what we had learned. Definitely developed some pretty good TTPs about,

especially because all those compounds in Baghdad, all those houses, almost all of them had like the gate up front. And so, we initially assessed, put a guy up over just to kind of cover the courtyard, but we had some f run around with the gate. And so then we started talking about, hey, do we just run up hard and ram the gate

to get guys to get a foothold in? Or do we want to start looking at going over the wall? And that's something we were debating heavily. But the critiques for me were like, hey, you're at 11 or a 12 and like maybe dial it down to like a five or a six. And I think it took me quite a while to get there because it was just like, I mean, the mentality then,

especially with CQB was like be as aggressive as possible, was like get into every room and dominate it and control it. It's kind of funny saying that now what we learned subsequently in the wars is like, that's exactly what the enemy was anticipating that we would do. And so having a more calm approach and a more methodic approach definitely is much more beneficial.

It's definitely interesting how to see how much the tactics have changed since the beginning up until all the way up until the end. Yeah. But let's talk about your first op where you guys went kinetic. Yeah. Do you remember that? Oh yeah, yeah for sure. So we were really lucky. I think because we're operating in a very bottom up environment, we were able to get a drop on a lot of the bad guys.

And also it was early on in the war, so I don't think the bad guys knew our tactics as well as they would in subsequent wars or in subsequent years of the war. We took some fire here and there, a little bit of returning fire. So there was gunplay kind of on the streets every now and again.

But again, it's that sweet spot too. The IED threat wasn't that really that big. I think the first time we really got into a scrape, a proper scrape was in Fallujah. So the next year, the next deployment went back and essentially did the same mission. We can kind of go back, but we took the Iraqi commandos. We had trained them up later on in that first deployment that I was on.

But we took them into into Fallujah and we took the hospital that's on the the western side of the Euphrates right there. So it was actually the first target we took down in Fanfury in the hospital itself. I don't know why. We should have gotten stitched up, but we didn't. There was foreign fighters in there. They had machine guns. They had explosives. But for whatever reason, we got the drop on them. But then when the sun came up, we took a ton of accurate fire. Probably the most accurate mortar, sniper, and RPG

fire that I had been under was there. Because before in Baghdad, I think we were kind of fighting a lot of financiers, a lot of guys who weren't like pros, like the dudes that hung out in Fallujah that knew we were coming in, like those guys were ready to fight and they were ready to lay down some. So you were in the invasion? I was in the second Fallujah, November.

So we had just rotated home when the first Fallujah happened, but then we came back that summer of 2004. After we got done doing direct action for a couple months, my team got a more traditional SF mission. They said, hey, we're going to make a new Iraqi military and we want them to have a commando element, a special operations element first. They gave us a bunch of anti-Saddam militias that we demobilized and then created the Iraqi commandos out of. And with that,

we started getting a lot of the politically sensitive targets. So you were on the forefront of that. I was. Yeah, my team was. So we actually trained up the initial crop of commandos with heavy Kurdish leadership. So yeah, and then we really, that really opened up our aperture being because we were living in the middle of Baghdad, basically went from living kind of on the airfield doing a traditional soft mission of you get fed the targets, then you go kick in the doors to, hey, now you're living in the middle of the city, basically amongst the people with a bunch of indigenous forces that we just gave guns to. And we just sort of need to train them up and hope that they're

not going to turn their guns on us. And then once we got some reps out of those guys, we realized, number one, that we had access to the population now. So our intel just absolutely was on fire because we had guys that were part of our commandos that were from all these different neighborhoods. And so we dove immediately into running sources, developing our own targets, but then also having the Iraqis, we were able to do a lot of the politically sensitive targets. We ended up hitting a ton of mosques.

We became the go-to for mosques. The first Fallujah, the hospital was used by Zarqawi and Al Jazeera basically as a propaganda center. They would broadcast out of the hospital and they'd bring in just mangled people that they were probably harming. And they were like, look what the Americans are doing in Fallujah. And they just broadcast it nonstop. So going into Fallujah the second time, the order was for us to get in there with the

Iraqis and have the Iraqis seize the hospital initially. So they couldn't use it as a media hub, but also so we could immediately put an Iraqi face on the operation. Let's let's go back to standing up this the commandos. Yeah, I mean what was Did those guys had any experience? Well, some of them had some of the Kurdish ones had and we were I'm probably alive today because of those guys Because basically this this wasn't the greatest plan ever but this is at the same time when ones had. And I'm probably alive today because of those guys. Because basically, this wasn't the greatest plan ever. But this is at the same time when Paul Bremer is saying that we're going to fire everybody

who's part of the Ba'ath Party and basically fired the entire Iraqi government, but especially the Iraqi military. And so we got a bunch of the anti-Saddam militias, which was mostly the Kurds, but there was a couple of Shia anti-Saddam militias as well. Unfortunately, those ones were heavily infiltrated by Iran, which we picked up on pretty early. But we had to bring these guys together and make them a cohesive fighting force. And we had all kinds of issues because we had interpreters that spoke Arabic, but a lot of our Kurds didn't speak Arabic.

And then we had Kurds from the PUK and the KDP. And so there was actually a dialect difference in Kurdish. So we had like these three-way translation issues. This is actually where like I had to really step up my language game, because we really didn't have interpreters initially. We had like one or two. And so I was literally doing pointy talky.

I could read a little bit of the Arabic from having poshtune, but I was just phonetically writing down basic stuff like left, right, stop, go, shoot, weapon on safe, that type of stuff. So they didn't have really as a cohesive fighting unit, they didn't have any combat experience. Some of the Kurds did. We ended up losing the PUK guys because they all got recalled to go back home and defend Salmaniyah and defend their home. But we kept the KDP guys luckily.

But we basically took those guys in two weeks, we put them through like a basic training, taught them how to shoot. And then right after that, it was go time. We were living in the middle of Baghdad, trying to build up our own little FOB slash safe house, trying to house the Iraqis, but then also going after targets and going after bad guys and running a lot of those guys as our human eyes and ears. How did you find out that there was Iranian influence within?

Because a lot of the Shia anti-Saddam militias, they are from Sqiri, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. And we had a couple, we had a couple like area study books, because this is, you know, the internet is still pretty primitive at that time. And you could just read the history of these groups and their armed wing was the Bader core. And these are the guys that fought against Saddam. They fought against Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war. That's why they were technically anti-Saddam. And so, you know, me being a 23 year old E5, I'm like, surely somebody knows that these guys are like pro Iran, which also hates us.

There's gotta be a reason why they're here. Somebody above me must have a master plan and I'm just gonna do my deal. But it wasn't until, because before we went, we did Fallujah in November, we went to Najaf in 04 and we damn near had a mutiny. We had all of our Shia guys realize we were down in Najaf. These guys were completely okay when we were hitting the Sunni mosques, and Baghdad are

hitting the Sunni mosques and Anbar, but they realized pretty quick that we were actually in Najaf to go after the Imam Ali shrine because Sadr had held up in there. Muqtada Sadr and his militia had basically strong-pointed the most sacred mosque in all Shia Islam and we're on the outskirts and basically our Shia guys figured that out and they were on the verge of running a coup against us, probably one of the fairly significant green on blue type of incident. Luckily our Kurds that were there, because they spoke the language, they were like, this is about ready to go down. And so we actually had to subtract a lot from our fighting force because we put a lot of those guys.

Hold on, hold on. What? I mean, how many of these guys are there? This is probably like 25% of our fighting force. So per company, we probably had about 25, 30 of them or that had some degree of ties. Some of them were full on card carrying members of Vodacore, of Skiri. Other ones were a little more subtle about it, but their loyalty was definitely to Shia Iraqis and not anybody else. How do you handle that? Well, at the time, we just had to get weapons away from those guys.

Then once we got back to Baghdad, we fired quite a bit of them. There was a few of them that said, hey, I want to stay working with you guys that hadn't violated that trust that we kept. But that was basically, I mean, honestly, it was a test. When we would go after, and this is why the Kurds were the guys we could trust the most, because obviously we weren't going after any Kurdish targets. But it was always a roll the dice. If we were going after an al-Qaeda in Iraq target, we had to take a look at who are our

Sunni guys. We had to know our guys. We had to say, okay, who are the Sunni dudes here and how do they feel about al-Qaeda? Or even moreover, more politically sensitive, how do these guys feel about the Ba'ath party? Because we were still at the time going after some Ba'ath party members. And that's where really the geopolitics hit us hit us in the face, you know, because I'd gone from just being focused on literally my sector of fire, you know, when we're doing direct action to having to know Iraqi politics down to this level.

And especially when we started talking to a lot of the Sunni Iraqis, they were just like, hey, you guys fire, Bremmer firing the entire bath party. Like, that's creating an insurgency right now. That's happening. And I know my team leader and our guys at the lower level, we are sending that back up and saying, hey, this is probably a bad idea. But obviously fell on deaf ears and the rest is kind of history, unfortunately. Wow.

Wow. I mean, how would those guys take it when you would secure their weapons? We did it. We did it hard and fast. We did it really fast. And I think a lot of them were eager to not be associated with us anymore because that was that summer there of 04, that's when everything against solder really kicked up. So whether we were down in the Jaff or whether we were out in Sadr city, we were going after some pretty senior ranking members of the Sadr's clergy, but then also just members of the Shia community.

And so that switched pretty quickly, like almost overnight that we really couldn't trust a lot of those guys. Man, and I don't need... And we were living in the Shia neighborhood. We were living in Kata Mia, which which has the Khatamiya shrine, which is a massive Sunni shrine. So we're our little team house, our safe house was in that area.

So we are definitely in hostile country. The other side of the river wasn't much better. It was on Amiya, which was one of Saddam's big Sunni strongholds. So we were kind of surrounded in every direction. But we were definitely having to navigate that that really opened up my aperture to like the human intelligence side of the war. Like the more that you can understand who these people are and the different groups to different friction points, like the better off and the more productive you'll be, but

you'll also be able to stay safe. Wow. That's a lot of moving parts there. Yeah. Holy. And that's your second deployment. Yeah. My first morphed into my second. So we left in like spring of 04, but we were right back in summer of 04,

doing the same mission. Damn. So just a couple of months off. Yeah. Yeah. So no, it was definitely, I went from thinking I was going to miss the war to like, we're doing direct action. We're kicking indoors. We're getting the fast rope. We're getting into little scrapes here and there to,

you know, when I was in the unconventional warfare portion of the Special Forces course, because that's so different than anything I had done in the military. I was like, this is pretty cool, but where am I going to be like wearing civilian clothes and like leading raids with like indigenous, does that really happen really happen? And then like I fast forward just a couple months. I'm like at a little safe house That's not much bigger than this studio and we had to do split team too. So my team got cut in half

We didn't have 12 full guys. We had about eight or nine so there's four of us living in this location with a company of Indigenous forces of different sectarian background that we had just given guns to essentially and trained and they were now our force and we're living in downtown Baghdad collecting our own Intel. And I was like, this is pretty sweet, man. Like this, if it ends here

and this is the only combat I ever get to do, this is like, I don't know, 100% more than I ever thought I'd even get a shot at. So I was like a kid in a candy shop, man. Right on. I was like a kid in a candy shop, man. Right on. Let's move into, let's not go there yet. So this is the 04, 05 timeframe.

Yeah, yeah. What happens when you go home from this one? It sounds like this deployment was a lot more kinetic than the previous. Yeah, man, I guess I was just really happy to be there. Like, I love SF and like basically our schedule was we'd go over, we'd go to war. And then I wasn't I wasn't married at the time. I didn't have a family.

Most of the guys on the team did. And so basically I could go to whatever school I wanted to go to. Like when we get back from deployments, because there wasn't a lot of competition for it because guys were smoked, they were kind of getting burned out. And so there's only a handful of us that were like, Hey, we want to go train, we're going to the school at school. And so it was like, then you could come home, go party, and then you could go to some schools and then you go to combat again. And I was like, man, fifth Group's like the greatest place in the world.

Like, this is awesome, I want more, you know? What schools did you pick? So I picked, right after my first deployment, I went to dive school, because it was a dive team. I'd already been to Prescuba when I was in in range of battalion, wanted to go there so I could solidify my place on the team. Because that's like the second check,

like you get your green bra, you get assigned to a team, and if you're on a dive team, because that's like the second check. Like you get your green bray, you get assigned to a team. And if you're on a dive team, you got to pass dive school. Otherwise they'll send you to a regular team. And so I was really wanting to get dive school done so I could solidify my position on my ODA. So I went to dive school between my first and second deployment. And then between my second and my third,

because I had been exposed so much to the human intelligence side of things. And like, that was really kind of where my head was going. Kind of had an epiphany on my, I think, second trip. I was like, man, the issue with this war isn't, can we kill the bad guys? Like, whenever we put the bad guys in time and space, like, we win, you know?

Whether it's us with our Iraqi commandos, whether it's, you know, whatever, the Rangers, the Seals, whoever, the Marines, the Kentucky National Guard like America wins The problem is finding these guys and also there was a massive amount of confusion too Because I just felt like we did not understand Iraq at all like all this nonsense We got told about number one weapons mass destruction But then all the crap we got told about like oh be greeted as liberators and you know We're gonna install this new puppet government Like all that just kept exploding in our faces. And so I was like, man, the challenge

in this war is number one, locating the enemy, like doing the intel work, running sources, doing surveillance, like that, that's type of stuff right there is, you know, premium skill set type of type of type of skills that you needed to be successful in that. In my second trip, we had a special forces warrant officer on my team who really made it his, you know, his role on that deployment was to map out J. Shalmati and to figure out where they were. And he was running a handful of sources and he'd bring me along every now and again

on source meetings. And I was just really impressed that like, you know, here we were just a couple of guys, you know, here we were just a couple guys, you know, with initiative, a little bit of money, and we were able to map out like where the vast majority of these bad guys were, whether it was Sodder's guys, or a lot of the folks that Al-Qaeda was kidnapping at the time, we were able to start running down a lot of those kidnapping cells. And that's because we are juiced into the population.

So after my second trip, I wanted to go to one of our human intelligence courses, so I could be qualified to do that. And that kind of set the trajectory really for the rest of my career in the military. And interesting. Did you ever get into the ASOT stuff? Yeah, exactly. That's what I went to. That's what that is?

Yeah, that's what I went to. And then much later on, I went to the farm. So, I mean, that's a pretty, that's a long pipeline. It's a long course, yeah. Can you go through, can you talk about that? I can try. Yeah, I mean, it's a school that teaches, you know, how to basically run human sources.

There's a lot of like lines there where what the CIA is authorized to do versus what, you know, soldiers are allowed to do. But yeah, without getting into too many details, you have to learn basic agent handling skills. You have to learn how to debrief people, how to spot whether or not they're lying to you to the best of your ability. But then also- How would you do that?

What are some of those tactics? What's that? What are some of those things you learned about? Yeah. What are some of those tactics? What's that? What are some of those things you learned about? Yeah, I mean people get some people get really into the the neuro linguistic programming like how people sit and like do they look up and laugh right and left do they rub that like With a whole different culture. I think that probably applies a lot to police officers in America where you're dealing with your own culture a Lot of trying to apply a lot of that to a foreign culture I think is very challenging unless you're deeply steeped in that culture.

So for me, it was always like check the checkables. If somebody's coming to you and they're like saying, hey, I am part of J.Shalmadi, I'm part of Al-Qaeda. Like, okay, can you prove to me like how are you a member of that organization? Just very basic like is this person who they say they are? Because if they can't positively identify themselves to you, or they can't really prove what they have access to,

whatever information they're going to tell you, it's either completely made up or it has an agenda of its own. So I think that's one of the, I think journalists have to do this as well. It's like, you know, what are your actual, you have all these things you want to tell me, but you need to explain to me how you actually have access to it.

So I think that's probably the most fundamental. There's a bunch of other stuff that we can do to check in on people, but I think that's probably at the very basic level, what we look for when we're meeting a new potential asset. I mean, that's a, I find that to be an interesting route for you because you're so into,

it sounds like you're so into the kinetic in your face action of being a SF guy. And then you take this, which is almost, I mean, it's under the radar, kind of behind the scenes, and you're dealing with people. Yeah, 100%. Oh, I was surprised too. But when I was over there, number one, just being impatient,

especially when we were doing unilateral direct action, we'd get intelligence from our intelligence cell. And I was always like, where does this mysterious intelligence come from? You know, we get it in the form of we think this bad guy's in this house and this bad guy's important because of X, Y, and Z. And I always had it in my head.

I'm like, how did we know that? You know, like, is this something that's really, really interesting and like sophisticated, you know? But then, you know, you hit enough dry holes, you're like, I don't think this is something that's very sophisticated. I think sometimes they're doing the best they can. But then it was really,

once we started working with the Iraqis, I was like, okay, the actual cheat code is understanding the culture and understanding the people. And the closer that you are to the people, the more that you're gonna be able to understand and the faster you're gonna be able to get to target, the faster you're gonna be able to produce your own targets. That's one of the unique things about special forces,

about a special forces ODA is that organically, we can do our own human intelligence, and then we can analyze our own intelligence, and then we can train up a force or we can prosecute the target ourselves. So we can basically do cradle to grave targeting. And that was what I noticed was different from us. Once we branched out, and we started doing especially the commando mission, I was like, okay, I can see our unique role here. Because you had everybody else, you had the Rangers, the SEALs, you had the Marine Corps Debt One guys, the Marsot guy, the initial Marsot guys, everybody was kind of competing for the same DA kinetic mission. They were competing for assets, they were competing for the targets, you know? And so it was like, now I see what our niche is here. We can do that, sure, but our niche is being down here

with the local population, mapping out the human terrain, but then also at the same time, being able to take our indigenous forces out there and prosecute the target at the same time. So I really liked that autonomy, and it put me much more in the driver's seat being a part of the intel side. Cause it was like, now I'm driving operations

because I'm the guy collecting the intelligence. Totally. I mean, you're self-sufficient at that point. Yeah. So was there any regret into kind of taking that route versus staying in a more? Not really, man. I really liked it because especially as the wars went on, it just seemed like we were

screwing up the end. Like we, the US government, like we were screwing up the intel piece. Like we, again, we were pretty good at hunting. Like once we got the bad guys in our crosshairs, like they were going to get dead or they were going to get a set of flex cuffs. Like that was just it. But could we find them? That was a big thing.

Also on my 2004 trip, that's when Zarqawi was doing a lot of the kidnapping and putting the beheading videos up. We had really good intel from one of our sources who basically was like, I know who the guy standing by Zarqawi is and we know where he is. But he's in this area where like you guys really can't get into. Because we had been training up a low visibility snatch team with our Iraqis, we were able to go get in garb and blend in and snatch this guy. He was part of this kidnapping cell out of his apartment. Probably the coolest

mission I've ever been on in my life. But basically, the big army wouldn't go into the area because it was in Abu Ghraib, just on the other side of where the prison is. They wouldn't go in there because they were just like, every time we go in there, we get stitched up by IEDs, like we're not gonna do it. We had moved so fast that basically we were just to the outskirts of the city by the time we even like called it back in,

because this is before people had constant conductivity in the team houses. So by the time we called in that we were going out there back to our headquarters, they were like, well, this pertains to hostage rescue. So we think that like one of the JSOC units should do it. And basically like my team leadership was like, yeah, we're less than a mile away.

We're just gonna go ahead and do this. Like, we'll let you know when it's done. And I was like, wow, because we're juiced into the human terrain, because we're running our own Intel, we're actually beating the guys who, in theory, are supposed to be handling this, the guys who were supposed to be one rung up from us,

we're actually beating them to target. And that didn't happen every time. Obviously, they were doing great things. But that was a big eye-opener for me, especially coming out of Ranger Battalion. I was like, because we're down here, because we're dealing with the populace who are running our own Intel,

we're beating people to target. And we're coming up, because we're dealing with the populace, we're running our own intel, we're beating people to target. And we're coming up with unconventional solutions. We're not getting on a helicopter every time and waiting for us to have a cordon force. We're sneaking into these places in whatever vehicles we can acquire off target. We were doing a lot of stuff. We were jumping onto bread trucks as well, broad daylight,

just places where the big army wouldn't go. And even a lot of the other units couldn't get into, but that's because we were living downtown amongst the populace. Let's talk about that operation from start to finish. Yeah. Yeah. So we were at our team house and one of our sister teams calls us up and says, hey, this team, our sister dive team was living

in a different part of Baghdad. They didn't have an assault force. They didn't have Iraqis. They were training up. They were doing doing basically unilateral intelligence operations. And they said, Hey, we've got a guy that knows where these American contractors and British contractors are being held because he was in the video. And he's he's identified one of the guys that was in the video.

And he knows where he is. And so basically, he knew, this source knew where one of the members of the beheading cell was, and he was in Abu Ghraib. So they briefed up the source, and they said, what we need for you guys is we just need a handful of people that can blend. They knew that we had been out doing a lot of reconnaissance in the area, because we recon all of our targets before we hit them in indigenous clothing. We had grabbed a couple guys here and there off the street. Like if you were doing a recon and you can make positive ID, why wait for that night? Why not just grab them now?

So we had done a little bit of that. So our sister team knew that we had that capability. So we loaded up a handful of our Iraqis and then four of us Americans that had been out and about in the city a lot. We went out there. We got the brief from them, from that team, and then we went to the local American FOB, where the closest big army unit was, just to tell them,

hey, we're going to go into this area. And what's your radio frequency? Can we call you if we get into heavy contact and that type of stuff? That regular army unit was like, you guys can go in there if you want, but we don't go in there. You know that, right? We're like, yeah, we're aware. We're like, what are the threats? They're like, yeah, we just get stitched up every time we go in there. RPGs, IEDs, these guys aren't playing around. We're like, all right, well, we're taking an Opal and a Scooby van, so I think we're gonna blend in.

And we, I mean, it was night, but it wasn't super late. It was like eight or nine o'clock at night because we needed traffic to blend in with. So if we would have waited till the typical two or three in the morning, like we usually do, there wouldn't have been anybody on the road. So we leave in our, one Opel in the lead and then a van trailing much further behind. I'm in the lead vehicle with one other American and other Iraqis.

We get there to the France and apartment complex that we're going into. We're looking for apartment number seven, I think it was. And so we get into where the apartment is and there's a bunch of guys just out there malingering, hanging out, young military-age guys. It's winter time too. So they've got, it looks like they're potentially armed, but we want to get in and get out as quietly as we possibly can.

Because our overall goal is to snatch this member of the beheading cell so that we can snatch him, we can get information on where the hostages are being held. So if we end up having to go loud and we end up killing the guy or whatever, then the hostages get moved and we got nothing. So our whole goal is to get in there as quietly as possible. So before we left, we basically said no English on target. And so we're all dressed up.

I had a Dish-Dash on with my M4 underneath it had one of those like breakaway Dish-Dashes Light skinned body armor underneath it and then a keffiyeh covering my face That's basically how all the Americans are dressed Iraqi to dress similar Luckily our Iraqis went up first made contact to talk to the guys that were out front they said something to the effect of We're with one of the other groups, I think Ansar Al-Suda, like we're with this group.

Don't say shit, just stand here. Like if you know what's good for you, just stand here. And so we kind of file past, we go, we know the guy's name, one of our Iraqis knocks on the door, the dude's mom like cracks the door, you know, and I'm pulling security in the hallway, just trying to make sure that nobody comes up the door. The dude's mom like cracks the door, you know, and I'm pulling security in the hallway just trying to make sure that nobody comes up the hall. And she cracks the door and our Iraqi says, hey, I think the guy's name was Ziad or Jabbar or something like that. Is Ziad here? And she's like,

no, he's sleeping. And he said, okay, well, I really need to talk to him. He kind of got her to crack the door open a little bit more, just enough for him to get his foot in. Right when he got his foot in, we silently flow in there. One of the Iraqis puts the hands over the mom's mouth. We come in and literally her son, this kid, is just asleep on a sleeping mat, on a bed, AK by him and a phone by him. He's a kid? He's, I don't know, teenager maybe. Maybe he's in his 20s, but young enough, young enough that he's still not married and living with his parents. It always

interests me how young some of these leaders are, you know, on the opposing side. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I was 24 at the time. And so he's probably probably looked like he was younger than me. But they're asleep. So we got him, we keep his mom gagged, grab him, and now we have to get out. And so our Iraqis kind of walked ahead. They made sure the hallway was clear. And so his mom's freaked out.

Was he combative at all? No, because we basically got him, like he got woken up with a bunch of guys of Kofi'as covering their faces in his face saying, just give us your hands. And he looked around and he was, he had a hand over his mouth, flex cuffed him, put another Cofia shirt over his cuffs

so people couldn't see that he was cuffed. That's what we didn't cuff him in the back, we cuffed him in the front, so he could kind of walk out like this. And so he walked him and his mom out and had the van come around, throw them in the van, hop in the car, and we get off target that way.

Had to drive them all the way back. At the time, we didn't know this, unbeknownst to us, there's a big fight going on between the unit that's charged with getting hostages and in our command. So we get off target, and this is before, we had very good radios. So somebody just calls my buddy on his little crappy Iraqi cell phone and is like, you guys got to take them to the airfield right now.

So we took the prisoners and dropped them off with, you know, the guys that were going after the hostages right away. Unfortunately we were, I don't know what happened there. But unfortunately we didn't get those hostages. Zarqawi ended up beheading them a couple of days later. I'm not sure if we, there was an argument like, should we keep them and tactically interrogate them ourselves? Because this is before the big lake.

This is before there was a lot of restrictions on us interrogating people. And so we definitely, our team wanted to keep them and interrogate them because we knew the target set. We had kind of been all over this. We felt that we could move faster. Above my pay grade, we lost that food fight and we ended up having to hand the detainees back over to the guys at the airfield and it kind of went from there. Who was it the airfield?

Was it? It was JSOC. It was JSOC? Yeah. I don't remember if it was, you know, if it was the army guys, the Navy guys, whoever it was, but it was JSOC command that our command was fighting with. This is like oh, for us, this is before everybody was fully integrated. Years later, there was just the SODIF and I think there was a lot more conductivity,

but there was still a ton of rivalry and there was not flat communication. I don't think our efforts were very synchronized in those years. How long after was it that the hostages were beheaded? It was a couple days later. Damn. Yeah, it was a couple days later. Yeah. So that whole summer and into fall of 2004, that was probably some of the biggest work

that we did. We were doing a little bit against the Shia militias, but Zarqawi kept grabbing Americans and Brits and beheading them. And so we were trying to run down Zarqawi's Baghdad-based kidnapping operations. And that was probably the hairiest mission that we did. We had quite a few other ones. We were out broad daylight,

Haifa Street, places where the army had like literally still smoldering Bradley fighting vehicles. They'd gotten lit up and we're out there in our little like Opals dressed up like Iraqis trying to find guys. Yeah. I mean, I gotta be honest, it's pretty heads up, you know, it's been a long time since I've been in a mission planning session,

but to pick up on the traffic patterns like that, that early, did we even have a curfew in place at that time? You know, to pick up on those traffic patterns, I mean, that's not going too late to blend in with the traffic. I mean, did you, going too late to blend in with the traffic. I mean, did you, were your guys' commandos advising you on how to dress and how to blend in? Yeah. So really early on-

And that's an art in itself. Oh, big time, man. Big time. So we got tasks, they just stand up commandos. And there was a guy on my team who'd been around for freaking out, a legendary guy. And he was really big on reconnaissance and he was really big on reconnaissance. And he was really big on like, unconventional solutions. That was his whole thing. He was like, there's a bunch of other people in SOF who get paid to kick indoors and shoot dudes in the face. Like, he's like, we can do that.

He's like, but if some other unit can do it, then it's probably not what we need to be doing. He's like, but we know languages. We know cultures. We know unconventional warfare. This is our lane. So early on, he had a vision of grabbing some of our Iraqis that had a little more aptitude, putting them through a more reconnaissance oriented selection process, and then also

picking them based on what part of the city they were from and then brought our picture what part of the country they were from. Really developed a good initial pool of sources, but those guys right off the bat were a godsend to us because they were the ones that were teaching us how to dress, traffic patterns, what do the Iraqi police notice on a vehicle that's going to get you burned? Because this is before Iraq really had a vehicle registration system. It got much more complicated. I know you guys probably dealt with this in GRS.

It got much more complicated later on with the whole license plate thing, but things were still much more Wild West back then. But just basically, how do you move through the sea that is Baghdad or greater Iraq without getting detected? And so those guys really helped us. And for me, it really opened up my aperture because I'm a six foot two white guy. And I don't think I could, I didn't at the time, I didn't think I could blend in. But then once you learn, hey, it's all about your demeanor. It's all about how you dress. It's all about your vehicle.

You know, it's about how big your signature is. You know, and the lower signature you have, the less gringos that you have in any location, chances are you're probably gonna get away with it. Chances are you're probably gonna blend in. And so that's, that was kind of the direction that we took that reconnaissance element. And that was really beneficial for us

in terms of gathering intel. But then also just being able to, hey, there's a whole bunch of tools that our government had when it came time to interdict targets. But we could offer an alternative solution usually, a lot more low visibility. How motivated were the commandoes, a lot more low visibility. How...

How motivated were the commandos, the Iraqi commandos that you guys were training? My experience with them was not great. Yeah, yeah. We were lucky, I think, because we kind of had the initial crop, and so we fired a lot of guys initially. because we kind of had the initial crop. And so we fired a lot of guys initially. But luckily, we had some former Iraqi special operations guys, like from Saddam's side, that we vetted to see if they were like war criminals or whatever. But like Saddam,

they fought a horrible war against Iran. So Saddam actually had a decent amount of combat experience in his own military. And so we brought in some of those guys and the Path Party was secular. These dudes hated the Islamists, they hated the Iranians, and they had a lot of combat experience. Some of them were a big help. The Kurds were also a really big help too, because the Kurds basically were like, hey, most of Iraq hates us and would kill us all. We're down here to partner up with the Americans to get a little payback and then also to make ourselves

very valuable to the Americans, which they did. But yeah, it was, as the years went on, later on I worked with some other like regular Iraqi army and they were not, I mean, and they performed as such too when ISIS came across the berm, you know, 2014, 2015, that $2 trillion military that we trained up through their guns in the dirt You know with the exception of the commandos the Iraqi Special Operations Forces They actually even when they even when the whole government of Iraq abandoned them when America had already left like they fought in Ambar against

ISIS they got left for dead So like one of the only one of the only things I think one of the only successes from Iraq that we can claim I think is standing up the Iraqi Special Forces other than that. I think a lot of the only successes from Iraq that we can claim, I think, is standing up the Iraqi Special Forces. Other than that, I think a lot of it was unfortunately a failure. Yeah. I'm with you. What is the, so there's a standard that you're not just taking Iraqis in and it's like, all right, you're here. Yeah. That's it. What would constitute somebody getting ejected from the program? Your typical soldier stuff was there, like if they just refused to at least even try, because I mean, Iraqis have a different culture than we do.

So like, we definitely tried the whole American style selection. And like, that doesn't really work with that culture. Like there, you know, you yell at them and tell them to run or do pushups or whatever, they're just going to kind of look at you like, why? You know, like I don't, like it just, you know, so you do a little bit of that. You wanna get the guys that aren't gonna quit, you know? But also we were looking for aptitude and you know, could we trust them too?

So really getting to know the guys and know where they're from, making them provide us with documentation that we could at least get some degree of vetting on. So we knew who they were. Cause I mean, Iraq was in shambles. We took out the government. And so it was like, what is a valid ID card here?

You know, like, so people could give you an ID card and like, we didn't really know if it was legit or not. We didn't really know who these guys were. And biometrics didn't come into play until years later. So a lot of it was like having a relationship with the guys and then making sure that we, you know, there was always two of us in a location or if there couldn't be two of us in a location because that happened quite a bit, we did make sure that we had some of the Kurdish guys with us.

And so really having the Kurds there. So they were your most trusted. Most trusted and they were our eyes and ears too. I mean, there were some of them that were so Kurdish they didn't speak Arabic, but most of them spoke Arabic and Kurdish. And so they definitely had their ear to the ground for us. And they had been briefed by their leadership that like keeping us safe was like in their national security interest. Like they needed to make sure that Americans felt safe around Kurds. So it was those guys definitely kept us alive in terms of like making sure that we didn't get

killed in our sleep, essentially essentially How would you recruit them? So the Kurds came to us basically from the the KDP from the Kurdish Democratic Party They gave us a lot of their their peshmerga their paramilitaries And so those guys came ready ready to fight because they were already Part of like an organic peshmerga unit and they came to us And so we would use those guys kind of as force and multipliers, we'd break them up, make them squad leaders, make them team leaders,

platoon leaders, that type of thing. But the initial recruiting came from like those anti-Saddam groups that we essentially just inherited either from the CIA, because the CIA had contact with a lot of the anti-Saddam groups, but they didn't vet them It was just like hey These guys are part of the Islamic Council that hates Saddam and they're gonna bring you 50 fighters

It's like it's I mean like literally when we first got the crop of Iraqi commandos Some of these guys thought they were joining like the new Iraqi soccer team like no joke Like they had track suits and like soccer balls and we're like, what do you think you're here to do? And they're like this is gonna be the new Iraqi national soccer team, right? You got to be, are you serious? I thought that was, uh, wow. No, that happened. Yeah. I mean, most of them, most of them knew,

but we did have, I don't know how many it was. It was like 10 or so. They were just like, we're not here for the soccer team. It's like, all right. Thanks for coming guys. We'll, we'll, we'll see you later. That's down the street. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Wow How about the I mean, I'm really interested in Saddam's former skies. Yeah, excuse me Saddam's former guys I mean, how does How do you trust that? It's tough

luckily, we had guys on my team and Some of the leadership in fifth group that had really, like these guys have been studying Iraq since 1991. And so there was a lot of them that were really skeptical initially on the narrative that the Ba'ath Party were in league of al-Qaeda. Because if you studied the Ba'ath Party at all, like they were secular, they were really against any kind of radical Islam. And so these guys actually had done their homework.

And so they saw potential in some of the former Saddam guys and some of the former Saddam special forces, some of the former Saddam intel guys. And the base, the little compound that we ended up occupying in Qadamia had been one of Saddam's Intel services headquarters. We were able to find old documents and we were able to start reaching out to people and through some of the other rackies we had and say, hey, we're open-minded. If these guys are willing to work with us, we're willing to work with them.

There was a lot of vetting that had to take place there, obviously, before trust was given. But there was a lot of them that, you know, sit down and talk to them and they would explain like, hey, I didn't like Saddam, but I love my country. They're like, I didn't support him, but we were at war if I ran, you know, we were also going after and making sure that al-Qaeda didn't get a foothold here before you guys showed up. You know, so we did find some people there that we could really work with and that actually had proper soldier experience, soldiering experience, and then proper intel experience too.

Man, that's got to be tough sipping through all that. It was. Did you get a lot of, were you later on, were you turned over the same guys over and over and over? Yeah. So for two deployments in a row, I worked with basically the same crop of commandos. And then subsequent years went back and worked the exact same program. I mean, some of the guys quit, some guys got killed here and there. So there was some turnover there.

But even up until the time we left Iraq the first time in 2011, I was working with some of the same Iraqis that I had worked with back in 2003. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. You know, it sounds like maybe you don't think we should have been in Iraq. I don't. Why is that?

No. I mean, I think the whole narrative that, you know, number one, Saddam had WMD, like that was completely and totally found to be inaccurate. And then to base the war off of that, but then also that Saddam has ties to al-Qaeda is just preposterous. I mean, Saddam was not a good guy. He was a very bad guy. He killed a lot of his own people, but he was threatened by radical Islam.

And so he was actually, his intelligence service was pretty brutal against radical Islam. I just think we were lied to lock, stock and barrel. I think our government squandered the will of the American people after 9-11. After 9-11, the American people were like, yeah, let's get it on. Let's go to war. Let's defend our country. We took down the Taliban and al-Qaeda pretty quick in Afghanistan. And line escapes to Pakistan,

and all of a sudden it's like, don't worry about that. We're gonna build a new government here in Afghanistan. Oh, and by the way, now we need to go to Iraq. And now we're stepping back and looking at it. It's like Afghanistan, especially the counterterrorism mission done by SOF, done by the CIA, nobody got rich off that. That didn't cost the government very much money at all.

You need a good proper invasion and occupation to really fill the coffers of the military industrial complex. And you look at a country like Iraq, if you're going to invade that man, you can bring everybody. You can have armored divisions there and your air package combined arms warfare with the military have been practicing for so long. I mean, it's just right there. It's way too tempting for them not to do it, which is I think tragic.

It was a big wake up call for me. I was like, man, because after my first year or so, I was a little confused. I was like, why are we bringing more? It seemed like we were always building new bases and bringing more people in. And I was like, why are we doing that? Do we really plan on, I thought we were only gonna be here for like another six months. Because even in 03, we were always building new bases and bringing more people in. And I was like, why are we doing that? Do we really plan on,

I thought we were only gonna be here for like another six months. Cause even at 03, we were talking about handing over the Iraqi government like in 04. And we caught Saddam or Delta caught Saddam in December of 03. And after that, I was kind of like, well, I mean, now what are we doing?

Aren't we leaving? But it never seemed like we were leaving. Why do you think we were there? I mean, I really think we were there because the military industrial complex saw an opportunity. They saw, hey, the American, America got attacked and we have a bunch of will from the American people. We have permission from the American people right now to go to war as long as we can tie it to terrorism.

And so I think they took that and they lied about the intelligence. And then the next thing you know, we're in Iraq. I think there might have been some, I think at the mid levels, I think there were some idealistic people there who thought that we could spread democracy through the barrel of a gun, who really believe in that neocon nonsense that says,

if we go over here and we install a government and we let people have elections finally, that deep buried within the soul of every single Iraqi and Afghani. There's a young Thomas Jefferson who just wants to spread liberty. I think there's some people who believe that because that was definitely the propaganda. But I do think at the end of the day, it was a math problem. It was like, hey, we have this massive military that takes up nearly $1 trillion of our budget. We need to justify that.

We didn't really get to use that in Afghanistan because that was just a bunch of dudes on horseback and the Air Force that got that done. Let's have a proper war. Let's use our actual military. And then once you get the proper war going, like the occupation, that's where the money is. Because even going in and toppling Saddam,

not really gonna get, people aren't gonna get rich on that. That's not a reoccurring investment. Nation building is a reoccurring investment. Propping up these governments and building these governments, security forces training and all that stuff, that is something that never ends. That can go on forever. Where do you think the big push came from? I think it just came from the moneyed interests in Washington DC.

At the time, you had the Cheney family deeply invested in Halliburton, you know, I mean, that's kind of what I'm getting. That's not kind of what I'm getting at. That's what I'm getting at. And then they put everybody who is part of polite DC society, everybody who's part of the establishment, they get a they get a taste of that too. They get a taste in terms of, you know, where the contributions are going on the political side.

But then they're also building out jobs. They're making people very, very wealthy. They're putting up new production facilities in different congressmen and senators districts. And so it's good for business, it's good for everybody. And I think an unfortunate thing, I think our generation, the GWOT generation deserves a lot of credit for being like

the first all volunteer force that fought our longest wars, the longest period of time our country's been at war, global war on terror, but we never stood up the draft. It was all fought by volunteers. And I think we deserve credit for that, but I also think overall that was a bad thing for the country because you could send the country off to war for 20 plus years. You could make a small group of people very, very wealthy based off that war, but only a very small fraction of the population is going to feel any effects whatsoever of the

war. It's like less than what, 1% serve in the military. And then who knows that less than 1%? You're talking about now two, maybe 3% of the American population. So it's like, this is kind of a money making scheme done on the backs of those who are true believers like us that volunteer to go over time and time again. How read up are you on Cheney's involvement with Halliburton? Fairly read up, I think. Yeah, it's been a while since I looked at it. I would love to dive into this.

So Cheney, for the audience, Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, was the former CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton ran, I believe, all logistics for both wars. Yes. Correct? And that's what I'm talking about, where the money is in the occupation. The money is in the nation building. So anybody that doesn't, anybody that was there that still isn't tracking all of the KBR,

because KBR was a subsidiary company to Halliburton, a big logistics company. Everything that you saw that had KBR on it, the shitters, the chow halls, the construction, the fuel, every piece of logistics in that war belonged to Halliburton, whose former CEO is Dick Cheney, who is now the vice president of the United States, who probably made the big argument on why we need to go in there. Yeah.

Cheney and all the guys that Cheney brought in to the Bush administration, all the Wolfowitz's, Douglas Fife, all those guys who made the case. These guys have been talking about taking out Saddam for years before Bush was even elected. I mean, since 91, that had been the big neocon dream. When you read a lot of what they were writing at the time before 9-11, they always said we didn't have the national will. And then bam, 9-11 happened. And they're immediately talking about Iraq. I mean, right away. I mean, the Taliban are a country, one country

over, they're in a very different country. They flee to Pakistan, a country we're still giving billions of dollars to, yet everybody is chattering about Iraq. And I personally think had Iraq not gone so disastrously, I think we would have gone into more countries. I mean, we did in a way. Later on, we went into Syria and Libya and Yemen and all that. But I think we would have gone in with a much heavier hand had things hadn't gotten so stalled in Iraq. Can you go deeper? When did you find out?

I mean, I didn't look into this until way after my career. Yeah. And that's when it hit me. It sounds like you were onto this immediately. I wasn't onto it immediately. I was like legitimately, I was legitimately believing that there was a bigger plan somewhere.

I mean, when the order came down to like fire all the bath party guys, for instance, that was the first time I saw like a major discrepancy between where I was in the ground truth and what was getting put out from higher. Because before that, I really hadn't thought that much of it. It was just like, hey, let's go get some bad guys. But then I was like, this is kind of weird.

Like everybody at my level sees this. I know that my team leader and the guys who were writing the reports to go up higher, I know they're saying things about this. This is common knowledge down here on the ground. What's going on? Why are they gonna fire all the bath party guys and create an insurgency overnight?

Like it's pretty evident to us. And then I still had a lot of faith in the system. And I was like, no, maybe there's a bigger plan here that I just don't see. And then as the deployments wore on, I was like, okay, there's definitely not a bigger plan that I don't see. So here's the question, are they incompetent at the top levels? Or do they just not care? And they're all making money here. And that was the last conclusion that I wanted to come to. Like, because morally, that was hard for

me, you know, it was like me and all my friends are over here and not everybody comes back from every trip. Like we're over here making big sacrifices. We believe in this. It'd be one thing if the top level folks just weren't getting all the information and they just didn't understand the ground truth. But after a while I was like, they just don't care. They don't give a shit about the ground truth.

What they care about is pumping more, more, more into Iraq. They want more bases, they want more troops and they want us to stay into perpetuity. They want us to stay here forever with a very, very lofty idea of turning this place into a Jeffersonian democracy. And that, to me, I was just like, no one actually believes that. No one believes that someday this place is going to be like Geneva. There's no possible way they could believe that. But the current status quo of us basing thousands, hundreds of thousands of troops here, that is really good for business.

And that really started to make me furious after a while. But we still had all these different problems that we had to deal with because by us being there we are creating more problems. We fire the entire bath party, we radicalize all the Sunnis, we heavily empower the Shias. Well, that's how you get ISIS. But now we have to go deal with ISIS because we created that. We ended up right on Iran's border. The Iranians have been at war with us since 1979.

Now we're dealing with EFPs. Now we're dealing with the Iranians. It's just like this never-ending self-licking ice cream cone of perpetual war. And again, there's a small percentage of the population that's shouldering the burdens. And there's another smaller, more elite percentage of the population that's making a ton of money off this. But then the majority of Americans,

they just have no idea. But fast forward 20 years and we lost somewhere between six to nine trillion in those wars, and what have we gotten for it? Nothing. Nothing. Yeah. We're far worse off. A veteran suicide epidemic? Veteran suicide epidemic. We've got a fiscal crisis because we still are addicted to perpetual wars. Maybe it's not a kinetic hot war, but we still want to send foreign aid every single place.

We still want to be the security guarantors of all of Europe, of the high seas. That's still the American mentality. Meanwhile, we came to secure our own border. The last priority is always America. I think it's important to talk about this because not many people do talk about it. Not many people understand it even when you bring it up. They can't wrap their head around the fact that their vice president sent us to war

for the betterment of himself and for Halliburton, KBR. And here we are on the verge of three wars. I guess not on the verge, two are already happening. Yeah. The conflict in Israel, obviously Ukraine, and then China's about to take Taiwan. Yeah. And who the hell knows what else is gonna kick off,

but it makes, I feel like Americans need to be more educated now than ever because- 100%. Because the fact that the, I mean, it's, there's no ifs, ands or buts about it. The government has been lying to us for a very long time. They're gonna continue to lie to us. You can't ask questions.

Right. If you do, you'll immediately be labeled, you know, either a far right conspiracy theorist or, you know, a neo-Nazi or Putin supporter or whatever. But that's the scam. And if you look at the rhetoric that's being used right now, in particular with the Ukraine war, it's the exact same rhetoric they used in the lead up to the Iraq war.

There was a handful of courageous Republicans and Democrats out there who eventually were almost ostracized from their party who were against the Iraq war. And those guys were called like, do you want the terrorists to win? Do you hate America? Like the surrender Republicans, the traitor Democrats, like that they were called all the exact same thing. Man, like I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I know pattern recognition. And like, those guys were right, they were ultimately vindicated after they were basically politically destroyed. So not being able to see those patterns now, it's very alarming to me that we're falling for all the exact same tricks.

Unfortunately, as disastrous as the war on terror was for our country, what's happening now in particular of Ukraine, that could be much worse because now we're potentially getting into a nuclear exchange with Russia, potentially a World War III type of scenario. There's a lot of people right now who are saying, oh, that'll never happen, that'll never happen. That'll never happen. It's like, well, we are bragging about the fact that we're supplying the Ukrainians. We're bragging about the fact that we're providing

intelligence that's being used to kill Russian military members. We have members of our political class that are saying that they want regime change in Russia. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff just the other day said, yeah, we might be getting to a point pretty soon here where we could put advisors, American advisors into Ukraine. It's like, well, how did Vietnam start? How did all these little periphery wars?

I've been an advisor before. I was an advisor in Yemen. We were at war. That's exactly how we get into a kinetic war. So we're going to risk a nuclear war right now because the war propaganda is so compelling. It's absolute insanity. People have to realize how big of a business, how big of a racket war truly is.

I'm not like a peacenik that's going to say that we should never go to war for any reason. Quite the contrary, I just don't want us getting involved in any more stupid wars. Stupid wars are big business in DC and all that machinery in DC is built around foreign aid and foreign wars and the American people, they hardly realize it. But that's the reason why the priority is always sending money overseas. But the second you say, hey, I want to repair a bridge in my district. Hey, I want to do something about all the people that are addicted to fentanyl living on the streets of my district. That's why they get table scraps because the only time that Congress will buckle down and actually

Work in a bipartisan fashion and like I don't know work really hard work overnight. It's to send a hundred billion dollars overseas We just saw that a couple weeks ago working all night. We're gonna send a hundred billion dollars to you name the country We're probably sending the money. Don't worry about our border still wide open I can't even I can't even keep track of the, I look at the news cycle, not very often, but I see it through social or people talking or what, I don't watch the media anymore,

but it's 100 billion pack, just like you said, we sent another 100 billion over there. And it's like, is that the same one that we were talking about two days ago or is this another one that happened there. And it's like, is that the same one that we were talking about two days ago or is this another one that happened already? And I can't keep track of it. I mean, I think it's important for people to hear this stuff because your sons and daughters are gonna go to war again.

And it's gonna probably be for some bullshit reason to make the elites richer. And I mean, look at the recruiting crisis that we're having right now. We can get into why that's happening. We have a recruiting crisis right now. That's out in front. Everybody is seeing that right now. That's in the news. But we're also provoking a war on multiple fronts. So just because we haven't had a draft in any of our lifetimes, that doesn't mean people still don't register for selective service. People still register for selective service. Like people will say, hey, he's crazy, he's fear-mongering. I'm just saying look at the facts. Look at how many conflicts we have brewing,

plus our recruiting crisis here at home. Easily the law of unintended consequences, like we could get into a shooting war in one of these theaters pretty easily. I mean, Biden thought it'd be a great idea to go build a pier off the port of Gaza, and they've already taken rocket fire there with American soldiers, like getting in between the Israelis and the Palestinians. About the dumbest thing, you can do all kinds of dumb stuff in the Middle East,

and we've done most of it, but this has gotta be the dumbest thing that we've done, is trying to get in between the Israelis and the Palestinians and their conflict, and we're doing it. And so there's all these different pressure points where if one thing happens that we're not anticipating, somewhat of a black swan event, we could easily be in a war and you've got a depleted military.

And so you're completely right when you say it could be your sons and daughters, because there's people who are like, oh, my kids aren't going to join the military. Like, no, they're still registering for the draft, aren't they? Like, that's the logical conclusion to the direction that we're heading in right now, unless we make some serious changes. I mean, it's already, I've already heard rumors that fifth group is going to be sending guys to Iraq because of the escalated situation with Iran now. Yeah. I mean, most Americans aren't aware of it. Our troops in Iraq and Syria have been attacked 150 plus times by Iranian proxies. And when we say Iranian proxies, we've got to be clear on what that is.

That's the Iraqi government that we pay. Because after the Iraqi military, we spent two trillion on, surrendered to ISIS, we had to go back in there in very short order and stand in military back up again. And guess who filled the breach? The Shia militias controlled by Iran did, and the Iraqi government's controlled by Iran. So these Iranian proxies that are attacking our troops are 100% funded by the United States of America.

We're funding the guys that are attacking our troops. And so it's like, well, then why do we leave our troops there? And that's always been my question. I think we should have had them out a long time ago. We can get into it when we talk about my late wife, but she should have been out of Syria because Trump gave the order to get those guys out of there. And then you have the administrative state dragging their heels and desperately trying to keep us in these conflicts. It's the exact same thing we see now. We've got troops that are out there vulnerable under fire and Washington, DC refuses to withdraw them either because they're ignorant and scared or because they're like, well, worst case scenario, some troops get killed.

Then we got to double down. We'll send in more troops, build some more bases. That's all the more justification to stay we beat ISIS, but now we can't leave now. We got to fight these Iranian proxies Infuriating yeah Let's talk about your wife. When did you guys meet? So the first time we met briefly met for 10 minutes was in 2007 actually met her at the the Baghdad in 2007, I actually met her at the Baghdad, Ville, the area where all the different intelligence agencies are. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you probably know it.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I attended a targeting briefing that she was giving, actually on an Iranian militant we were trying to track down. So I met her there for five, 10 minutes and chatted with her and had every intention of coming back and chatting her up some more. But the war moved fast and she moved on to a different location. and chat up with her and had every intention of coming back and chatting her up some more.

But the war moved fast and she moved on to a different location. And I didn't see her again for several years. I didn't run back into her until 2013. Who was she working for? So she was working at the time she was on an individual augment. So she joined the military right after 9-11, had an act for languages, went to DLI for Arabic, really excelled. And then they sent her to Fort Gordon just to translate stuff.

And she was like, this is not what I joined for. I want to go to war. And they were like, you want to go to war? Boy, do we have a war for you. And so they put her on the plane to do an individual augment. She ends up at Siege of Soudaf, so working for special operations. And then she gets put down from Balad to Baghdad to work in the inter-agency, inter-intell-agency

environment there in the Ville doing targeting. And her name? Shannon Kent. Shannon Kent. Shannon Smith at the time. Shannon Smith. Yeah. Let's take a quick break.

And when we come back, we'll just pick up right where we're at. Yeah. Well, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll just pick up right where we're at. Yeah. Look around. War, inflation, recession. Did you know that many experts call gold the everything hedge? Gold often goes far beyond hedging against inflation or the stock market. It can potentially guard against today's wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Not to mention the great economic danger of a recession lurking. That's why gold

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Policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company, not available in certain states. Price is subject to underwriting and health questions. All right, we're back from the break. We just got introduced to Shannon. Let's talk about her. Yeah, so native New Yorker, she was inspired to join because of 9-11. So her dad and her uncle were both ground zero first responders. Really?

Yeah, her dad's a career New York state trooper. And then her uncle was a New York City firefighter. So the attacks happened. She had just started college. And her father and uncle are both down there at ground zero, trying to dig deep a lot of the rubble for the first three or four days. Man. Yeah.

So after that, her and her brother, you're younger than her, both do a lot of Americans did at the time. They went and found a recruiter, said they wanted to serve. So she knew she could learn languages pretty easily. That was like her passion. She taught herself Spanish and French and just had that mind that automatically gravitates toward languages.

So she went to all the different recruiters and said, Hey, I know I can learn Arabic, like put me in. And so the Navy was the first one that said, Hey, we'll, we'll send you to DLI. If you can pass the test, we'll send you there. And so she, you know, smoked or whatever it's called, D lab, um, scored really high, great aptitude. So signed Navy contract, went to DLI, defense language Institute in Monterey for say a year and a half to learn Arabic.

So 18, 18 months I think, the initial Arabic training. So came out of that, she scored really well, but she never liked doing the easy thing. She had a passion for like specifically like the Iraqi dialect because you know like there's standard Arabic and then there's like Iraqi, there's all the different dialects. So the Iraqi dialect is pretty challenging because it's so different than your traditional modern standard Arabic. So she latched onto that pretty quick and then volunteered for a deployment right away. And then her basically just going from being an individual augmentee to working at CIGISODIF to working down there at the VIL, she just kept kind of shining and making herself value

added that she eventually ended up on that same deployment. She ended up getting brought right down to Biop Airfield to work with the NSW task force that was down there because they wanted to bring in more Intel people closer to them because they had the same frustrations that I had like, hey, we're not getting Intel fast enough. So they started home growing some of their own Intel capability. They brought her down there. And then on that deployment, she got an invite to go try out for the special reconnaissance teams for NSW because they had just opened that up to non-SEALs and then to women as well. So she was in one of the first classes for the special reconnaissance troop. Wow.

That let women in. What year is this? So that would be 07 or 08. Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. And so you guys met in 07. Yeah.

And then reconnected at what point? 2013. We both ended up going to Selection 4 and getting invited to the year-long training course to be in a pretty unique special operations unit. Combines intelligence folks with special operators. Still one of the few units that not a lot is known about, so I'll be a little bit cagey and not talk too much about that unit.

It's kind of funny because when you go and you do the, for the book, you do the publication review stuff. Yeah. And the CIA is pretty cut and dry. They're like, hey, you say what you did at the CIA. They gave me one or two things I couldn't say. And then DOD is pages of don't say this, don't say that. Yeah, but we both ended up there at that unit.

And so we both recognized each other right away. Can I ask questions about that unit? Sure. Yeah, yeah. How did you get recruited into that? So I was fortunate that on one of my deployments, I ended up working with them. So, I kind of got exposed to what they were doing. And I already kind of gravitated towards that Intel world.

And so, that's kind of where my head was. And I wanted at some point, I'd kind of set my sights on going to the agency next. Again, because I was interested in the Intel side. But also, I kind of wanted to be like a voice of reason, I guess, the way you could put it, like somebody who had been there on the ground to actually like give real information to decision makers so that we didn't ever get involved in a disaster like Iraq again. That was kind of like my long-term goal.

But I had an opportunity to work with some guys from that unit and they had a pretty unique mission at the time. They were part of one of the task forces that was specifically going after just the foreign to work some guys from that unit. And they had a pretty unique mission at the time. They were part of one of the task forces that was specifically going after just the foreign fighters that were coming across the Syrian border. My team was on the Syrian border, so we were working on that 05, 06 timeframe.

And a couple of guys came out and they had a lot looser rules than we did. And they had a lot more money than we did. And they were like, yeah, but we're in the army. And I'm like, wait a sec, like, so who are you? Cause I was like, man, I thought I knew everybody. Like who are you guys? And they wouldn't even tell me, you know,

and they're like, hey, email, email this guy when you get home and we'll talk to you later. No kidding. Yeah. I didn't know what that unit was until way after I was out. Yeah, it's not, we don't really advertise. I mean, the unit doesn't advertise that much. They kind of find who they want.

I think we've done some more blanket emailing of the whole Special Forces community or the whole NSW community now to kind of get more guys because it's cool to have a super secret unit, but you still need people to know to come to try out for it. So I think they're a little bit more upfront nowadays about getting guys to come try out for selection, but I didn't hear much about it at all.

So that was my first exposure. But really I didn't plan on going to the unit until we pulled out of Iraq the second time. Because I had always just wanted to stay on an ODA, loved it. I went from weapons to Intel and then I became a warrant officer. And so as we were leaving Iraq, I was like, crap,

now are we going to enter the peacetime army now? You know, I was like, am I gonna have to go sit in a staff somewhere now that I'm a warrant officer? And luckily that unit takes warrant officers, like you can go try out. So I was like, you know what, I wanna stay in the game, I'm gonna go try out for this unit now. And so luckily Shannon had done three Iraq deployments

and she had just done an Afghanistan deployment too He says she and she had tried out for the unit. So we ended up in the same Same class. So would you guys have been doing or maybe we're doing the same job description? Well, her job is a more technical than mine because she had the significant qualification She had the language skills and then Shannon was also a qualified humanter So she she was proficient in all three of those. Can you talk about, can you go into a little more detail on human for the audience? Yeah, so she was a really, if you look at her Navy job, it's a crypto linguist technician

and then interpretive, which means her entire job is cryptology. So intercepting signals, radio signals, cell phone, cyber, there's a cyber aspect to it as well. So she was trained in that. But then she had the interpretive, she had the language skills as well. So she specifically targeted in the Middle East, Iraq, those types of Arabic speaking countries. That was her target language.

So SIGINT, for those listening that don't know what that is, that's Signal Intelligence. Yeah, Signal Intelligence, exactly. Yep. So that was supposed to be her main job. When she was over in Iraq, because of basically demand, she ended up just kind of fumbling her way into source operations because she understood the Iraqi dialect so well that a lot of the guys down there at the NSW task force that she was working with, so the Intel Enablers and some of the SEALs that were ASOT guys, they realized their TERPs sucked

because we had TERPs from other parts of the Middle East. They're having a really hard time. And so they were constantly having Shannon check those TERPs work. And so she ended up getting in on the human aspect really early on. And then this is around the same time, I think, where as a fighting force, we were having an epiphany that there was a whole other side of the population that we weren't talking to, because the Middle East is just so segregated between men and women.

We were missing the entire, like, literally female perspective. And women in that culture aren't really regarded as anything, but at the same time, they're everywhere. So like you have women that are in the room with all the same bad guys we're going after. And so Shannon started working with a lot of the women's sources because the women's sources wouldn't come in and they wouldn't talk to men.

So human, for those that don't know- Yeah, human intelligence. Human intelligence. Yeah. So that's how she sort of, she found her way into that. And then between one of her deployments ended up going to one of the human courses to be officially certified and blessed off on to run source operations. So you guys are at selection

for a special missions unit. I can't say the name, I won't say the name, but I mean, from a, I mean, dude, you saw her again. I did, you, dude, you saw her again. I did. I mean, so what's your pickup line? It was pretty wild. Well, she helped me. She, everything with the unit is very cryptic.

And so you go through like a 40 day selection process, which is pretty wild onto itself. And then you go back to your unit and you get orders to come to the year long training and they basically give you like this super random email that's just like show up at this parking lot at this time wearing business casual or something like that. So you're like, okay, you show up

and you're hanging out in this parking lot. There's a couple of guys I recognize from my selection class that are there. And there's some other people who maybe were in a class before us or behind us that are there. And then Shannon pulls up and we make eye, make us like out of a mood, we make eye contact. We both, like kind of, I think we recognize each other

and she's looking at me and she backs into this other car. She like taps the fender of her car in another car. And she's like, I just go over there and I'm like, hey, I saw that car jumped out and bit your bumper. Like that was my, that was my pickup line there, you know? And then we both realized we were who we thought we were. And we were both still in training. So we had a lot going on for that first year.

But from that moment on, we were pretty much inseparable. Do you want to talk about, can you talk about the selection at all? Not really. There's all the typical stuff that you'll have in a Ruck-based selection. So they also kind of follow the same pattern that like SFAS or Delta Selection follows.

Oh, good. Where they're seeing how you perform individually. I'd say this one, you're even more isolated then because they're recruiting for, they're recruiting from a population of soft guys that have already kind of been tested. You've already kind of have to have a decent reputation in your community to get the invite.

So they know that you can kind of perform well in a typical team environment. And so they take you and they're gonna isolate you and they're gonna have you do a lot of the typical land nav stuff. But then there's a ton of other challenges that even with like some of the best intel going into it, like you just don't anticipate.

I don't want to ruin for anybody. But I was, by the time I went, I had been in the army for like 12 years, been in combat, been around pretty much every unit here and there. And there was stuff in that selection process that I was like, I did not see that coming. Like that was really surprising and very well done too.

So a lot of resources go into it. They challenge you in a bunch of different environments. And it's 40 plus days, and you don't really know when. They give you a really, they give you like a week timeframe of when it'll be done. They'll be like, yeah, you can tell your unit, you'll be back between this day and that day. Wow.

Wow. Yeah. What's the attrition rate like? It's pretty big. It's pretty big. There's classes where there's like one or two guys that make it. My class wasn't that way.

I think we had 10 of us that made it through. It's kind of like a scale thing. You go to a standard military base initially and that's where you do all your PT tests, psych eval, and that's one of the first places where they're actually gonna put you like, they're gonna polygraph you as well because anybody that's in the unit has to have a TSSEI. And so there's a

lot of guys that the psych eval and the poly they're gone, you know, and then they take you off to a much more isolated place. And then they take you to another isolated place. And by the time you're all done with it, it's kind of interesting, you don't know how many guys make it through your selection class. Because of the way they end selection. There's like a final event you do and then you go before a board and then you just kind of get put on an airplane. And so you don't really know. They shuffle you from the board to the airplane.

Basically. Yeah. Holy shit. You know, like there's one other guy maybe that you're in the van with and they also, you also don't really introduce who you are fully. This sounds like the place I always wanted to go. That's what I said.

I've been looking for this place forever. Yeah. It's a very unique place. It takes a long time to get into it, but it's a really cool place. How long does it take to get into it? Well, the selection process is 40 days, and then it's about a year of OTC. What's the attrition rate once you get into the OTC portion? It's still fairly high.

Well, at that point, they know you pretty well based on your past reputation and based on your performance and selection. But you still lose about half your class, typically, in that. Because the double-edged sword, I think of recruiting from an experienced pool is you get a lot of people who wake up one day and they're just like, wait a sec, I'm already a green bray.

I'm already a ranger. I'm already a seal. I'm already a, you know, Marsauk. Like I don't need this shit. I can go back to my other unit and be just fine. And so there, there's a lot of guys who self-select because it's a year long, I mean, you know, staring down 12 months of being a student in a fairly high stress environment.

Interesting, interesting. Can I ask you what the job, what is the job description? So the job description, it's basically special reconnaissance, but a broad aperture of special reconnaissance. So basically anything that requires providing decision makers with a wide variety of options. So you're kind of getting way ahead of where the current Department of Defense might be.

And you're looking at a lot of potential threats out on the horizon. And you're saying, hey, we're going to go get fidelity on these things. We're going to track down these future bad guys, or maybe bad guys that we're technically not at war with, but they're doing bad things against the country. And we are going to be able to provide a target packet

to decision makers and say, this is who this human is. This is who this person is, this is his network, and here's the following ways that we can get rid of them. Like there's a kinetic option, you can drop bomb on them, you can send in one of the other units to come kill the guy, or we have a wide variety of other options, or here's how we can continue to collect on the threat they pose to the country. So it's a broad spectrum of special reconnaissance. There's also a more traditional role too of being the reconnaissance element ahead of the other special missions units

that kick indoors and do hostage rescue. A lot of them have kind of grown their own indigenous reconnaissance capability within their units, their own indigenous reconnaissance capability within their units, their own organic capability. So I would say the unit probably is much more strategic in the types of targets that they're looking at. But it's also, you kind of are working really for the Secretary of Defense and the National Command Authority. So anywhere there's a gap, a lot of times in Intel that will get thrown right in the unit's lap and they'll say, you know, kind of figure it out. Is the, I mean, this is a very individual, very, this isn't a team environment. Sometimes it is, but when we're talking team,

three, four guys, maybe, but a lot of but a lot of individual stuff where you're augmenting maybe another unit, another task force, or working for the agency, one of the other intel agencies, or you're kind of on your own. The whole, I'd say the foundation of our selection process and our training process is you're on your own. It's just you, you and your wits, and very little guidance.

It's just you, you and your wits and very little guidance. And so you and Shannon both, you both, I mean, you did the whole year long course together. We both ended up there. So we are in a little bit different pipelines because yours is more Intel related. There was some stuff that we would do together. And then the operations side, ours is probably a little more, I'd say like hands on. So yeah, we're there together. So a lot of the combined exercises and stuff we did together. So how did your relationship develop? Fast, because I mean, we were busy with the course.

So it wasn't like your typical, let's go out and have coffee, and then we'll go out and have dinner later on. And then, you know what I mean? There wasn't like that real gradual, it was, we have a little bit of time, you know, you get in the course of the year, there are portions of the course where you're living at somewhat of a classroom, like regular schedule. So, you know, go out for dinner or whatever.

But I mean, I think we fell in love pretty quick. I mean, so we both realized we had found who we wanted to be with pretty fast. So it was, a lot of it was like, hey, when we get out of this and we can actually have a life, like where do we wanna live? What do we want that life to look like?

So a lot of future planning. But yeah, it definitely wasn't your typical courting cycle. What does the, I'm just curious what life's like between a married couple that is That's in a unit like that, you know, I mean what's the deployment schedule like I would imagine that's not even us Is it even a schedule? Not really at the time we tried to get that's a even as I was leaving the unit They were attempting to get some sort of a normal cycle, but it's just hard with the nature of that work.

So it's pretty intense. I mean, both Shannon and I found it, I think, pretty refreshing. We could be honest with each other. I mean, because it's hard enough being in a relationship when you're in the military and the other person's not in the military. But then when you take it into this murky Intel world where you really can't talk about a lot of what you're doing and you most certainly can't communicate a lot of the times,

I think both of us found it much easier that we could just be upright and forthright with each other about what we were doing. We both had all the clearances. We were both read on the stuff. So it was like, OK, you're going here. I'm going there. So it was much more cut and dry.

But there was a lot of exterior demands on both of us. It's definitely a high stress unit. I mean, at the time to me, it just felt normal. And I think it felt normal to her because that's what we were... By the time I met her, she had been to war four times, all the special operations. She had seen some shit herself. But we were both pretty committed to what we what we're doing. So what kind of shit? So she was she was really deep in the Intel world.

So she had ran a lot of sources. She'd been on a lot of targets too. So she was actually out there going on targets with the seal platoons. And then also elements of the task force pretty early on. Before the whole female engagement thing, she was one of the females they'd bring out on target to bring in to question the women. So there's a scene in the book where literally the guys just shot up a whole bunch of dudes

and there's a bunch of screaming women and they're just like, hey, Shannon, get in here. Tell them to calm down and then figure out where our next target is. How'd she handle that stuff? Shannon could compartmentalize things very, very well. Very business focused. She realized it was a job and for her, I mean, she really just wanted to be in the fight and providing as much support as she could. Like she really felt like, hey,

our entire country is engaged right now. You know, her dad and her uncle were there at ground zero. And so she was always, I think like a lot of us wanted just to do her fair share, you know, for her, it was never like, I need to be here because I'm a woman and you guys should accept women. It was like, hey, I can speak Arabic. Like, and if you guys need me to come on target to speak Arabic, if you need me to sit here some headphones, intercept signal, like whatever, I'll do what you guys need. But I want to I know I can contribute. So put me in a position where I can contribute the most.

What was it about her that drew you to her? Man, you know, when you find your person, you find your person. I think that's a lot of it too. A lot of it's that what you just can't explain. You look at someone in the eye and you're like, oh, okay, this is it. But really, it was that understanding. It was the understanding of like, we have a mission and our role here is to go to war for our country.

Because, you know, by the time I met Shannon, I was in my 30s, so I'd been in other relationships and stuff, and I just had a hard time, like a lot of women, and rightfully so, just didn't understand that. They're like, what's wrong with you? Like, how many times do you need to go over? Like, are you a crazy person? You know?

Yes. Yes, I mean. I am. I don't think I am, but apparently. Yeah, so I mean, it was refreshing to meet somebody who basically had the same ideology that I did, where she was just like, no, this is what we're, until this is over, this is what we're going to do. We're going to serve and we're going to, we're going to go and fight. And then her also, I think, just really having a fascination with like

the intel side of understanding Iraqi culture, in particular Iraq, we really initially bonded over Iraq, because I initially bonded over Iraq because I spent a lot of time there, she spent a lot of time there. So it was just a place where we had both spent a ton of time. So it was very much part of who we were. But I think just that commitment, I think the way that we were both just kind of synced up on those values, I think really made us compatible for each other. How long was it before you guys got married?

Little over a year. You got married after a you guys got married? Little over a year. Yeah. You got married after a year. We got married after about a year, yeah. Yeah, so we, yeah. So basically you did the course together. We basically did the course, got married, yeah. And then you got married right after.

Yeah, yeah. And so in a unit like that, is everybody, is everybody in one centralized location? Are they all over the place? All over the place, man, all over the place? All over the place, man. All over the place. The unit's a funny place. I've ran into guys who were there,

and we were there at the same time, and maybe we have some mutual friends, we can play that game. But if you didn't go to the course of somebody, and you didn't do a deployment of somebody, it's completely conceivable that you two would just never see each other, just because of compartmentalization or just the op tempo.

Wow. Yeah. So we both worked in different locations. You both worked at different locations. Yeah. Well then how does that work with Mary life? Well, she was up at Fort Meade and I was kind of in the DC metro area. So we initially lived in downtown DC before we had kids, which was fun. It was kind of before DC, the bottom fell out. So it was neat living there.

But then once kids came along, we got a place just outside of Annapolis to be closer to her work, because I was I was gone more than she was. OK. Yeah. Was she gone when you were at home? Sometimes. Yeah. How was that? How was it being, I mean, what's it like being the spouse that's home

and your wife's overseas? Yeah, no, that's weird. That's different. If we were both deployed or whatever, like it didn't, it's just what we were doing. But she didn't deploy once we had kids until she went to Syria in late 2018. So for the most part, for most of our married life when we had kids, it was her at home and I was deploying.

She was still working at the NSA, so she was still doing pretty vital stuff for the country. But she was the one staying at home up until her final deployment. How much time were you guys getting together face to face? Now that I've been a normal person, not very much. Now that I have that perspective, at the time, it's just like, it's your world. We knew a bunch of other couples that were either in the intelligence community or in the unit as well. And so it was just like normal, you know, but not a lot.

No, not a lot at all. I mean, if we got, you know, two weeks for both of us to be home, that'd be like a big deal, you know. How many years did this go on? Three or four years. Three or four years. Yeah. And that was just a schedule, you know.

What's a deployment like? Do you even call it a deployment at that unit or is it just quick trips? Yeah, I call it a deployment. Yeah, I mean, I basically, for the most part, I was doing traditional warfare stuff or traditional war zone stuff. So I went back to Iraq when the ISIS thing kicked back off again, went back to Yemen. So yeah, still deployments. Went back to Yemen. I did, I went back to Yemen in-

Hold on, when did you go to Yemen the first time? First time I went to Yemen was 2010 to 2011. Not the whole year, but for about like seven months. In SF? Yeah. I didn't even know SF was there. Yeah, we actually had a really cool mission. I mean, this was when we were attempting

to prop up the Saleh regime. And so they had basically sent CENTCOM was like, boy, those Iraqi commandos sure work good. Like, let's stand up some Yemeni commandos. Which, it's a whole nother story there. So we were working with Saleh's special forces, but we were also doing basically atmospheric collecting intelligence.

It's interesting now with everything that's happening with the Houthis, because at the time we were trying to get Sala to focus on Al Qaeda. And Sala was like, the Houthis are the real SOBs. You guys need to be worried about the Houthis. And we were like, nah, the Houthis aren't that big of a deal. Now it's like, yeah.

But I really enjoyed my time in Yemen because we had basically a lot of autonomy. I mean, we were living in the middle of the city, in a house, like there was still, you know, you were there. There's still good freedom of movement. It was still dangerous. So it was kind of exciting. There was definitely bad guys there.

I love all the places I worked. I loved working in Yemen. Same here. I think Sana'a is a beautiful city and you can go like wander around the old city, like all the history there. And Yemenis are really, at the time were really friendly. I think that's probably changed the war she said was such an interesting dynamic there for me because and maybe this was happening in other places, but but but

Yemen was just different but You had the regular operations that were going on everywhere. But then also you had all the other foreign intel agencies that we're not friends with that are all there and everybody's spying on each other. And you're trying to do the regular mission and you're also doing all this other stuff. You get the Chinese there, you got the Russians there, you got the Iranians there, you get,

everybody is in Yemen. But it's all under the radar. You got the Iranians there. Everybody is in Yemen. But it's all under the radar. But everybody knows. It makes it really, it just makes it, it makes life very interesting. Yeah. It was a very, it was a really exciting place to be. I thought, especially living in Sana'a, you go move around the city and, you know, we're

looking for bad guys. But like you said, the Russians were there looking at us, the Chinese were there. Everybody, I mean, did you ever eat at that sushi restaurant? I know, yeah. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, there could only be one, I'm sure. And the owner got killed outside of his own stab to death? Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah. I wonder if we crossed paths over there, probably not, but yeah, those were good times in Yemen. Really good times. So what were you doing there?

So we were training the Yemeni Special Operations Forces, and then also we were working just collecting intel on the Al Qaeda, looking for AQ and AP. So because I was human qualified, that was my my night job was to augment that and so the guys that station or whatever We give us requirements and we had really good again We had really good access to the population because we were working with the enemy special forces Like I was hanging out with Salah's nephew with the president's nephew And they they knew that we were there to try and track down some of those guys. And there were some cat and mouse games being played with the Salah regime,

because they were trying to basically, like Salah said, dance on the heads of snakes, like keep all the different militias happy. So he was trying to feed us low value AQ targets to keep us happy, because we were funding his entire government. But at the same time, he had like the back and forth going on with the Houthis, and he was trying to bribe off different tribes to not join the Houthis. So we were trying to map out all those dynamics,

which was super interesting, I thought, especially just the role that the tribes play there and how much power the tribes have inside Yemen. It was like, I mean, I had done a little bit of that in Anbar in Iraq and those tribes out there were powerful and had influence, but like the tribal dynamic in Yemen and how Sala patched all that together,

I thought was pretty amazing. So just trying to navigate all those dynamics and map them out was really cool. Yeah, yeah. Back to DC with Shannon. Yeah. I mean, with both of you guys in a unit like that, how does the discussion of kids get approached?

Oh, it just happened. Well, I mean, it's kind of funny because I just live in the life I lived. I was just like, I'm probably never gonna have kids. And that was just like, for me, I was like, okay, well, it's fine, I'll just go to war for my entire life. That was my dumb mentality. Then I met Shannon and Shannon was like, it's fine, I'll just go to war for my entire life. That was my dumb mentality. Then I met Shannon and Shannon was like,

that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. Like we're gonna have kids. And I was like, actually, that does make a lot more sense. It's like, you're probably right. And so we got pregnant really pretty early on, like right after we were married. Our first son was on the way. And then, right after that were married, our first son was on the way. And then, you know, right after that, we had started, right when we first started talking

about having a second kid, Shannon's like, I'm pregnant. It's like, you know, because I mean, I'm three years older than she was. So we knew we were kind of on a tight timeline to have kids. And you guys planned on staying in with kids? We did. We did. I mean, that was definitely, if we had any friction point in our marriage, I mean, that was definitely it.

I mean, Shannon really understood who I was. And as I was approaching retirement, I mean, I had my next career mapped out. I knew I was going to go working ground branch work at the CIA because I'd already worked with those guys and I'd already been to the farm. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to just basically cross deck right over there, get my military pension retirement, start a second career. The way I sold it to Shannon was that I'd only do ground branch for a little bit and then I'd go do traditional case officer stuff.

And she had worked around the agency a bunch and you can have a decent life because there's a lot of married couples in the agency that make that work. So that was my sales pitch. But you know, Shannon was like, at some point, we're gonna have to say that we've done enough. You know, like I think when we hit the 20 year mark, I think we should, we should call it good. And I was like, I'm, I'm not good after 20 years.

Like, I want to keep going. Like there's more. And so that was definitely our, our one piece of marital friction there was when I said, hey, I'm going to retire on a Friday and swear at the CIA on a Monday. Wow. Yeah. Wow. She was supportive.

I mean, she was like, I get it, this is who you are, but you've really got to figure out who you are past all this. And to me, that was like white noise. Anytime people talked about like transitioning out of the military or, you know, not deploying for a living and getting shot at, I was just like, yeah, you must be talking about somebody else, cause I'm not going to do that.

So that was, yeah, that was, that was our plan. That was my plan anyway. Shannon was, you know, much more realistic. And after we had kids, she was like, I don't want to deploy. I don't want to go overseas and deploy and be with my kids, but I still want to serve. On her last deployment to Afghanistan with NSW, she was part of the team where Commander Joe Price killed

himself in Afghanistan. And because Shannon was always kind of a forward thinker, she was like, it doesn't make sense that this guy killed himself. Like he's well respected, big strong Navy SEAL. Like why did he kill himself? And so she really went down the rabbit hole of like the mental health crisis. And she was talking about the mental health crisis, like before I had ever heard anybody talk about it.

And she was like, I want to do something about that. And so she got her bachelor's and her master's in psychology. She had gotten accepted into a Navy program to get a PhD and to become an actual therapist. And she wanted to work on the mental health crisis that we're having right now. But catch 22, when the Navy picks up people for those programs, it's a commissioning program. So they hold you to accession standards as if you just came off the street as opposed to retention standards.

Retention standards have some flexibility in the medical side, because like if you're fit enough, if you have a record of good service, like they'll keep you in the military. If you're a kid just coming off the street, they wanna make sure they're gonna get their money's worth. So the medical standards are actually a little bit higher.

Shannon had had cancer when I was in Iraq on it. When I was in Iraq, the last time she had thyroid cancer, she had it cut out, returned to duty. She didn't even tell me about it until after it was cut out. Yeah, she's like, sent me a text of like this stitch across her throat. She's like, I had a little bit of cancer cut out. I'm like, what, like, do I need to come home? Like, what's wrong? She's like, nah, it's okay. That's fine. Cancer free return to duty. You know, she's like, I had a little bit cancer cut out. I'm like, what, like, do I need to come home? Like, what's wrong? She's like, nah, I took it, that's fine. Cancer free, returned to duty, you know, she's back to working out and leading her sailors up there at the NSA.

And she applies for this program. They're like, well, you previously had cancer. So you're in, even though she was accepted academically in the program, they shot her down and they wouldn't let her commission and go to the psych program. So she ends up, that's how she ended up going on her, her fifth and they wouldn't let her commission and go to the psych program. So she ends up, that's how she ended up going on her, her fifth and final deployment.

So she was looking responsibly and looking for an off ramp from the deployment lifestyle. Before we move into her deployment, I wanna talk to you about moving from the unit that you were in, you retire from that. Yeah. Cross-stack over to CIA as a ground branch, PMCO.

What was your impression of the agency after coming from the previous unit? I think I had a pretty good picture because I'd worked around the agency so much, just doing the things I did in Special Forces and then in the unit. And I had been to the farm already. So I had been deeply immersed in the agency while I was there. You know, I have a lot of like the CIA treats its people really well. Like the military are kind of a number almost all the time, but the agency, they treat their people I think, I think they realize they're going to invest a lot in folks and they have a lot of talented people and they do treat them very, very well. Obviously the agencies, it's a little bit softer than the military, a little more touchy

feely, a little bit more corporate HR. So in processing at the big agency, it's sort of like, I don't know, dealing with the big army, the big Navy, you're kind of like, all right, well, you know, this is sort of bureaucratic and a little bit more touchy feely. But I had worked enough with ground branch to know that that was exactly where I wanted to be because that's, you know, those are the guys that do covert action. Like those are the dudes that are actually doing the most dangerous things that the agency does. And so I knew that's where I wanted to be.

And so ground branch is tiny within the agency, but you go there and it's like, this is where every legendary dude goes to continue their career after they already had a legendary career. So like I go in there and you know, there's guys that were, you know, fighting back in the eighties and the nineties and covert dirty wars, you know, there's still some old Vietnam veterans running around that are still there doing something at some capacity.

Guy that ran our, you know, shooting package, which was part of the selection was a Mogadishu guy. I mean, like it's just, you walk in there and it's just like, holy crap, man, like I've made it and I'm around absolute legends. You were more impressed with ground branch at CIA than you were with the previous unit. It's hard to say in terms of like intelligence and aptitude, the previous unit that I was coming from, that unit recruits from such a small pool of special operators and they're looking for such a unique thing that you get some really, really smart people there

and just really unique. And then Ground Branch is bringing in, they're bringing in a lot of the smart guys as well and a lot of people that gravitate more towards the intel side. But because Ground Branch's mission had been so kinetic, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, they had brought in a ton of just hard men who loved to fight. Like guys who literally like these are the dudes

who didn't get enough action in Delta, SEAL Team Six, the rest of the flavor of special operations probably had a full career there, or they left because they weren't getting enough action and they wanted to go to a place where they could literally do nothing else but folk, especially on the contractor side, the guys that were gonna be contractors,

I mean, they were there specifically to run indigenous forces and to get into gunfights and to kill bad dudes. So it wasn't as specialized as what I had in my previous unit. But to me, it was just like, this is where the guys who were 100% gonna run towards the sound of the guns,

everywhere I'd been in the military, guys would run towards the sound of the guns. But here you had guys that had already had a full career somewhere else that were like, yeah, I know I'm in my mid 40s, but I'm still here to get it on. Up until they're 60 or so. Yeah, yeah, I know I'm in my mid 40s, but I'm still here to get it on, you know, up until they're 60 or so. Yeah, yeah.

Interesting. All right, back to Shannon. Yeah. Let's go into her deployment. Yeah, her last one? Yes. Yeah, so when the psych thing, when we find out that's not gonna work out,

cause we thought that was kind of our off ramp. I was gonna go to ground branch and continue on with my career and she was going to be a psych, stay at home with the kids, get me much more stable. We kind of had to adjust really quick because she knew that a deployment was coming up for her element that she was a part of. And she hadn't deployed for a couple of years because we were having kids. So she was like, well, it's not exactly what I wanted, but my number came up.

And we had a lot of spirited conversations about this because I was just like, I was torn. Because I was like, yeah, I get it. I mean, this is your job, but at the same time, now you're a mom and I don't want you to go overseas. And I knew she didn't want to either. And she was like, I don't want to go either.

But this is what I do for a living. I'm not going to just get out of the deployment. She's like, you've deployed three times as a dad. She's like, every time I've deployed, half the guys have been fathers. She knew women that had deployed as mothers. She's like, I'm not special. I'm here to do my job like everybody else. They need me to go.

I'm going to go. And when she put it They need me to go, I'm gonna go. And when she put it that way, as much as I didn't wanna hear it, I was like, okay, yeah, that's who we are. So she ended up deploying in, just after Thanksgiving in 2018, November 2018. So she goes to Iraq initially, and then she gets pushed into Syria.

Shortly after that, the task force that she's a part of, She goes to Iraq initially, and then she gets pushed into Syria. Shortly after that, the task force that she's a part of, they take out and they liberate the last village that ISIS controlled. So now in Syria and Iraq, ISIS controls no more ground. And so it looks like it's more or less over. We're two and a half years into the Trump administration. And Trump gives the announcement, says we're getting out of Syria now. Like, this is what I ran on.

We're going to pull our troops out of Syria. And I had already noticed something that really bothered me. I was an early on, you know, Trump supporter going back to 2016 when he went after Jeb Bush on the debate stage about how Iraq was a big mistake. I was just blown. I was blown away by the common sense. I was like, yeah, he's, he's saying what we've been seeing for two decades. And once he got in, what I noticed was initially, because Obama had screwed things up so bad with ISIS, the way that ISIS had taken over multiple countries. And Trump said, like, we're not going to tolerate that we We're going to go crush these dudes. The military and the intelligence apparatus initially liked Trump because he took the gloves off and he let us actually do our job. The second Trump said, I want to start pulling troops out, it was like a night and day shift.

I mean, I was seeing, because I had just in process over at the agency, and there's the mid-level people there that are like, yeah, we're not going to do that. Like, that's not going to happen. It's like, I'm like, whoa, stop. I'm confused. I came in the army under Bill Clinton in 1998, served for every other president.

The oath I took says that we obey that guy, unless what he's saying is unconstitutional. And all he's doing is saying we're going to pull troops out like I ran on. And also for me, I was just like, when do you say this is over? Because if we keep doing this whole move the goalposts on when we've reached our objective, then we'll be here forever. And that's what we're seeing now. But I had a sick feeling. I was like, man, something's not right.

They're going to leave these guys there. And sure enough, Shannon was like, yeah, because we can communicate openly on systems because we both had clearances and all that. So I could go into work and we could talk on chat. And she was like, yeah, we're supposed to be out here Christmas Eve 2018. We're supposed to pull out. And then I'm reading the message traffic, you know, from her task force and seeing everything else.

And it's like, no, these guys are trying to justify their existence because Mattis resigns, McGurk resigns. There's a bunch of confusion at the senior level. So then there's even more confusion downstream. And there's a bunch of people saying, well, now we need to justify our reason for staying here. And so that's horrible guidance to give to people, to give to commanders, because then you're going to put people out in harm's way without any real clear-cut objective.

They were still trying to run down the location of where Baghdadi was. That was the big target they were chasing. But they should have been out of there Christmas Eve of 2018. The president shouldn't have been disobeyed. So I was really frustrated watching that. And I'm talking back and forth with Shannon during this entire time. And one of the last conversations we had, I was like, don't be the last person to die in a conflict in a war that our entire country has already forgotten about.

You know, so it was, I was surprised when she got killed. But at the same time, it was kind of like watching a train wreck in slow motion. It was like once once that order to withdraw was given, and there was all that downstream confusion in the mid to withdraw was given and there was all that downstream confusion in the mid to senior levels, that's when I knew something, this wasn't going to turn out good. This was going to be a chaotic end. Where were you when she was killed? So I actually was on my first deployment with the agency. So I was in a war zone somewhere in the Middle East.

So I had selfishly decided that I was going to do a quick trip while Shannon was deployed. So my parents came and watched the kids and I was eager to go be a paramilitary operations officer and so I did my first deployment. And so I was downrange when she was killed. Shit. Yeah. How did you find out? I had a very atypical notification.

There was no knock on the door or anything. I had been out doing an operation myself. Nothing kinetic or anything. But I was out in harm's way, kind of like Shannon was when she got killed. I got back to back to the base. And my immediate supervisor, my boss over there was a guy I was on a team with for years, and then this guy for 15 plus years. And I get back into the office and he asks everybody to leave leave the room so that me and him can talk.

And I'm like, crap, did I screw something up already? And he was just like, hey, man, I'm going to tell you everything I know. And we don't know everything right now. He's like, but there's been a suicide bombing in Manbij. Four Americans dead, two of them are females. Do you know where Sharon is? And I knew exactly where she was. I knew she was in Manbij.

So I was like, fuck, she's there, she's in Manbij. There's not a lot of women in our profession. There's a couple, not a lot. And so I already knew then that the odds weren't good. So we spent the next hour trying to get ahold of the task force there in Syria to get confirmation. And we got confirmation within an hour or so. And then I had to make the decision

because I knew what was taking place back at home. I knew that they were gonna have to notify Shannon's parents. I knew they were probably looking for me too. So I had to call her command back at home and say, hey, I've been notified. Don't bother going to my house because there's nobody there. But I made the decision that I wanted to be

the person to tell Shannon's parents as opposed to just somebody randomly knocking on the door. So I called from the Middle East and I called Shannon's dad. I couldn't get a hold of him. And then I called Shannon's mom and had to tell her that Shannon was killed. Man. Yeah. Worst phone call I've ever had to make. How did your kids find out? When I came home, I told them. They were one in three when she was killed. So really, you know, I don't know if they ever fully wrapped their heads around it. I actually went and talked to a child psychologist pretty early on, like, what do I do?

Like, how do you explain this to a one and a three-year-old? You know, so they gave me some, I think it was helpful guidance, you know, on just kind of how to handle it. But it's, yeah, it's something we still still talk about. I mean, I think my my kids have had, unfortunately, more exposure to death and reality than most most adults have. What did the psychologists tell you? So it was interesting that the psychologist said to be as blunt and forthright as you could

Like they said definitely I'm a Christian faith is strong, you know, they said it's okay to say, you know mama's in heaven It's okay to say that But they said if you start dancing around the topic of death It's really confusing for kids so they they explained to me and this is actually really helpful because it's part of like our vernacular. When you talk about death with adults, you say passed away or no longer with us. And that's really confusing for kids to hear because what does passed away, what does that mean?

And no longer with us, does that mean they just walked out of the room? You know, there's this innuendo that they're gonna come back. So that was what the psychologist said. Like, he's like as painful as it is. And it was, it still is, to talk to my kids about it. Cause it's like, you have to just say that she's dead. You know, and as they get older,

you can explain to them how she died. But they said, if there's any ambiguity in it, it really can confuse the kids. Man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to talk about how she was killed? Yeah, so she was killed by a suicide bomber.

She was in Manbij doing an intelligence operation, kind of piggybacking with the special forces team that was out there. So they were at a, I think a fairly well-known portion of man-bidged I've never been to man-bidged myself, but a fairly well-known area in the city center and It's one of those things where you got to be lucky every time you roll the dice and the enemy must be lucky once I mean, I think that ISIS had suicide bombers in that area because they knew Americans were in that area. And so her

and Scott Wirtz, Forme Ciel, and John Farmer and Gidir Taha, the Syrian American linguist, were kind of standing in an area right before they got in their vehicles. And it's on the streets, there's people walking around and all that. So it's sort of streets. There's, you know, people walking around and, and all that. So it's sort of permissive, but not fully permissive environment. And a suicide bomber came up to them and detonate himself, killed the four of them and wounded quite a few more. Scotty was a, Scotty was a good friend of mine. Was he really?

He was. Oh, wow. Yeah. Man. Shannon really had a lot of respect for him. Yeah. I'm sorry, man. Yeah, thanks man.

How do you recover from that? I mean, it's an ongoing process, you know? For me, if I wouldn't have had kids, I think things could have gotten pretty bad. But having kids, I view that as that's gotta be your primary mission, regardless of how you you feel like so for me, I right after shams kill, I'm in a foreign country. I had been outside the wire that day. The enemy could have really gotten lucky that day and made my kids orphans. So I felt very guilty being over there.

I was like, this is pretty selfish of me to be doing this and leaving my kids at home while my wife was deployed. Whatever sense of duty and nobility I had was kind of like, was a little disgusted with myself for feeling that way. And I was like, I need to focus on my kids. I need to not be here anymore. I need to get home and be there for them. And so since she was killed,

that's kind of been my mentality. Like you gotta put them first, because it's hard. I mean, it's one of those things, I think especially having a, I guess a problem solver type of mind, you always wanna look for the solution. And with death, there isn't one. You can't do anything about that, that person's dead

and you can't bring them back. All you can do is honor them, honor their legacy, and try and move forward. But it's been hard, man. I mean, I'm really lucky that I have supportive family. I mean, my folks have been great. Shannon's parents, Shannon's sister, been great. So it's really a matter of just putting them first

and trying to live the best life for them. Just talking to, reading a lot about how kids process grief, especially that young. It's traumatic for them, but they're young enough that if you keep their environment steady and stable, it's not as catastrophic as it could be for kids that are a little bit older, based on everything I read. That was my goal, was to make things as normal and stable for them as I possibly could. And I think that helped me kind of compartmentalize a lot of my own grief and my own guilt to move forward.

And do you have any advice for somebody that's that's that's lost the mother to their kids? Yeah, I mean, it's hard. It never gets any easier. It's just different. I mean, there's a lot of people have a lot of different sayings about grief. Like, you know, it gets easier of time.

I don't know if any of that's true. I think it's a really deeply personal thing. Because I've talked to a lot of Gold Star spouses, Gold Star kids, and it's almost a little bit different for everybody. But I do really believe that if you have kids, your job now is you've got to do the responsibilities of two parents in one and provide that stable environment for your kids because that's what your deceased spouse, well, that's what your late wife would want.

She would want the best for the kids. She would want them to be in a stable and loving environment. So I think making that your main mission and then honoring them, you know, like talk about their mother, talk about everything that she did. We do that she did. We do that with Shannon.

We have her pictures are up in the house and we celebrate her birthday and talk about what her favorite foods were, that type of stuff, and memories that we had just to make it part of our everyday rituals to keep her memory and spirit alive. Let's take a break. I want to give a big thank you out right now to all the Vigilance Elite patrons out there that are watching the show right now. I just want to say thank you guys. You are our top supporters and you're what makes this show actually happen. If you're not on vigilance lead patreon, I want to tell you a little bit about what's going on in there. So

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Thank you. Let's get back to the show. All right, Joe, we're back from the break and man, that's some heavy stuff. And so I wanna talk about now what life, I mean, everything has just been flipped upside down. Love of your life is gone. You've got two kids. Obviously you can't deploy anymore.

Yeah. You left the agency. Yeah. I mean, how do you even, I mean, where do you go? Yeah, so I knew I needed to fully resign and then just leave that environment. The agency was really good to me. I mean, they said, hey, if you want to have an admin desk job here, just tell us what

you want to do and we'll do it. And so they gave me a bunch of different options, very generous of them, gave me a lot of time. And I was honest enough with myself at that point. And I was like, no, if I keep a foot in the door, I'll find a way. Six months, a year from now, I'll find a reason why I can go do one trip here, one trip there. So I knew I needed to completely remove myself from that and just kind of get out of it.

We were living in the DC area. In the DC area, I think if you're a workaholic, that's where you go get your fix. That's like the Las Vegas of workaholics. So I wanted to get out of that environment and get my kids closer to my family back home. So that was my initial like 50 meter target. So let's get out of the,

let's resign fully from the agency to get the kids back home closer to my parents and I'll figure it out from there. And that was kind of the general plan. And so that's what we did, we moved back. I bought a house just kind of down the street from where my folks lived in Portland initially, just to have that stability.

And then like we talked about before, 2020 kind of happens. I'm really, really blessed though. I mean, to have my parents really step in like that, they were supporting me my entire time in the military and then to have them just down the street, providing that love and care for the boys. And then a year after we lost Shannon, I met my wife, Heather, and she really just stepped in there.

I mean, really, God really put her in our life and she stepped up as a mom to the kids and really helped me heal. And so that was the first year, year and a half. Obviously the country kind of fell apart as we were rebuilding our family, which kind of gave me a new mission. But yeah, it's really just one step at a time. And I always said to myself, hey, as long as the kids are adjusted

and happy and healthy and thriving, then I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. How are the kids doing today? They're doing really good, man. They're doing really good. I mean, Heather stepped in really early on as their mom. We moved, years ago, we moved way out of Portland. We're kind of out in the middle of nowhere,

very, very small town on five acres. Great community, great church we go to. We're homeschooling. So my wife teaches them three days a week and then they go to homeschool, basically a homeschool commune type of thing. And so my wife will teach the older kids and another mom will teach the younger kids.

So we've got them in a great stable community and they're they're really thriving Good for them, man. I'm happy to hear that. Yeah, I'm happy to hear that. Yeah Do they ask a lot of questions? about Shannon initially they did Not as much now and Not as much now. And I think some of that will kind of change as they get older. I think kids will ask them more questions, like his kids just ask questions. Initially, their questions would really catch me off guard.

I mean, there's times where, you know, we'd be talking about something completely different. And my oldest son Colt, when he was, you know, would talk about like, well, can mama see us from heaven? And like, you know, just, I had a dream about mama last night and just random things like that that really, you know, you can't be prepared for. But I was always, the advice I got from the child psychologist was good. I mean, be upfront and honest. And you know, they at least understand generally what happened. I mean, they haven't asked any details yet about like how she was killed,

then she was killed fighting, you know, bad guys overseas. So they know that much. And so that's a big reason why I wanted to write the book was so as they get older, they can have something that they can they can read on their own. Because at this point, I think they've heard my stories about their mom. And it's important to keep telling those stories. But I think at some point, they're going to want to have their own source of information. So I want the book. I want to write the book so they have an opportunity to get to know their mom. And so they can kind of understand who she was.

And they can consume that independently of having to ask me or listen to stories from relatives. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. I'm sure that's gonna mean a lot to them. But how did you get through all this? Was there any time for you to grieve, to get to process? Yeah, having my family really close by really, really, really helped.

And then, you know, being grounded in faith, it's hard because sometimes I felt like it's different for everybody, but I never wanted to be somebody who dwelled. Cause I've seen a lot of people just dwell in the pain and it's easy to do. I mean, I think there's a part of us that wants to dwell and there's a fine line between, I think, dwelling in the pain and maybe moving forward too quick

and pretending that it doesn't exist and just compartmentalizing it, which I think our type of people, like we're pretty good at doing that. So it was hard to find that balance for me. You know, there are definitely a lot of days where, and I'll still have bad days too, where it's just like, man, I do feel really, really guilty

and like, why did she get killed and I didn't get killed? You know, those questions that have no answers. But I would always try and really just focus on the kids and saying, hey, like you don't, you can't dwell on this because this is bigger than you. This is the kids and saying, hey, like you don't, you can't dwell on this because this is bigger than you. This is the kids. And also at the end of the day, what would Shannon want me to do?

I mean, she would not want me to be a morning train wreck, perpetually dwelling in the sorrow. She would want us to move forward. She would want the kids to be happy and to be healthy. But that's hard. I mean, that's easier said than done. I think, and even before, you know, before Shannon lost other friends,

and it's like, I know in my logical brain that they would want me to move forward and live the best life possible, but there still is that guilt that's with you all the time, you know, of why them and not me. What, you know, what does it all mean? So, yeah, I really just try and focus on the kids and stay grounded in faith.

How has your faith helped? Man, without it, you'd be, without it, I'd be lost. I mean, cause without it, everything is just like a bunch of random chaos and there is no reason. And it's almost sick and cruel. But I think being grounded in faith and understanding that God has a plan for everything, I think that's really important and understanding

that there's evil out there and that's why she got killed and we're constantly at war with evil here on this world. But understanding that the last time I saw Shannon won't be the last time I'll see Shannon or anybody that we've lost. I think that's pretty key. Without that, I don't know where I'd be. I feel sorry for the people that don't have faith because the world to them, it's just chaotic. But having the foundation of that faith is essential. Have you always had that or did that come after?

That, you know, I was born into it, I think, my family pretty consistently, creating a very, very solid Christian family. And so I was raised with it. And so I've never strayed too far from it. I mean, I definitely have had times in my life where I probably wasn't the best Christian, especially in younger team days or whatever, but it was always a framework for me. Like that was the truth. That's what I believed to be the truth. So it's always been there with me,

but I had to get a lot more reflective and a lot more serious about it, I think, once Shannon was gone. It just seemed to be something that was much more anchoring once we lost Shannon than it had been before. Well, let's move on. So now you've got a career in politics. Yeah.

Hopefully. Hopefully. For you. Working on it. Yeah. How did that come on your radar? I mean, what motivated you to subject yourself to that kind of scrutiny, to that, I mean, that's a whole other animal. It's ugly. And I don't know, I like to think I still would have jumped into it the way I mean, it's a whole nother animal. It's ugly. And I don't know, I like to think I still would have

jumped into it the way I did, if I would have known how ugly it gets. But sometimes it's like, it's probably not best to analyze the ramp of the airplane you're jumping off of. It's better just to jump into it. I really got into speaking out publicly after Shannon was killed, because I explained to you

the lead up to her getting killed and watching what happened within the Trump administration. So I got an opportunity to meet President Trump at Dover when I was waiting to receive Shannon's remains. And I personally, I thought that Trump was just going to come and shake our hands and say he was sorry and check the box. But I actually got to spend 10, 15 minutes, just me and him in a room like this talking. And I basically told him what we talked about before. I was just like, hey, your gut instincts are correct. You don't know who I am.

At the time, I had hair down on my shoulders and a crazy beard. And so I probably looked like a crazy person. But I was like, I'm one of your CIA guys. I think initially I actually messed up and he asked me what I did and it just rolled off my tongue. I was like, I work for the State Department. Even Trump was like, you don't look like a guy who works for the State Department. I wanted to tell him, I was like, look, I've been doing this really since this thing started

and your instincts are right. You're just being thwarted at the mid to senior levels, you know, in a way that I find rather alarming. And you know, he had just lost his secretary, his secretary of defense had just resigned. So I personally didn't think I was telling him anything that he didn't already know. I kind of thought he was just humoring me, which I appreciated. I also appreciated that he met with us all individually. There was four families there and Trump spent 10, 15 minutes with each family and it wasn't scripted.

The Secret Service didn't even really screen me. I was in a room and next thing you know, Trump walks around the corner and it was just us together for 10, 15 minutes. He gets portrayed a certain way in the media as being, you know, crass and kind of cold-blooded. But with Trump and the questions he was asking me and just the reaction that he was having to being there at Dover, I really felt like he's a guy who did not like the fact that people died under his watch.

Like he felt responsible. Because, you know, you've probably been around a lot of leaders, too, in combat. And there's kind of one or two routes they can go. They can stay connected with the feelings, the fact that we're losing people. Or they can kind of become very cold-blooded about it and wall themselves off in a way that it doesn't even affect

them. Maybe they'll think, oh, does this affect my politics? Does this affect my evaluation report? But with Trump, I saw somebody who legitimately, he did not like the fact that we were losing people in Syria. And so I thought that interaction was that, and that'd be the end of it. But a couple of weeks later, I actually

got a call from some guys on his team. And they said, hey, we don't know what you said to the boss, but he wants to hear more of what you had to say. We come out and chat with us. So got to go back out to DC, met with Jared Kushner and a couple other folks there, you know, wrote a couple like what, like they're like, what are your recommendations? And so I wrote like a white paper essentially on, you know, what I thought essentially about the status of the war on terror at the time, like we need to be getting the heck out of here.

Trump's instincts are right. Don't listen to all the so-called experts. So kind of establish that relationship with them. And then the 2020 campaign was ramping up. So I did some stuff for the Trump 2020 campaign. And then I got another call, went back out to DC and they're like, hey, Kushner and his team were like, hey, if we offer you a job in the second Trump administration, would you come work here? And I was like, did not expect that, you know, because usually the guys that go and work

at the White House or whatever, you're talking colonels and generals and, you know, that cast of people. But I have a mentality, hey, if you can serve your country and your country calls, like, if you can do it, you should do it. And so I said, yeah, you guys want to hear what I have to say? I let me help. I'd be honored to. So I was going to go work somewhere, you know, maybe back in the IC or maybe at the NSC.

Then the election went the way that it did. But I was already pretty vocal on speaking out. And that's right after that. That's when my congresswoman decided to vote for Trump's impeachment. So to me, it just felt like and it still feels this way to me. I mean, it really feels like we're losing the country. I don't think it's just you, man. Yeah, I think it's a lot of us.

And as much as I would like to just focus on me and just focus on the kids and kind of live my life, I just really fear, I fear a future where our kids are young adults and they look at us like, what the hell were you guys doing when the country is burning down? Like if there's still history books, if we get to that point, these guys are going to, our kids are going to look at us and be like, this country was once great. That's why you guys went and fought, right?

But now look at it. And now it's barely, and if we keep going in this trajectory, our kids are going to be like, this isn't worth fighting for. We have to scrap the entire thing. So I think we've got a small window right now where we've got to put our aspirations and desires individually kind of on hold and go fight for the country. Because the political class that's been driving the decisions

has gotten us to this point. And we've got to change that. We had some conversations at breakfast about some of the stuff that was going on in your hometown. Yeah. Portland. Yeah. Around the 2020 timeframe, would you like to go into any of that?

Yeah, I mean, the media covered, they covered the assaults on the courthouse, which were pretty dramatic. But what they didn't cover was how long those riots went on for. I mean, the rioting in Portland went all throughout the summer in 2020, basically right up to the election. Like when the weather started getting, you know, rainy and gloomy, like the media just stopped covering, but the riots continued. That courthouse down there was under siege. Antifa was moving into a lot of the residential neighborhoods and just harassing people, assaulting

people, vandalizing property. But it was very much, to me, the way I interpret it all of it was it was a power play. Because if you're going to continue to dominate terrain, and you're going to expand your area of influence, and you're going to basically get up in the face of law enforcement and make them retreat, that's not just random protests, that's not just random violence. Like that actually has a strategy behind it. Like you're trying to hold ground. To me, it felt very much like what we saw in the early phases of the Iraq War when there was no central authority, because we had taken out Saddam.

There was essentially all these different competing sects and gangs and groups of individuals that were banding together and competing for power. To me, Antifa, BlackBlock, whatever you want to call it, they were the power brokers. With this last round of Hamas protests, like they reared their head again, they took over the campus of Portland State University, they burned down and conducted explosives attacks against Portland police officers' cars. And so like it hasn't gone away.

It's one of those things, we know it all too well, if you don't confront this, it's not just gonna go away on its own. It might go into a more nascent phase for a little bit, but it's gonna pop back up. And that's what we're seeing here. And to me, that was a big wake up call. I was like, man, the country's really changed. Because I was just so focused on the war for most of my adult life that I hadn't really followed a ton of like domestic politics. But just seeing that erosion of law and order, it was a huge wake up call to me. Trevor Burrus It's still bad over there.

Jason Kuznicki It's still bad. Yes. 2020 really drove a lot of the business out of Portland, which is a tragedy onto itself because Portland was experiencing a pretty big boom because a lot of the tech bubble that was leaving Silicon Valley was finding its way up to Portland. And there's a lot of great companies that were headquartered there, but the riots drove a ton of them out. I mean, like Nike, REI, Columbia Sportswear, a bunch of them just quietly leaving. They had the flagship stores down there. Then there's a bunch of other smaller businesses too that are leaving.

That void gets filled by the homelessness and that homeless element now is heavily addicted to fentanyl. Then these last Hamas riots, they've taken over ground, they've had their little autonomous zones, they've kicked the police out of. It's still ongoing. I think people should really be concerned with it's the economic downturn, it's the money leaving the town because then you're going to have essentially just a shell of a city that people don't want to invest in.

And they're not going to want to invest in it until law and order is restored. But you've got this weird culture in Portland and a lot of blue cities where nobody wants to say, hey, we need to restore law and order. Like we can't have nightly riots. We can't have vagrants on the street that are high on fentanyl, you know, swinging machetes and chains. Why don't they want to say it? They just leave? We can't have vagrants on the street that are high on fentanyl, you know, swinging machines. Why don't they want to say it? They just leave? Yeah. I mean, I think at the top levels, I think that they wield power and they can influence people that if you speak up and you say you're against this, they'll automatically turn that

media apparatus against you to say that you're like a horrible, hateful bigot, whatever, et cetera, et cetera. And then I do think there is a lot of people who've just been, for lack of better term, indoctrinated in the education system that think like, no, this is compassion. It's compassionate and right for us to let the homeless people just do whatever they want on the streets because they're homeless.

We have to let them. And I'm a compassionate person. Who am I to say you can't do this here? And the same thing, like Antifa and mainly Antifa, they use the rhetoric of social justice. So if you're against Antifa, what are you, pro-fascist? And I think that as dumb as that sounds to us, because we've seen propaganda before, that does neutralize a lot of people. That makes it so a lot of people just won't speak up because like oh wait

No, no, I'm I'm against the fascist the fascist other really bad Well, of course the fascist the bad people like you're playing their game if you're gonna let them dominate language But they've been able to dominate language for so long through the media that they can essentially Suppress that the desire to have any kind of law and order with their narrative And that's that's really what I saw happen in Portland. It's happened in Seattle as well. And there's probably other cities that are like that, that are essentially committing suicide in slow motion because nobody wants to say like, hey, this is poison and it's

destroying our city because they don't want to be called a hateful mean bigot. They don't want to be aligned with someone who's far right, who says we should have law and order. I'd like to think some of the tide is changing. Portland just had a primary election where a, I think, normal Democrat DA beat out the Soros DA, who was one of the main architects of just letting the lawlessness take place because it's hard enough for police officers to arrest people in Portland, but the few arrests they could make, the DA would turn them all loose.

I mean, if you talk to Portland police officers, most of them would tell you they know who the Antifa guys are, they know who the leaders are, they know how they communicate. They've got the entire network mapped out like we would downrange, but what's it matter? You go and you arrest these guys and they get right back out because of the DA. Maybe the change in the DA leadership will start to slowly change some of that. I just, I think with how much business has left the city, I think it might be a little bit too late.

I just, I just, I can't wrap my head around how this can continue to go on and, and, and, I mean, who the hell is for this shit that lives there? I think you- Everybody? There are some very- Is it everybody?

It keeps, it's been going for how long? Four years now? Yeah. And they're just, what, keep, they keep putting the same shit back in? Yeah. Very affluent people that aren't affected by this, that their businesses don't depend

on their being basic law and order, that can live in a gated community and send their kids to private school. They're the ones that are all for this. Just like our tech overlords, their kids don't have screens, but they're okay with giving our kids digital poison. I mean, how do they keep these people

out of the gated communities? Private security. Cops can't do anything, but private security can? And how do they keep these people out of the gated communities? Private security. What is private? Cops can't do anything, but private security can? The private security business in Portland and Seattle, it's booming right now. Because anybody who wants to stay in the city and has access to and can afford it, they're hiring private security to basically do what the cops used to do based on the... But they've tied the police officers' hands

behind their backs based on the way they vote. So now they just hire private security. They can still virtue signal. Maybe they make their money that's somewhere not directly tied to their being law and order in the city. And because of the money and the influence, these guys are able to basically control the politics of the city.

And I think that's true in Portland, it's true in Seattle, in a lot of major cities right now. Holy shit. I hope with that DA election, I was surprised to see DA Schmidt got tossed out. Hopefully this next guy, the bar is pretty low. All this guy has to do is basically prosecute some criminals. That'll send a message. I personally think just because of all the money that's

left there, it's going to be a while before they get those cities back on track. Because who's going to want to invest in a city that's been ravaged by lawlessness for four plus years? What does it look like walking through Portland now? Is the entire city like this? They'll clean up pockets every now and again

to make them look decent, which means they'll kind of move the homeless people from one area to another. But it's kind of zombie land. I mean, Portland used to be a great, I mean, going out and doing a restaurant, brewery type of tour. It was a dining out and a drinking town. So there used to be a lot of great restaurants and bars and those types of things to go to. And there used to be really vibrant culture down there.

But if you go out at like prime happy hour dinner time nowadays, and like the Pearl District of Portland, like it's fentanyl zombie land. There's a shell there of what used to be Portland where some of the restaurants and pal's books are still there. But it's just not at all what it used to be Portland where some of the restaurants and, you know, Powell's books are still there. But it's just not not at all what it used to be. And then right on the other side of the river where I live now, Vancouver is kind of Portland's sister city on the Washington side. And the whole Portland saying used to be keep Portland weird.

Vancouver saying was always keep Vancouver normal. We're getting a lot of bleed over from van from from Portland into Vancouver. And now we've got Democrats like the woman I'm running against that are trying to put light rail on the bridge that connects Oregon to Washington. So basically taking light rail and putting all the Portland's problems on a light rail car and jetting across into downtown Vancouver. So it's not contained to Portland, it spreads, spreads up and down the I-5 corridor everywhere. What's the pulse of the people in Vancouver when it comes to that railway?

Every time it's been on the ballot, it's gotten shot down. So the citizens of Clark County, Vancouver have rejected it three different times for obvious reasons. So what the Democrats have done is they basically attached federal grant money to it. And so now in order to get some basic safety repairs to the bridge, which the bridge needs, we actually need another bridge because of the population growth. But they've attached federal grant money. And so now the federal grant money has a stipulation of light rail on it. And maybe you should just knock the bridge down.

So they just shot, I mean, just shot getting it through. And they're also talking about putting tolls. It's a whole different story, but they're putting tolls on there. And there's a lot of folks, because Washington doesn't have an income tax. For a while, a lot of people who lived in Washington, they worked in Portland. If Oregon puts tolls on there, it disproportionately targets Washingtonians. Between that and the light rail, it's like, we're going to get all of Portland's problems, but in order to go have people work in Portland, we have to pay tolls.

It's insane. Again, you've got us fighting over table scraps to get basic repairs to the bridge or to get a new bridge, you know, and our representatives will come back and be like, look, we got a couple million dollars here and there for it. But we can't fix the bridge, but maybe you'll get light rail. But then meanwhile, they'll send $100 billion overseas. And so we don't have enough money to fix our bridge. Like it's just, where are the priorities? Yeah. What are some of your other priorities running for Congress? The border's massive, man.

We feel it, especially even though geographically, we're far away from the border. But we're right up the I-5 corridor. I've been down to the border twice. I went to Yuma in 2021, right when the invasion first started, right after Biden opened the border up. I thought that was bad. I just went to San Diego about two months ago.

Went out there by Yakuba Hot Springs, San Yaro-Sedro area. And that was bad. I just went to San Diego about two months ago went out there by Yakuba hot springs, San Yaro-Sedro area and That was insanity because if you go out to where the wall stops You will just witness it see as humanity come across the border and the vast majority of these people are not Hispanic They are not our neighbors Mostly Chinese nationals a ton of folks from the Middle East coming across the border nationals, a ton of folks from the Middle East coming across the border. And then talking to law enforcement in my district and down there, the amount of fentanyl

that's getting pumped through. Like pretty much every event I go to, like I do a lot of town halls, and every town hall I do in the district, I'll have somebody come up to me and tell me about how they've lost a loved one to fentanyl. And these are not career drug addicts. These aren't people who like, you know,

got addicted to this drug or that drug, and that was the path that they were on. These are people who didn't know they were taking fentanyl, in many cases. A big issue we have is the black market Percocets and Oxycontin. So people will get an injury. Their health care will put them on Percocet or Oxycontin

for a while, but then after a while, they cut them off. And so there's an entire market for black market Oxycontin and Percocet or oxycontin for a while, but then after a while they cut them off and so there's an entire market for black market oxycontin and Percocet and fentanyl is getting introduced into that because fentanyl is highly addictive and so the dealers are putting it in these somewhat seemingly benign drugs and People are falling over dead because all the consistencies of fentanyl are different. No batch of fentanyl is the same You know what one day will get you hooked for life the next day. I'll kill you dead of fentanyl is the same. What one day will get you hooked for life, the next day will kill you dead. So that's a major issue in the district. The immigration angle, of course, because people are worried about who we've let into

our country and rightfully so, but the fentanyl I'd say is probably the biggest issue. I don't even know how you stop this, especially at a place like Oregon. Yeah. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but there are no narcotics in Oregon now, correct? I think, yeah, drugs are legal in Oregon, and in Washington, where I'm at, the drugs were legal, but they've just now gone back to enforcing intent to distribute amounts.

So you can still basically have enough to consume on your own on you and that's not illegal. But in Washington, the last year, we've gone back to going after drug dealers, which is a good thing. Kind of a little bit, little. Which is a good thing. Believe it or not.

Believe it or not. This is me, far right wing guy, with my far right wing take of like, maybe we should go after the drug dealer. This is actually a good thing. This is super fringy stuff I'm talking about here. Yeah, yeah. So that's where we're at.

Or it's like, you have to explain to people, no, it's actually good to go after the drug dealers. I mean, but I mean, two years ago, they were calling the Washington State Democrats in the legislature were calling to defund the police. Taking away the police officer's ability to actually pursue criminals, taking away any kind of drug control measures.

So of course, California and Oregon are very similar. So the entire West Coast has just become the fentanyl super highway, because why not? If you're the Mexican drug cartel, you can make a ton of money off of it. Yeah. Low risk.

Do you have any idea how many people have left Oregon and Washington? I don't know, but lot but a lot a lot of a lot of I see a ton of Oregon and Washington plates here in Tennessee I know a lot of folks who moved to Tennessee. Yeah, I mean between Idaho, Texas Every time I see a plate. Yeah from Washington, Oregon, California, Illinois, New York You gotta ask him like do you remember why you moved? Here's what they say, we're the good ones.

We're the good ones. I'm sorry. What the fuck does that mean? You're the good ones. How are you gonna vote? That's the question. That's all that matters, man. Why don't you quit using this code shit

and just fucking tell us. Like, who the fuck are you and why did you move here? Are you a registered Republican? Like. I'm getting goosebumps, man. Yeah. Like I get so fucking angry. Oh yeah.

I mean, it's everywhere. You made that shit. You fucking clean it up. Yeah, exactly. Don't come here. Don't just flee. Shit where I fucking live. Exactly.

Yeah, I'd be pissed too if I lived in this state, man. Cause you guys are, you guys have good taxes and you know, you guys handled COVID much better than most places. You in Florida, and Idaho and Texas have become quite the magnet. But if you look at like what's happening in Texas, like with the way that the cities are in Texas now, I mean, that's a direct bleed over from people coming there for a certain reason, but then not remembering like, how their voting screwed up the last place they were, they were living. So yeah. So yeah, it's a big issue, man. I personally think people gotta fight where they're at.

I mean, like right now, if you're trying to run from this, I just think the way the country's going, it's coming everywhere. It's obviously bad in major urban centers. That's why I won't live in a city, but like every state's got its urban hub that's been taken over by the Soros DAs or just far left wing laws being enacted.

I mean, look, we're already seeing it here too. I got friends that are cops in all the different surrounding areas around Nashville and in Nashville and they're all complaining about the same thing. We're not allowed to arrest illegals. Where they're letting criminals back on the streets and it's just like, fuck man. I'm just gonna move farther out into the, I already live out in the woods.

Now I'm gonna move farther. But more land farther. It's, I just don't wanna be around it at all. No, I for a long time really enjoyed living in cities. I'm glad I lived in DC before the bottom fell out. But now I have, especially having kids. Do you have a nice apartment on Black Lives Matter Boulevard? No, no, we couldn't afford that.

That was too expensive. We were on military pay at the time. But you know what, exactly, yeah. And that was right behind the White House, man. I know, I mean, I go to DC quite a bit and like I'd always heard about that, that they've renamed the street, but I was like, ah yeah, they probably just painted some, it's there.

It's there. It's there. Yep, it's BLM Boulevard. That's right. Right behind the White House. I mean, still, it's absolute insanity. And the crazy thing, I mean, in the last couple of years, going back to DC, like, just seeing the homelessness,

like, on the National Mall or, like, Union Station, it's like, come on, man. Like, even when I was in Yemen, Sala kept the area around the Royal Palace pretty clean. I know, I know. Can't we figure that shit out? Poorest country in the Middle East, and you see more people shitting on the side of the road in California than you will in fucking Yemen. Yeah. It's insane. 100%. It's insane.

Because they wouldn't tolerate that crap. Maybe on the sticks, but not in the nation's capital, they wouldn't tolerate it. Yeah. So I think that's probably the fentanyl, the border, law and order, obviously inflation is right there because that's hurting so many people. But I mean, the crazy thing is when you listen to Biden and a lot of these talking heads discuss these issues, they make it seem like it just sort of happened as a course of nature and like, boy, gosh, we're really trying to solve this. It's like, we could solve the border crisis pretty easily. We have a military that is deployed throughout the entire world. I'm pretty sure we could grab about, I don't know, a fraction of those dudes

and have them secure the border and lock it down pretty quick. And we still got an internal illegal immigration issue and that's gonna be more challenging, but don't tell me we can't secure that border. At least stop the bleed. At least, exactly, at least stop the bleed. And the thing is with the fentanyl,

there's some fentanyl that comes through the ports of entry is where they smuggle it and all that, but we catch a lot of that with the radar systems and stuff that we have. And there's some that's getting smuggled in in cargo jets, but the majority of it's coming across the border because the wave of humanity, the illegals, overwhelm the border patrol

because they all want to claim asylum. They all know how to do that. They all know that's their ticket into America. Border patrol is overwhelmed. And then you get the people who don't want to make contact with the border patrol. They've got a wide open border. They don't want to shut the border. I mean, who don't want to make contact with the Border Patrol, they've got a wide open border. They don't want to shut the border.

I mean, they don't want to. Yeah. And are you aware of the CBP, CB, what is it? CBP One app? Yeah, I am. You are. Yeah. Do you want to explain it?

I mean, it's basically an Uber service for illegal immigrants. And it's the simplest way to put it. It's an app that illegals can download and they can basically make travel arrangements into the country. Now, some of them qualify immediately for immediate parole and that's going to get them the hotel room, that's going to get them the government stipend and a plane ticket or a train ticket or a bus ticket into the city of their choice. And then other ones, it's just going to kind of make their entry a little bit more smoother. You know, I don't know if you know this,

but this came from a source inside Border Patrol, and then a sheriff, you know, Sheriff Mark Lamb actually confirmed it for me. So it's from two different sources. We'll actually fly down and get you from another country. We will send a jet to come down and I mean, not individuals, but I think they told me that, and this is several months ago now at this point,

but they told me that over 50,000 people we have gone and gotten, sent jets in, loaded the jet up, fly it back to the US, here you go. And those don't even get counted in the overall numbers of people coming across the border. And the crazy thing, I mean, this is what Trump solved, even though he couldn't get the wall built, he solved through executive order, was saying that like the famous remain in Mexico, it was more deep than that. It was basically, if you want to claim asylum, you can't just come to America.

You need to go to the first safe country, first safe third country. And that's where you can file an come to America. You need to go to the first safe country, first safe third country. And that's where you can file an asylum claim for. You can't come right here unless you're Cuban, Canadian, or Mexican and claim asylum. Those are the only, only our neighbors can do that. Biden got rid of that. And when he did that, he basically made it possible

for you to come right to America and claim asylum. And once you made an asylum claim, we can't deport you. And so then you're given a status of being paroled into the country. And so right now you're hearing like AOC and a bunch of the other crazy, really active people on the left say, well, it's not illegal to claim asylum. So technically these people aren't illegal.

They all have a legal status. And they're right because of what Biden did. So when we say, yeah, there's been 12 million plus illegals brought into the country, the Biden administration and these guys are like, well, no, no, actually, technically, they're not illegal. They all have a legal status. So if we don't secure the border and close that amnesty loophole, we're still going to

have some degree of this problem because there's still a major incentive to come here and claim asylum. I got a question for you. Do you think this is actually, do you think we can turn this around? It's gonna be hard. I don't think like if 2024 election works out and like Trump gets elected and I go to Congress

and we win the house in a big way in the Senate, that doesn't automatically turn around. I think that the administrative state, the un-elected bureaucrats are gonna fight Trump twice as hard as they did in the first term. And it's gonna be a bloodbath. I mean, they're gonna do everything they can to impeach him, to jam up any kind of legislation

that's gonna stop the flow of illegal immigrants, because that's what the Democrats want. They wanna flow of humanity coming into the country so they can skew the census numbers so that they can get more seats in the US House of Representatives and more electoral college power. Because Trump also tried to make it so that when we do a census, we only count US citizens when we allocate US House of Representatives seats or electoral college votes. Basically what Biden did was he got rid of that requirement.

Now we're just basing House of Representatives seats and Electoral College votes based off population. The more people you pump into the country, the more electoral power you have, even if those people never vote, because they're counted and there's seats that are allocated for them. That's all the Democrats want. That's all they care about. They view the fentanyl as collateral damage. That's all that they want, and they'll do anything to retain that power.

Because even if we win in 2024, if they continue with that plan, they're eventually gonna be able to get full control and full power. And the funny thing is, if you say that, they'll be like, oh, that's a conspiracy theory. Two weeks ago, the Republicans in the House put forward legislation that said,

we want the citizenship question back on the census, and we only want American citizens counted to tell it to Distribute House of Representatives seats and electoral college votes every Democrat voted against it So every Democrat just out out and open voted to let illegals be counted when it comes time to have actual legislative power And because it potentially presidential power, which is absolutely it's saying the quiet part out loud and it's absolute insanity But we have to get a leader in there who's willing to make hard decisions. We have to get somebody in there who doesn't, and this is another reason why I'm for Trump, because he won't be running again.

He can really go in there and be like, hey, we're going all out. I don't care about getting reelected. This is my last hurrah, because we need someone who's going to say, we will deport all these people. We will start going after the businesses that are employing illegals so that we can focus our law enforcement resources on hunting down the bad actors who don't leave

when there's no more economic opportunity. And that's not gonna be pretty. I mean, like, how do you just get 12 million plus people out of the country? Like, that's really hard to do. And then legislatively, we're gonna need to make some really heavy lifts of like ending birthright citizenship, the ability for someone hard to do. And then legislatively, we're going to need to make some really heavy lifts of ending birthright citizenship, the ability for someone just to come here and have a kid and now the

kid's a citizen, can't deport the parents. That's one of the big draws for a lot of the illegals to stay in the country. So legislatively, we're going to have a lot of hard work to do as well. And it's going to be ugly. It's not going to be easy. Why did you choose Congress? Why not the Senate? Well, I live in Washington state and I don't think a Republican has a chance in hell right

now at a Senate seat. Fair enough. Just to say why my district is still pretty conservative. I also, I like the role of congressmen. It's the biggest legislative body, but you are the closest to the people as opposed to representing a massive state like you have a District you're representing 750 to 800 thousand American citizens and then the House of Legislature the House of Representatives

Has a ton of power when it comes to like our budget which you know inflation is a major issue But then also more in peace. I mean figuring out where we spend our money and technically Only the Congress can send us off to war. Now we've thrown that out the window in the last 20 plus years and let the president take us off to war, you know, laterally, but it's supposed to be the Congress that does that. So I like that that angle of how we're the ones calling the shots when it comes to, do we go to war? But we're also the closest ones to the people. I think that's a pretty unique position to be in. Yeah, yeah. Man, you know, I just, I'm going to keep fighting, but you know, and I've, man, it's just, I just, there's so many things that need to be turned around that it's just overwhelming to think about. And then to think that we're putting a guy in there

that does only have four years. I mean, this is what we're doing. We're just batting the shit back and forth over and over and over again. We're not getting anywhere. Our enemies are getting stronger. The world is changing. We're getting weaker by the day.

And you're gonna have your work cut out for you. That's for damn sure. We definitely are. I mean, we've got to take a long war approach. That's how the country got destroyed. The other side, the leftists, they really took a long war approach and they infiltrated basically every institution.

I mean, we talked about Boy Scouts at the beginning. I mean, all the way from like civic institutions all the way up to all the different levers of power to include every single inch of the federal bureaucracy they took over slowly over time. We've got to do the exact same thing. And we've got to have the discipline and the long vision to do it on our own. And that's why I think it's really important for guys

with our background and veterans, like, you don't have to run for office, but just to get civically engaged in your community, because I think we just have a different mentality. We do, man, but even, I hate to be a pessimist here, but even a lot of the guys that we have in there now that were veterans, I mean, what a fucking disappointment. You know, not all of them, but a lot of them.

It's like, man, you really could have done something here, but you're just a money hungry fucking chump. Yep. Just like everybody else. Just like everybody else, yeah. I mean, you can't go there and think, if you're a veteran, you can't go there and think like, well, now I'm a team player

and this is just my new chain of command and I'm going to be a good soldier and sleut and move out. I mean, that made you successful to a degree in the military, but Congress is completely different. Like you were elected by the same amount of people that elected everybody else there. So you don't need to do anything but be responsive to the people who elected you.

That's it. The party leadership and all that, yeah. If it benefits the people in your district, you play ball. But if it doesn't, it's incumbent upon you. It's in your oath. That's why you were hired, is to stand up for what you actually ran on. And you're right, there's a lot of vets that just have not done that. I think you get a lot of guys maybe who had their military career cut short that now they want

to go into politics and climb up the ladder. I think that's appealing for some people. But I do think there is another crop that's coming up of veterans that don't view it that way. I mean, like Eli Crane, I know you had him on the show a couple of times. Eli's done everything he said he was gonna do on the campaign trail and like he stayed really true. That guy's just doing what the fuck he should be doing. Absolutely. You know, he came on here and told me

that he changed his vote. He thought he believed that a certain, I can't even remember what the hell they were voting on. But he got one that his district, his voters did not align with that, sent an emergency email or some type of message back to his people and had an email go out to all of his, everybody in his district and reversed his decision and voted the way they wanted him to vote. And I mean, you know, that's all you can ask for. Yeah, exactly.

It's all you can ask for. And that probably pissed off a lot of people with a lot of money in DC, but his people in his district who voted for him saw that he was representing their will. And I think he'll be rewarded when it comes time for reelection for that. So yeah, he's awesome man. Corey Mills is another vet. Annapolina Lunalection for that. So yeah, he's, he's awesome, man.

Corey mills, another vet on a Polina Luna is another vet. So there's, there's a crop of freshmen right now, I think that are kind of. Cutting a new path for veterans in Congress. That's, that's much more populist and like, Hey, we're actually going to listen to our people. And we're not here just to become corporate shills. We're here to fight for what's right. Man. I hope you're one of those.

If not, come after me. That's it. If I sell out, man, that's why I always tell people, I'm like, hey, because people always ask because people have been betrayed so many times. They'll be like, well, how do I know you're not going to be just like them? And I'm like, number one, look at the money. Look at where I get my money from. I get my money from small dollar donors. But number two, don't take my word for it. Watch my votes. If I start voting like a DC chump that doesn't care about you, then freaking get me out of there. We still, for now, we still have a representative democracy, we still have a republic, and we can choose our leaders.

The problem is people get lazy, and this is why incumbents have like a 90% re-election rate because people just don't participate in the primaries. And so we kind of get the government that we unfortunately deserve. So we got to get people much more active in that process. I almost said that exact same thing. There was a, somebody has a famous quote that says, you get the government that you voted in. It's unfortunate.

You deserve the government that you voted in. And then, yeah, yeah, it's, and it is, you know, you hear everybody. And you know, I'm a lot more center right than a lot of folks that I speak with, I think. But you know, it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're talking to. It is, I don't know anybody that's happy with the way the government's running. No. You know, and everybody bitches about Congress and they all bitch about the Senate and the President. They bitch about everything.

And they bitch about Congress and Congress has what, a 90% real reelection rate? Incumbency re-elected, yeah. Yeah. 90%. 90%. 90%. And there's a lot of- And it's like a 10% approval rating.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And everybody's mad at Congress, but then they turn around and they either don't participate in the primaries, or they just blindly check that, oh, I know that name right there, without saying, what's this guy's voting record? He's got an R by his name, but does he vote that way? What issues do I care about?

How is he voting? I mean, a lot of what's happening right now with the political parties, it's a lot of pro wrestling. There's one party in Washington, DC, and you always hear it, the mainstream media will be like, oh, there was bipartisan consensus. There's the bipartisan problem solvers. They move forward the Ukraine deal. Anytime it comes time for us to send billions of dollars

overseas, suddenly there's bipartisan harmony. But when it's time for us to send billions of dollars overseas suddenly like there's bipartisan harm bipartisan harmony Yeah, you know But like when it's time to do like real things like secure our border and stop the fentanyl Take care of the American people the only folks you hear fighting for that consistently are branded as like far-right nutjobs You know like the Freedom Caucus Eli Cranan those guys when they were negotiating the rules For the Speaker of the House and they were saying hey It's absolutely crazy that we're still doing omnibus bills,

that we're jamming together multiple bills together that no one reads and passing them at a massive deficit and putting more on our national debt. We can't keep doing that. We need to do the bills individually, and we need to actually have fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget. They called those guys every name in the book.

And like literally they requested the most reasonable, like even keeled set of policy proposals out there. And everybody else is like, no, we want to keep spending money into oblivion. And we're just gonna call these guys crazy Nazis. And it's just like, that's the, unfortunately that's the way it works. I just hope people wake up and see the game.

Yeah, me too, man. It's just, I just don't, I just don't get it. You know, even with the, with the, with the LGBTQ stuff and, you know, I don't, I don't care, man. Like if that's what you want to do, great, go do it. Yeah.

But you know, we shouldn't be cutting eight year olds dicks off. Yeah. I can't believe. Sorry, I do it. But we shouldn't be cutting eight year olds dicks off. Sorry, I said it. You shouldn't be dismembering an eight year olds penis. Right. How can you vote for that? How can you do it? How can you morally vote for that?

And yet people do. I mean, my Democrat opponent basically voted to put biological men into little girls' bathrooms and let them compete against them in athletics. So it's crazy. And this is stuff, I talk about this all the time. I'm like, 10, 15 years ago, these wouldn't have been Republican or Democrat issues.

If you said that you wanted to protect children, you didn't want to let men into the little girl's room, that wouldn't be like a radical far-right thing to say. As a matter of fact, I think even most Democrats, like old school Bill Clinton Democrats, would have been like, yeah, of course, that's absolute insanity. Or hey, should a six, eight, 10, 15-year-old, should they be allowed to mutilate themselves, or chemically castrate themselves? Most people would have been like, what the hell are you talking about? What's wrong with you?

But here we are. And we're in a place where even so-called moderate Democrat elected officials, they will not vote against that stuff. Yeah, I know. It is part of their doctrine. They won't go against it. Even the ones that won't talk about it that much, my opponent won't talk about it that much.

But if it's put on the bill, if it's put on the floor, she will vote with the radical Democrats every single time. You know, because I think that there's some really powerful corporate interests. There's a lot of money to be made off of these so-called gender affirming surgeries, the mutilation. But then also, it's just old school communist doctrine to separate parents from their kids, break up the nuclear family. I mean, Mao did it.

Al Qaeda wants to do it. Like every single bad ideology out there Yeah, they go after the government they go after power But the real center of power is the nuclear family and if you can break that up Man, you've got all kinds of power if you can break that up while you control language at the same time and say like a boy It's not a girl a girl's not a boy Like that's that's kind of in game in terms of power and I think a lot of people don't see that they think it's like a kooky social issue.

They still think that we're talking about like gay marriage or something, you know? Like stuff that most people are like, cause I think most of us feel like you just said, like I don't care what you do. If you're a consenting adult, I don't give a shit what you cut off, you know? And I don't care who you marry.

I'm not gonna pass laws about that. I don't care. But when we're talking about protecting kids and there's one side that is diabolically focused and they're focused like a laser on going after kids and breaking up the family, that's not just a goofy social issue. What about the, I mean, you can't even protect kids anymore from pedophiles. Right.

The maps thing. I mean, that was a conspiracy, what, a year ago? Yeah. And now here it is, minor attracted persons, been talking about it on here for over a year. Yeah. And here we are, now we have people that are voting for the normalization and rights of pedophiles. Yeah.

I mean, if you're allowed to discuss sex and sexuality with kids of every single age as a teacher, I can see how they've now moved it and said like, well, you know, maybe some of these teachers are attracted. Like, it's not a big deal. Like, you can see how this incrementally goes. Like, the slippery slope thing is 100% right. And now here we are. And again, I just go back to, yeah, a lot of this

is a bunch of sick perverts that are inserting themselves in here because they're predators. But why is the apparatus moving in this direction? They are at war with the nuclear family. Break up the nuclear family, that's the last line. If they take away family autonomy, that's the last line. That's complete control right there. Because then you just have all these programmable human

beings that you can control. And you can move around like they're just little mindless widgets. That's the last line. That's complete control right there. Because then you just have all these programmable human beings that you can control and you can move around like they're just like little mindless widgets. You know, so that's that's what I think is some of the darker forces that are at play. Yeah, I think you're right, man. Well, is there anything we haven't covered that you want to cover? Man, we covered everything. I think we covered a lot, yeah. We did.

We covered a lot of material, but... Yeah. Well, Joe, I really appreciate you coming here and telling your story. And I know that's got to be tough. And man, I just wish you the best of luck. Thank you. And if you ever need anything, reach out. Absolutely, man. Thank you so much.

Alright, brother. Yeah, appreciate it.