Shawn Ryan Show - #294 Pete Blaber - Part 2: Delta Force Commander on Pablo Escobar, Takur Ghar, and Pat Tillman

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

Pete Blaber is a retired Delta Force commander renowned for leading elite counter-terrorism and special operations teams across the globe, now applying his battle-tested leadership principles to corporate environments, authorship, and innovative security solutions. Born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, as one of nine children in an Irish-Catholic household. Pete attended Southern Illinois University. His military career saw him rise through the ranks of Delta Force to high-level command roles, directing critical operations in Panama, Colombia, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Retiring in 2006, he transitioned from commanding elite combat teams worldwide to leading executive teams. A prominent voice on leadership, team dynamics, crisis decision-making, national security, and organizational effectiveness, he has been featured in profiles, interviews, and podcasts sharing practical insights drawn from his extraordinary career. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Post jobs for free at ⁠https://ziprecruiter.com/srs⁠ Get 20% off sitewide at ⁠https://helixsleep.com/SRS⁠ and enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you! Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get 20% off with promo code SRS at ⁠https://shopmando.com⁠ ! #mandopod Go to ⁠https://meetfabric.com/SHAWN⁠ and apply today, risk-free Go to ⁠https://shopbeam.com/SRS⁠ and use code SRS to get up to 50% off Beam Dream Powder, the sleep formula designed to help you fall asleep fast and wake up clear. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at ⁠https://claude.ai/srs⁠ and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today’s episode. One thing to pack, five ways to power! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code SRS at ⁠https://www.Ridge.com/srs⁠ #Ridgepod Pete Blaber Links: IG - ⁠https://www.instagram.com/blaberpete⁠ Website - ⁠https://www.peteblaber.com⁠ Books - ⁠https://www.peteblaber.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Great news. The federal EV rebate is back. Eligible customers get up to $5,000 with the federal EVAP rebate on select 2027 Volt and 2026 Equinox EV models. Visit your local Chevrolet dealer today for more details. Pete, I don't know how much more of this shit I can take for one day, man. Yeah. But it's important work we're doing. So let's press on. Okay. Um, so, You know, I guess we'll kind of do a segue because we're in Afghanistan in 2002. Just two years, not even two years, about a year and a half later, eight kilometers to the east of Taka Gar is where Pat Tillman and his platoon are doing, searching for weapons caches. the how I got involved in this was was kind of twofold or two pronged first in

2017 Mary Tillman Pat's mother found an intermediary that contacted me and she sent me an email and it said I read your book I know you were in Afghanistan and you were a ranger. If you have time to talk, I'd love to talk to you. And so I called her immediately on the phone and she said, you know, she told me her story. She said it's been 13 years and I still don't know how, whether my son was killed on purpose or whether it was an accident. I have a massive 3,500 pages of videos, reports, testimonials, if you have time, would you mind taking a look? And I was said, told her, hey, I'll be up there, you know, tomorrow. I drove, about 400 miles, I think. They lived up around San Jose. I drove up,

met her at her place of work. She came out at lunchtime. She gave me this big bin of documents. And I took the documents home. And, you know, I was supposed to. spoke because I did a round trip in 24 hours. And I just opened one binder and I started reading. And, you know, next day I found myself like with dribble coming out of my mouth, collapsed into the binder. I'd already highlighted, tabbed because what I was discovering was, you know, just shit that every page I was like, you've got to be kidding me. You've got to be kidding me. And so she, there's speculation that he was killed, he was murdered? Well, she didn't know, and she didn't know because the Army lied to her.

You know, it took them 35 days. From the time Pat died, it took the Army 35 days to tell the family, to include the brother who was in the platoon. 35 fucking days. That Pat was killed by friendly fire. And so when she found out, excuse me, that Pat, it took 35 days to tell that, the original story which was embedded and told via the Silver Star narrative was he was shot while charging uphill to counter an ambush.

That's what his Silver Star read. So, you know, once her quote was something to the effect of, you know, if you're telling, if that's the way he really died, why would you make up such a massive lie to cover up. And, you know, that's what happens, too, is, you know, once you're lied to, lied once, then lied twice, and still no truth, you don't believe anything, you're told. And I think that's the mode that heard, the rest of the family was in, and quite frankly, a lot of people who looked at it and still look at it. This is why the entire U.S. government in every fucking institution inside of it is in the position that it's in right fucking now. Yeah. You're

right, the credibility, lack of consistency, lack of telling the truth. And, you know, in this case, there was no reason for it except the same old thing, pride, careerism, covering up, you know, something that was very embarrassing. But, you know, I went into it with eyes wide open. I told her, hey, I'd be happy to take a look, but I just want to tell you right now, because I didn't believe he was murdered right off the bat. And so I just want to be frank with you. I'm going to tell you exactly what I think after I read this

and it may not be what you want to hear. And she said, I'm fine with that. I just want to hear what you think and what we can do to prevent it from happening again. So, you know, I was super busy at the time. I just opened a new business. was trying to finish my second book, which was complex book, the common sense way. But, you know, I did what anyone would do when a Gold Star mom asked him for help.

And that's, you got it. I'm in. And I started working on it, working on, you know, basically the research for that. I did not initially think I was going to write it into a book. I just decided that at some point a few months in because I realized the same thing. The only way to get the truth out is to put it in on paper so people can read it and memorialize it. So, you know, I started right away. The first thing I did was talk to some old Rangers who, not old, but Rangers I knew when I was in the regiment.

and I served in Second Ranger Battalion twice. I told you I was a lieutenant. I went back once from the unit for 18 months to be the S3 of 275. So I went back as a major for 18 months, a mentor of mine who told me, hey, I know you love it at the unit, but in the same way you join the military to pay something back, you ought to go do some time in a regiment

and pay something back to them, you know, share some of the knowledge, you learned in the unit and I like that and I love Fort Lewis not pretending it was some massive sacrifice and I loved every minute of being back in the Rangers uh same thing I had a great battalion commander while I was there a great bunch of captains and COs so um you know I knew 275 very well I still many of those NCOs who I knew even as lieutenant were now first sergeant sergeant sergeant majors so I knew a lot of guys in the battalion still when I started working on it and you know right up the bat I just started calling up Rangers getting Rangers to give me other Rangers

numbers guys who were involved and started talking to him and you know I think three things I learned right off the bat one what unbelievably harrowing situation these guys were in when they were ambushed. I mean, when you hear the details of it, you know, there's not many ambushes like this, this ferocity. They were in the most daunting terrain and that was inhabited by the most obstinate and difficult to ally with or reason with tribes in all of Afghanistan. These are ancient Pashtun tribes, tribal sects of the Pashtun tribe,

who are known to be bandits, smugglers. They're right on the border with Pakistan, where this area is, it's called Sparodistic Koust Province. And like I said, it's eight kilometers east of Shahi Kot. And about from where Pat was killed, about five to eight kilometers to the Pakistani border. So unbelievable area ambush, most intense ambush. But the thing that really stood out was, I think the platoon was, when they were out there,

they were about 40 guys. I didn't get a hold of everybody. Some guys went, so they're so wounded psychologically by it that no one knows where they're at. But out of all the guys I talked to, I think 20, a little over 20 still had PTSD from this event. At least two of them were still suicidal. And so, you know, right off the bat, I was like 20 years, almost 20 years after it happened, all these guys are still suffering. And from talking to them, what you do.

discover is most of their trauma is from the investigation, is from the way the whole thing was handled, because the platoon ended up, they scapegoated the platoon after it happened. They made it. They told the rest of the regiment, they told everyone, uh, higher, you know, this platoon fucked up. And that's what caused it. It was a massive, you know, series of errors by the platoon. And nothing could be further from the actual truth. When I looked at it, pretty much across the board, you know, and anyone can second-guess platoon on anything you want, but pretty much across the board, they did all the right things

to include the young platoon leader who was only a lieutenant at the time. So those were the three things that struck me. you know, I ended up learning a lot more about PTSD that I didn't know. And one of the things that I think is most important for our viewers is a universal principle of how you help people heal from PTSD. And it's this, psychological wounds only heal with truth and community. So guys who, whatever they're diagnosed with psychologically from war, the two selves they need are truth.

They need to know what really happened and they need community. They need guys, you know, preferably the guys who are in their unit, but it can just be guys in the community telling them, hey, man, I would have shot that guy too. You know, don't torture yourself. He was standing there with a gun. You know, you shot him in the head. And, you know, I talked to a lot of my former colleagues about this. You know, one of things you, another thing you learn about PTSD is mostly it's a young man's disease.

It can accumulate to be a more senior guy, a guy in his 30s, you can have it in your 40s, 50s. But most of the guys who get the severe PTSD are the young guys. And part of that is what we now know biologically, the male brain doesn't fully develop until you're 25 years old. And what the part that doesn't develop is your neocortex, your thinking brain. So a lot of these guys, you know, aren't even, their brains aren't fully developed. And so they can't handle a traumatic event like an older guy who, just what I just gave an example of, the way you deal with emotions is you use your thinking brain.

the logic-based brain to make sense of the emotions. And, you know, as an example, anxiety makes sense when you think about it as a way for your subconscious to tell you there are things that you're not addressing in your life that need to be addressed. That's what anxiety is. You know subconsciously you're not doing something and anxiety is produced from that. Guilt is the same way. Guilt is actually a productive emotion. Guilt is your subconscious way of telling you that something you're doing could have serious negative effects on a relationship you have. And, you know, it can be wife, girlfriend, anything like that. But that's guilt. And it could be your brother, your son, any, it doesn't, it doesn't have to be, you know, sexual. It's just logic makes sense of our

emotions and a younger guy is a harder time making sense of it and you know my my good buddy uh from the unit uh Kevin M I'll go by his gnome de gar predator he's a guy who pointed this out to me and he said remember remember that time we were sitting there after uh after an op in Afghanistan it was you me and the third guy I won't say his name I'm like yeah and he goes we were doing the AAR went to like 3.30 in the morning. I'm like, yeah. And when the IAR finished, I said, come on, let's go get a shower and get a beer. And you were like, okay, and you and me stood up. And we looked over at our buddy, and he had his head in his hands. And we were all right next to each other on this target that we were talking about. Everyone saw the same thing. Everyone shot at the same targets. But that

guy took it differently, something about it. And I didn't know that. the time, but what it probably the difference was, he didn't see all the same things we did. And, you know, one of the problems we have as victims of PTSD were men and we're hard men and we don't like talking about our injuries and we don't talk like talking about our, you know, our frailties. We don't like admitting it. We want to fix it ourselves. And, you know, what really, instead of putting your heads in your hand, you know,

the most important thing to do is to, you know, say out loud what's bothering you. Because then your buddies will say, dude, you know, I shot him too. Or you may not even hit him. I hit him twice. And I have no problem with that, you know. But certain things set people off. You can never tell. Everybody's got a different brain.

Everyone's got different past experiences. But the main thing is truth and community. And I started seeing that real time because as I'm. piecing this whole thing together, I talk to these guys every day, at least one of them every day. I never logged a call that went less than two hours. I had some calls that went three, four, five hours. Wow. And at the end of these calls, I couldn't get the guys off the phone. I want to thank them, but they can't stop thanking me. Thanks for listening to me, man. And just, and none of them, it turned out, none of them were allowed to read. there were four investigations.

So none of the guys in the platoon were allowed to read the investigations. So again, holistically, I end up knowing because I've read now all 3,500 pages, watch the videotapes, been over the maps. I'd been there myself. I drove through that area. I now know it better than them, and I can piece shit together for them. So it's both truth and community they're getting. they're getting the truth.

No, that's not what happened. There were guys who thought, you know, he shot at me. I'm like, no, he did not shoot at you. He was shooting at the target up on the ridge, and you were in the line of sight below him, but they were not shooting at you. I didn't know that. You know, I've been pissed at that guy for all these years,

and I'm like, yeah, he did not, that's not what happened. And it's right here, you know, and two guys witnessed it, and he's like, fuck, I wish I'd seen that. A couple of guys called each other for the first times, said, hey, man, know, like, I'm sorry I was mad at you. Holy shit.

It was real, really in aggregate. I'll just jump forward before. Just ripped these guys apart. It did. And that's what I mean. There are guys, you know, they're in the prime of their lives. They're mid-40s now. I mentioned a couple of them were suicidal.

A couple of them can't work. They've got anger management. So you're in your mid-40s and you're already basically disabled from working, you know, you're the best, most productive years of your life. Really sad. Again, jumping forward, I made it right. Why were they not allowed to read the investigations? They just didn't, you know, the, I don't know what the exact reasons they were given.

They just weren't allowed to classify. Because the investigators didn't want the actual fucking truth? I believe, I believe that's what it was. I believe that the investigation never could withstand any scrutiny by an objective observer slash reader slash investigator. And this goes up, again, to the, you know, the J-Soc commander at the time. He signed off on the Silver Star. He signed off on the, the repercussions.

The platoon was punished. The platoon leader was reprimanded. Four guys were thrown out of the regiment. The squad leader was fined like $3,000. I mean, they punished these guys, but none of the guys who actually caused it were ever punished. Of course. So, yeah, just, you know, I don't want a short-shed-comander, no, this was all a fucking lie. Uh, by day, by at least, by 72 hours after everyone knew, because-

How the fuck can you expect? I mean, isn't integrity ingrained in every branch of the fucking service? And you have the fucking J-Soc commander, the fucking top dog, the person every fucking buddy wants to work for, J-Soc, is a lying fucking piece of shit. Yeah. Signing off on fucking lies to protect his sorry fucking ass. What's his fucking name? McChrystal. Huh.

Another fucking seal. No, he's a army, tried, true army guy. Okay. So you're thinking of McCraven. But, you know, same thing. And I'll tell you what he did that is really egregious. So let me just go through the, you know, I'll start at the end. The result was my finding that I delivered to Mary Tillman first before the book.

And by the way, she would not ever read anything I wrote. And she didn't read that book until it was published. She didn't read a word I wrote in that book until it was published. That's my final report to her. That's what I decided. I'm like, I'm going to have to give her a massive report. And then I was like, you know, I should make this a book because there's so many foundational lessons here, especially about toxic leadership.

And, you know, the lesson of the past. Tillman incident is the title of this book. You know, common sense leadership matters. Toxic leadership destroys. And it does. And until we internalize that and institutionally say to ourselves, we will seek out and fire every toxic leader that comes up on the radar. We're not going to fix the problem. It's got to be treated, you know, worse than whatever the worst DEI offense was over the last four years because toxic leadership is a killer. And ironically, toxic leaders seem to get promoted when their peers who take care of their people don't. So even more reason to fix the problem. But my findings, basically to summarize,

Pat Tillman was killed in a tragic friendly fire accident. But that friendly fire accident was not caused by the fog of war, battlefield friction, or enemy acumen. Instead, the death of Pat Tillman and the friendly fire incident was caused by the sum total of senseless choices made by the toxic chain of command and their staff officers who issued the orders. Who probably were not even fucking there. They weren't there.

They were 44 miles away in this new, fangled, of what I was telling you, now called the CFT, the cross-functional team concept, which essentially made every talk in Afghanistan the same, and they consisted of a wall of VTC's, a U-shaped table, each side was 10 staff officers, one side worked on current ops, the other worked on future ops. Don't ask me what that means. I can't, there's no such thing in my mind. OP is a future op and the current op, you just stick with the op that's going.

You don't have 10 staff officers in 10. And then the commanders sit at the base of the U at the top. Their days were defined and I'd say gauged by how many VTCs they participated in. And usually it was four to five VTCs. Most of those were higher headquarters back at Fort Bragg, sent comm. anywhere else that they needed to talk to. So and while the VTCs were going, no one, none of the commanders in the VTCs were answering radios. So the radios went to people manning the radios and again one of my recommendations is the military needs to set out an

edict. If you're a commander, you do not issue an order to subordinates who are in the field unless you, that order comes out of your mouth. You don't pass it to a staff officer to pass. You don't send it out via email or secure text. You say that order out loud. Same thing I told you before. Saying it out loud is our best common sense litmus because when we say it out loud, we make it physical. And when we make it physical, our own senses and those of the people around us can pressure test it to see if it actually makes sense. But they don't say it out loud more. And the takeaway is technology hasn't made saying it out loud obsolete. It's made it absolute. And we have to get back to that. Every order you give. And if you can't talk on the radio,

like we just talked about at Taka Gar, that Air Force General never came on the radio. He never said a word. He had a major, a field artillery major commanding the battle. If you can't command a battle on a radio, you don't not deserve to be a commander. That's part of what you're supposed to be able to do. That's how you issue orders. That's how we get this back and forth we talked about. Hey, that doesn't make sense. Can you explain to me the purpose of that?

But you can't do that if you're not talking to the person who issues the order. So it has to come back. Pat Tillman's what happened to the platoon is just a cavalcade of senseless orders. And, you know, it's hard to believe all of them. Essentially, they were given an order, a made-up order to go clear grid zones in this area, one of the most daunting and dangerous areas in all of Afghanistan, and that's saying a lot. So they were riding around in Humvees that were constantly breaking down. They'd drive up to a remote village, try to find a village elder, tell him,

hey, we're here to check for weapons cachets. We need to check every house. then they'd go in, toss the house, you know, search for their weapons cachets and go out. About six days into it, they'd found a rusty machete, a couple of old RPG rounds, and just an ass load of marijuana. A lot of people think of Afghanistan as pure poppies when they think of drugs, but weed, grows everywhere. It goes wild. It's a cash crop also. And where Pat died, there was a weed field below where he died at. So incredible waste of time. Terrain kicking their ass. They're low on food, low on water. I think they were seven days in when one of the vehicles

broke down. And it was a Humvee that actually Pat Tillman happened to be right. riding in. Now, it broke down why they were static at a place called border crossing point five. So it's up on a raised elevation, manned by Afghan, secure fence, HLZ inside of it. The Humvee breaks down. They call back to the rear, say, hey, the Humvee's broken, and the rear says, well, fix it. You know, you're, if you, you guys are already behind schedule. So in the top, The talk is monitoring everything with this color-coded sink matrix. And if you got a red box in your sync matrix, it means you're behind schedule. Each green box means you have already cleared the grid zone.

So, you know, you got nine platoons in a battalion. You got nine rows of green blocks. And then this one platoon is starting to fall behind. But there's this is a made up mission. The S2 of the battalion made it up. There's no intel that UBL and Zawahiri are living here, and there's a, you know, every weapon that is owned by Al-Qaeda is hidden here. Nothing like that.

It's just made up fishing. This is the kind of bullshit we did in Afghanistan. Yeah, a lot of people did. Just like a bunch of, like, what? Busy work. The fuck is this. Busy work. This is fucking special operations?

Yeah. Well, I should add, too, again, back to remember the time. It's 2004 and everybody, every leader at the time in the military lays their head on the pillow at night and dreams of getting lucky the next day and capturing Osama bin Laden being the one. So when you see some of these far-fetched missions, they're far-fetched, but they're far-fetched because guys are willing to do anything, no matter how painful for their guys, if there's even a slight possibility, they might find UBL. And I think that was the case here.

So these guys call from border crossing point five, BCP5, and say request a spare part. They thought at the time it was a fuel pump. It ended up being a solenoid. So fuel pumps flown out there, they try it, still doesn't work. Palltoon leader calls back, says, say it's deadline. I know you want us to get moving. I recommend we leave the vehicle here at BP5, which is a secure site. A helicopter can come in, airlifted out, or a helicopter can come in

with a higher level mechanic who's qualified to fix a solenoid. This guy was not. Negative, we want you to tow it with you. And the toe to, the toe to, the, The route they needed to go to get to this town they had to clear, called Mana, was taking in the opposite direction of Koust, which is where they had to tow back to. So they were basically telling them, hook it up with nylon straps, and tow it through the most difficult terrain on the planet for about 55 miles, maybe 60 miles. Off, you know, this is creeped. It's insane. It is insane.

So off they go. It's like trying to get through the fucking Rocky Mountains. It's Grand Canyon. Yes. On a fucking trail. Yes. Wow. These people are so fucking disconnected. Yeah.

So off they go. They leave in the day driving along. The average speed is 1.5 miles an hour. Imagine towing a Humvee with nylon straps. So there's a guy. 1.5 miles an hour for 55 miles. Look at 50 hours. Well, right.

But at the end of four and a half hours outside. a little Stone Age town called Magara, the vehicles had enough. The wheels collapse outward, tie rods break, this thing will never drive again. So once again, they get on the radio. Now they're in this town. So most of these rural tribes are friendly in Afghanistan. You probably experience this. But that doesn't mean the part that you're seeing is friendly, but the young men and whatnot

are almost certainly not, especially here. And they break down immediately the town folk. There's about 100 people living in the town, surround the vehicles, so they got a security situation. Call back to the rear, it's 1130, and they say, hey, we got a vehicle deadline. It's not going to move. Request CH47 to air lift it out.

The answer is, right. Roger, wait, you know, basically we're busy. We'll get back to you. Half hour later, they call back. Negative, there's no heloes available. We want you to, we want to send a wrecker, which is a military tow truck to pick it up. But the wrecker is not allowed to go more than a kilometer off the main highway. So we need you to get the Humvee to the Kausk Gardez Highway, which is still about 15,

kilometers away. The platoon leader does the right thing. He says, that's 15 kilometers. You know, how am I, like, Roger, we want you to do it. Also, it can just sit in a fucking bone yard at Coast. Right. Things not worth anything. And then let's fast forward a few years. We left 85 billion to include something like 3,000 Humvees in Afghanistan. So, the absurdity of it cannot even be described with adjectives. Here's what should have happened. Blow it in place, leave it the fuck alone. Never talk about it.

Well, the next thing, they wanted to blow it. And same thing. Negative, don't blow it, tow it. And in one of the testimonials, they interviewed one of the commanders, and he said, we the reason we didn't blow it is because that's number one it's against army policy and number two the enemy would use it for propaganda they'd get on top of it they'd take pictures and that would not be good so what i add in the book is there is no army policy nor was there ever an army policy against blow in a vehicle um if you're i had just in iraq in 2003

had one of my M1A2 tanks that we asked to have attached to us to pretend we were a tank battalion, it flipped over in a ditch. So the guys amazingly came out the bottom escape patch. The tank is in a ditch 20 feet down, upside down. It's over. To get a crane out there would take three days and require guards for three days. and then it would probably take another three days for the crane to get it out. So you guys rolled a tank?

Yeah. Yep. Offside down. Nice work. And so I said to the guys in the ground, what's your recommendation? They said, well, we got two tanks left. Let's fire a sable round into it and just leave it. And I'm like, Roger that.

And I didn't ask permission. I told him, fire that sable round in it. hanging out, we're not going to guard a tank and get a ranger kill. We had been in a massive firefight a few days before that with Fedien, like 28 of them in pickup trucks, killed most of them. One of our guys got killed. But it just showed you they were still coming out, and I was not going to leave Rangers in the middle of the desert. And we blew it. I didn't ask permission to blow it. And no one ever second-guessed us. No one ever. Want to know why'd you blow that vehicle.

We're doing an investigation. And the M182 tank was, I think, worth either 2.5 or 3.5 million at the time. So, you know, again, when you're talking about toxicity, you're talking about making decisions that are divorced from taking care of the men. In fact, they're designed in spite of taking care of to exert more pressure to, you know, we'll show them. they're behind schedule, we'll show them, you know, they're going to, they're going to pay the price for it, that type mentality. That's where toxicity comes from. So they're trying to figure out, they war game, they figure there's a driver comes up to him from Moghery, he's got a jinga truck, and he says, hey, I can tow that thing for $150 bucks. It calls back, gets permission, platoon leader, gives the guy $150

bucks they chain this Humvee to the back of the jingga truck now I need to explain two wheels are up off the ground so the rear wheels are the only wheels that are touching the ground the front is elevated on the back of a jinga truck and now they're going to drive all the way back that way or attempt to drive so it's going to get worse now they get it set up and they get another call And the talk, it's now been four and a half hours they've been sitting there. And the talk calls them the CFT and says, okay, here's what needs to happen. You need to split the platoon.

One half of the platoon will escort the broken down Humvee to the KG Highway, which is up, take this route up north. The other half of the platoon will drive directly to Mana and get, get boots on the ground in mana before nightfall. So the platoon leader, again, he's new. You know, a lot of platoon leaders would have shrunk from the moment, but he's like, well, why do we need to get to mana tonight? We're not allowed to clear villages at nighttime.

It's against SOP for good reason. Women are in there, you know, not fully clothed. And, you know, you're going to get someone shot at nighttime. You won't see squatters. which we and and so they rogered that and he said so we're just going to drive to mana and sit there and get some sleep till the morning and then wait till the other guys come back yes okay well as far as splitting the platoon goes if we split the platoon then only one element will have a 50 cal and we'll only have one satcom they actually had two but he was right they would their radios would be limited

if they split the platoon because the SACCOM is the only thing that would work. Line of sight doesn't work when you've got a mountain between you and the guy you're trying to talk to. Negative, you know, the answer was do what, do his plan, do what you're told. He, the platoon leader before leaving, so now it's starting to get dark. Time is, you know, sand slipping through the hourglass. He tries one more time hoping that maybe. he can get through some other people, if they can hear the predicament, to include Ranger Regimental headquarters, which is at Bogram. So he gets on the red set. I did not mention that the whole

conversation up to this point has taken place on email. And the guy answering him is his company XO. His company commander's not talking. The S3 is not talking, and the battalion commander's not talking to them. There are VTCs going on. All he's getting is emails. Emails telling him split the platoon. So all this is memorialized. It's all, this stuff's all in the investigation, the emails.

But, you know, you're reading them and you're going, a fucking email? You're telling them they can't blow the vehicle over email. You're telling them to split the platoon over email. Again, one of the hallmarks of toxic leadership, climate is that they don't communicate. They don't respect subordinates and they don't communicate. Everything is passed down through staff officers and intermediaries and emails and, you know,

always indirectly, which is kind of the coward's way of obiscian an order. Passive, aggressive, fucking coward. A pussy. Yes. So he gives one more try. switches from email to the red sat. So red for Rangers, everybody's on this. This is monitored 24-7 in and out of country. It's the Ranger sat. He gets on it, you know, says his call sign, asks for his company commander. Once again, company commander doesn't answer. XO answers,

hey, you got me. And he's like, okay, he ran the scenario by again. Exo said, nope, still stands. No one else chimed in. No one else at Ranger Regimental headquarters, who was at Boggroom, no one in the talk. No one else chimed in. This platoon leader was, you know, really just begging for a lifeline. And as much as he was begging for a lifeline, this is where platoon leaders need leaders, where junior leaders need senior leaders.

just wants a sounding board. He's under incredible stress. He's got this platoon looking at him like, are we fucking really doing this? He's in this, you know, incredibly harrowing situation. He's new, so he doesn't have a lot, you know, of experience to draw on. But this is where you need someone to get on and go, okay, tell me what's going on. What's your recommendation? And why does that make sense? And walk him through and use logic and, you know, reasoning with them. And again, the irony of doing that instead of avoiding it is you save yourself from making as a leader some incredibly catastrophic mistakes which is what's about to happen here you know one that will go down in history is one of the biggest senseless chains of decisions that were ever made so you know

they're in magarer they're broken down now they got to leave they've got the vehicle rigged The first cereal, they called it serial one, serial two with the platoon leader, leaves out, five vehicles, drives to mana. It's only 3.2 kilometers, but to get there, you go through a slot canyon. And I don't know if you've ever been to the narrows in Utah. A slot canyons like the narrows. It's got 1,000 to 1,500 foot walls and a creek runs through the middle of it. This one, the creek was only a trickle, but the creek bed was full of massive, geometrically sized boulders. And so just getting through this, the, the, uh, the slot canyon is shaped like a mushroom. So it comes up, goes out, goes around, switches around again,

comes down and goes out. That's how you get, most slot canyons are in a U-shaped format. This one was like a mushroom. So the first group gets through. Every guy, uh, in his statement, it says a different version of the same thing. I got a bad feeling about this because you're in, if you get ambushed in there, you can be killed by rocks. You don't even need bullets. You can be killed by rocks.

That's how vulnerable this area was. First group makes it through, makes it all the way to Mona pulls up on the outside. They believe the other group who comes out of Magura is going to take a right and follow the route to the KG highway. The first two vehicles do that, but when the jingo truck comes, he slams on the brake and he ain't moving. Everyone's like, what now?

So they get out, the interpreter's riding with them, and the interpreter begins translating for the platoon sergeant says, he says that route is impassable. They actually knew that. They drove that route to come in. It was, they almost rolled their vehicles like three times. Humvees could barely make it. So the driver's telling them. you can't get a jinga truck, much less a jinga truck,

towing a Humvee over that ridge. It's 6,950 feet. But here's the thing. This other route, the route 0-1 just went on, is not only faster than that route, it's way safer. There's no hills. It's like an open highway. We'll get there faster and we'll get their safer.

Platoon started, okay, let's go. But before he goes, he gets on the radio and tries to call the platoon leader and tell him, hey, we're changing direction. we're coming in behind you. No comms. Let's talk about something that actually brings a lot of stress this time of year. Banking. Most of us are used to the old school banks that seem built for the 1%

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He tries and tries on line of sight, then he gets on SATCOM, that doesn't work. Then he gets on the SATCOM again, and it's 6 o'clock. So the biggest VTC of the day is at 6 o'clock. He calls back to the CFT, the battalion headquarters. He's doing the right thing. He's calling back to get them to bridge comms. So when you can't make comms within a joining unit, you call higher so that hire can call relay between the two units.

and then stay there as long as needed to make sure that you're passing. You can conflict. Right. But there's no answer from battalion. So he starts striving. And now, you know, if you read the statements, there are some senior guys in serial two, and Kevin Tillman, Pat's brothers in serial two,

Pat's in serial one. And everyone said the same thing. we had no idea we were driving that serial one was anywhere near us, much less right in front of us. And serial one, the guys in serial one said, we had no idea where zero two was, much less do we think they were right behind us. But they're behind them. Now like about 10 minutes because they've stopped. So zero two turns around. So they tell the jinga that's okay, jinga now pulls out into the lead.

you know, now you're getting into the seven mistakes before a catastrophe. And, you know, they know it's only 3.2 kilometers. They can see on the map, but he's out in front to, you know, the road's narrow enough just to get to change that position. It's going to take a kilometer and a half to find a right spot. So they, he leads, the jingo truck. There's two Ranger NCOs sitting in the front seat with them. They pull into the slot can.

and same comments. I get a bad feeling about this, but they really have a bad feeling because all the platoon Humvees are behind the jinga truck now and he's moving at about one mile an hour. So I mentioned the geometric boulders. Not only do you have to zigzag to follow the creek, but you've got to zigzag within the zigzags because the boulders don't let you go, you know, cross at the spot you want to cross the creek or move up the little. sand dune that you want to use to get to the next spot. So it's almost impossible driving how this jingo truck got himself in the Humvee. Even 100 meters in is amazing, much less the whole canyon. But about 100 meters in, two explosions. Some guys think they were RPGs. Other guys said they were

mortar rounds. They blew up on the canyon wall to the west of them, where the sun. going down. A massive boulder gets loose, comes crashing down, the size of, you know, like an F-150 goes right between two vehicles. You know, everyone's watching it. Luck would have it. They made, they do the right thing, they get out of their vehicles because they weren't sure if it was an IED or, you know, someone shot something at them. And then the RPK machine guns open up from up on top on the ridge. The Rangers, return fire. And like, you know, only Rangers can do, they've got a lot of firepower. They've got Mark 19s, 50 KALs, they've got, you know, they've got AT-4s, mortars, and they just start opening up. It's actually the right thing to do. They took some criticism for this, but to suppress

the enemy, you know, you've got a blanket them, drown them, in shrap. Rapino and, you know, rounds flying over their head to keep their heads down. So they, they, they, you know, your first recourse when you drive into an ambush is to drive out, but they can't drive out because the jingo's in the lead. He ain't even in the vehicle. He's scared shitless hiding behind a rock. And at first, some of the guys thought, you know, hey, he's in cahoots with the bad guys. They set us up at this last town.

He wasn't. He was just scared shitless. and he's in the middle of a firefight. So they force him back in the vehicle, get moving again. And, you know, if it wasn't so deadly, it's farcical. They're moving through. It's like a Monty Python thing. You're moving through an ambush at one mile an hour, stacked up, you know,

four vehicles behind a jingo truck and a towed vehicle. The jingot truck stops again in the middle of the slot canyon. They get out. Heated discussion. happens. One of the squad leaders, you know, gets in what was called, called almost a fight with them, smashes his window. The driver goes, you know, berserk, but he gets back in the vehicle and starts driving again. Finally, they come to the end of the canyon, and the canyon opens up. The jingo truck can move over and let the Humvees go by. they've been now firing for 12 to 14 minutes.

So we talked about making sense how important it is in combat. And one of the definitions of making sense is the only way to make sense is with your senses, sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. So when you lose any sense, you're losing a major ability to make sense of what's going on around you, especially sight and sound. But if you expose the human ear to a decibel level of 130 decibels or more for over 30 seconds, temporary deafness sets in. And temporary deafness is a variable thing. It can go anywhere from minutes to hours to days.

The lowest decibel weapon they were firing was the M4 at 150 decibels. almost none of them had ear plugs on because they're not a mech unit they don't drive around they should have been driving with peltoors on but they didn't have peltoes only the mortar guys did but they didn't even have ear plugs on so 12 to 14 minutes they were exposed to machine gun mortar and rocket fire you know at the 150 decibel range almost the entire platoon is now deaf and it's in every statement, you know, my squad leader had to get up and yell in my face, and still I couldn't hear him. I could just read his lips. So they're now seriously handicapped because they can't hear. The light's also going down. Now, before we come out of the canyon, let's go back to serial one. Serial one pulled in, to Mana, which is they're about to drive up toward Mana, 0-2. They got out to do a map check, and just as they got out to do the map check,

they heard the boom, boom, and they could tell it came from back in the Slot Canyon. They got on the radio, still no comms, no one to talk to. So the decision was made, let's get up to the high ground, see if we can overwatch the position, provides suppressive fire and or kill the enemy. So the squad leader and the platoon leader have a hunch that it's the rest of the platoon behind them. The rest of the platoon has no idea. They just think, you know, we're going up to shoot the enemy.

So up they go. They leave the vehicles and all their crew serve weapons. A couple of guys stay with the vehicles, and the rest of them run up, 11 guys up this incredibly difficult slope up to what's the terrain feature is a spur which sticks out from a ridge like a tongue and they occupy this spur thinking here's where we'll be able to get comms and provide fire support they try the comms still no joy on the comms so that's out fire support there's still a whole other a whole another ridge between them and the canyon so they can't see into the canyon but they can't

see down right to where the canyon opens up where serial two is about to come out um now as soon as they get up there they come under fire from the high ground so six guys in serial one said they saw enemy up in the high ground to the west they don't know though that serial two is shooting at that same enemy so you can kind of extrapolate that rounds are bouncing off rocks looking like even more fire These guys said they saw guys up there. Pat Tillman, who, I should go back. When they said split the platoon, something happened that is, you know, violates a major part of any fighting element strength.

Everyone was in a position based on where their squad leader, team leader was, and then how they sat in the vehicle was based on that same organic relationship. You always want to be with your fire team, your squad, whatever. When they split the platoon, because they were told, don't just split it, here's how to split it. Sent two mortars, send two snipers, send these guys. They fucking broke it all up. Broke the organic relationship of the platoon apart.

They micromanaged it all the way to that. So now, Pat's with a squad he's never worked with before. He's a team leader of one. And the other team is in the other serial. The squad, no one tasked the squad with, hey, Pat's attached to you. So same thing in serial two. You got guys in vehicles in the lead vehicle, which has the most firepower, is the weapon squad. But this weapon squad leader is not in the front seat.

One of the rifle squad leaders is. And so where does that matter? unless you've gone overall your hand and arm signals for fire, what direction, ceasefire, you've got no way to control those guns when you're driving and, you know, the guys are in the back. So the organic nature of the platoon's been broken apart. Pat gets up to the top of the spur. The squad that he followed up there, you know,

did their immediate action, laid out beautiful linear formation, military crest of the ridge. Pat, there's no more room. So Pat goes, hey, how about I take me and my guys down by those two boulders right there? And they're about 20 meters lower on the east side of this finger. He means two guys, because he's got one Ranger private, that guy's really attached to him, and one Afghan. So these Afghans came with them from border crossing point five, and one of them decided to follow Pat Tillman up the mountain. So he's now with them. This is not a great position. It could have been sufficient, but they weren't good boulders. They didn't provide full protection for the most likely spot you'd be shot at, which is right down on the Canyon Road. But they get

down into that position. And the now, so they're set, and just to give you an idea, So a spur is like this. It's like a tongue. Pat's down here. The squads up like this. The canyon comes out right like this. So the rest of the platoon is behind this ridge, but they're about to come out in the canyon right in front of them.

And, you know, you can hear them because you can still hear them shooting. And to Pat and the private, they're new guys. And one of the things I cover in the book is that, you know, friendly fire is a constant. As you read, I've been to combat in Panama, Colombia, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and I've experienced friendly fire in Panama, Colombia, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq. Friendly fire and experiencing combat go hand in hand. It just tells you friendly fire is a reality of combat. So what does that mean that you just shrug your shoulder and go, no, it means you're always

expecting friendly fire. Your brain's always extrapolating. Well, if he goes over there, these guys could be shooting at us. It's become second nature and you expect it. For new guys, that's not going to be in their, you know, locusts of experience. They're not going to go, if that's, that might be second platoon coming around. They're not alerting the themselves, hey, they're not going to know we're up here. We didn't tell them we're up here. They're going to start shooting at us. And remember, Pat's squad leader, who is a fairly experienced guy, he's down riding in the Jenga truck. So if he was up there with him, I know, because I talked to him, he would have done what I would have done if I was there. And it would have been,

guys, get up, get out of here, get back behind the military crest of the spur. This is totally exposed. When they come around that corner, they have no idea we're up here. They're going to be shooting. And that's pretty much what happened. Fuck, man. Within a couple of minutes out they come around the corner, the lead gum jeep has a 50-cal,

a saw, 203, and, yeah, two saws in a 203, I think. And they're firing full up because, when they come around the bend, the Afghan, who doesn't speak English, will not get down.

Pat and the Ranger Private are trying to tell him, dude, get over here, down, down, but he's not getting down. Whatever reason, language, how he didn't understand. There were two or three rounds landing like 50 meters away. He froze. He probably fucking froze. Yeah, whatever, but he's firing his AK2, like from the hip. He's firing up at where they had seen enemy across the road to the south. So serial two comes around this bend, blind.

First thing they see is a guy with a beard in these weird khaki camos, AK-47 firing away, the squad leader, who's now pretty much in reptilian brain mode after 12 minutes of firing and fighting with the truck driver. he just puts his M4 up to his eye, looks through his ACog site, drops him, fire seven shots, hits him, the guy was hit seven, at least seven times. So shot him, you know, at about 50 to 75 yards, dropped him. When a machine gunner does not get a verbal command, they're trained to shoot where their squad leader shoots.

So this is a new, this is a squad leader. hasn't been working with them. He just shot at the Afghan, so all the machine guns swing around, including the 50 Cal, and start firing right at that Afghan. 10 meters behind the Afghan is Pat and the private behind these insufficient boulders, especially for Pat's hulking muscular frame. So they begin opening up, and, I mean, it's a hail of fire. these guys are on their back, and suddenly the firing stops.

So they, Pat and the private think the Afghans down, but they don't know that yet because they didn't see them drop. But Pat and the private think, oh, they figured it out. So again, you know, what really happened was these guys came to a corner. There's a rock wall down there that fences made of rocks, that fences this marijuana and poppy patch that's growing by the creek. To get around it, they had to make a right turn. But to make that right turn, there was a depression.

So the Humvee sunk into the depression, and the guns wouldn't elevate over the rock wall, so they paused their firing until they came back out of that depression. Pat and the Ranger Private thought, hey, they must have figured it out. They stand up, start waving their arms going, hey, it's us, it's friendly. Pat's like, it's me, Pat Tillman, Rangers, Rangers. Well, they also don't know their death, and they're even deafer now because they've been firing 50 cows right next to their already, you know, damaged eardrums. They get back down again. Somehow they survived the return

fire. He's like, what the fuck? And the Ranger Private, who, you know, is a great guy. He just, he stayed in the Army the whole time after this became a sergeant major, passed on Pat's legacy to every soldier he, you know, he taught throughout his career. But he's a brand new guy, months in the Army, he knows nothing. He starts praying. Pat tells him, hey, man, now's not the time to pray. You got to, we got to pay attention to what's out there. And if you pay attention to it, you'll save your life. And the Ranger Private writes, and he was right, because by refocusing my brain on where they were shooting from, I was able to inch my body around with the boulder to get the max cover out of it and avoid getting hit. But right when he did that,

Pat said, I got an idea on how to stop this. Pat had a smoke grenade. And he got up to his knees to throw that smoke grenade. And this was probably the last couple of hundred rounds shot by this lead vehicle. They were about to be, again, occluded by terrain. And the sawgunner had swung around, and the sawgunner saw him come up and hit him with three rounds right in the head and killed him. You know, Pat went down the platoon, the private screaming. finally these guys see there's a bunch of Rangers up there range of Ranger Ranger it's getting dark zero two comes riding in they're like what the fuck happened they've got you know the platoon sergeant there's actually the new regimental

sergeant major great guy are in the rear vehicle they come up what happened because no one knows and and now word comes hey there's we've got an eagle kia up here and what's his initials P-T and the whole platoon, but Kevin Tillman, the squad leaders and platoon sergeant hear that, they know Pat's dead. Devastation falls upon the platoon. Some of the guys, you know, broke into tears up when they saw his body. You know, one of the conspiracy theories that he was killed was that he was killed by the platoon.

And I can vouch for the platoon. they revered him, not because he was a football player, but because he was a great guy. And he was this guy who sacrificed to do exactly what they did, you know, these kids from small towns across America who didn't have nothing but a high school job like we talked about earlier. And here's this guy who's doing the same thing as them for the same reasons, but he gave up a $2.2 million contract and a career in the NFL. and he was just a great guy.

You can read all the independent statements, even squad leaders who normally in the Rangers, you know, don't interact a lot with junior guys. They loved talking to him because he made everyone feel like they were being listened to and like, you know, he was a great conversationalist, ask great questions, super intelligent, but just a good person.

And so the platoon is devastated. The platoon sergeant comes up, starts piecing things together. He finds the platoon leader who was from serial one. He's injured. He was hit by a mortar round that was or a 203 round that was fired by serial two and hit him and his RTO. He's bleeding going into shock.

So they got to get him medevac. They got to secure the perimeter because they're still enemy out there. So this chaos and it's dark, it's getting dark. And no one knows where anybody else is. you know, they're spread out. This is sheer, utter chaos. And, you know, they did it. They called in a Medevac. Medevac, Pat's body, the Afghan's body, and Medevac, the platoon leader, his RTO, both were hit. The RTO was shot in the knee, again, by the first vehicle. They confused them, too. They saw them, shot them also. And Kevin Tillman went along because it's his brother. And, you know,

he was despondent, you know, once he found out that it was Pat. Fuck, man. Yeah, so they have a memorial service back at Koust, you know, at the airfield there in Kaus, which is, you know, the base memorial service for Pat. At the end of Memorial Service, his body's going to be flown to Bogram first and then off to Germany and back to the U.S. and Kevin is going to go with the body, accompany the body all the way, you know, back home. So before that morning, I should say, so this is two days after the morning, the next morning,

the battalion commander shows up and they do an investigation. He walks up to the site where Pat was killed, asks the first sergeant, what do you think cap and he said, sir, I'm pulling 50 cows rounds out of the rock. Pat was behind. This was friendly fire. By 12 noon, every guy in the platoon who was still out knew Pat was killed by friendly fire. The battalion commander knew he was killed. The battalion commander in his statement said, I called the regimental commander at 12 noon and told him Pat was killed by friendly fire. So anything you hear now when we go to the 35 days, just remember that, that these guys knew it was friendly fire. So now the next day is the memorial service,

and they're going to put Pat's body and Kevin onto this Chinook. Before they get on, the body's loaded. The battalion commander in the S3 pull Kevin to him and aside and, you know, give them their condolences and say, look, we just want to let you know we're going to find these guys. And when we find them, there's going to be hell to be paid. They knew he was killed, but they had been told by the regimental commander, keep this under your hat. We got to do an investigation

before we say anything. But this is a member of the platoon, so he's both a brother in arms and a brother in blood. He, of all people, knows how chaotic it was. He was in serial two. His gun had its buttstock torn off by one of the canyon walls.

his Mark 19, thank goodness, jammed. If he had opened up with that Mark 19, he probably would have killed multiple guys in serial one. So he's in the back of the, for the ambush 12 to 14 minutes, he's got a 9 mil. He fired eight rounds out of his 9 mil in that canyon. So of all the people who knew how chaotic it was, Kevin Tillman knew how chaotic it was,

knew how difficult it was to identify the enemy, He knew the volume of fire they were up against, knew that you couldn't see anything, knew they were following a senseless order. But they don't tell him. So Kevin goes, gets on that helicopter, flies to Bogram, still doesn't know, but he's going, why isn't anyone talking to me? And he tries calling the Ranger Private, who was next to Pat when he died. He demands, they put him on the red phone from Bogram. They put him on the red phone. and the battalion commander tells him,

you say anything, you're going to pay the price for it. So they make him... To his fucking brother? Yep, they make him lie to the brother, not be truthful. He did whatever. I don't know, I don't know. And, you know, him and Kevin get along great. Kevin now knows he was coerced into doing that.

And again, if you freeze the moment in time... Holy fucking shit. And think of what these guys did by not telling Kevin. When Kevin landed in Bogrom, he went right to a phone, a secure phone, called his mom and Pat's wife, Marie, and gave them the bad news. And he did it in the way that there's no sugarcoat in it. Mom, Pat was killed in one of the most chaotic ambushes I've ever seen today. I'm flying home with the body.

Mother devastated. wife devastated. There's no sugarcoding telling family members that their loved ones been killed in action. But you can only make it a thousand times worse by not telling them the truth about how he killed, especially when the truth about how he killed is friendly fire. And you're telling him he's killed in an ambush. So for the next 35 days, I'm not inside this chain of command's head, but somehow they're, no, no, no, hold it off. To just be completely objective and fair, for 48 to 72 hours, they could have said, we don't know for sure.

I would have told Kevin everything I know, Kevin, we don't know exactly the bullets that killed Pat, whether they came from friendly or enemy. didn't know that, and they could have still come from enemy. But what we do know is the guy who was laying next to him, the Ranger Private, who's still alive, is telling anyone who wants to hear that Pat was killed by friendly fire. They came under fire from a lead gun jeep, and he believes he was killed by friendly fire. I want to tell you, we're going to continue the investigation. They're doing an autopsy at Bogum before they ship the body. When, as soon as I get, a definitive cause and what killed him from the autopsy, you'll know everything I know. And if you need anything in the meantime, the battalion is at your service.

That's what I would have told him. Instead of, you know, let us know if you need anything, we'll get these guys and off they went. But Kevin would have told the mom and Marie right there, not just that he was dead, but he was killed by friendly fire. And the whole thing that went on for basically 20 years. years would have been nipped right there with just the truth. So, you know, the old adage, you know, the truth doesn't get any better with age. You know, bad news doesn't get any better with age is, you know, on steroids here. But they're aging it, and they're aging at 35 days,

a memorial ceremony in San Jose where they read this Silver Star citation, charging up a hill to counterattack an enemy that ambushed his comrades. And so here's the other part. On day, three days after it happened, the platoon comes in back into Koust, into the basin Koust, and they do a hot wash. They're directed to do and they do a hot wash. No one from the chain of command attends that hot wash. In the hot wash, you can really be, you know, I was very proud of these guys because each

squad leader got up. The first squad leader who was in the gun jeep that shot Pat said, it's not it's not my guy's fault. We thought we saw an Afghan. We've been shooting in that direction for 12 minutes. They only shot up there because I shot. I'm the one who shot the Afghan. They did what they were supposed to do and shoot where their squad leader is. Don't blame my guys taking full responsibility. Next squad leader gets up. Says I was up on top of that spur. I knew Pat was down there. I didn't know he was supposed to be under my supervision

or whether he was or not, but I know he doesn't know much about friendly fire or positions because he doesn't have experience in combat. Pat was very common sense, astute guy. So I take responsibility for it. So two guys get up, two squad leaders, 24 years old, and they take full responsibility like leaders are supposed to. And as I point out in the book, there's a huge difference between responsibility and blame.

Responsibility means accountability, which is by default if you're a leader. You take accountability for what happens to your men in a combat zone. Blame means you are admitting that it was your fault. So these guys took responsibility, not blame, but then by taking responsibility, this thing was flipped completely into blame. It was their fault. They should have made comms. They should never agreed to the split the platoon. They should have known that their one element was behind the other.

Should have never agreed to split the platoon. They were ordered to. They came from the fucking XO. Yep. Where's the X-O? The S-3. The S3. So here's one that'll get you.

The S3 gave the order to split the platoon. He lied about it when he was first interviewed for investigations. So the first one he said, the company commander did it. Finally he admitted the battalion commander said, no, the S3 gave the order in a separate interview. Then the S3 admitted it once he heard the battalion commander said, yeah, I told them too, but, you know, because they needed to hurry up. They were behind schedule.

That guy was a major at the time. He just got promoted a four-star general. What's his fucking name? I can't remember right now, but I'll get it for you. But he's a four-star general. Of course he is. And he was, he's probably... Under Pete Hegseth?

Yeah. Right now. Yep. Pete Hegseth has a fucking lying piece of shit who's too much of a pussy to take fucking responsibility under his command. Yeah. Yep.

scapegoats the guys. And I wish you knew this fucker's name. Yeah, I'll remember. Four star fucking general. Oh, remember. A four star fucking general with an integrity problem. Hodney. Who's probably going to wind up being the Secretary of War some guy.

Well, not. What's his name? Hodney. Yep. Yeah, so. Wow. So it just goes from bad to work. Did you imagine watching 24-year-old fucking kids take responsibility for your fuck-up?

When I interviewed guys. And then you fucking get promoted to, four-star, this shit happens all the fucking time. Yeah. And it would never, no one would ever known the difference if you didn't have a mom, a resilient, you're not going to tell me to shut the fuck up mom. One of the things she told me in the beginning was, you know, everyone, that people won't talk to me. People hang up the phone on me now and DOD and whatnot. And she said, you know if the roles were reversed and pat was the one killed pat would never give up till he found the truth and so i'm going to do the same thing and she did and you know i write a letter to her at the end

of this book what an amazing mom she is and you know i say as a son of an amazing mom myself i know pat would be incredibly proud of you to know how you fought how you never took no for an answer you kept at it, you somehow found me, contacted me, you know, were able to work and figure this whole thing out. And, you know, she got some closure out of it, but it doesn't make it any less painful the reality of what happened and the fact she was lied to repeatedly. Once again, General Hogni. Wow. Yeah. Wow. How many of these fucking people do you think there are?

Well, I think there's the tip of the iceberg. Like you said, I think it happens way more than we know about. And they just find a way to scapegoat their way out of it. And again, the tragedy is they prevent current and future warriors from ever learning from it, learning what the real lessons are, and preventing it from happening again. And that's what happened here. and, you know, my recommendations are we need new studies on group PTSD. This group PTSD, find these clusters of PTSD's, and when you find them, you're probably going to find a toxic chain of command above them because the PTSD comes from no truth, no community. These guys were ostracized.

When they got back to 275, no one would talk to them. The word was already out. They fucked up. They got Pat killed. This was a huge embarrassment. These fucking leaders will stop at nothing, nothing. They will fuck anybody over. They will lie.

They will fucking cheat. They will do any fucking thing in their power to get that next fucking star. Yeah. Yep. And so, you know, I go back. Would you say this is the majority of the fucking military? I wouldn't say that. I just think there's.

a number of these incidents out there, a lot of them, that, you know, still need to be uncovered, you know, talked about exposed. Any incidents off the top of your head that need to be dug into? Well, I think you already mentioned the Red Wings thing needs to be corrected. The truth on that needs to come out, especially because of Red Wing, all the guys who died on that Helo, you know, flying back there, they drop the ropes. You don't fly back to an HLZ where you drop the ropes the first time. When you drop ropes, you've compromised that position. They left those ropes. So, you know, what happened to that team was just a string of errors when they were

compromised by the goat herder. Any experienced sniper-recky guy knows. compromises mission abort. There's no question. As soon as you compromise, it's abort the mission. They weren't going to disarm a nuclear weapon. That would be maybe an exception to that rule. They were going on a tipper that a low, you know, a low-ranking Taliban guy lived up there and hung out with his gang up there. So this was also a fishing expedition. But these guys were watercraft guys. sniper reconnaissance guys who would know that when you're compromised it's abort the mission there's no debate do we kill him do we tie him up you get the fuck out of there you call for exville or use shoe leather express to to exville yourself uh no and ifs or buts about it uh so and you know

in in lettrell's book that's not covered he criticizes i think the the lieutenant for saying no don't kill him. And he, you know, the book goes into some diatribe on, you know, we should have killed them or something. And you don't fucking kill non-armed combatants. You abort the freaking mission. You've been compromised. He almost as surely has a cell phone in his pocket. Someone knows he's out there. He didn't show up. You're compromised anyway. And now they're going to be coming after you. So, you know, there's plenty out there. But yeah, with Pat, you know, it's a tragedy. Pat Tillman, to me, is, you know, a role model for future warriors, future leaders.

You know, and in a time where we don't have a lot of role models, this guy represents, you know, one of the purest that I can think of. and he deserves, his name deserves to live on, his legacy deserves to be carried on. People need to know his sacrifice. And ironically, you know, if you watch Pat's speech, he gave on September 12th, he says, you know, it makes you realize what's important to life. Same thing about freedom. And he says, you know, all my relatives served. My grandfather was at Pearl Harbor.

And, you know, I look at my life and I haven't done a damn thing. And then the next day, the media swarmed. him and he said, look, I'm joining the military. I'm not giving any more interviews. This isn't about me. Treat me the exact same way you treat every other private, every other soldier in the military. And ironically, that has ended up, you know, what happened to him. There was no special dispensation for this platoon because Pat was in it. They were treating this toxic leaders, treat everyone with the same disdain. And that's the way they were treating this platoon.

Just tell him to do shit in spite of what they wanted to do, almost like, you know, a bad parent punishing his kid for not doing something that they expected. And, you know, and Pat paid the price for it. But his memory and what his mom did, I think every parent out there can draw inspiration. from what she did. I certainly did and certainly have a lot of respect for her and the Tillman family in general. So, you know, not to beat the horse again, but this is exactly what happened at Tucker Gar. It's a disconnected chain of command trying to make decisions and solve problems,

micromanaging the guys on the ground when they have no ability to make sense despite their wall of high-resolution screens, satellite imagery. They have no ability to make sense of what's happening on the ground or sensible choices for the guys on what to do next. What advice do you have for the Secretary of War? Change the way the military thinks about leading and organizing.

The current way does not work. There is another way. It's called the common sense way. And I'd be more than happy to explain it. It's not invented by me. It's invented by our ancient ancestors. It's all based on the way the brain works, the way we're biologically hardwired to make decisions and solve problems. And we need to go back to that.

We need to teach it. We need to teach people to stay calm in a crisis. If those guys knew about diaphragmatic breathing, they could have been breathing. They were stressed out to the max. When they came around that corner, it was like coiled spring. with 50-Cal machine guns and Mark 19s and every heavy caliber weapon you can name, that's the times where you've got to calm down. And remember, panic like calm is contagious.

So when one guy's panicking and flipping out the whole vehicle is. But we really need to change the way we think about leading and organizing and specifically change this trajectory on command and control. it is hard fucking broke. And if we keep going down this path that these generals are telling him works, it's never worked. There's no

nothing on record that shows this working. And someone might go, well, we had it for the Maduro raid. Well, the Maduro raid was a set piece operation. It was a one in and out thing. That's where you have to have a talk somewhere. So, but the same thing that

was done probably with $10 million of Whizbank shit could have been done by a squadron commander with two SATCOMs and a couple of RTOs and an Intel guy sitting next to them like I had for all of Anaconda Shahi coat. That's all I had. It's all I needed. And I was not maxed out in any way, shape, or form. So yeah, I'd tell them we've got to change the way and there is another way. And we need to start teaching our people how to use their brains to make good decisions and solve complex problems that set the condition for our soldiers to succeed. I hope it listens.

Me too. Take a break. Yeah. Hi, I'm Sarah Adams, the host of Vigilance Elites, the watch floor, where we highlight what matters. It became a permissive state. Explain to you why it matters and then aim to leave you feeling better informed than you were before you hit play. terrorists, hostile intelligence agencies, organized crime, not everything is urgent, but this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know. All right, Pete, we're in the ninth inning. I want to chat with you about getting out, your journey out. And we talk a lot, a lot of heavy stuff today. And I think it would be good to end on a positive note.

talk about some things that some things that guys could think about you know that are out that are struggling that are getting ready to get out i mean you know we're coming off the ass end at 20-something years straight of war yeah and and guys are already back at war you know i mean we didn't even talk about the afghan withdrawal but something i wanted to you know tell you about is i think everybody needs to hear this shit is you know i got still have a lot of friends in and I don't want to say what unit group, any of that, even what branch they were in. But a good friend of mine just came back from Syria about a year ago. Saw a lot of shit there, bonded with the Kurds, who we have now abandoned already.

And he fucking texted me this morning. And he said, man, he's like, we went in there. we did this fucking regime change, we abandoned the fucking people that I was fighting with, and now they're being slaughtered in the fucking streets. And they're asking where we're at. And, man, I just read that shit, and... I can't believe it's happening again.

Yeah. And I just said, man, I'm fucking sorry, man. Seems like every fucking American generation, generation, a veteran goes through this shit. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, fucking everywhere we go, we do this shit. Yeah, well, you said it earlier. Like, part of the responsibility of veterans is not that you're a veteran of going to combat or a veteran of serving.

It's you're a veteran of knowing. knowing what was said before you joined and went to combat and what happened afterwards. And when you look at it in, you know, in a cohesive way, beginning, middle end, it shines a different light on, you know, everything you thought and everything you believed in the beginning and what you now know. And what you end up saying is what you said. said earlier, you know, which is advice to, you know, young man, you'll, you know, you're going to see, don't, don't be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. What you think you're doing may not be what you're doing, and what they do after it's over might shock you because you went in under

this belief system like Afghanistan. I think we're all, you know, still suffering. offering internal pain because every single one of us in some way, shape, or form, whether verbally or through other means, told the Afghans, we're here, we're going to support you guys. And, you know, there's a lot of freedom-loving Afghans, and they thought they had their country back. And when they still had it, you know, they still could have defeated the Taliban if we had just let them. But they were told to stand down by the, you know, the fleeing American generals and admirals. There was an admiral on the ground, too. So, you know, war is not just what you learn in combat. It's what you learn afterwards.

You know, was it worth it? Were those great men, you know, who, that's why it's always important to keep some of these guys top of mind because they're gone. You know, that's an evolutionary change to the planet. These incredible human beings are gone. And what are they gone for? Well, you know, based on the way our government, you know, treated it nothing.

Because I guess, you know, our president at the time, Joe Biden, was saying, hey, none of this ever mattered. These people don't matter. And we don't care that you gave your word. that we'd always be there to protect them. Pretty soon we're not going to be able to go anywhere in the world without that fucking reputation. Yeah, I agree.

Because that's what this country fucking does. I'm with you. And that's what I, so again, if we had Hague set in here, I'd tell them, you know, everyone needs, that needs to be brought up when these decisions are being discussed. You know, we, the Kurds especially, that goes back to the Gulf War in 91.

They've been our allies, you know, incredibly valuable allies. And they should still be, they're the finest fighters in the Middle East, in my opinion. They should still be protected as the go-to guys, if anything ever flares up over there again. We can count on them, you know. Not anymore. Yeah, no, it's disgusting. I did not know that to you. You brought it up.

Not anymore. It's despicable. But why did you? get out? Yeah, thanks for asking. You know, you never make a major life choice based on one single variable. So if you think about all the major life choices you made, there's no one reason you make it. And getting out is a complex decision, and it was very hard for me. I was promotable. I was already a full colonel. I was on the brigade command list, both regular infantry and, you know, for special mission units.

But, you know, I had been thinking about it for a long time. You know, Afghanistan, I, you know, told the commander, you know, when he said, you know, the whole story, I told you, he was not happy with that. Iraq, we didn't get to Iraq. But, you know, when they told, when he told me to send my guys into Tikrit in unarmored vehicles, I said, we're not doing that. That's not the mission I gave them. They're already pulling out, and they don't have the combat power to go in there anyway. Good for you.

So, yeah, that was part of it. The other parts, I never saw the military as defining my whole professional life. And, you know, I had a couple, what's the Christmas Carol movie, you know, he sees the ghost of the Christmas future. And like I remember this one of the few times I had ever been in the Pentagon while I was still in the unit. And I went walking through there seeing all these old broken down white-haired kernels and, you know, and a lot of them were civilians working their GS-15. And that's cool.

But I looked at them and I'm like, I do not want to be that guy. And, you know, I want to try something new. I want to reinvent myself. So that was that was part of it too. And then, you know, my, I had two kids at the time and I just wanted to spend more time with those kids. And it was bothering me that I was, you know, not able to go there because of GWAT, Afghanistan, Iraq, back to back, and then nonstop tours. So, you know, all in all, it just, it was the right thing for me to do, but hard to do. And so when guys ask me about it, I tell them, you know, first off, the brain can only think of one thing at a time.

So the way you get around that is when you want to make a complex decision, you have to understand all the key variables of that decision. So sit down with a pen of paper and just ask yourself a question, why do I want to get out? And then start writing. Don't, no filters. You know, you might throw in there. I want to make more money. There's nothing wrong with that. not be one of your priorities, but you should still go in there. I'm sick of the mindless shit.

You know, all those little things are important too. They may not end up being the five key variables, you know, whatever, your marriage, you never saw yourself. You always wanted to do something different. You want to live somewhere different. Things like that matter. But write them out so that you're consciously aware and you can make a good decision. Because I think it's such a hard decision, a lot of people default. And the military institutionally will pressure you unless you're in a very special, you know, a situation where people who really care about you

are, you know, advising you. Usually they'll pressure you. That sergeant major I just told you about who was laying next to Pat, they almost wouldn't let him retire. In his 21st year, you know, they wanted to keep. them in and I remember quite a few operators that happened into during GWAT you

know instead of you know when a guy comes to me and says I want to retire I want to go to another unit I say tell me about it okay what can I do to help you know that's your job even when they want to leave your job is to help them make that transition they you owe it to them they've given their blood sweat and tears to you now it's time to give them a little back little something back that helps them in their life so they wouldn't be what they were anyways because their fucking heart isn't in it anymore yeah yep if you're thinking about it and that's huge if your heart's not in it get the fuck out before you get you know killed and never have a regret never look back uh every one of these

accidents any one of us could have been in one of those accidents could have been in one of those friendly fires plane crashes helicopter crash is there's a lot of shit so it's a damn shame the real fucking good ones never seem to stay in to make the difference yeah it's always the fucking shit bags much like politics yeah yeah i don't think you can be a general without you know compromising your integrity you've got to not only your own yeah i mean you got you have to and uh I never had any interest in that. You know, I kind of knew what I was doing when, you know, in Anaconda,

I was told, stopped sharing information with the CIA and the 10th Mountain or the command, you know, J-Sight commander is going to bring you home. And I was like, well, you know, he, I guess he's going to have to bring me home because I'm not going to do that to my guys or their guys. and I never regretted it, but I knew even at the time, you know, that I was, you know, in some ways, you know, digging my career grave, but I didn't give a shit. It was like liberating. And then when it happened again in Iraq, you know, I was like, I had no doubt, you know, you know what the right thing to do is. So, you know, I was happy to get out.

I also had a thing, you know, I always was intrigued by business as like another frontier, you know, and it's got actual metrics, black and white. You either make a profit or you loss. So, and, you know, in 2000, before I'd even, you know, made the decision, you know, I enrolled in, and, you know, in 2000, before I'd even, you know, made the decision, I enrolled in, an MBA course at Fort Bragg, go to school on Saturdays. The part was online, and then you went in the summer. It was a year and a half long. And so when I initially deployed to Afghanistan, I had one book with me, an organizational behavior textbook, and I read the thing from cover to cover. But I loved it, you know.

It was like a different, and it sounds kind of geeky, but it's, you know, someone once said to me, you know, you've got to reinvent yourself every few years or you're not taking advantage of this thing we call life. And I think that's good advice. I think business is a just, it's the perfect thing for guys that are hard chargers to get into. Yeah.

You can put as much into it as you want. You can never put as much. you can never put too much in, you know, and, and I mean, you will just, it's just, you never hit the end. Yeah. You know, and so, so I think, you know, if you're a guy getting out, in my opinion, you know, it's entrepreneurship, business. If you got the drive, you don't fit in society, don't take authority very well. This is, this is it, man. It'll be the hardest fucking thing you ever do.

and the most rewarding, but you control it. Especially if you own your own business. It's not as easy everyone, you know, thinks you're living this easy life and it's full of pitfalls and stresses and legal shit. We're all addicted to stress, right? Yeah? Plenty of that to go around in business, but. But you said it, you know, I think a lot of guys don't understand what they

possess when they come out of the military and, you know, you hear all the shit, but the main thing you possess is you've got discipline and discipline is a strong neocortex. That's how you strengthen your thinking brain through resistance training. So you resist temptations to strengthen your thinking brain. You resist temptation and train the brain by reading and reading and And, you know, things like standing in formation require discipline. So when you come out of the military, you are at a level of intellectual discipline that surpasses almost anyone except maybe the most geeky, hardworking fanatical scientist. You can sit down and read.

You can sit at a project and work for hours on end. And that shit's going to start, you know, ebbing away the longer you're out of the military, unless you stay on some kind of intellectual discipline program. Same thing writing a book. People ask me a lot about writing a book, and I don't write with ghost writers. I write by myself. I wouldn't.

Ghost writer is not your book, in my opinion. But people ask me, how do you write? Were you always a writer? I'm like, no. And like I told you, yeah, I was dumbass in high school and college. I did not do well. You know, if you gave me an English test, high school, college, I'd come close to flunking it or getting a D. Nothing about it was a talent that I possessed, but what, there's two variables you need to write.

Experience and discipline. It's a everyday thing. You know, I woke up in the mornings. I like to wake up early 5, 5.30, and just start writing. And when you first start, you try to write an hour, move to two hours. But very quickly, you can get to three, four, six, seven, eight. And that's an incredible thing to be, you know, self-contained, no distractions, no internet, you know, no social media. And you become a machine and you realize it while you're doing it.

And like I said before, if you don't keep something up, it fades. And so, you know, I wrote that first book in 2008, and I didn't start on the second one, Common Sense Way, till, like, 2016 or something. And when I first started out, I was like a guy going into the gym who hasn't lifted in five years, you know, I was weak. I had to go back to an hour, two hours. Now, knowing that the strength is there makes it easier to do, but I had to build up. my, you know, discipline, my neocortical strength, and I did it. But it reveals the same thing. You know,

when you go out into the corporate world, you might, it's easy to be intimidated. Think, oh, you know, these guys highfalutin colleges, they're also smart. They're not. And most of them don't have any intellectual discipline. You've got discipline. You've got stick-to-itiveness. You know how to interact with people. You know how to motivate and inspire people. So I feel like a lot of military guys underestimate how much potential they have in the corporate world and how much they're appreciated. You know, in good companies, a military guy that'll travel anytime he's told to travel and not bellyache about it, you know, we'll take a report that needs to be done over and go, okay, I got it, and go do it. those are the things that make you stand out. And, you know, you feel like you're behind when you go into any company, but every company,

the turnover rate in every company these days is so huge. You're not far behind anyone, and you'll close that gap immediately the same way we close it in the military when you start a new job. You immerse yourself. You read everything. You become an expert. And when you do that in the corporate world, you start, you know, memorandum. memorizing formulas, memorizing specs on whatever the job is.

And you become a guy. People are suddenly like, wow. And you force other people to pick up their game. But it starts right here with what we call discipline, but it's really neocortical strength. It's you've got this resilience, this ability to concentrate, and the ability to self-discipline yourself without distractions. I would add work ethic, too.

I mean, we brought that up, we brought that up at some point in this marathon. And, you know, but I mean, one thing that I've found is just fucking brute work ethic. Yeah. Most people don't have it on the outside. Especially for, you know, and I just don't have any time in conventional units, but I mean, it's where I grew up in the fucking seal teams. I mean, you're up at five to work until one, two in the fucking morning every single fucking day. Yep. These people don't know how to do that shit.

Yeah. But they sure is fuck, take note when they see it. Yep. Everybody here does, but not anywhere else. And if you don't have it here, you don't fucking last long. And I think that's a big, big reason that we've wound up in the position that we're out is we have a fucking work ethic. Very impressive. Insane, man.

And so I think, I mean, we look for that. Well, you should talk about it. You've launched an amazingly successful business here, and you know, you should put your thoughts down and do an episode on that, man. I talk about it all the time. Do you? You know, I talk about it all the time. And that's really what I love doing here is plucking guys out that are grinding and putting them in a spotlight and watching their businesses flourish. It's really, really, it's the most rewarding part of this whole thing.

is being able to do that. Amazing. Yeah. Did you struggle with any stress, PTSD, TBI, any of that kind of stuff? No. Nope. You know, I mean, when I showed up, I got a job in a biotechnology company, so super high tech, super highly educated people. I showed up my first day and walked in this meeting and this female vice president was talking about launching the new product.

And she was like, all right, bottom line is we've got to take a toehold on the beachhead, expand the beachhead, move inland. And she's using all these military metaphors. Are you serious? Yeah. And then as I'm kind of laughing to myself but not wanting to look like that. like I'm laughing. And I'm looking at her and I'm going, and she looks just like the deputy chief of mission in the Budapest embassy. And the takeaway to me was human nature is human nature. And so what the other thing, you know, military guys are going to find, find an industry where

value-based people work. And I would tell you that in a lot of sales organizations, salespeople are that way. They eat what they kill. So they kind of get that mentality and they're just good, solid people, you know, especially tech sales. But, you know, you know people. You've been in the military. You've been studying people. And so don't be shy about, like, recognizing the common ground and applying the same thing you do in the military with difficult bosses, good bosses, common sense people. you know, glom on to people that will talk to you, people that, you know, respect you,

and then pass it on, you know, make sure you pass it on. And everybody, I think, admires guys with military experience, so, you know, don't shy away from that, but you said it, you know, all you've got so many advantages, work ethic, that discipline, intellectual discipline, and just the ability to, you know, accomplish a purpose to set your sights on it and do what it takes to accomplish a purpose. Problem solving. Yeah. Intengency plans.

Yeah. It's fucking hilarious. Every time we run into a problem here, my guys know I already have 15 ways to fucking 15 different avenues we're going to go down or, you know, not 15, but, you know, they give me shit because I've already solved it 50 different ways. Well, that's a good sign too. If they're giving you shit, that that's really. reflective of being a good leader.

And that's what I said about freedom of choice. When you guys can make jokes about you, when they can do little back and forth with you, that's an open environment. They feel comfortable and that's the way they should feel. You know, friendship is an important aspect of leadership. You know, it doesn't mean you buddy buddy with all your employees or treat them like, you know, with special dispensable.

It just means that, you know, if you want trust and loyalty like you have with your friends, you've got to treat people that you want to trust and loyalty the same way you treat your friends. And, you know, I always remind people, remember, friends don't let friends drive drunk. And when they do drive drunk, a real friend will take you to task for it. And that's part of that, you know, contextualizing friendship. It doesn't mean you don't take them to task when they screw something up or don't, you know, or let something fall by the wayside. But, you know, friendship is important.

And it's, I think, a harbinger of your leadership philosophy and the culture you're setting amongst those people. So very clearly, you're excelling at that. Thank you. Yeah, no, it's very obvious. They love you. I learned a lot from you today. Likewise. Thank you.

Thank you. And I just want to say that, man, I'm really thankful that we met. And I just think you are a hell of a guy. Thanks, Sean. Thanks for being here. Appreciate it. Thanks for being you. It takes a lot of courage to do what you did.

Thanks, man. What you're doing? Cheers. Want more from the Sean Ryan Show? Join our Patreon today for more clips in exclusive content. You'll get an exclusive look behind you'll get an exclusive look behind you the scenes where you can watch the guests interact with the team and explore the studio before every episode. Plus, unlock bonus content, like our extra intel segments where we ask our guests additional questions.

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This winter, stay warm. Tap the banner to order your groceries online at voila.ca. Enjoy in-store prices without leaving your home. You'll find the same regular prices on the online. as in store. Many promotions are available both in store and online, though some may vary. Pete, welcome back. Good to be back, Sean. Same episode.

So, yeah. So yeah, I just want to throw some contacts out for the audience. So I just looked and we went, I think seven hours and three minutes on camera last, last time you were here. And got about halfway through the outline. And I was just so enraged with the institutions that we were talking about, the leadership, the top-tip-top leadership that, man, I couldn't fucking sleep. And I think we were both exhausted. And I remember saying, I think we got the point across here.

And then I went home and I was talking to my wife and tried to go to bed, couldn't sleep. and I was like, this isn't complete. We have to finish it. I think it's important that we finish it. So I called you and asked if you would be willing to make the trip halfway across the country again to wrap this thing up. But I just think it's such an important topic. And people need to know this stuff. And you know what's weird is after we're talking a lot about institutions.

And after you left, the next couple episodes were all about institutions. In fact, one of them, which hasn't been released yet, and it'll probably actually release before this. He actually bred your books and used a lot of your pillars, all of them, for his leadership. I told him you were here. Wow. And he, like, lost his ship. But he was two-time chief of station for CIA, got hit with Havana Syndrome.

in Southeast Asia. Which is real. Yeah. It's real all right. And how is he? How's he doing? Not well. Not well.

And all to protect a fucking institution. And is the institution doing anything for him? Nothing. That's unbelievable. Nothing. That's unbelievable. Won't even give him his retirement. They told him, I mean, the guy couldn't even walk.

had something, I can't remember what he called it, but it was way worse than Vertico, can't tell up from down, says he's got about two to three hours a day where he can get clear thinking, where he's super engaged. But if he utilizes that two to three hours, he's down for a week after that. And, but yeah, if I remember correctly, the CIA told him his options were come back to work. Unbelievable. Go part-time, burn leave, or quit. And he's the chiefest station.

Yep. Two-time chief of station. The most exalted position in the CIA, you know, it's the top operational position. It's unbelievable. Told me here on camera that the whoever he met with, I can't remember if it was the seventh floor or whoever, one of his colleagues and said, you know, I'm being forced to pick between people and protecting the institution. And I'm going to protect the institution. Is that fucking crazy?

Yeah, I don't get how it's protecting the, unless, you know, the agency was doing some experimental thing. They lied about it. Well, exactly. Why wouldn't they come out? They told him. They told him. that they would knowing, they would wittingly lie in front of Congress to cover this up. They told him that to his face.

So if you have the CIA lying to Congress, how can we trust anything that comes out of there? You can't. And you're right. That's the thing about institutions. There's got to be accountability. Most of these people making these decisions are non-elected officials. you know, which when allowed bad people will do bad things. But the only thing that stops them is accountability.

That's why we have, you know, a penal code. That's why you go to prison if you rob a store. And, you know, that's why the death penalty was created as a deterrent against killing other humans. and, you know, to some extent, they work. And certainly the penal code works because people think twice. What is the penal code? Well, just meaning it's our whole criminal justice system. Oh, okay.

You're going to go to jail. You're going to go for two years if you do an armed robbery or whatever the, whatever it is in whatever state you're in. But if it's not enforced, you know, then they can do whatever they want. And shit like that, you know, same thing with the guys from DOD who were kicked out for refusing the Vax. Yeah. There should be no boards. Everyone who was kicked out for refusing the Vax should be allowed back in and should be given back pay.

And the reason is very simple. There's no doubt anymore. This was an experimental substance. It's not a Vax. It's a shot. And I work. I was an executive in the biopharma industry. and there's one overriding principle in biopharma.

Never take a new molecule, a new therapeutic that does not have long-term safety and efficacy record with massive emphasis on safety. If there's no safety record, you don't take it unless you're a stage four terminal cancer or other life-threatening disease type person who's been told, we've tried everything. There's no hope for you. Then you can try. But before that, no one ever tried, no one would ever do in the pharma, biopharma industry,

anything, any shot would be put in the body that didn't have a long-term safety record. So we launched that thing and then forced it upon people with no safety record, no efficacy record. They called off the phase three clinical trial that most drugs have to go through and that are highly scrutinized. They called that off. They unmasked the blinded side, the placebo side, gave them all the drug, and that's a classic technique used by drug companies to hide serious adverse events. You unmasse the placebo group, so now everyone has the drug, so now you can't see any difference between drug and no drug. And heart attacks are happening with everybody in both groups. And unless there's an asterisk every time you call that out and they didn't.

do that. And then they lied about the efficacy. They said it was 96% effective initially. It wasn't. It was 96% relative risk ratio. And I won't go into it. It's a kind of complicated thing, but relative risk ratio was made only for cancer drugs. And the term relative should tell you all you need to know about it. It means it's not factual. It's just in a relative sense, you'd have this much more of a chance of living if you take this drug than if you didn't, given your terminal condition right now with cancer. So it's, you know, everything about it has been proven. And, you know, as Jason and I were talking about, especially the crime against humanity

was especially pronounced against these, the junior NCOs and the low-ranking soldiers. So if you're an E6, a staff sergeant, you probably have two to four kids. You're living on post in military housing. You're making, I don't know what they make. It's not a lot. And during the pandemic, you're told either take this drug or you're out. They have nowhere to go. There's nowhere to get employed during the pandemic anyway.

You already sacrificed your livelihood to serve your country. So, you know, you don't, you can't, most guys can't go back out and pick up, you know, a job, skill that's transferable. So, you know, we did an unbelievable disservice to those, those individuals who were kicked out because of the VACs. And it's the same thing you're talking about. It's institutional accountability. And, you know, I tip my hat to you for exposing it and providing, you know, a platform where it can be talked about and people can, you know, become aware of these things. Thank you for saying that. I mean, what you said the first time you were here,

all the things that we talk about, it just really got my head spinning about institution and how history is documented. And really, we only went through two events where the institution was covered up, but there's multiple. We talked offline about some really big events that happened in the SEAL teams, but are completely.

bullshit and I don't I don't know who to talk to about it and I won't I won't talk about what they are unless I'm talking to somebody with firsthand knowledge like you because otherwise it's just fucking hearsay right I mean I know it's I know it's a lie but I have to find the right people to talk about and so you I mean right now the bin Laden raids like huge controversial topic in the veteran community it's a fucking embarrassment yeah you know it makes me wonder It's like, was the fucking guy even real? I hate saying it, but it's like we kicked his body off a fucking boat in the middle of the sea.

We can't figure out who shot him. Yeah, I think we can figure that out. I think it's... What? It's just... And what we talked about with Anaconda, and what we talked about with Tillman, those are two events. Yeah. Two events from two separate institutions.

And one of those institutions has a lot of events that are lies. that I know personally. And I don't know much about, you know, red, but... And then after our interview, it just made me think how... You know, we entered... I just talked about the CIA with the Havana syndrome. I mean, the FBI, it just goes on and on. But we're talking about two events that happened

where history was totally manipulated to cover up a lie, documented it... like it's like it's accurate history and that's just two institutions and two instances that the American public have no idea what actually happened and they turned it into a fucking heroic event you know and so that's two instances in a 20 plus year war and then we we take and then you think about it's like man that's just two incidents how many incidents happened at each one of those institutions. How many institutions is this shit going on and probably all of them? How many institutions are in the country? A lot. How many institutions are in the world? A lot. And then you think about

the time, you know, that we occupy. It's a sliver in the grand scheme of things. And so kind of what I'm getting at is man is just a fucking liar. You know, and then you take all the history from the beginning of man to present day, how much of that history has been manipulated into a fucking lie? Is anything real? What do you think? Well, it's a great question. And, you know, again, I don't want to blow sunshine up your rear, but that's, you know, that's, I think, what you're doing is why it's so important. Look, you know, we talk about accountability, and that's definitely a main factor of it. But here's the bigger factor, the evolution of our species. How did we get here today? We got here today, humans were 200 to 300,000 homo sapiens, 200 to 300,000

years old is our species. That's what they believe. So how did we make it? How do we make it? And at one time, after one of the ice ages, it's believed that only 600 humans, were left. So 300, they call it 300 breeding pairs, we're left on the face of the earth. How do we make it back? We have no claws, we have no fangs, you know, we're not fast, we're not camouflaged. How do we make it? Well, a lot of things, but the main way we made it is we have this neocortex that allows us to learn to adapt. And the way we learn to adapt, adapt means change. So if you, at We all experienced 911, but if you didn't learn from it, you didn't, you know, if you didn't change after 911, you didn't learn a thing. Learning is change. And literally in our brain, that's what happens in our brain. Every time you learn something new, you know, axioms in your brain change, reconnect with another neural cell. And your brain changes.

So we learn through this learning feedback loop. and when you take away that learning feedback loop, we're not learning anymore. So why is it important to know what really happened when guys died? It's the learning feedback loop. We owe it to the guys who are currently in those positions and all the future guys who are going to be in those positions to present them with the truth. For their own evolutionary potential, they need to be able to learn from the reality of what happened. so that they can change too.

And the individuals who take that away, who cover it up, who lie and do it supposedly for the greater good of the institution, are denying all of those individuals their freedom to adapt. And if you don't adapt, you can't change. And if you don't change, you're going to go the way of 99.9 infinity of all species that have ever walked the face of this earth. And that's extinction. Man. So, you know, it's not a little thing. We've got to learn. And that's what motivates me. That's what, you know, I'm not on here. I don't make money off telling people what happened. I'm doing it because I have a responsibility. I was fortunate enough to have the privilege of leading in the military and in the corporate world. And so I have a responsibility for the rest of my life to pass on what I learned. And that's especially applicable to the military because we are the people of this country. We represent the people of this country. And we owe those people the truth after we experience these lessons, again, so that they have the right to survive, adapt and survive in the future.

Man, that's another aspect I've never even thought about. So thank you for saying that. It's just what good is an institution if it's not there for truth? Yeah. I mean, it's just sad. But, all right, let's get in. Before we get into it, you know, everybody gets a gift. So.

All right. My son loved the last ones. So, I guess we had a little problem with the spear going to California. So, I know you already talked to Jason, but this is the Cig Cross, Chamberd in 308. Beautiful. I believe this is what they're sending you. Yep, yep. But I thought you might want to take a peek at it.

That stock folds. Gorgeous, too. Maybe you can grab a nice elk with that. Yep. And I know the stock folds inward to enable you to put it in your backpack. Yeah. It's beautiful. And, you know, thanks to you, thanks to SIG.

Love it, man. Right on. All right. So I think we left off at operational working dogs back at 1999. Okay. Yeah. So the dog program, to me, is a prime example of, you know, since we're talking about institutions, the way every institution should approach.

whatever their product is, whatever their industry is. And that's with this culture of never being satisfied, you know, with what you have. Everything needs to be turned upside down, inside out, look that, you know, if you have, if you find something wrong with a methodology or a piece of equipment, you need to have the freedom to say that out loud to share it with other people to explain the logic of why it makes sense.

And the unit's just naturally like that. It's always been this incredible engine for innovation. From the time I got there, it was already, that culture was already well established. And, you know, to give you an example, unit operators invented the SATCOM top hat antenna, you know, the one you put on the ground, fold out. it oh you guys invented yeah that that was i did not even know that was invented for uh you know desert one uh to be able to walk out of an aircraft put down an antenna you know normally from from that location you'd face south to the indian ocean um that's what it was invented for and the unit was like that

the whole time uh you know i'll tell another larry story uh larry was a team leader for for me and we got this new high-speed device. He's probably sitting at home going, oh, no. And it was like a, it was like an all-in-one gyro-stabilized laser thermal site. And, you know, brand new off the shelf, like off the, out of the laboratory. And this company brought it right to us, hey, can you test it? And, you know, I gave it to the guy who, you know, would obviously do the best job at testing and labs says, yeah, I got. it. Well, he leaves my office, he comes back about 45 minutes later, he goes, it doesn't work anymore. I go, what happened? He goes, well, you know, I wanted to make sure it was waterproof,

so I threw it in the pool, and it doesn't work. And I go, lab, don't you think that could have been the last test you ran? Don't you think you should have shot the thing first? And he's like, maybe. You know, we got a big kick out of it. And they were able to send us one almost immediately, and we tested it. But it's that, that's the engine that makes that unit so great and why it continues to invent so many things. And, you know, if you look at the Ukraine War right now, they're all wearing the same equipment and accoutrement

that our soldiers all had when Afghanistan ended in 2021. They got the Molli helmet, the half helmet. They've got the BDUs with pockets on the side. They've got, you know, chest plate with their magazines stuck up top, nothing constraining their hip flexors like the old LBE did. And the helmet, that uniform was invented by unit operators, not going, telling some guy in R&D in a company, here's what we need.

these were guys on sewing machines, sewing the shit in to make the prototypes, and then wearing it, and then everyone's seeing it and going, that's a great idea. You know, the sleeve thing was invented by snipers. They're like, you can't get anything out of your cargo pockets when you're laying in the prone.

It has to be up here. So you put shit, you want to access when you're laying in the prone up here. So ergonomics, you know, I'm looking at you in that helicopter. right there and you got the big side, the sleeve pockets on right there. So, you know, that's why I said before, to me, the culture of the unit is the culture of common sense. So, so the dog thing, you know, it started, I was the, the B commander at the time. And, you know, I would never say we came

up with the idea because people have been talking about dogs from the very first time I got there, senior guys. One guy in particular had a bunch of German shepherds, the black German shepherds. I forget what they're called. And he had him in the back of his house, and he said, hey, can you come to my house? I want to show you this.

And I... He had him in the back of his house? Yeah, well, he was raising. He was a dog trainer. He was raising these dogs, and he goes, I think this would be a great addition for the unit. And let me show you some of the stuff these dogs can do. And he just showed, you know, basic training stuff that military working dogs, you know, all can do today or most of them can do today.

So the idea was around, it was still controversial. You know, there's plenty of another beauty of the unit is it's incredibly diverse. Nobody is the same. You know, everyone's from different states, different cultures. They share the patriot, you know, common ground, but they're very different people. And so you have very different perspectives. And some people were totally against, you know, dogs. It'll take operators away from their primary job of shooting, moving, and communicating.

You know, we'll spend valuable resources on keeping them alive and sustaining them. So there, it was not a no-brainer. But at some point, in our squadron, we just started talking about it. We're like, we need to figure out a way to do this to experiment with it. And sure enough, right within our own organization, we had one guy who was a medic who was trained. Lackland Air Force Base is DOD's Center for Dog Training. Always has been. Dogs were huge in Vietnam.

When the Vietnam War end, all operational dogs in the U.S. military were done away with. Why? I don't know. They just were. There was no longer an operational dog. The only dogs that were trained at Lackland were MP dogs to sniff out, you know, weed and whatnot out of guys' lockers or rooms, and then bomb sniffing dogs for, in case there was a bomb on post somewhere. So those were the only military working dogs in DOD in 1999 when we started the program. So, you know, we had a subject matter expert. and we had a number of guys who just loved dogs, knew a lot about dogs, you know, anecdotally. And we just started talking about it and all the things dogs could do. You know, CQB always has been and always will be

kind of the foundational skill of the unit because it's target discrimination, which is what the unit's so good at. This room could be, have 10 people in it, nine of them could be civilians. One could be a crow, a bad guy, and they could come in here and look in an instant and guys would, you know, coalesce on that one guy and he'd be the only one shot. I'd be confident that that would happen 10 out of 10 times. That's how good they are. That's how serious they are about target discrimination. So CQB was the first thing. It was like, hey, imagine

if we had a dog. You know, first off, stairs are the most dangerous thing in CQB. You've taught CQB. A dog runs up that step. Steps are clear. You know, he stops at each floor. You can train them any way you want. You can go all the way to the top, clear the whole thing. Now you can move with speed, right, because you know it's clear. One of the big missions has always been deeply underground, deeply buried underground facilities. That's where everyone. hides their nukes, and to get to a deeply buried underground facility, almost always there's a tunnel, and it's not just a shaft. There is a shaft for people to go down an elevator, but it's a series of ramps so they can drive trucks down there and move heavy equipment in and out.

And so to get to the deeply buried underground facility, you have to go down this funnel of death. and everyone who ever practiced it, you know, in a real sight was like, this is kind of a suicide mission. So as soon as you think about a dog with a camera attached, you know, to his head or his collar and sensors on it also, you're like, no-brainer. And then, you know, you can put a dog, you can halo a dog in on your chest, tandem them in, dogs, you can add dogs to the MH6. There's that little space in the back on little birds, so the dog doesn't even need to sit on the bench.

He can sit inside. So just when you think and say out loud all the advantages that dogs can provide. And I didn't mention sentry, you know, acting as sentries in your patrol base, which, you know, I'll get to when we talk about Iraq, they were huge, huge asset in Iraq for us when we were behind enemy. lines living out in the desert. So it made total sense. Now we had to figure out how to do it. And again, you know, in this book here, the common sense way I talk about this concept called developing the situation. Developing the situation, I didn't make it up. It's the common sense way humans are hardwired to not only make decisions, but solve any type problem.

And, you know, when we talk about problem solving, you can't talk about it without opportunity. seizing. So we didn't have a problem, you know, this is what I mean about the culture. The culture is, it's always a problem. Every piece of equipment can be better. Everything on your body can be more ergonomically positioned, can be better ergonomically positioned. So it's continuous improvement. And that was the case here. It was just, hey, this will take us up another notch, but we got to figure out how. So the first thing we did was, you know, got our shit together, our facts, found out, you know, where we needed to go to get approval, Lackland Air Force Base. We read the DOD, DOD, PAM, 112 or something like that, that covers, you know, dog care and sustainment.

You know, we were like, we can do all this. The fact, my medic was Lackland Air Force Base trained, we had a legitimately certified dog trainer already in the unit. At least we were, you know, we figured he met that threshold. So first thing we did was go to the unit commander. It was Colonel Harrell, and this just shows you, you know, how important good leaders are. So many other commanders I worked for there would not have approved of it. And in fact, you know, I know of at least two who were thought it was, you know, insanity, thought it was another high, just ridiculous idea coming out of, you know, guys who didn't understand what really made the unit tick.

But he was like, okay, I could see that makes sense. But how are you going to get this approved? And I was like, sir, let me work that. I'll keep you updated at each step. we're going to get it approved, but, you know, we need to do some travel in. So the first thing we did was flew out to Lackland Air Force Base. And same thing on leaders, you know, it matters, leadership matters. And the right guys at the right time are why, you know, we have every great invention, every great breakthrough that mankind's ever experienced. And this guy, I think's name was Vance Zeter, Colonel. He, ran the dog school. So he had every reason to be like, you know, reticent, like to be parochial to go, you know, what are these special ops guys that now they want to, you know, cut into my dog

thing? He was not like that. You know, we walked in to the conference room. He had three of his chief trainers there with him. And we walked in and we go, sir, here's where we're from, the unit we're from, here's what we want to talk to you about. And he goes, okay, stop. Does everybody take the batteries out of your cell phones? It's funny today, and it's funnier because people are like battery in the cell phone. Well, batteries, before the iPhone, cell phones had batteries in them that you could pull out,

and that was how, you know, the secure thing, when you were going into a skiff or whatever, you separate, you could bring your cell phone, it just couldn't have a battery. So he goes, everyone taking it, and we were like, fuck, I've never, how do I get the battery? So we got it out and then he goes, okay, go ahead. And then we just explained it to him and you could see in his face as we were going. He was a, you know, lover of dogs, lover of, you know,

a believer that dogs should be doing more than just searching for marijuana in guys' lockers and, you know, sniffing out a bomb. you know, fake bombs in around a military post. So he's listening with great interest. And he said, well, tell me what you want to do. And we had the whole thing set up. We talked about deeply buried sites. We talked about CQB. We talked about, you know, squatters. So, you know, in Somalia, a bunch of squirters got away by running into the crowd. Well, you got a dog. That crowd is not saved you. He's on your scent. He's going to go.

You could have 10,000 people. He'll still zero in on the one guy he's been chasing. So on every level, you just, you know, it makes sense. How do they know? I've never, I was never afforded the opportunity to work with dogs. Yes, because their nose brain is so much more sensitive to ours. And apparently humans used to have a nose brain similar to dogs. dogs.

Really? Yeah, we used to be able to scent stuff out. We used to be able to smell water. We used to be able to smell, obviously, fires from long distances. You could smell humans. And we know there's all kinds of olfactory things about, you know, attraction that happen at the unconscious level because we're not conscious anymore of them. And I guess a good description would be, you know, if you're ever going wine tasting and

you want to impress someone, you need to, before you go, put out a a thing of cinnamon, a thing of chocolate, a thing of like raisins, caramel, whatever, all the ingredients, and then smell each one and then say out loud what each one is that you're smelling, because that's the only way our brain knows, that's what cinnamon smells like, that's what chocolate. So when you sniff the wine, you can actually identify the sense in that type of wine, and that's what we've lost. We no longer need to smell water, you know, smell an animal, sneak it up on our position so we've lost that sensitivity. Dogs have it.

Our smell works. The reason you smell is molecules are attaching to sensory receptors at the top of your nose. So, you know, there's nothing invisible. Real molecules are entering your nose. That's why you're smelling. So, you know, when you smell a good meal, you're smelling little, at the molecular level, little pieces of that good meal. and, you know, when you smell shit, the same thing applies.

So that's how dogs do it. Once that guy runs, that's a scent. He knows that's my target. That's what I'm going after. And every human smells slightly different. So he just is able, he's that sensitive to discriminating smells so that he can find a guy in a crowd. But so, I mean, how does he, how do you get him the smell before you hit

target you teach him oh to smell what do you mean i mean if if he's looking for a certain individual yeah we don't i i was never involved in that i'm sure maybe there's you could do that if he had great insider info like maybe if you were trying to find maduro and you had an insider give you one of maduro shirts or something you could train the dog but you have to condition the dog ahead of time the the squatter thing is just he's he's running after So, you know, behind him is this, you know, non-visible-to-the-naked eye trail of not just sense, but, you know, we exfoliate skin 24-7. So little chips of skin are flying off every time you run or every time you move.

And the dog is smelling that, and he just is locked on to that specific smell, especially a good disciplined dog who know he's only rewarded when he finds his target, you know, item. So, you know, so we were in there and this guy just believed in as we talked through all the different mission sets, he right off the bat was like, you know, I'm going to support your pilot program. I'm going to write you a waiver. Please share all your lessons learned. We can't do that here. we can't expose them to gunfire here.

We don't have the, and explosions. We can't, you know, expose them to helicopters, because all this stuff has to be done. Do you have a dog? I do. Yes, so I do too. And, you know, all the same training principles of a working dog apply to your own dog. Dogs are smart.

You know, they're mammals. And people think you just train your dog and lazy people. You can send your dog to dog trainers. and I'm not criticizing dog trainers. They're great things. But you've got to train your dog, and it never ends. It's kind of like a kid. You don't stop telling your kid to wash their hands

or, you know, clear the table or whatever you tell your kids make their bed. You don't stop. It's continuous. And the dog's the same way. A dog's training will fall off as they get older unless you continue it. And so, you know, like with my dog,

I still do the find it game. He's got an amazing sense of smell. And he loves it. I bring him in the back room. I tell him lay down. I tell him stay with the hand and arm signal. He lays there. I go hide the item.

I take these jerky strips. I cut them into five. I hide them around a room in the front of the house. And then I whistle to him. And I tell him, find it. I show him nothing in my hands. And he works that room methodically. And he lives to do just that.

you know, a couple times a week. He lives to train because your dog wants to please you. You know, dogs want to, they're like kids. They want to do something that you go, wow, great job. And, you know, that's a hormonal thing. There's all kinds of neurochemicals that reinforce success. So that's the way dogs are. And this guy, this head of Lackland, you know, deserves all the credit in the world.

He goes, I'm signing the waiver. you guys can start the program immediately. Wow. Yeah, we walked out of their high-fiving each other's. We went right from there. That's Lackland Air Force Base. We went to one of the, at the time, the biggest dog training facilities in the world was in San Antonio. I think it was called World Dog Training.

And we visited them. They had a direct pipeline to Belgium where the best Malinwas are raised. bread and raised, and we're like, we want the very best they have. And I can't. You don't know what you're talking about. First off, you got to go to Belgium, and it's going to be a hefty price. We're like, yeah, but no problem. So two days later, two of my guys flew to Belgium, two guys members of a team, both flew

to Belgium with, you know, I told him, you find the dogs, you're clear to spend whatever you think makes sense. And at the time, you could get a quality dog for between 10 and 15K, like the best dogs, the best lineage, you know, the best breeders. And so we bought the two best we could find in Belgium and brought them back. They were the first operational dogs to run our pilot program. Yep. Why did you, why did you guys pick the Malamaw? Just all our research and our one subject matter experts said they're the best working dogs. They're bred to be working dogs. They're bred to, you know, dogs like different things, bones.

They like, you know, being petted. A Malinua lives to taste blood. And a Malinwa, the first thing the breeders told us was we asked him, how long you think it'll train, how long will it take to train him to do what we want to do? And he said, oh, you'll get him trained.

But he'll never hit the kind of Ph.D. level until he tastes blood. And then you'll notice your dog completely, this dog will be completely different dog. He'll be a hundred times more

focused, more dedicated to, you know, finding and capturing a guy that you release him on. So, you know, I went back to my commander. I said, you know, said, sir, we got approval. We got dogs. We're ready to go. He goes, all right, man, you know, you got it.

He goes, but you got one year, proof of concept. And, you know, just keep me updated on what you do. And, you know, I already gave him credit. I give him more because that's, you know, that's the essence of what commanders do. You don't then micromania. micromanage the shit out of it, make it happen the way you want it to happen. You know, let release your hounds, your human hounds, and let them explore, let them innovate, let them adapt.

And that's what they did. You know, the first thing was conditioning the dog to be around the rest of the unit. We knew what was important. Again, we're tapping into all these experts, the breeders in Belgium, the, you know, 30-year trainers at this facility. in San Antonio, and we're getting smarter as we go along. That's part of developing the situation that I was talking about, problem-solving technique. You get smarter as you go along. And so we're learning things about these dogs. You know, we got the bite suits out, and, you know, everyone was volunteering to be escorted.

And, you know, you could go out in any lunch for hilarity and watch someone try to escape the dogs and get attacked. And then, you know, you can't even imagine the debauchery that was going out with some of them because boys will be boys. But very incrementally, you could see these dogs, the utility of these dogs, and that they were very quickly becoming habituated. They would sit in the squadron. We'd bring them in.

We have a squad. You know, usually there's a bar in most of the, you know, common areas. so that after a mission or whatever, you can have a beer or something. And so on like Fridays would be a big day that people would meet down there. So we'd always have the dogs down there during that time.

And, you know, you have to act differently around a dog. Like, I never, so Arco is our main dog, I never petted Arco. People were like, you know, Panther, you brought him in, man. I would you? And I go, because that's not what this dog's for. You don't get down and talk. baby talk to a military working dog. They respect you. I show no fear around them. I walk right up to

them, but I don't start, you know, hey, smoochy and making out with them, all the crazy stuff. That deconditions dogs. Malinwas are like the dog you have in your house. They have to have an alpha male. And what we're trying to do with these malinwas was train them that they not only have an alpha male as their trainer, but they have like friends of the alphalans. alpha male, sub alpha males, they're also ahead of them in the pack, and that's the rest of the squadron. We got them on helicopters. We got them into tunnels. We did all the technology stuff, huge breakthroughs and cameras, scent detection devices.

And then, so one year later, 99, it's March of 2000. We did a demo. Again, no-brainer. The commander was like, wow, these things are incredible. We had them jumping out of MH6s. They can jump out of a helicopter from 10 feet off the ground and take off. So you don't even need to hold them. All of ours are taught, you know, and they're taught in Belgium, Belgeek commands.

So, you know, they don't get confused. They only understand that. But you take the dog, he sits, you just put your hand right on top of his head so that he can see the edge of your hand. That's how you point to where you want a dog to go. Yep, and they were able to do all that. They were able to find things. So passed with flying colors. Again, just to show the diversity and that, you know, change, no matter where you are,

always come slowly. There were plenty of people. We're like, yeah, whatever, you know, those guys are, why they're out there wasting time with poochie, you know, or shooting better. And, you know, how many rounds can you shoot on the range, you know, like that shot group? Yeah. It's a pretty good shot group. Taking it down to that is, you know, for competition and whatnot.

So there were still guys who didn't believe that would change in the coming years. We took them to Afghanistan. They were very helpful in Afghanistan. There were a couple patrol bases we used, you know, they were like centuries. We used them when we'd capture guys to, you know, keep them from thinking, hey, I'm going to make a run for it. I'm going to fight because people have a natural fear of dogs. But it was in Iraq in 2003 when we got our first bites. The first phase of combat was over with.

I'll get to that a little bit later. We had moved into Baghdad. We were staying in a band-in home as our safe house, and it was right on the edge of Baghdad. And one night, a couple of insurgents. They were armed, tried to sneak into where we were. We had a good standoff area. It's why we picked it.

There was a lake in front of us, and then a couple of acres of flat ground to the back of us before you hit a road. And they came through that side. And the dogs were out at the time, took off, got bites on both those guys. and they were completely different dogs after that. Were they really?

Completely different. One week later, Arco gets taken out on a mission. It was a routine mission. It was in this house is two of Saddam's deck of 52 going and capture them. So we get on the ground, we isolate, we go, we breach, we secure. Only one of the guys was in there were calling in a medevac for the guy because he was injured. And we didn't want to take him by road all the way back because he needed to be interrogated immediately. And all of a sudden, a sniper fire opens up from behind this house,

about, I'd say about a thousand meters behind the house. And like a lot of places in Iraq around the Euphrates River, long sawgrass, you know, probably up to here. So you can't see anything. And this guy's got us pinned down. And, you know, the urgency was not like one of our guys was injured, but we wanted to save this guy. He hurt himself. He fell down the steps. We didn't shoot him or anything. And we wanted to save him because he was valuable intel. And so, you know, we were pinned down. I was like, fuck, and it didn't dawn on it all of us at the same time. The dog guy, without anyone telling him, just at a low crouch, moved up,

did what I just showed you, put his hand over this dog's head, pointed him where we believe the sniper was coming, and then unleashed the latch on his collar, and that thing, he'd already tasted blood. He took off like a bullet. And we all just, you know, everyone just sat there. No one was shooting. This guy's still shooting.

And no one's shooting back. Seconds past, they seem like minutes. All of a sudden you hear this orgasmic howling from the dog. And I mean orgasmic. It wasn't pain. We knew he wasn't injured with some sound we had never heard before. And so the rest of us, kind of like that story I told you about when we saw The Shepherd, we just started cracking up and running as fast as we could out there.

And, you know, still had our weapons face it forward and everything, but we just ran to where the sound, the orgasmic noises were coming from. And we get to this little spot. And there's Arco and there's this sniper. His SVD sniper weapon is off to the side. Arco has his face in his mouth. His whole face is in this dog's mouth. and the dogs just all orgasmically. And the guy's like, ah, help, help, help.

And we called it off. And, you know, he had bite marks on both sides. But he, this sniper was looking through his scope when the last thing he saw was a massive mob of a Malinwa, which took his face in like a vice grip and then held on. The dog won't release, won't break his jaws until you give them the Belgi command, gave him the command. took that guy back. So we were in business and then, you know, to finish with the dogs,

and they've just gone to incredible levels. They do things that you just can't believe. Some I don't even want to talk about here because I don't want to give away the capability. But maybe their most high profile mission was Ude and Kuse. So we found Ude and Kusei. They were in a house second floor of a house, hold up the approach. And I wasn't there on the ground when this happened, but the approach was isolated. And it happened up near Mosul, I believe. And so they isolated it.

I can't remember the division. It might have been the 101st. So it was surrounded by every weapon, every gun jeep, every mech vehicle. And our guys were there. And so our guys went in to clear and they got through the first floor, got up to the stairwell and gunfire was coming from the, not the top of the steps, but the

hallway that those steps led to. Same thing. Now it's two new dogs. They released these dogs. They ran up the stairs. Went one way. Nothing. Came back the other way. Udi and Cuse were in the same room. We heard them. You could hear what happened. No one saw it. You could hear them. You could hear them go in, you heard Udi and Kusei scream in terror, then you heard them open up with their weapons. And as soon as we heard that, we followed. It's like a flashbang. You know they're distracted. Let's go. So the team ran up, but by the time they got up to the top, you know, first off, both the dogs have been killed. Both of them have been shot. But if they didn't know that, And then they pulled back because Udi and Kuse were still firing on automatic.

There was, you know, a funnel of death in the door. They were like, fuck this. We're not going to go try to clear them. They just pulled back out. The dogs were dead. I think they pulled one of them out. They couldn't get the other. And then they knew what room they were trapped in, went outside, fired.

I'm not sure what anti-tank weapon was fired into that room. And that's how Ude and Kusei. Wow. Came to an end. But those dogs, you know, and then, you know, in the years since then, they've saved so many lives. They've enabled, you know, guys to accomplish missions that we would never have been able to accomplish as quickly and as efficiently as without them. So, yeah, it's just a story of innovation and adaptation. It's what, again, since we're talking about institutions, I think every company should be like, every corporation.

your people should know your culture should be, never be satisfied with what we got, continuous improvement, and it starts with you, you're the subject matter expert, fiddle with things, throw it in the pool, you know, after you've tested it. And, you know, just have that innovation. You're all scientists. And that's, and I really think when you're in the unit, you feel that. you feel like you're a research scientist. That's part of your job.

And no ideas are bad. Nothing's out of bounds. There's been some crazy shit invented there that you would never think is possible. But, you know, the guys do it. And that's where dogs came from. Those were the first operational dogs since Vietnam. Once everyone saw what they were doing in Iraq, you know, it started the title wave of we got to get dogs.

And now every, I think almost every unit, every infantry unit in the military, I think, has dogs at some level. The Rangers have dogs. Everybody has dogs now. How quick did you see the other squadrons? Yeah, it's a good question. It took a while.

It took a while because we didn't use them in combat for, you know, that's 99. 2003, so it took three years to get those bites. So it was kind of all theoretical. Guys could see them in Afghanistan. You know, your prisoners are not going to run. They're not going to try to fight you when you got a dog snarling at you and a guy with his hand on the quick release. So it took a while. And, you know, but that too, I think is an important part of that innovation culture. You've got to have people who are, it's okay to go, well, that's, I'm fucking not doing that. That doesn't make any sense to me. And it may not, you know, like with equipment, ergonomics is

everything. So what is the best, you know, gun for you and me might not be the best gun for Jason or anyone else. And so they got to be able to feel, you know, the freedom of speech to go, yeah, I don't fucking believe that. And then it makes you think deeper about the logic of why you're doing it, you know, and the most controversial thing was who should be the handlers. You know, should we bring in outside handlers or make operators' handlers? Well, we believed that you should make operators' handlers. So, and as far as I know, that squadron still is the only one that uses operators as handlers.

Oh, shit. Yeah, and we did that for a lot of reasons. Like, first, by rotating guys. through and I was shocked at how many guys wanted to do it. So it shows you how many guys loved dogs and can see the utility of it. So there's no shortage on guys who wanted to do it. You got to have the right guy, but there's no shortage on that. And then you just get into operational dynamics. So, you know, to get to target areas, most of the time you're flying in a helicopter. And if it's me, I'm flying on an MH6. If I

have any choice of it and there's only four seats on an MH6 so you know if you're if you got four mh6s that's only 16 guys you're gonna take you're gonna you're gonna sacrifice one operator one shooter for a dog handler a guy who's you know no matter what you say he's not gonna be a fully integrated into the unit he can live there but he's not gonna get that full integration and so it's just more difficult to do. And that was very controversial too. But most units tried the operator. I think now the combat's ended.

Some of them have gone back to doing, you know, having a full-time handler. Interesting. Yeah. Man, that's cool. Yeah, yeah. It's... I mean, what do you either?

You, it's just cool. I mean, you implemented it. You and your team implemented it. Now it's, it's in every unit, every spec ops unit, every police unit. It's everywhere. All stemmed from that. Yeah. Well, you know. It's pretty wild, is common sense, though, you know. And yeah, it is wild. And it's a great, you know, it's just one of those things you feel lucky that you were part of. to be there at that time. Anytime you and I had this conversation, anytime you're starting something new and you're like you're heading full speed into uncertainty, there's no right answers. No one's ever done it before.

The more those conditions are in place, I think the more motivated we are to be part of it and to make it work because that's life, right? That's the complexity of life is what we, you know, what jazzes us is what we feed off of. It's what makes us human. And so, you know, again, I think it's a, it should be recorded as, you know, an example of the innovative culture that every organization should have and should instill in their people. And the rewards are, you know, inestimable because they're so huge on the breakthroughs you can make on all types of things.

It's crazy how fast things are innovating now. I mean, I just, shit, I think it was yesterday. I never really messed around with the, with the FPV drones. You know, that wasn't a thing when I was in. It came long after I was in, but I didn't see them at the, when I was contracting for, say, either. and I talked to, I got a buddy that's up at Fifth Group, and he just got back from Syria, and he's just, he talks to me about some of the shit they're using now.

And I saw this picture yesterday of this guy, I mean, dressed up just like, you know, we used to dress up, but he has these fucking goggles on, you know, and he's flying these mini drones. And she's fucking crazy, man. It's like, it looks like he's, like, hiding in a cave or something. and his fucking drones doing, I mean, he's doing the work, but it's just, it's, I don't, I don't think I would even recognize the battlefield now. Yeah.

Well, you know, it's the same thing whenever these big technology changes happen, but then context is everything. So, you know, we're watching the Ukraine war, which is fought the equivalent. It's the equivalent of fighting a war in downstairs. Illinois and Iowa. So it's farm fields with rows of trees to break up the wind that line the roads or bisect the properties. That's it. You know, there's folds in the terrain. There's not a lot of significant topographical features. There's folds and terrain has a lot of rivers, obviously, too, but it's flat. And so now think if that war was fought in Vietnam,

We'd be barely hearing about these drones because they can't see through the trees and they can't fly through triple canopy. You know, they'd find some places to go in, but they have nowhere near the effect they have their. Same thing. You know, Russians do most of their movements in bad weather now, which has always been the way, except we were stymied for that by the helicopter. You know, we became helicopter-centric. And so when the fog and rain would come, we'd be like, mission's off. It's like, why? Fucking enemy's all buttoned up in, you know, their trenches and their shelters.

Now's the time to infill. The helicopters can't fly. But that's why now the Russians move because the drones can't see, you know, and they can't fly in heavy winds and heavy snow and stuff like that. So, you know, and to every technology advancement, there's a counterme. measure the counter drone stuff is taken off you know amazingly to the lasers but you're right the drone just what you can do with the drone and and it's the same thing that's all innovation that's all you know guys forward adapting to the battlefield adapting the equipment to the battlefield to make it

as effective as possible it's really interesting i mean we i interviewed this guy founder of Skydeo, I don't know if you've heard of that company, but they, and they hadn't even thought of it, but they're using drones. They live in these many garages, they charge up, and they just deploy from there, and they're putting them on fire stations, police stations, all over the country, and it's responding to stuff,

and they gave me one. Wow. And so this thing comes out of the garage, patrols the property, it can fly to other properties. Wow. It's all done by, AI, it can follow somebody for, so if somebody breaks in, the damn drone will follow them for like

45 minutes or two an hour. Wow. And just broadcast it. You can talk to them. You can put sirens. You can play music. You use thermal. And it's all AI.

Did you just tell her what to do? He sent it into the woods. He's like, watch this. Sent it into the woods. It just finds its way out. It's, that's, and then they have ones that do indoors, too, and they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll rope around your house or building or whatever. And notify the police.

It does all that shit. And I'm just like, holy shit, man, this world is changing so, so fast. Yeah. In Ukraine, I mean, we were talking to, I know we talked about, about Ukraine the first time you were here, but do you, do you think there's any part of that war that keeps going on because so much innovation is coming out of it? at another country's expense, somebody else's lives are on the line? It's definitely one of the things that has been stated repeatedly.

If you listen to like the generals, the four-star generals, American, U-com commanders who have been commanding and controlling this thing since, you know, it started in 22. They, they, when they get in front of Congress, you know, and do their, report outs, they always say, you know, one of the biggest benefits is what we're learning,

you know, about equipment. But what they never say is what Russia has already learned, you know, and it's very clear Russia's already figured out how to neutralize our Patriot anti-aircraft, anti-missile batteries. They've figured out how to neutralize our attackums, which are, you know, kind of like precision rocket artillery fire. You know, they've, they have reversed jerry-rigged all of our primary equipment over there. And I don't really see, you know, to me, the advances. I always ask, like, there's a, you know, this just happened.

They just were in front of the Senate, this four-star general. And I wanted the senator to go, have him name, something that's changed. Because if you look at the Ukraine War, it is just old school light infantry. Drones have taken out any mech, any armor potential. I mean, they still use them sparingly. They bring forces up. And if there is a big, if they find a big salient, a big weak spot, they might charge through it or at least charge forward in armored vehicles and that to disgorge the guys. But armored and tanks are not being used on that battlefield. It's a 100% light infantry battle.

And Russia's fighting it the exact same way they defeated three German armies on the Eastern Front during World War II. And it's it's the tactic of choice anytime you're on flat terrain. You probe, you find the NFE's defenses, then you go around them. On both sides, you envelop them until panic sets in because they realize they're caught in a cauldrum. And if you just look at what's happened in Ukraine, every big city that's fallen has been caught in a coldrum. Because there's some point, and I think I said this in our original one, there's some point where that guy laying in his defensive position, he's been staring out in front of him for days, weeks, months, thousands of hours.

And he knows if those guys get past that cops of trees over to my right, we're fucked. You know, we're surrounded. And so once they pass that cops of trees, panic sets in and defense always invariably breaks down. And, you know, the big problem for Ukrainians is they have a command and control. a disconnected command and control element that, you know, disconnected hierarchies don't give a shit about the guy in the ground. They can't because they're looking at screens in air-conditioned talks in the case of Ukraine, 1,300 and 500 miles from the front lines. So, you know, what's happened in Ukraine is there is the same thing Hitler, mistake Hitler made. His generals were like,

request permission to fall back to the Volta River. You know, it's a better position. We can no longer sustain this positioning. And Hitler had the same answer every time. Not one inch. We're not giving one inch to them. Hold every position like it's the last position you'll ever hold. And that's why three German armies were annihilated.

Like 150,000 men died in one massive battle. Yeah. Surrounded. you know, brigades, divisions, surrounded, and then cut the pieces by artillery and direct fire and eventually direct fire weapons. So, you know, the Ukraine war is a light infantry war. It just goes back to why, you know, as high speed as everything's gotten, it's still the thing that matters, still today is your competency at shooting, moving, and communicating. And all three of those things have to be wrapped together because as a light infantryman, you know, you've got to be able to

shoot, but you've got to be able to move and you've got to be able to move with everything you got is on your back. And that brings on huge decisions about protection versus speed. Do you wear Kevlar or do you go light? I never wore a Kevlar vest in Afghanistan or Iraq. I would have if I was clearing a building, but I never wore one driving. I never wore one in the Battle of Shahi coat because I wanted speed. I wanted to be able to get behind a rock to get over a wall like that and not be tired. Then once I assess where the enemy is, I'm going to try to flank him, but you can't do that if you're not in shape or if you're carrying too heavy of a load. So the Ukraine war is a light infantry war on steroids and it just reinforces all the things that, you know,

hardcore ground guys have been emphasizing, you know, those old Sard majors for decades. And it's still as relevant today as it was back in World War II. Yeah. You know, another thing, this is kind of a rabbit hole out of left field here, but, I mean, since we're talking about Ukraine and innovation and all this other stuff, I mean, And decentralization of the military is a huge strategy that's that's coming up now with all these drones and stuff. And I never really, I mean, I've heard it, you know, talked about. And it never really clicked until I had Brandon sang from, he's a seal.

He's the founder of Shield AI. Are you familiar with Shield AI? I don't think so. They just came out with this. They just came out with the expat. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a drone. And they put a three, I think it was a three-quarter scale model out here on the front yard. It's like 20 feet wide, 20 feet high, vertical land, vertical takeoff.

The way Brandon describes it, it's, it, every pickleball court in the world becomes a launch pad. But what's interesting is, I mean, Operation Spider, was it Spider, or Spiderweb where we took, where they took all the, drones and blew up all the, you know, strategic bombing base. Exactly. And you think about how we do and it's like, shit, all our jets are on a fucking aircraft carrier. They're all at Bogram Air Force Base. They're all, it's all centralized. But now that they have these vertical takeoff and land drones, and I think it has a 12 or 1,400

nautical mile radius that can go with payload, it's fucking wild. it's fucking wild. Yeah. And so that means that you could have one at a Ford operating base of Delta guys, you know, and have one guy stay back and operate the damn thing or whoever. It's just they could be spread all over, not centralized at all. What's the payload on that thing? Like, what can it carry?

It sounds pretty powerful. Man, I can't remember. But I'll send you the episode. Actually, I don't think he could tell me what all it could carry. But I think he told me the weight, but he didn't tell me what all they were putting on and they're all modular. So you can kind of put whatever the hell you want on them. But it's, I mean, what they've invented and what they've developed is just, it's, it, it literally changes everything. Yeah.

And then you think about how do we even, how do we even start to decentralize everything? it's almost like you're just you're recreating the entire U.S. military at that point. Well, it needs to happen. I'm with you. Yeah, I mean, we talked in the last episode. To me, the lesson of 25 years at war,

which includes Ukraine because our generals were commanding and controlling the battle until 2025 this year out of Wiesbaden was the main lesson is that decision-making and problem-solving made by disconnected chains of command who aren't there, never has and never will be capable of making sense of what's happening on the ground, nor capable of making sensible choices or for what the guys on the ground should do next.

And the reason for that is not theoretical. It's biological. Our nervous system makes sense through our senses. The Ernst Mott principle, which came in 1869, and still stands today, is that the only way to reveal scientific fact is through our senses. So in other words, there's no reality unless you can prove it with your senses or sense enhancing devices like a microscope. So by very nature, a disconnected chain of command, by the nature of its definition, cannot make sense of what's happening on the battlefield. So you can line every wall with 50-inch high-resolution flat-screen TVs. You can have every sensor out there. And you're still just looking at a one-dimensional view of the battlefield from your air-conditioned,

darkened, talk with coffee pots humming all over the office. It does not work. But that's what we've adopted. And we've adopted it because the senior guys love it. It allows senior guys to be captains again because you can, to micro-manage the battlefield with your SACCOM radio while watching the predator feed. But that predator feed is not the reality

of the situation on the ground. It's a one-dimensional depiction. And with AI, it's even worse, because you can get hacked and have a fake video feed and tell it to do shit. But in every case, that's why we've had so many friendly fire, drone deaths. That's why we've had so many mistaken targets

because they're making decisions that are disconnected from reality. So what I'm advocating is we end the disconnected chain of command, these massive multimillion dollar jock talks that we set up everywhere. We name them something new, the tactical support facility. And that's what you are. Even as an overarching commander, you're in support. When you guys are on the ground,

that's why the question is, what's your recommendation? That's why it's so powerful, because those guys are the only guys that can come up with a valid recommendation, and you have to tap into that. You have to let them know they're the guys in charge. The decision's got to come from them. And I'm concerned about AI, too. I saw some of the prototypes for the new C2 system,

and it's full of these AI feeds. And, you know, I see two problems with AI. First, I'm not yet convinced that it's, smarter than a human, certainly on rote stuff, accessing data it is, it can do it quickly, but it's not smarter than human because it has no emotions, it has no feelings. And so remember, everything matters, the temperature on the ground matters, the light level on the ground matters. You know, they're looking at it through a thermal scope. You're looking at night, so what you're going to do is highly dependent on that light level. But the big,

The bigger thing I think AI is problematic about is that once we take away that decision-making from the guy in the ground that, you know, that like a little kid when you're playing, you know, hide-and-seek or ditch, you're thinking, your brain is 100% focused on that task right there. Lay still, lay still, he's walking by me. Okay, once he gets around the corner, turns that corner, he can't hear me anymore. I'm going to get up and run the other way. You know, those decisions, instead, you're going to be like some heads-up display on your helmet

telling you, you know, in five seconds, get up and run for another position, it'll be safer. There's no learning feedback loop there. You didn't come up with that. What it's teaching you is to depend on this electronic advice, which can be broken like all electronics. There's still no breakthroughs in antenna. reach a power capacity, you know, the ability to carry a battery that provides continuous power and also enough power to send a signal to wherever you need to send it to. So I think we should be continued down that road, continue developing all this stuff.

I'm not anti-AI. I just am anti-AI in conjunction with these disconnected hierarchies as an answer to what, you know, of the future warfare. The future warfare is teach guys how metacognition, how the brain thinks and makes decision, become consciously aware of that, and understand how your brain works and then understand how to make good decisions

and solve complex problems. And once you do that, you know, to me, the tactical and operational world is your oyster. Yeah. Have you, I'm just curious, have you seen the new eagle eye helmets that Ann Girl is putting out? Yeah.

What do you think of those? They look cool. And, I mean, in concept, it looks like, you know, it has promising aspects to it. But that thing's full of AI, too, with data that's coming in. And, you know, I'm just, you're from Missouri, the show me state. So you're going to have to show me, and you're going to have to put it into action. And, you know, I'd put that thing on a bunch of, you know, From every level, I'd put it on the E5, E6, team leader, squad leader level primarily.

I'd put it on the sergeant majors, the platoon leaders, the company commanders, and, you know, let them throw it in the pool and, you know, figure out what its strengths are and what its weaknesses are. But, you know, I don't think there's any replacement for your senses and your brain's ability to collate sensory information and make good decisions and solve complex problems. And again, if we take that away,

it's kind of like, you know, the same drawback of GPS. GPS has created some generations of warriors who can't fucking read a map. Right. Read a paper map. And not only read a paper map, but just read

terrain in general. From reading a map, you learn to read terrain, you can look at terrain and go, that's where we need to go. That's where the defensive position needs to go. That's where we need to avoid. Or if they take that ridge over there, we're fucked. So, which makes it key terrain. I need to put an OP up there for early detection to tell us if they're trying to take it. So those are the things I'd be concerned with, but I saw the And it looks, you know, looks cool. Yeah.

I thought, uh, I talked to Palmer about it. He actually kind of, I can't say he unveiled it on the show, but he made the announcement here or at the other, at the old studio, but some of the capabilities of that thing are just fucking out of this world. Like what? Well, it can, it can, it can identify aircraft, helicopters, whatever. And based on its maneuvering, it will tell you. this is the probability of what's about to happen.

It's about, based on the way it's flying, it's about ready to come and do a bombing run on you. So get the hell out of here. Another thing is you can see people through walls. That's cool. You can see three people through walls. It will identify every member on your team where they're at. See, I'm all for that sense enhancing.

So thermal sites and shit. saying. Yeah. Like you still have to, if the helmet goes away, you still have to understand how the fucking, how to, how to, how to operate out there. But it's so enhancing that it's, I mean, I don't know what the bugs are. They worked out. I actually made a suggestion to them. I asked them if it could, you know, if they, if they had done anything with hostage rescue stuff. And that's a great question. He had said, no. And I said, if you figure out a way, maybe if you can put facial recognition in it or something like that, if you can figure a way out to identify the hostage if they dress them up, no matter what, it identifies the hostage.

It would speed that process up immensely, which would make us more successful. They should have paid you consultant fee for that. I know, I know, right? He said he didn't think he could do facial recognition, but that they might be able to do something where they take the exact height of the hostage and plug it in, and then it will identify. They're usually sitting. That person.

When you're coming into the room, they're usually tied up. I think what he's saying is the AI would be able to maybe see the bone structure or something and get the exact height, whether they're sitting, standing, leaning over, no matter what. Wow. Compute it and then outline that hostage and blue or green enemies are all red. I was like, if you could fucking pull that off. Dude, that's incredible. That would be, that would be.

that would be incredible. But I'm excited about a lot of this stuff. I think it's really really neat what all these younger innovators are bringing to the table. Yeah, with him, you can't help but appreciate his passion, his patriotism, you know, that seems to sit at the foundation of what he's doing. And, you know, the best side of the best side of the best

Scientists are mad scientists. So, you know, you've got to have guys who are fanatically dedicated to figuring shit out. And he seems like one of those guys. So. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Pete, we're getting ready to move into Iraq. And I think this is going to be a very long segment. So let's take a break. Sounds good. Perfect. Want to stay up to date on all things SRS? You bet your ass you do. Our newsletter brings you the latest SRS news. And and critical updates. Get instant alerts on the newest episodes, never miss a beat. Exclusive Intel briefs from counterterrorism expert, Sarah Adams, you've seen her many times on the show.

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Plus, exclusive offers from our partners you won't find anywhere else. So subscribe to the Vigilance Elite newsletter right now. All right, Pete. We're getting into the Iraq invasion. So you were the interim Delta commander during the invasion, destroying al-Qaeda pockets and accelerating Saddam's fall. Hmm. What do we start here?

That's a good question. I guess start where it started for me. The Iraq War started for me in Afghanistan. So I was doing my third tour, 2002. So we already talked about, you know, Battle of Shaiycoat slash Anaconda slash Taka Gar. After that, I went to Pakistan, did a tour in Pakistan. You did a tour in Pakistan? Yeah, we opened. So remember I told you in that story, we found. We, we found. So remember I told you in that story, we, we followed the trail of tears out of Shahi coat, the bandages, these guys were discarding equipment. They were, you know, the foreign fighters and the Taliban were retreating, and they, we followed their route. This is day 13 from the first day of the battle. Everyone else was gone. It's just the original AFO guys left. And like, what do we do now? And I'm like, fucking let's follow a man and destroy every one of them we can find why we're following them. And we followed this trail of Tateers went through that Spara district, Kalsh Province, which is where Pat Tillman was killed,

eight kilometers from Taker Ghar. And that's, from Takergar, it's about 13 miles to the Pakistani border. So the Trail of Tahr went right to the Pakistani border, which, like all borders, is on some sort of line of drift. This one's on a ridge line. So we stood up on this high ridge. looking into Pakistan. There's no line there. It's the Duran line. Looking into Pakistan, you could see still bandages. There was a piece of equipment about 500 meters down the other side of the slope, the Pakistani. And we could see Miram Shah. And so it was obvious they went to Miram Shah. So we went back and I had my agency counterpart with me, Spider. So he and I went back and we both sent up through our separate chains of command, hey, the enemy,

the enemy that survived Shai Qat fled to Pakistan, request permission to go into Pakistan, to talk to the PAC military to see if we can find these guys and destroy them. Where they went, there's probably more of them. Franks, everyone said no. Just like before, Franks is like, send them. So we got on an aircraft that won't talk about the aircraft, flew into an airfield, I won't talk about the airfield, and linked up with our Pakistani counterparts, special ops counterparts. And they were good guys, you know, and I say that because you could see right away all they cared about was making Pakistan, you know, a first world country. They were very, you know, Pakistan hates India and India hates Pakistan.

It's a religious thing mostly, but they wanted to be like India. And the first day I got there, the commander showed me that he goes, look, look at this. And I read the headline. It's like India produces nine millionth Honda motorcycle. And, you know, it was like the headline of an Indian. He goes, see that? That's what we need to do. I'm like, oh, okay.

I guess we're going to talk business. instead of fight in al-Qaeda. But I, but, you know, the point of it was he was showing me that he cared about his country and he kept talking about his kids and the shitty schools, you know, that in Pakistanis are like Indian, super intelligent people. This guy certainly was and he just wanted good schools. So they were very much in on the fight, but he said, look, our generals are like yours. going to believe any of this and it's like well you know they have to we have evidence so

the second day we were there they took us to the equivalent of the pentagon and we were brought into this room me and spider you know dressed in r i beat up clothing we had been fighting a battle for you know we were all hairy and disheveled and they're all you know it's pakistan military is the brit military is like the stepchild of the British military. So everyone's got a teacup. The fine china's out. Everyone's in a perfectly appointed uniform. You know, they even have English accents when they speak English. And so it was every four-star general in the Pakistani Army around the table. And they turned it over to us first. And I went first, you know, because they asked me to. and I just told them about Shahi coat

and what happened and how we followed the trail of tears. I had pictures. And I said, these Al-Qaeda are hiding in the Northwest Frontier Province. And we want to, we don't want to do it ourselves. We want to do it with you. You know, we want to link up with our counterparts and get them out of your country. And if you don't, they're going to do the same thing they did,

you know, in Afghanistan. Holy shit. and turn it over to them. They went around the table. You're the one that's having that discussion? Yeah. Yep. And then we went around the table.

What do you think about that? I mean, I'm just curious. You're coming from Anaconda where the top head shed fucking inserted themselves somewhere. They have no fucking business being. They probably have business being at something like that versus on the,

But I mean, it just seems ass backwards to be. Yeah, I mean. Does it to you? Yeah, well, but dealing with American military, you know, teaches you that, you know, you got to go to. If you ever been to the Pentagon, it's just a surreal experience, too. And you, I don't want to be too harsh about this. I'm not saying you, I'm not, let me refrain. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have been.

making those calls or been in that room by any means at all. Yeah. I'm just saying that it, from the outside looking in, it would be a lot more fitting if the roles were kind of reverse there. Yeah. Just in my opinion. No, it's a great point. I haven't thought of it that way.

You know, I think... You're convincing Pakistani top generals to allow operations to happen and kill bad guys inside of their belongings. orders. Yes. But you're not allowed to actually handle what you're supposed to be fucking handling on the ground. Not that you aren't supposed to be handling that, but it just seems more of the job description than foreign war policy. Yeah. That was a great point. Wow. Wow. But you know, remember, just like we did when we talked about Shaiycoat Anaconda, you've got to go back to that time and you got to put.

yourself in that time. So, you know, it was the equivalent of after Pearl Harbor still, you know, we were highly motivated. There was no doubt about our purpose. Our purpose was righteous. We were trying to neutralize this terrorist organization that to prevent them from inflicting further combat power against the West. And we knew because, you know, the, the twin towers were still, you know, the image is still indelibly etched in your head. So, you know, the passion is there. You knew what we were doing mattered or we believed what we were doing mattered. And, of course, you know, these were real fighters and we had just fought them.

And, you know, I... How many days prior was this? Was it anaconda to... Well, we've, we followed. So the 13th day, Anaconda started on the 28th of February, I think, 27, 28. And then went 13 days until when we got, when we went and walked to the border, 12. And then the 13th day was we came back. And then we sent it up the flag.

So it's only two and a half weeks. So the leadership was busy trying to come up with the lie and how they're going to turn Anaconda into this heroic event while you're over here doing foreign war policy. Our immediate chain of command was, but I think the Franks was, and I'm not like a man of Franks, you know,

however, my interactions with him were always, he was spot on. He's the guy that told me, here's your mission, find the enemy, then kill or capture him. And I was like, you know, I told you, I had to suppress my urge to pump my fist before I got out of the room and go, that's the fucking greatest mission I've ever been given. And he was also the guy who said, who told every general, you guys need to be more like aFO. We can't have convoys driving around Afghanistan. We can't have massive military bases

with PXs in them. This is what did in the Soviets. You need to stay low viz. It needs to be a couple of guys. And when Intel comes and says, hey, we think there's enemy over the mountain. it takes me about five days to get a conventional or conventional SF unit to go check it out. These guys go, okay, we'll put two guys in an SUV and drive over to the ridge and take a look. And then I get feedback right away. So he was a huge advocate of nimbleness and, you know, less is better, which I think I carried with me through all of Afghanistan, which was, you know, respecting the xenophobia of the Afghans,

any large formation they're going to hate. Any, you know, any massive mistakes, collateral damage, they're going to turn against you. We have to be incredibly surgical, incredibly low-vis about everything we do. And so I appreciated that. And he saw the opportunity. He knew what they went to Pakistan.

All right, let's fucking go get them. But our, my own chain of command, the joint special operations, Command was busy making up rules to make sure that anaconda slash, you know, shy coat never happened again and that these, you know, lower-ranking guys never were able to find fix and destroy an enemy in battle again without the massive talks. So anyway, I finished my briefing and then they went around the room and each Pakistani general spent between five, in 10 minutes, be raiding the living shit out of me. They all said basically the same thing.

You have no, you've never been to Pakistan before. You don't understand our culture. You don't understand the Northwest Frontier Province. We know what's happening in our own country. There's no al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Thank you, sir. And then the next guy. And then the next guy. And then the next guy. And it got so bad. My buddy, Spider, who's, in addition to being a a great leader, great operator is a great diplomat. And he had actually, he had experience in Pakistan. I won't say what that was. Extensive experience and knew, you know, a number of PAC military guys.

So he was very well versed at the culture and everything. He just, you know, took the floor and he said, you know, gentlemen, we understand your hesitation to believe this. we're not trying to convince you this to blame you or to put you into a position to try to force you to do something. We're just telling you what we just experienced and what we saw. And the reason is we have your best interest in mind. If they're here, people are going to die here in the Northwest Frontier Province. That's what kind of people these are. And, you know, they waived him off.

in the end they you know the head general the chief of staff summed it up he said we appreciate

you coming here but you haven't convinced us of anything nothing has changed there's no al-Qaeda in Pakistan

there's no Taliban in Pakistan and consider UBL was there at that time also so that ended

the meeting we left that meeting drove back, it was in Islamabad, to the embassy where we were staying at the time, and met with the chief of station. And Spider goes to me before we walk in, he goes, hey, man, I just want to tell you ahead of time.

Don't fucking go off. When we start talking, have I ever gone off on anybody? Because I hadn't. I'm not a, you know, explosive, emotional guy. And he goes, no, but, you mind on this guy? And I'm like, all right, what the fuck is this going to be? So we get it, open the door, we'll go into his palatial office. And he's sitting, you know, in the little

side chairs. There's a coffee table, three chairs. He's in the one that's raised up. He's a short guy. And the first thing I'm, you know, it's part, I already described how we were dressed, how disheveled we were, you know, hair and everything. And so contrast draws interest in the human brain and I was like just taken back first by his hair. His hair was permed and it looked like he took a basketball and cut out a section for his face and put the basketball on his head. That's how his hair was perfectly permed. I think you use a pick to make a perm perfect. He was in this suit that, you know, probably cost it to take a perm perfect. He was in this suit that, you know, probably cost at the time, $1,000,000 had a handkerchief, you know, perfectly triangled in the pocket.

And he goes, so I heard your meeting didn't go well. I'm like, you know, spider's taken over. I'm staying quiet. And he's like, yeah, you know, they've got it in their minds that there's no okay to hear, but we need to convince them. We need to, you know, this is a mistake because if they allow this to happen, and they're going to build up here, know that they've got a safe zone of operation, and then they're going to just start launching attacks.

We want them to make it uncomfortable for al-Qaeda, push them back into Afghanistan where we can neutralize them. And the cheapest station goes, well, I don't know what you two have been smoking, but I'm the one who controls intelligence in Pakistan, and I'll tell you those generals, we're telling you, truth. There's no al-Qaeda here. I don't care what you saw at the border. Nobody passed over that border. There's no al-Qaeda in the Northwest Frontier Province. And now I was like, now I know why he told me not to go off. So I just bit my tongue again.

And he, we, I did speak up a couple of times. We tried to, we showed him that we had pictures, you know, bandages. We had pictures of the day. guys. You know, I don't know if you saw those picks, the guys up on top of Tucker Gar. We had guys down in the valley. These are foreign fighters. These are not amateurs. These are hardcore fighters. Look at these guys. I mean, I'd be proud to have these guys in my unit. That's what these guys were like. That's what you saw when you realized the dedication, the tenacity that they showed. But he's having nothing to do with it. Wave this off.

He goes, you guys can stay here a few more days, but I'm not supporting your assertion that there's al-Qaeda in Pakistan. And by the way, the ambassador wants to talk to you. Like, okay, well, maybe that's another chance to convince somebody. So we walk out of there, spider turns to me, go, see what I mean?

I go, fuck, dude, this is unbelievable. So we walked down to the ambassador's office, secretary says, have a seat, she's not ready yet. Okay, so we sit there, hour and a half later. From the appointed time, the secretary goes, you can go in her office now. We walk in her office, it's empty, there's nothing on the desk. Like, it's this fucking joke.

We just waited a half hour for her to be available, and she's not, you know, it's not even sitting behind her desk. all of a sudden the speaker phone on her desk it's the secretary Madam Ambassador are you ready to talk

to the two military the two men and I was going to say the name but I don't want to say the names she's yes I am I'm like okay so she says okay I'm listening

and you got to be Spider goes to me. Ma'am, I just, I have to ask this because, you know, protocol for the agency, how do I know who I'm talking to and where are you? This is a conversation that should be face to face. She goes, well, when the war started, I took leave. I'm back in Virginia. And it doesn't matter.

I'm still the ambassador. I'm still making decisions. What is it that you want? She went right to that. Holy shit. Think of how surreal this is. We're sitting in the ambassador's office. It's fucking dark.

There's like one little light on. We're talking to a speakerphone to the ambassador during the initial phases of the war in Afghanistan. And she's not even in Islamabad. She's the ambassador for Pakistan back in Virginia. And we start talking. We go, here's what happened. And she said, okay, okay.

So what do you want? What do you want for me? We go, well, we'd like to go forward. We'd like to go to Miram Shah with our Pakistani counterparts. We'd like to check it out. Ideally, we'd like to set up a base there and monitor the situation and collect intelligence to figure out what exactly they're doing and how many of them are here. Oh, that's not going to happen.

That's not going to happen. And by the way, do you have guns on you? And we were both fucking, you know, had our sidearms on us. at the time. She goes, you're not allowed to have those guns in Islamabad. Who gave you permission to have them? And, you know, I kept wanting to speak up. I want to go, we don't need your fucking permission.

In spite her ever the diplomat, you know, said, I can't remember what, but somehow said, we have to have them for force protection. Not approved, disapproved. And you're not going forward. And I've got another meeting. So unless you have something else, I'm done with this meeting. Like, okay.

Instead of saying thank you, we just hit the button on the phone, the fucking, you know, that was to her. And we walked out of there. So now all the generals, the chief of station, the ambassador, so we go back, get on our secure internet, send this note back. We CC the CENTCOM liaison so that Franks can get it and go. every one of them says there's no one here. We have no idea why they're so adamant. There's no Al-Qaeda here. It's not like it's embarrassing. It's not like it's some indictment of what they've been doing. There's just real enemy here. We followed them. We have proof that they're here. We just want to check it out as part of, you know, Bin Laden might be here. We threw that in.

that got to Franks the next day. We got a spider got it. Now it's coming through agency channels from the chief of station. Apparently you have some high-placed supporters because I've been overruled and I've been told that you're supposed to go to Miram Shah tomorrow with the PACs. I won't say the name of the unit, their special ops unit. But I'm going to tell you, you're wasting your time. There's no one, there's no Al-Qaeda in Pakistan. And we're like, okay, well, we're fine with that, but at least, you know, we'll figure it out once we get on the ground of Miram Shah. So we leave all that ship behind. We, the Pakistanis are incredibly sensitive, you know, to Americans in Pakistan. We understood this. We actually were in Pakistani military

uniforms when we went forward. So we go to the most forward outpost. Pakistan has and Miram Shah. And it's this ancient base that we arrive at. And I immediately, I told you about the, you know, the stepchild of the British military. When we walk into the base, there's five shoeless soldiers painting rocks that line the walkway into the base that lead to the commander's office.

So we walk by these guys and, you know, I'm already going, fuck, this is going to be interesting. We get in there, the inside of the headquarters is like a shrine to British occupation. It was literally a museum with pictures from, you know, the great game, the years that before Afghanistan threw all the Brits out. And, you know, showed them, showed the lineage of the military, the British military.

There were special tea cups that were drinking by four-star generals. There were all these items. It was like a, it was a museum. And then they bring us in to see the commander. He's a colonel. And we walk into his office and he just starts yelling at us. What are you? What do you think you're going to come in?

I'm supposed to sit here and listen to you now. You're going to tell me that there's al-Qaeda in my sector, my operation. I have men out every day. There's nobody here. There's no one in, there's no al-Qaeda in Pakistan. And I, quite frankly, I'm being forced to talk to you. I would not talk to you if I wasn't being ordered to talk to you. I think Frank's called the president of Afghanistan at the time, I think was Zia, who was very cooperative.

And by the way, when I say this about Pakistan, I'm not criticizing the PACs. In full objective truth, if it weren't for the Pakistani ISI and military, they're the ones who captured Abu Zabida. They're the ones who captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We wouldn't have the two biggest trophies of the war on terror without the PACs. So, you know, this is another institution that's, you know, constantly at odds with itself. With the bureaucrats, the people who aren't real leaders, and those who care, like that lower-level commander, lieutenant colonel, talking about the 9 million hondas and his kids getting to go to a school that had competent teachers.

That's the dynamic, you know, in every country. So he's shouting at us, and we, then he goes, okay, so what do you want, what do you want to tell me? So we present our case very calmly, both me and Spider, showed him the pictures. And he goes, none of this, none of this matters to me. Okay, I've had enough of this. Lieutenant, you know, he calls his, they call them, same, just like the Brits, Lieutenant. Yes, sir, comes in, snaps to attention, you know, and we're like, wow. He goes, show them. The item.

My fucking item, man. So the lieutenant walks over to a lockbox. He's got the key. It's like attached to one of those like... Landyards. Yes, lanyards. Pulls it out, opens the lockbox, pulls out a key with no shit.

The ring was that big and there was that many keys on it. And he turns to this cage door and he starts going through keys to open the cage door. on about the 10th T gets the cage open. Behind that, there's a steel door. Ten more keys gets the steel door open. Goes into this room. We're like, wow, this must fucking really be something.

This evidence, he's going to show us this, you know, this, you can't come back after you see this. Finally, the lieutenant comes out with this little, like, cigar box thing that's also locked. And he comes out, stands attention to the colonel. Here it is. sir, and the open it. The commander yells at him, you fucking swine, you know, he said something in Pakistani, open it, you swine. And the kid goes through the keys, you know, his hands shaking,

finally opens it. And the colonel reaches in and pulls it out and goes, what do you say to this? And I'm having, I don't know if you were a Monty Python fan, but I'm having flashbacks. You know the shrubbery thing? A shrubbery. It's like, what the fuck? So that just popped in my head. You know, this is a fucking hairy situation, but it shows you how humor and insider indelibly linked.

And so I'm thinking, it's fucking shrubbery, man. It's just a piece of paper he's got in there, some kind of commercial wrapper of something. And what's funny about it is I wiped this literally, you know, without using my hand, I wiped the smile off my face because I then thought, this is getting fucking explosive, you know, like my, my senses are telling me this is getting dangerous. And so I went from a Monty Python flashback to if they start shooting, you know,

we were both armed, I'm going to fucking drop this colonel. And then we're going out that window and we're going to fucking run the 13 kilometers back to the border and fucking escape this place. So, you know, that's why I say humor and insight. So I, I, Spider goes, what is it? And he goes, you look at it and tell me. And we fucking holding in front of us, it's a Danish MRE cracker rapper. So the Danes, the Yeagers had a small contingent, which we loved the Yeagers. We had trained with them multiple times before 911, had multiple personal relationships.

So they came over. They were not being used. we tried to get them attached to us. They were down in Kandahar with that big, it was run by, I think, a seal, that big conglomeration in Kondahar. We tried to get them attached to us. But I knew, I stayed in contact with them,

and I knew they did a O.P. mission up on the border. And then, you know, they told me about it after it happened. We did an O.P. It was nothing. We went up, sat on the border for two nights, came back. I'm like, well, that's fucking not bad, because at least you're, you know, getting into the shit. I go, what'd you find?

They're like nothing. So immediately it clicked to me that this Danish team, Recky team was up there. But this was an MRE rapper that probably one of them had, you know, discarded and it blew across the border into Pakistan. And so he's going, you've been here the whole time. You've been inside Pakistan trying to say that the al-Qaeda is here the whole time.

This is a setup. And, you know, at some point, you just, when you're staring in the eyes of a madman, you just stop trying to, you, one thing you don't want to do is be a madman like him and start, you know, trying to convince a madman of something they're not going to be convinced of. So Spider, you know, just said, okay, Colonel, you know, where are we staying? The order was that you would have a spot for us to set up our off center and that we could begin monitoring situation for the next, I think, six weeks. And he goes, I don't have any room.

You're sleeping out in the soccer field. And I'm like, it was nice out, you know, the weather was okay. Pakistan's very temperate. And there were trees out there and shit. And I'm like, I'll put up my fucking poncho hoot. Spider's like, that's not happening. That is not happening.

You, I don't care if you don't have room. You move somebody out of that room. room right now and we're taking over that room. You're going to get us a room with a roof over our head and a room that we can put up an antenna. This is a travesty. So again, I'm looking at the window, fucking touching my sidearm. So we walk out of there, we get on the satcom, top hat antenna, call back. Spider calls back to the agency headquarters, which was totally on his side, just like Franks was on our side, not an hour passed and out he came, sheepishly, okay, I have a room for you.

And we set up our off center there in Miram Shah. And, you know, yeah. So six days after we set that up, six days after the shrubbery conversation, 23 Pakistani soldiers were killed by three Al-Qaeda members. They went to a house that's really a fort.

The Pakistanis had a full platoon lined up in front of the house. They pounded on it. Open it up. We've been told that we are allowed to come inside. The door opened. Two guys with AKs fucking on automatic. Just leveled the whole.

platoon, 23 dead. I think there were 30, so only seven lived. And from that moment on, they started supporting us and they realized there were al-Qaeda in Pakistan. Any word from the generals, the ambassador of the chief of station? Never. No, no, sorry about that. Not that fucking we, maybe shit. I never saw any of them again. I was hoping you were going to say they all got fired. I don't think so. The one guy was on CNN a ton after that and the station chief, you know, told everyone he knew everything that was happening in Afghanistan the whole time. And, you know, every time I saw him on CNN, I'm like, that fucking hairdo, man, you got to get

rid of that perm, dude. It's distracting his shit. So, anyway, so that was Pakistan. I would have to find out who this is. Yeah, so Pakistan, you know, ended. And this is my third tour. It's winter of 2002 Christmas time. And the rumor had come up that, you know, we're going to go into Iraq next.

And all of us, agency, SF, you know, unit guys, no one believed this was going to happen. Why didn't you believe that? Yeah, yeah, good question. Because I didn't think about it at the time, but only reflecting. I think we were that way because first, this is a year in. almost a year in, you know, because we came in in, really, November, December of 0-1. So it's a year in. And in a year of work in the situation, we understood, you know, not only where we were in the effort to find UBL, the killer capture UBL, but also prevent the enemy from using Afghanistan as a safe haven to launch ops,

against the West. And we had made huge progress. I'd say the majority of the progress had already been made. There were no foreign fighters, or if there were, they were one C2 C's left in Afghanistan. The Afghans themselves, what a lot of people don't understand is there's plenty of Afghans who believe in freedom, and they're freedom-loving Afghans, just like the ones we left. The majority in the military, we left behind in the disgraceful exit of 21, were free. freedom-loving Afghans. And so we always connected with those guys. We had personal relationships with those guys. So in one sense, we were personally invested in Afghanistan. But at the same time, we understood how the gravity of this, the importance of it, and the effort that it was going to

take to finish this off. And we had leads at the time on UBL. So hearing that we're going to go jump and do Iraq was more like a why the fuck would we go do that right now you know if it's a real threat saddam's been there for years can't we wait you know three years two years uh because all the guys who are here now all the guys I work with are the same guys that will have to be moved out in order to really take Iraq so none of us believed we we just believed it was all bluff it was all over the news, all the UN shit and that. So we believed it was just a bluff. And then it was announced that CENTCOM was starting planning conferences down in Tampa. So they were planning the war in Iraq before any of the UN stuff had happened. And in conjunction with that, they were sending out,

here's what we know so far. So we got, and it was right about Christmas. I can't remember before or after because we didn't really celebrate Christmas. We were doing ops. It was in the Christmas time. We got a packet. Here's the packet. Colin Powell is going to eventually brief the UN on. Here's the logic of why we have to invade Iraq. And so me and Spider went into a room to look at these satellite photos.

Now, again, the history, the one year in Afghanistan could also be called a year of disproving the validity of any satellite photo, because every satellite photo, because every satellite photo, remember you asked me before about shahy coat there were i was told there's no one there we've got satellite photos and you know all their low tech guy all defeated those satellite photos they had tarps over their dish because satellite photo didn't see any of those of course you don't see people because they're sleeping they're camouflage they're in their tents whatever uh so like you know a guy on the ground foundational lesson is never believe a satellite photo or never take it as a foundational fact.

It can be a corollary, a contributing fact. So we start looking at these, and these are the famous, I think there are seven pictures, same ones, seven satellite photos that Colin Powell showed the UN. We had all seven. They were all different versions of the same thing. They were convoys lined up next to buildings in Baghdad and next to buildings in a remote outpost

about 40 miles into the desert, the middle of the desert, western desert from Baghdad. And we just started looking at them. And if satellite photo, an Intel satellite photo always comes, it's the photo, but the photo doesn't mean anything. You right away default to the call-out boxes that have little lines to tell you what each thing is.

And so, you know, we started reading the call-out boxes, and this truck was a decontamination truck. That's what the call-out box said. The guys around it were security members, obviously securing a high-value-type item. And the buildings, they were next to all had this common denominator. They had this square thing on the roof about six feet by... six feet and about three or four feet high on top of the roof. Each of the buildings had this thing, which the call-out box called an air purification system. So this guy, my agency counterpart, in addition to being a great leader and diplomat, he's also funny as shit. So he immediately

switches to a pulp fiction like voice. And he goes, okay, let me, let me just get this shit straight. So this fucking thing right here, this decontamination truck looks a hell of a lot like every water truck we've seen driving around in Iraq for years. And if you were driving 40 miles out into the middle of the desert to a place that doesn't have any water, wouldn't you take a water truck with you? I'm like fucking A man. And he goes, next thing, these air purification systems, these air, you know, that purify the air, doesn't that look like the same thing we got on top of our buildings, an H-FAC system? And wouldn't you have a heating and air conditioning system on top of every building where the temperature fluctuates between 107 and 38 degrees?

which is constant in Iraq. The nighttime is freezing. The days are hot as shit. And I'm like, spot on. And I go, and those security guys, standing guard, take a, zoom in on that one. And we had it on a big screen

and attached it up. And he zooms in. And the guy's fucking taking a piss. Very clearly, taking a piss. He's not pulling security. So these are the seven satellite photos. This is, oh my gosh. And again,

the lesson out of that that I'd pass on to everyone who's listening is anytime you see a photo that's or a video that's narrated or a photo with call out boxes get rid of the call out boxes get rid of the narration watch the video without the narration look at the satellite photos without the call out boxes then pop those up and see if it matches what you take away from what you see that's common sense. That's allowing your common sense to operate without being prejudiced by someone trying to hand jam

to please their masters. Those intel guys were probably told this is for sure WMD activity. You know, prove it. Show me that this picture is that and that's why they put those call-out boxes on there. So we were kind of in shock. We didn't know Colin Powell was going to,

use those at the UN, we were kind of in shock. As I told you, there was already a planning conferences. So we both, you know, as we did so many times, went up both our chains of command and said, hey, I don't see what they're saying in those satellite photos. It looks like water truck. Everybody takes a water truck wherever they go. There's no water out in the desert, so that place has to have a water truck visit it. That's why he's there two different times. it probably comes every week to refill their tanks, and every building in Iraq has an H-back system on top of it, just like they do in America.

But, you know, that went nowhere. Wow. That went nowhere? Yep. And only, you know, only like when I rethought of that, when you asked me to come back and talk about it, and I started putting Iraq into the context of today. So today it's 2026, so we're 23 years removed from that moment.

And in 23 years, we never have found any evidence of chemical or biologic weapons in Iraq. And that's not, though, the lesson. The lesson is this. And it's so applicable when you put it in context of 2026 and these color revolutions that, again, these unelected government administrators from the State Department and CIA have executed all across the world, including Ukraine, as we talked about. We, that was totally manufactured, Maidun revolution protests. Same thing they did in the U.S. in 17 and 18.

That's what a color revolution is. It's the tech approach, the indirect approach to doing what we did in the war of Iraq, regime change, overthrowing a government, installing your friendly Boy Friday. Straw man. Yeah, to be the president. And so when you think about that, when you think about this strategy of taking out heads of state or governments

as a strategy, and in order to execute that strategy, you're using an intelligence system that has been proven empirically proven over and over to be fundamentally flawed. And that's why color revolutions need to be outlawed. That's why the whole regime, force regime change thing needs to be the absolute last resort

because it's usually based on bad intelligence. And in this case, saying that up front, now you're going to hear everything we're doing And every guy who got killed there, you know, those decision makers have that blood on their hands, those individuals. And so Colin Powell took those seven slides to the UN on the 6th of February. And just to, you know, re-blue myself on it. I watched the videos. They're still online of his presentation.

And he's... Are they really? Yeah, he starts it off with everything I'm going to show you is based in hard. empirical facts. There is no gray area here. What I'm about to show you is empirical proof that Saddam has violated the 1991 UN treaty that was made after the UN war that he could not... We toppled an entire fucking country off of a water truck, a guy taking a piss, and some air conditioners on a fucking... in an HVAC system.

Yeah, it's a great way to put it. And it's why we need to fucking outlaw this shit because these people who don't know anything, they've never experienced the real world, they don't have any operational experience, are making conclusions to support their own emotional proclivities. They're usually steeped in politics. Is it emotional, though?

It's not logical. Why do you think we went in there? I think oil has a lot to do with, it, but it was just a thing. I think the hubris of, look, we just fucking were successful in Afghanistan. We weren't yet, but the first year was highly successful in Afghanistan. No one thought we'd kick the Taliban out, you know, be able to put a new government that seemed like it was for the people in power that quickly. So I think hubris was a big part of it, overconfidence, and then just, I've never liked this guy. This is where the emotion comes in. I've never liked

We should have gotten him back in 91. It was a mistake not to get him in 91. Remember Bush 1 did 91. Bush 2 did the Iraq war. So there's a connection there too. He's emotionally focused. And then what I told you about the Ukraine war with Trump initially getting nothing but fucking horrifically bad intelligence from the individuals around him, I believe that there. that's the main flaw of Bush. Bush didn't have, wasn't an independent thinker. It wasn't a critical thinker. So he defaulted to Cheney and Rumsfeld, two septuagenarians who also didn't know shit about shit, both 25 millionaires and above 25 to 50 million each. Didn't give a fuck. Well, Cheney did know a lot about something, and that's logistics. He did. With his fucking company, KDR. No doubt. So all that... Which ran all logistics in both wars.

Exactly. There's the fucking connection. Exactly. Dick Cheney. Fucking... Corporate, profit, obsessed. No doubt. And dude.

And then... But they, you know, the ignorance, the naivete. And then, you know, what's disgusting is their inability to think forward in time. You know, fucking guys are going to die. civilians are going to die. And because you're fucking hand jamming something through that you know is not hard evidence, you just think it's good enough because you already know we need to get rid of Saddam, we need a friendly government in Iraq, which we still don't have today.

But gee, I wonder why. Exactly. Because we can't, that's the flaw of the color revolution. You can't pick the best. leader for a country. You cannot. The country needs to pick the best leader for the country. And we've now seen what that looks like. It's someone who loves their people, loves their country. Mission Men and Me puts the country's purpose first, their citizens second, and themselves last. That's been toppled. It's me, mission, and men is last to all these globalists.

And I think that was the way Iraq was. It's horrific what they did. I wonder if there are any other countries in the Middle East that wanted us to topple Iraq. Almost assured they. So I'm sure Saudis did. And, you know, the Saudis don't like the Iranians either. So, but, you know, you've got oil.

You've got oil companies. You've got oil lobbyists that influenced that. Your point on Cheney, is exactly right. It might not have been the main reason, but it's the inertia that makes these decisions final. You know, he's like, fuck, if we do this, I make another 20 mil in zero strike options that were given to me for free for being CEO of that company. So, you know, that's why you've got to bring in ground truth. You've got to bring in objective thinkers. you've got to bring in people who don't have agendas.

I mean, that amount of greed to topple a country and put your own people at risk, which... How many people died in Iraq? Do you know? I think it's 4,000. How many amputees? Yeah. Burn. How many horrific burn victims?

Answers that are still going on today from all the fucking shit. PTSD, TBI. TTIB. T diabetic brain injury. I mean, it is divorce, fatherless kids, all for a fucking logistics company. Yeah. And they fucking called a water truck, a fucking air conditioner, and a guy taking a piss. Yeah.

They manipulated the fucking UN with a water. Yep. It's on it is, it's just, it's so far out there. it doesn't even fucking seem real. Yeah. And I, you know, I was still, you know, until really even these last five years ago with the pandemic and the 2020 election and whatnot, I still always believed, you know, our government that will collectively make the right decision.

They can't be this fucking dumb. Yeah. They can't be this fucking dumb. Yeah. ignorant, they can't, there's no such thing as, as government-wide conspiracies. They're, it's, you know, so none of us still believed, even we sent all this back, you know, sent it back to, I mentioned the SENTCOM planning thing, and I had a, my point of contact, I was, you know, still the ops officer. So I sent back to my ops and say, oh, hey, I need you to go

down to Centcom Planning Conference tomorrow. Here's the list of what I want you to tell them. And we've redone the satellite photos with our own call-out boxes. I want you to present them. He's, Roger, that, sir. I can't wait.

Calls me back next day. I'm like, how's it going? He goes, they won't let me come to the meeting. I'm like, what? He goes, yeah, the Centcom planning meetings are for 06s and above only. And right there, I was like, We are fucked.

And, you know, I'm promotable to 06, so I'm not like saying there's some, but I would never, I wasn't even going to go to the conference. I was going to send my guys to it, guys who, I had guys who had guys who had been to Iraq in other capacities that I won't mention. They had also been through all the combat in Afghanistan, which Afghanistan, the lesson of Afghanistan, was through with and by. So when he told me that, I was like, fuck, this thing is spiraling. of control. So we started running brainstorming sessions in Afghanistan. We're at

Bogram, you know, it's still a South Bronx shithole at the time. We're in some crappy S-hanger. We had these brainstorming sessions at night and I had SF guys, I had agency guys, and I had unit guys and whoever else was around. And we were like, okay, what are the main lessons from Afghanistan that apply to Iraq. Let's talk about them. Let's get them down on paper and let's send them to them because if they're going to do this thing, let's at least take advantage. So number one was and this is not, this had been an idea rolling around from the beginning of Afghanistan. There needs to be a hyphenated American database where, and it's not a secret database, everybody in that database has been approached and is volunteered to be eligible to serve. And what that is is it's got Iraqi Americans,

Chinese Americans, Afghan Americans, every hyphenated type American first generation, who by the way are some of the most patriotic people, the ones who come here for the right reasons, some of the most patriotic Americans you find. It's always been that way, first generation, because they know what freedom, how important freedom is. And so, That was an idea, and I said, we need that. It's a good point. Fucking immigration might be the only damn thing keeping this country alive. Yeah.

First generation Americans. I've never even thought of that. But individuals who come here for what we stand for, freedom, not come here to fucking steal money and fucking infiltrate and all that other horse shit, bring their religion. You know, because this is a free country. It's freedom of religion. You can do whatever you want yourself. So the first thing was the hyphenate American database. Start it now.

Find every Iraqi American. Find out how many we can advise because that leads to point two. We've got to have Iraqi American cultural advisors from the first day. If we're going to do this thing, every unit needs to have an Iraqi American culture advisor. Why is it so important to have that hyphenated? Because that guy understands the culture of his old country through the culture lens of his new country. And he can translate that to you. Here's why they do that.

Here's why this is important to them. He speaks both languages. If you think about it, you know, the main reason I tell anyone that the history of expeditionary warfare is a history of a lopsided record of like 4,000 to zero. Expeditionary warfare has never worked. You can't go to a country and force decisions on that country if you're not going to live there with the decisions. Because you make different decisions if you've got to live there,

if your family's there, if your kids got to grow up there. Those are a whole different set of decisions. The same ones you make in your neighborhood should be made when we go overseas to another country. But that's not what happens. We just make flippant,

you have guys who know their tours ending in a few months. Do this, do that. And so we needed these Iraqi Americans with us. When we went into Afghanistan, I was fortunate because I was the entire time I was co-located with the agency and the agency had a handful of Afghan-Americans. I had a Wall Street lawyer, an Afghan-American Wall Street lawyer who was with me the entire time leading up to Anaconda. All the intel we gathered, I never would have been able to gather that without him.

If I had to, you know, pick an All-Star team from those first phases, this guy, would be on that all-star team with a couple of the heroes that, you know, who worked with me during that time. That's how important they are. And if you think about it, if you can't just just at the most basic language, communication language, if you can't communicate, how the fuck are you ever going to find common ground with anybody, enemy friendly, neutral? how are you going to persuade them of why you're there, the case you're trying to make for why you need to find these foreign fighters and get them out of their country?

You can't even do that. So, you know, to think you can operate in another country without connecting with the people and communicating, which, you know, that's the history of our species can be traced back to the history of language. Once we could speak, you know, the arc of human evolution just skyrocketed because we could share knowledge. Think about not being able to share knowledge and all the miscommunications that happened because of that. The Jessica Lynch convoy drove into a hornet's nest of enemy while because they couldn't read the signs, the highway signs, and they couldn't

understand what the people were jumping up and down screaming at them, telling them, in Arabic, do not go in there. It's full of enemy forces. They're going to kill you. That's on video. They were screaming that at these trucks as they drove obliasily into Nazaria. So language matters,

and that was why we were so passionate. Have these guys ready, and every unit that goes in needs to have one with them. And then our final thing was also an extension of the database. we need to be thinking about post-combat. How do we get the country back, stood back up? We already have been studying Iraq quite extensively, and we knew that anybody who had any key job was a Saddam, you know, loyalist. So once you take out Saddam and his administration,

all these loyalists who people hate, they shouldn't have been in the job. And I'm talking about the guy runs the power company, the water company, the sewage company, the gas company, the trash pickup company, they're all gone. And of course, you know, what do you do? How do you start that ship back up post-combat? We need Iraqi Americans who've been city managers who've worked in, you know, water companies. And all this turned out, all of these turned out to be legitimate. Once they started doing this, and, you know, so I sent these three lessons back

again, tried to get them to SentCom. Man, you came up with all this stuff? My guys, the brainstorming sessions. They were just the aggregate of guys on the ground who had been in Afghanistan, like me, three tours. Yeah, I don't claim authorship of them. I claim, you know, I organized the brainstorming, but they came up with this shit. It was the collective common sense. That's what you're always trying to aggregate and bring out.

And so we sent it back. Same thing. We can't get it to them. It's 06 and above, and, you know, there's no way to get this to him. So earlier, before I came back for that third tour, I had done this briefing up to the, at the Pentagon on how we, you know, found Al-Qaeda and where I thought this intel we found after Shahi Coat that told us where UBL was. And guess what? It was Intel that came from a source who was related to the courier, the same courier who was shot in the final raid, the one courier that bin Laden used from 2001 until he died in 11 to bring him information from his al-Qaeda underlings.

and we were turned on to this guy from an interrogation that I got to sit in on, and the guy was from Tunisia. He was a cobbler from Tunisia, you know, fixed shoes. And he knew this guy. And he said, if you want to find him, just follow this guy. And so at the time, we even knew where this guy was. So I presented that case to the Pentagon, and they were blown away by it. And remember, there's a rift in the Pentagon between civilian and military.

So I'm talking to Paul Wolfowitz and his civilian staff, not to the military. I didn't have, they didn't ask to hear, you know, how, what Pete Blaber and his AFO guys found out about UBL's location. And he was in Banu, which, you know, I told you, we. drove to Miram Shah. We cut through Banu on our way. He was there the whole time. So we gave that intel and at the end of the briefing, I walked outside and Wolfowitz's, he had this young guy who's youngest, what are they called, SM, what are they called, a general level of civilians in DOD, SMS or something like that. Yeah, there's some rams. Yeah, there's some rank thing they use. He was the youngest executive ever. Great guy, total patriot. He comes up to me.

He goes, look, that used blue everything we thought out of the water. I don't want you to think wrong about this, but here's my card. If you ever have information that you can't, no one will listen to, you can't get anyone to take action on, just call me because that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to bridge this gap, this bureaucratic gap between guys who know what should happen and all the bureaucracy in between. I'm like, fucking A. And I gave him my card. And I said, same thing goes.

You call me if you ever have a question. So after I was told Senatecom wouldn't took it, I went to a secure phone and I'm like, I'm going to fucking try this number. Beep, beep, beep, beep. And I called him, the name was Jim. I go, Jim, here's what's going on. Here's what Sankham's doing. I have no idea.

You probably know better than me. I still don't think we're going to do Iraq. But in case we do, we did this brainstorming session. And here's the three things that have to happen if we're going to be successful in Iraq. He goes, let me have him, Pete. Let me have him. I gave him the three things I just told you. And unbeknownst to me, he went right at it.

Immediately, they traveled to Dearborn, Michigan, which is the highest, population of Iraqi Americans. They're also in Fresno, two places, Fresno, California, and Dearborn. He went to both. The recruitment began right away, and I'm not getting feedback on any of this, but this is what he's doing on his own volition. Again, you know, shows you the value of boundary spanning. If we're going to make government work, you've got to be able to, you've got to be able to connect, randomly connect to other groups, not only go one way. And traditionalists are going to go, ah, she's crazy. That's why we have a chain of command.

It's like, no, fucking that's not why we have a chain of command. You know, the goal is the same for everyone to accomplish your purpose. And we're crazy not to open our whole system, you know, take advantage of the strength of the whole instead of the individual parts. So that's finally, you know, I told you, Colin Powell gave that speech in February, but I think it was early, late, early January where we got the word you're going back. We need you to go back. You're going to go back and prepare for operations in Iraq.

Like, fuck. We're in the middle of some heavy ops in Afghanistan. But, you know, orders, order. And I'm like, wow, they must know more shit than those satellite photos. always believe in, always given the benefit of the doubt. So we flew back. While I was flying back on the C-17, my guy back at the unit faxed, the equivalent of faxed me,

the Centcom plan, which he said, Panther, this thing just went final. And I'm like, what? They've already finalized the plan. I thought we were coming back to help with planning, you know. And so on the plane, it's a 23-hour flight. We were stopping in Munich, I think, to refuel. On the flight, I started reading the plan, and I fucking, same thing, I was just crestfallen.

We're not going to use Iraqi, we're not going to bring Iraqi Americans because it'll be too logistically difficult to house and feed them in the initial stages. We'll consider it at later stages in the op. We're not concerned about infrastructure repair. We think the Iraqis will be able to do that themselves. So it might sound crazy for, you know, a unit guy to be, you know, to be upset over two seemingly administrative things, but you could tell right away and with the background of all of these experienced combat veterans going, are the three most important things to success. I was just, I was just in shock. So, you know,

same thing when I got to Munich. I called my buddy at, you know, DOD again at the SEPSEC Deft's office. And I'm like, hey, I just read the plan. And there's none of this is, and he goes, I know, I know, we're dealing with the same thing here. But give me another couple weeks. We're working this thing. We're gathering these guys. We've got volunteers. Maybe we can make it happen and the right thing will end up getting approved. I'm like, okay, Roger that. So get back to the, get back to the rear, start prepping. The other part about the plan was same thing we learned in Afghanistan. Don't plan, prepare. Don't, the problem with plans is the prison of the plan. Once you make it and say this is the plan, you're a prisoner of that plan.

No matter what new information comes out, you can't adjust the plan because the plan's finalize. And with this one, when I got back and called down to the guy who was running the 06 and above meetings, he said, look, Pete, I get it. But the time for good ideas is over. And I've always hated that expression because the time for good ideas never fucking ends. It doesn't end the moment you start or the moment you're operating. The time for good ideas is right now. That just applies to everything in life. As new information comes in, you need to be. You need to be able to set your fucking ego down and change your mind. Yeah.

And nobody does it. Yeah. Nobody does it. No. But you can train yourself to do that. You get slaughtered as a flip-flopper. If you do it just in everyday life talking about politics. Like, no, new information came on and I fucking changed my mind.

My thinking has evolved. I saw your clip yesterday. You said those exact words on that clip from a couple of days ago. Man. No, you do. And so think about this statement. Freedom of choice can best be summed up as freedom to change your mind. If you don't have freedom to change your mind, you don't have freedom of choice. You just took away your most cherished human feature. Your freedom to choose. And you can't choose if you can't change your fucking mind off new information. And so you're never, ever, marry yourself to a plan, even if you worked for a thousand hours on that thing, even if it's your plan, you know, your version of what happened. As soon as you find contradictory and information, go with the flow, man. That's how nature works. And you're never, you can keep going down the wrong path, but you're going to experience the same thing, just like those extinct species I was

talking about. You're going to be extinct. And the learning feedback loop will catch up with you and that's that's the case here so you know still with all this I did not believe we were going in I thought this was just a bluff kind of like what I feel like today with Iran that it's a massive bluff but do you think it's a bluff I'm well that's where I'm a student of through experience to know that what I think and hope for is not reality so I'm not sure. Obviously, we're getting to the point where the point of no return, where you can't even, the bluff gets called,

and you got no other option but attack. And I know we're going to talk about that later, so I don't want to go off the topic. But anyway, I still didn't believe, and then we deployed. I was like, okay, we're getting on planes. We're going to Saudi Arabia and landed in Saudi Arabia. It was a surreal scene there. The middle of the desert was transformed into a mega metropolis of tents and generators and every accoutrema you could imagine.

The logistic capability of our country is, you know, beyond comprehension. KBR is a powerful company, isn't it? There you go again. Yep, and you're right. And that's what was happening. C-17s were landing every five minutes, blackout land, blackout takeoff. They'd land, taxi. Guys with nods in forklifts would come flying up to the back of it, unload the pallets.

The C-17 did a hot turn right back out to the runway. You know, blackout night vision goggle take off, gone. Five minutes later, next one comes in. And that was all night for every night for day after day after day. So everything was there. And as soon as we got on the ground, we had to find our way through this maze of tents to the jock, you know, the center of everything. And right away, the first thing I came in on, they'd just gotten out of a VTC with Franks, and Franks was pissed off. He was like, this plan sucks.

And I didn't mention the operational part of the plan. The plan was basically this. There will be a frontal attack from the south and an area. field seizure of the Baghdad International Airport. And we were like, what in the fuck? Why would they do that? We just learned this lesson of through with and by. We have Kurds in the north. We have all the Shiites in the south. We have a force on both sides of Baghdad that will fight against Saddam and his Sunni henchmen that we can trust. And we know there's no. no other method. There's no other way to successfully do an expeditionary military operation

unless you do it through with and by. Because as soon as you do it on your own, that xenophobia and that collateral damage all begins wearing against you, you lose the hearts and minds, you're not making good decisions because you don't live there. But, you know, there was none of that. And Franks luckily called it out. He said, just like Afghanistan, this is all target oriented instead of enemy oriented. And, you know, that was the first thing I heard and I was like, again, I'm giving him credit because credits do. That's incredibly insightful. That's what everything should have been focused on. Well, that second day, our unit commander got sick, had to be sent back to the states. And I was promotable to colonel. I was already promotable on the command list.

So they made me the unit commander. And, you know, the general, the J-SAC general is the same one from Afghanistan. So, you know, it was not probably a happy moment for him that now I'm the unit commander, but he was under so much pressure from Franks. He had no other choice. And Franks, you know, again, because he knew I was the AFO commander, was a big supporter of me. and the unit working like AFO.

And so we immediately started coming up with a new plan, while we were in Saudi Arabia, brought everyone together again, and we were like, what do we need to do? And we settled on a couple things. First was we don't, let's not just, you know, do the cookie cutter approach. What do we need to operate behind enemy lines? And what do we need to do to be successful for the overall mission?

The mission was, you know, multi-pronged. It was killer capture, Saddam, and his deck of 52, and find WMDs, you know, if they're out there. And so we already concluded there's no WMDs. Sounds like an easy test. Just look for the air conditioner on the room. And the guy taking a piss. taking a piss on the wall.

Yeah. So we changed it to an effects-based operation. Everything we did had to have an effect. So that's what effects-based operation are. It's not the thing you're doing. It's the effect you're trying to achieve. So they weren't going to change the massive frontal attack from the south out of Kuwait, which was divisions lined up.

They weren't going to change that. But maybe we could make it a little bit more efficient for them by creating an effect that the main attack was really coming from the Western Desert. And so how do you do that? Well, it turns out we were in the coalition part of this thing. So we had the Brits there, and they sent an SBS, so the equivalent of Brits Seals. The Fifth Special Forces groups are the same guys we worked with in Afghanistan. All the same guys were there just like us.

They were going to go in in desert mobility vehicles, and the Aussies were there. The Aussie Sasser, S-A-S-R was there, too. So our thought was we take all four elements, and each of these elements had between 10 and 20 vehicles, desert mobility of all types. And we thought, when you looked on the map, let's look at this. as a whole, let's use, let's create the impression that the main attack is coming from the west via the swarm. Let's swarm, move forward at the same time all in a massive about a hundred miles salient. Let's move to the east toward the built up areas, which is Fallujah, to crit, Baji. Let's move like this to create the impression. They'll get calls throughout

the sector, hey, there's guys here, there's guys here, there's guys here, and eventually they'll think the main attacks coming from the West, they'll reposition forces, make it more efficient, thin the lines that are facing the guy, the main attack from the South. So it was effect space ops with swarming, and you would think that'd be a no-brainer, but we immediately got pushback. You can't do that. 1991, every guy, every, element that was scud hunting was rolled up. You know, you know the story of Bravo 2-0. The unit had guys scud hunting. They had to go on the run. And this is again where why you have to have updated subject matter experts. We were like, it's no longer relevant. And it's no longer relevant

for what we call J-squared, which is J-dams and javelins. We now had J-dams and javelins. DAMS give you the ability to point and shoot, either with a laser. You can talk them in, but lasers the best way. You can use handheld lasers. You just touch that vehicle, that target you want hit, and the aircraft punches in the code, releases the bomb, and the bomb maneuvers its way, precision strike onto target. So J-DAMS, and then the javelin was a game changer for defending against armor. you can engage as far out as you can see.

The thermal site on the javelin is what makes it, you know, really the weapon that it is, the great weapon, the thermal site's amazing. And so you just lock in on a target and fire that javelin, and you'll destroy, especially in 2001, any armored vehicle in the planet. And so, you know, now it changes the equation. Thin-skin vehicles can take on an armored formation because you have javelins. You got to know how to use them and you got to employ them at the right distance, but it changed the equation.

So we got approval. Next, we had to get approval from all our foreign and even our SF counterparts. They were all stationed in Jordan. So we flew over to Jordan, had this great meeting with all of them. They were all like, fuck, yeah, it makes so much sense. We're part of the swarm. then we got down to the details. It's like, okay, let's exchange frequencies.

And all of a sudden, this high-ranking intelligence guy who was there stepped in and goes, you can't do that. You're not allowed to exchange. American freaks cannot be used by foreigners. Doesn't matter who the ally is without special permission from, I don't know who. I'm like, okay, well, that doesn't make any sense. So we can't talk to them.

What if they're ambushed? and they need us to come to help. How are they supposed to call out for help? Well, you're going to have to figure that out. I can't violate security protocols. So the next thing we did was we had the Eridium SAT phones. And luckily, the SF guys had them already, so it was just a matter of exchanging phone numbers.

I can't remember if it was the Brits that didn't have them or the Aussies, but we gave them our extra, without once the Intel guy was gone. We gave them the iridiums, and then we literally exchanged phone numbers. And that, you know, it sounds superfluous, but that became a huge force multiplier because we were updating each other as we went along,

getting smarter from each sector. You know, they're already up here ahead of us. They haven't met any resistance, so we can probably move a little faster, you know, on this next leg. And, you know, we had a number of encounters. We hit four targets that we were told to hit. They were all dry holes, but they all had people.

They all had Iraqis on them. And we learned a lot from each time. We learned there was no plan. No one knew anything about WMDs, and they certainly seemed to be truthful in the way they told us it. We had a battlefield interrogation team with us. So we had, you know, Sykes. We had guys who made their living off interrogating people. We brought them with us across the border behind lines.

So we were learning. We were exchanging that knowledge. So this swarm, you know, was getting stronger with every mile it passed. And we made it. We found no WMDs. We went all the way to where the built up area starts, Thar Tharthar Lake, Haditha Dam, Fallujah. and now we're entering a new phase of the operation.

And I should add, right before we got there, the SBS had an incident which just underscores why you need Iraqi Americans, why you need cultural advisors, why you need linguists, whatever you want to call them. The SBS, a bunch of bedwinds, came up on their position, and, you know, a lot of people don't know this, but the Brits take breaks to have their tea, and they were having tea when these three bedwinds came up.

And they were, hey, you know, you want some tea, tea, no, no, no. And, you know, it was described to me one of the guys. It was a weird encounter, but the bedwinds just waved them off and left. And, you know, we're hearing this and we're like, dude, every fucking bedwind since, you know, cell phones came out, has a cell phone. They all talked to each other. They're all incredibly territorial. If you're on, you know, when you drive through the desert,

it doesn't matter if it's Iraq, Jordan, you come across these cairns everywhere, cairns a pile of rocks. Those mark Bedouins territory. And other bedwins know you don't go into that area. That's their desert. And somehow they fucking patrol that shit and know everybody in there.

exactly where they are. They know all the terrain. So the SBS sat back down to FT, and minutes later, they were surrounded. I don't know how many. I think their initial reports at 50 to 100. Because they hadn't thought through it, panic set in. Most guys hoofed it, ran, left the vehicles. the Bedouins captured their desert mobility vehicles. Holy shit. The radios, a bunch of weapon systems. Yeah, it was pretty bad. I guess that's why we don't share freaks.

Exactly. Exactly. So that guy, but even if you did that, you know, all he could do is get on and call the freak. And freaks change, you know, whatever, every 48 hours. I'm just being an asshole. No, it's a natural point. You have to say that.

To that guy's, you know, to the point that he made, it's relevant. But it's more, you know, I didn't say this about the guys that we had. Desert Mobility has been a unit mission from way before Desert Storm in 91. And again, same, just like, you know, the dog thing, it was guys going, what capability do we not have that we might need based on threats in the world? And they started doing desert mobility. And it's it is tough training. It's time intensive training.

It's arduous training. You're living in the desert. You're freezing. You're hot. You've got to figure out fuel loads. You've got to figure out routes. You've got to be a mobility expert because you're constantly getting stuck. Every off-roader knows this.

you've got to understand how to drive, you know, which requires guys to go to all kinds of off-road driving schools because the techniques are everything. You can go over a boulder, a five-foot high boulder with a vehicle, but you've got to know how to do it, how to turn the wheel the right way, how to accelerate the right way. So, you know, the unit, the Ph.D. level of knowledge on desert mobility, I can't. I can't do it justice with adjectives. And these guys embodied that. And they were serious as shit about it.

I've been on multiple training exercises. And, you know, you realized the power of accumulated knowledge. And a big part of that is contingencies, always thinking through things, knowing, you know, if this, then this. you know, I think we talked about lone survivor. If a Recky team is ever compromised, there's only one option. It's abort the mission. Once you're compromised, it's abort.

Unless you're going to disarm a nuclear weapon that's going to blow up the world. That would be maybe the one exception, but you abort the mission. And that's the kind of thing that only training, only talking about it, living it, and then pounding it into the heads of not just your colleagues, but the guys, the new guys that come in. And so the unit was incredibly steeped. We ran into Bedwins a few,

about a week after that was just my headquarters element, because I came out in the field, and I'll get to that in a second, came forward. We ran into Bedwins too, but we had our Iraqi Americans with us. I had one of them with me and we immediately asked them, hey, what can we do for you? What's going on? They want to know who you are. What are we doing? And I told Saif, my Afghan, I said, tell them we're Canadians and we're here to evacuate the Canadian embassy. We're on our way to Baghdad to get the Canadians out. We have no part of this war. We don't want any trouble with you. we're not here to take over your country. We'll be in and out. Bedouins were like, thank you very much. Would you like to have some green tea with us?

They put their, they put the tea on. I'm like, I ain't fucking drinking that shit. I put it up to my mouth, you know, because I was the commander, Saif had some. But they left and, you know, nothing happened. Probably reported, hey, there's a bunch of Canadians out here. and, you know, to Canadians watching your show, I'm sorry I had to. Whoops. Yeah, pretend I was a Canadian. But that was the way it was. We found a forward operating base.

It was the Iraqi equivalent of Area 51. It was the middle of the desert. It was where they did special testing, literally in the middle of the desert. Perfect for us. We turned that into our base of operations. that's where I flew out in a small plane, landed on the highway, got out of the plane and set up my command and control element there, which was five guys.

And, you know, same thing, lessons learned, stay small, stay nimble. Always command and control as far forward as possible because you have to, if the guys are hungry, if the guys are cold, if the guys are, you know, are injured, you know losing their motivation you have to live that with them you have to experience that with them it's the context I was talking about why a disconnected chain of command can't make good decisions so the way you do that is you connect you connect with the environment and that's what we did we brought in a the Rangers

the airfield seizure was called off by Franks so you had a full regiment of Rangers doing nothing so I got a battalion of Rangers attached to me It was actually two companies. One-60th guys, we brought them out, Little Birds specifically. And then we started operating out of this desert hide site. And we called ourselves the Wolverines after the famous B-movie. What's it called, Dawn? Not alone.

It's Red Dawn. Red Dawn. So we called ourselves the Wolverines. And that's what we are known as. just operating behind enemy lines. We are what you need us to be. And immediately, because of the phase of operations, you know, the thunder run happened

and, you know, the government fell. But Saddam, the deck of 52 is 51 other closest advisors were all on cards. And that's who we were trying to capture. And I was, same thing, affects space op. We could either go try to find intel to try to go find all 51 of them, or we can create an effect that forces them to make mistakes. What's that effect?

Well, there's only two basic lines of drift with roads on them that you can use to get out of Iraq to the north and west. One's highway 12, the other's highway one. If we block those highways and Word gets back, they're blocked, they're not even going to try to get out. They're going to go to ground wherever they're at, Baghdad to Crit, and we're going to have a much better chance of finding them all. So our mission flexed. It turned into what we call lock interdiction, line of communication is what lock stands for, interdiction. And we set up, you know, fixed battle positions on these roads.

But to do it, I needed more people. We were already running low. And I needed, we were now in the built up area, and I told you it was a fact space. We wanted them to think the main attack was coming from the West. So again, ideas come from the ground up. It was like, sir, we should get some tanks attached to us. I'm like, that's a great, freaking idea. So my buddy, who I told you about in Afghanistan, Jimmy, was working as he had worked,

because he was highly respected, was chosen as to be the war liaison officer. for the head three-star general on the ground. So he was his special advisor, you know, not his aide, but his special advisor. So I called Jimmy first. I go, Jimmy, here's what we need to do. Here's why we need to do it. If you can kind of, you know, begin desensitizing,

get a feel for what the general thinks of this, but make the idea, you know, his idea, make it seem like this is a great idea. If only we had tanks, and Jimmy did that, he did that, I sent the request up through my chain, the J-SAC chain, and the first thing the ops officer, J-SIC officer said, they never fly. No one's ever attached tanks to a special ops unit and no one's going to attach them to you guys because no one thinks you're going to have anything substantive to do with the attack. I'm like, yeah, well, just pass it up anyway. Pass it up, approved on the spot. He calls me right back. He goes, I have no idea how this happened, but somehow

This got approved. So you need to find a way to get C-7 to allow C-17s to land. We're going to, General Franks is going to send you up a platoon of tanks. So Franks approved 10 M1 Abrams tanks to be sent to this hodge-podge Wolverine group in the middle of the desert. Yeah, we scraped out an airfield. We had some great CCTV guys who set that up. They were with us the whole time. Scraped out an airfield that night.

set up the beanbag lights, income C-17s disgorged this platoon of, of, you know, M1 tank guys with a platoon leader. And I was the first guy to walk up to them. And their first question could have been, are you a freaking alien? What is going on here? How did it? And I'm like, what were you guys told? They're like, we were told, get your tanks ready to get on an airplane.

you're going to link up with the new group and you're going to be attached to him. I'm like, they didn't tell you who we are? They're like, no. And so I had this conversation with their commander. And, you know, he went, I watched him go through all five emotional phases of disbelief shock. But in the end, he's like, this is cool as shit. You know, he was really motivated and they were too. So we had 10 tanks now.

So this ruse that were operating on this effects. space up, we now want to show the Iraqis the tank. And the city were nearest to is to Crit and Baji. And to Crit is Saddam's hometown. We knew through Intel that his best troops were stationed into Crit. So it was a robust defense into Crip. It was nothing we were going to be able to do anything against. But again, what effect do we want? We want these guys to throw down their weapons. We want them to abandon their tanks. We want them to run for the hills. We don't want them to fight back. We want them to create this sense of hopelessness. So as we're planning that and moving to, you know, rehearsing how close we can get to

to crit, you know, before we're detected, my original group was attacked by what was described as 50 to 100 fetiene in pickup trucks. And this was a massive firefight. And again, J-Dams, you know, the J-square was supreme. And I should say, I told you about J-square. We also had D-squared, which was also two new things in the battlefield. We had dogs and we had drones. So we brought the dogs with us. We brought special kennels with temperature control in them

because they can't handle the total heat. They won't work the same way. So we had special kennels that actually had little mini air conditioners in them embedded in our trucks. Wow. And we brought two dogs, and we had the first, you know, self-piloted drones. Oh, shit. Yep. And so we were able to sweep our, whenever we went into patrol base, rest over day position,

we were able to sweep our position with concentric circles. And it was while sweeping this position that one of the guys, at the exact same time, the dog began to growl, saw these, this small armada of pickup trucks screaming through the desert right at us. So, you know, probably in someone else from a distance saw us. Some Bedwin called them. They were heading right for our patrol base. And probably, I think reports were there were 10 pickups, because I said there was, you know, 25 to 50 guys. And they just, you know, a 9-1-5-5. I'm violating them with J-dams. There's films of F-16s dropping bombs

that literally hit into the backbed of the pickup truck, which is packed full of Fedian guys. And then the, you know, the, that's the J-dams. And then the javelins were just blowing up pickup trucks from, you know, four or five kilometers away. So it was great proof of concept right there. But we're doing the record. to figure out how to do this mission. And the mission we came up with was we want to show,

do a show of force operation. That's what we called it on the edge of to Crit. To Crit goes right up against the desert. There's a highway. That's Highway 1 that is the demarcation line between pure desert for hundreds of miles and built up, you know, a couple hundred thousand person town. So we, you know, brief, we sent this mission to hire, said this is what we're going to do. It was approved. But as I said to you, the Thunder Run mission had just happened. So everyone was talking about the Thunder Run, you know, and the Thunder Run was M1 tanks and Bradley's that just floored it and went through a bunch of enemy fighters, went right to Biap Airport,

which was undefended. There was no enemy there. Occupied Biap. and that was kind of a dagger through the heart of the, you know, Iraqi defense. Once Baghdad International fell, they, you know, panic set in and they fled. But it had the wrong effect on, you know, these commanders, these generals, they were like, just do a thunder run into Tikrit. Well, we were panders and Pinsgowers, you know, non-armored vehicles.

And the tanks, we had been a... operating for about a week when we pulled the mission off and we already were down to five tanks. It took 10 tanks to make five. They break by the day. And so on that mission, we only had, we were down to five tanks. So we went to Crit. The first guys up were our guys in the unarmored vehicles. They went to a cloverleaf intersection, so highways just like in America. occupied the clover leaf the pillars that support the clover were their cover because we don't have armor uh these are mechanized forces that are out there and uh then the tanks crawled forward and we put the tanks on the four car no that was a it was a classic clover leaf so there were

four off ramps we put one tank on each with the fifth tank up on top and uh and then just sat there and monitored looked it to crit um I remember it. I was three kilometers out in the desert, my little command and control element. We moved forward with them. I could see the cloverleaf. I could see to crit. And, you know, it was dead quiet. And, you know, the guys were reporting the same from the cloverleaf. Not a creature is moving. There's no cars. There's no nothing. And this is again where experience comes in. we had learned that whenever a city is completely quiet and without movement or motion, something is awry.

And, you know, the sub-element commander there knew that, passed it to his guys. They were like, guys, stay alert, stay alert. There's something going on here. And sure enough, a couple of minutes later, it just, you know, opened up to crit opened up. There were gun positions on top of buildings. There were gun jeeps that were positioned behind buildings. They would pop out like angry cockroaches, fire, machine gun fire at us, pop back in. There were positions everywhere.

There were positions in buildings on top of buildings, garages. And, you know, the tanks, in the initial fuselage, the tanks, you know, you're in a losing battle against an M1-A2 Abrams tank with their thermal sites because they just started locking in and blowing these positions away. But what we realized was the only guys who were initially shooting were the guys who were on guard duty.

Guys were waking up and the fire, no matter how many things we blew up, the fire continued to intensify. No shit. And Bill, the guy who was in charge of the guys on the Clover Leaf was calling me, he's going, hey, this fire is pretty intensive. You know, we're just continuing to follow the plan.

I'm like, Roger that. Keep your back. You know, the last thing I told them in the briefing, keep your back to the desert at all times. So Bill calls me back a third time, and I can hear the staccato of 50-Cal firing in the background, main guns, and I'm like, fuck, this is a fucking all-out battle. And he goes, hey, man, it's getting really hairy.

you know, what do you want me to do? And I said, well, as soon as you think it's untenable, I want you to pull back in the desert and pull out, you've already accomplished our mission, which is to make them believe that the main effort is coming from the West and that these tanks have already arrived. So it's hopeless. You know, we've got them surrounded. And the guys down south they have no escape. And he's like, Roger that. Well, as soon as that happened, my second, Comradio came to life, and it was the same general that I talked about in Afghanistan, and he said, what do you think you're doing? Oh, man.

And I'm like... Is this a crystal? No, it's his underling daily. And so I just very calmly reiterated to him what the plan was, that he had already approved. This is a show of force operation. We're on the edge of the crit in thin-skinned vehicles. We showed them the tanks. That was the purpose.

We're returning fire. We've already blown up a number of vehicles, a number of enemy positions. But this is at least a brigade of fighters. And there's mechanized vehicles. We can already see the mechanized vehicles. And, you know, it's a total mismatch. It's not our mission. And he goes, I don't care what you told him.

I want you to drive into that city. and take out those positions. And then he was like, serphing out. I'm like, fuck. So Bill gets back on. So all the guys forward have this SACCOM frequency on their radio. So every vehicle hears this.

So, you know, it's freezing cold out. Fucking bullets are, you know, cracking the sonic crack above their heads. They know, you know, it's pretty hard to make a unit operator realize he's outgunned and outman, but they all knew that. It was a no-brainer. And so Bill calls me, he goes, you know, Panther, what do you want me to do? And I go, no change.

Continue on with mission. As soon as you think the time is right, pull back into the desert and head back to our patrol base. And he goes, Roger, I just have one problem right now. One of the tanks ran over some telephone wire when it went into Pittsburgh. position and now it's tangled in the track and it can't move. And as soon as he told me that, five guys jumped out of, five operators jumped out of one of the vehicles and ran down to that vehicle and started working on it with, you know, infrared headlamps trying to detangle with these tanker guys, the wire.

But we couldn't move, so we were stuck. So a couple seconds after that, my iridium phone rings. and it's one of the generals second, a guy who would go on to become a four-star general. And he goes, hey, Pete, I know what you're saying, and, you know, I just want to tell you that I think it's a mistake. And if you don't go into to CREIT, you know, I don't think you're going to be in command much longer. This is a subordinate. And, you know, I'd already had this conversation with myself in Afghanistan. Afghanistan, the mission of the men and me, you know, what's my mission? It's an effect space

up. My men, they're counting on me. I will never send my men in unarmored, thin-skinned vehicles into, to attack a brigade that's in fighting positions in a city. You know, this group happened to be the same group that was in Somalia, so they'd already experienced, you know, a real-world urban swarm and how helpless you are against an enemy who knows. the terrain and can swarm you in an urban center. So there was no doubts in their mind about the senselessness of such an order. And I couldn't talk to this guy, you know, and I didn't want to. Because I was going back and forth with the guys.

Bill's telling me it's still stuck. We're taking some really heavy fire. And I'm like, I just told the guy, hey, I'll get back to you, Roger, hung it up, got on another line. And one of our contingencies were, if anything happens, there's 160 attack helicopters. They're about 70 miles south of us in a loiter position. They weren't the ones we brought out. So I had their freak.

I called them up. I go, gave them the code word, we need you ASAP. Fifteen minutes later, I heard them come in, fly forward. They went through their entire basic load of rocket, fire. machine gun fire. Two of the Apaches were hit. They had to pull back. And at that moment, Bill said to me, hey, we got the, looks like we got the telephone wire untangled. Looks like we can pull back. What do you want me to do? I'll do whatever you tell me. And I said, no change. Pull back into the desert and I'll meet you back at the safe house. Roger that. And you know, I know he was not going to be on again.

but immediately the radio crackled to life. And once again, what did I just hear you say? I said, sir, it's the same thing. This is the mission that you approved already. They are not capable of going into it to CRIP. Now, you listen to me, and then dead silence. And so I was like, and so I tried three times, the standard thing, even though, you know,

I was doing it slowly because I wanted to build off that. And he was already gone. And he told me later, he goes, it wouldn't have mattered. We were, once you said that, not, no, we were not going to turn around. And there was nothing to do. He goes, you know, we would have been cut to pieces. Turned out, I later found out from a guy, a staff officer. He was so pissed off.

He yanked, you know, he had the push to talk. Yeah, he yanked the cord from his push to talk handset out of the radio thing. It broke it and stormed out of the tent. Oh my gosh. I mean, yeah. So this is you can tell this dynamic. Why the fuck would you want to turn a diversion into the main? He wanted another thunder runs.

He wanted, it's this same thing I was telling you about hubris, emotion. You know, I'll be famous. We'll have done a thunder run with thin skin vehicles. You can do it. They did it. And it's like, we're not a tank division. You know, a tank division has something like 200 tanks. I got five, and they're all holding on by a thread.

And I have nothing to support the five with. I have no, like, maintenance group or nothing like that, and my guys are in thin-skin vehicles. But, you know, it was an eye-opener, and it was good. It was, in a way, it was positive for me because, you know, it was the final thing I needed to learn. And, you know, I have no interest in compromising my integrity to get to the next rank. And so when we got back, it was, you know, sun's coming up.

I got, we got back before them. I, like I did every night, I was waiting for them or every morning waiting for them. They got out of their vehicles, you know, first checked themselves in the vehicles for bullet holes and damage. and then the sergeant major of the group, codename Armani, made a B-line for me. And, you know, he was fucking, I can still see him vividly, the classic, you know,

example of an operator who's been in combat all night. His equipment is still perfectly, ergonomically organized on his body, his weapons still perfect. His rest of the, his body is in tatters. His shirt is ripped. His hair is matted down by, you know, the combination of sweat and, you know, the headsets that he's wearing on his head. His face is full of black

shit, probably oil coming up from machine guns that he was firing. His eyes, you know, zombie-like eyes from, you know, another vampire night of staying up all night on two or three or three hours sleep in the day. And he just made a beeline to me and he said, sir, we heard every word of the conversation in our vehicle. We were hanging on every word and I just wanted to shake your hand and say thank you for what you did. And like that moment to me was like the highlight of my, you know, my military career tied for the greatest thing that, you know, greatest feedback I ever got my military career. And, you know, that's also just reemphasizes that's what it's about. You know, if you're not taking care of your people when you make a decision, then you're making a senseless

decision. And, and that's what happened there. But we now had a better expectation for, you know, what was about to happen. And that very next night, we went out again to patrol the desert. And we And we discovered a brigade of MEC. And the guys discovered them from a max standoff distance. So they sent, I think, four ATVs forward. And each of the ATVs had laser pointers. And they just sat from about a kilometer and a half in front of this MEC brigade. And they just touched each vehicle with a laser and a J-DAM evaporated the vehicles.

After the first three, you know, the Iraqis were like, this is some VU. do shit. They just abandoned the rest of their vehicles, and we destroyed a brigade's worth of mech equipment that night. That next night is when the main attack all stalled at the Carbola gap. I don't know if you remember that. They were all stalled. They were out of gas. Couldn't move any further. And, you know, they all set up their nightly VTC with Sentcom, and Franks got on there, and he said, you know, the night before they had sent a... swarm of Apaches, 100 Apaches to go in and attack this defensive position. And you might remember that. Something like 60 Apaches were shot up. They had to retreat. You know, Apaches can't operate on their

own. And so it failed. And Trump or Trump, Franks got on there and he said, you know, this is why I was against the original plan. Look what you guys are doing. You've just driven into the country. You haven't even made contact yet with any significant enemy. And I got 45 guys up north who just destroyed a brigade worth of armor. And, you know, he counted the vehicles. He's like, and he read him, like, 46 tanks, 38, you know, rocket launchers, all this shit. And I later was told by one of the guys who was in one of the divisions, a staff officer, he goes, once he did that, he goes, effective because we were like if those freaking unit guys can do that in those Pinsgowers we can do it in M1s and he said that was a big motivation for you know

there the ops that they pulled off the additional thunder runs they did to take the rest of Baghdad so you know it it worked out for the better I got a call from my contact and DODs like we're hearing everything we're listening to radio he's It's amazing, and I just want to, but I need to get some feedback from me. And I go, yeah, sure. First thing I want to do is thank you for, you know, finding and then being able to send those Iraqi Americans over to me before we launched out. Like, please tell your boss and you, thank you so much for what you did. We couldn't have done anything without the Iraqi Americans.

And he goes, oh, man, that's good to know because we're getting real heat back here from the Pentagon about the whole system. And I go, well, what's the heat? And they go, well, it turns out you're the only one who took the Iraqi Americans with you into the box. And I'm like, what? So 30 Iraq, they sent 30 Iraqi Americans over. We interviewed all 30, picked two, our two. So there were still 28 of them. The problem was they didn't have security clearances.

So even us, before we took off, my higher headquarters intel guy, great guy, comes up to me, goes, Pete, I hate to be the wanted to say this to you, but you can't take those guys with you. And I'm like, why? And he goes, because they don't have security clearance and you're the most secure organization in the military. And I go, but they're Americans. And he goes, yeah. And I go, and we're Americans. And he goes, yeah. And I go, to me, that's the only thing they had to pass. The fellow Americans, they volunteered to leave their jobs and fly to nowhere for no tax. No one ever told them what they were going to do. These two are actually on Pinskowers riding into combat.

They've participated in six combat firefights already. You know, the funny thing about the metamorphosis, if you looked at them, you couldn't even tell at this point. They were Iraqi Americans. They had jungle floppy hats on. The guys that outfitted them, they had their own kit. They looked like kind of like support guys for operators. or whatever, but they were completely ingrained.

And I was just in shock that no one else took them. And I said, look, most of the commanders probably, you know, got treed by Chihuahua over the Intel thing or didn't understand how much they'd need them. But I bet you they all understand it now. So don't let anyone talk you out of it. Get those other 28 and keep bringing them in because we're going to need more and more of these guys. So we rotate these guys out.

And he goes, okay, great. I have one other favor I need of you. he goes yesterday ambassador bremer took over he's in charge of all ops in iraq now because saddam you know the government had fallen and i go yeah and he goes he doesn't have any iraqi americans with them and remember the plan said no iraqi americans because they're too logistically problematic we got to put them up we got to feed them we already have enough guys and then i'm like okay and he goes so if you could give one of your guys who and i and i hate to say this but you're back guy to him, you'll be doing something for everybody in country. It'll help him navigate the decisions

he's got to make. And there was a rift between DoD. Bremmer was State Department. So there was a rift. DoD did not agree that state, which if you think about it, Shaman, again, the Bush administration, you don't change in the middle of the battle. You don't turn it over to a State Department guy. And Bremer was flying into the country. He'd never been to Iraq before. So he flew in that day and I said, yeah, I can do it. And he goes, okay, you need to go to the green zone and make contact with them to give it. So we were told anyway, we, you know, the fourth ID was coming in, the Marines were coming in. It was time to go back to Baghdad to do, you know, find the rest of the deck of 52.

So we were coming in anyway. And, you know, we drove back into Baghdad. And then I took Saif to the green zone to where. Bremer was setting up in Saddam's palace. And so when I got there, it was a beehive of activity. Contractors were repairing the new skylights that had been made by the J-Dams, the cruise missiles that took the initial group out. The air conditioners were being put in every window. They were even working on the pool, the swimming pool, I was in a swimming pool at the time. And so Saif, my Iraqi-American,

said to me what I was thinking already is we walked through the, you know, unobtrusive opulence of the palace entryway. He said, this doesn't feel right. And I was like, fucking, you are so right, man. It does not feel right. And we walked into the palace. Again, beehive of activity.

I ask a guy, hey, is there anyone from the State Department I can talk to who can tell me how to link up with Ambassador Bremmer. He goes, that guy right there is the head guy. Gray ponytail, reading glasses, sparking out orders to people. So I walk up to him. Again, I'm, I have not showered yet, nothing. I come walking up to him with my Iraqi-American, and I introduced myself, gave him the context, here's why I'm here. I was asked, I don't know if you know who Paul Wolfowitz is, he's Deputy Secretary of Defense.

His staff asked me to bring, this is one of my most trusted guy down here, so you can have a cultural advisor for all decisions you can make. And, you know, guys, you could tell you wasn't really, yeah, yeah, uh-huh, huh. And then I finished talking and he goes, okay, so I know who Paul Wolfowitz is, and Paul Wolfowitz is DOD. But let me tell you something, Colonel, this is a Department of State op, and we don't need any DOD assets here. and we don't need any cultural advisors. Now, your boy here, I can give him $60 a day to be an interpreter at the front gate. We definitely need that.

So I can put him in right away. But that's all. And if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to work. And he's like, get that air conditioner over the other side. And I turn to Saif, and he goes, sir, is this for real? Is this guy for the real? I cannot believe this.

how are they going to talk, how are they going to work with the people, how are they going to know where the enemy is, how they going to know how to fix things, how are they going to be able to tell the people, hey, help is coming, we're going to fix this up. It's going to, here's what's happening. I'm like, Saif, I don't know, buddy. And I remember the moment because it was the first moment in my life

that I felt embarrassment for being, like for my country. This guy embarrassed me, you know, being a fellow American. But, you know, Saif, it was like, that's why you got guys with you. You always want a wingman, you know, to bring you back to reality. And I'm like, fucking great point.

And I turn to this guy and I go, look, dude, where is Ambassador Bremer right now? And he goes, he's in a meeting. Why do you want to know? And I go, where's the meeting? And he goes, well, it's somewhere where you're not allowed to go to because you don't have an access badge and you're not clear to hear what he's talking about.

So I'm like, you know, this is when you're, again, staring in the eyes of a madman, don't, you know, don't become a madman yourself. I look around and I see this in the hallway, this magic marker written sign that says conference room and an arrow. And, you know, it just made sense. He'd be down this hallway in the conference room if he's having a meeting. And I go, yeah, okay, thanks for your time, Bob, because he was calling me Bub the whole time. And where are you going? And I go, we're going to see Ambassador Bremer. And he goes, you can't go down there.

He starts following us. You don't have a clearance. You don't have badges. He's in a meeting. It's a really important meeting. I go, what's the meeting about, you know, over my shoulder? I'm not going to patronize this guy anymore. And he goes, it's a meeting on what day to pick the trash up.

And I go, Saif, what day should they pick the trash up? He goes, it does not matter. Any day but Saturday. You don't pick the trash up on Saturday. And the guy's ignoring Saif. He's like, you know, not good enough. And I go, is that, does that a good enough answer for you? He goes, you are not allowed to go down there.

So we come to this, the conference room, and it's, you know, 20-foot high oak doors ornately carved. You could tell this was, you know, Saddam's. And the doors were shut. I wiggled the handle. They were locked. But there was a crack in the door. And, you know, I put my face up to the crack and I could. see inside. I could see Bremer, and I could see all the individuals in the meeting. And

the first pattern that jumped out was there were no Iraqis in there. These were all like State Department guys in suits talking about what day to pick the fricking trash up. And the trash was a problem. Just like the guy said in the brainstorm mission, the infrastructure, there was no water, no power, no electricity. So no electricity, no water, no, and no sewage. So you can couldn't flush toilets and there was no trash pickup. So there were mountains of trash. At this point, they were only like 10 to 20 feet high, but forming on every street. So I'm sitting there trying to listen to the meeting. This guy's behind us. He's going, I'm going to tell you one more time, you are not allowed in there, pull your ears and your eyes away from that door, and you two need

to get out of here. And this is where Saif, you know, shines. He goes, was, sir, you hear something? I know the wind blow really hard around here, and all I can hear is a bunch of hot air right now. And the fucking guy turned around, stormed off, and searched you somebody to tell. Saif said, what do we do? I said, well, let's wait till the meeting ends.

We sat there four more hours. And there was a window. You could see the sun going down. It was martial law, so we had to be back to our safe house before sundown. We had ops at night too. I said, Saif, let's go. And he's like, sir, this can't be really happening.

You know, they can't be really going forward without any Iraqi Americans. I'm like, yep, we'll try again. We'll come back. So we tried every day for, I think, the next two weeks. I would send a guy with Saif. We brought him up, reoffered every time they would not take him. Six weeks later, the trash piles were mountains. rat-infested mountains, no water, no power, no garbage pickup, no employment.

The Bremer's second day in command, he was allowed, a UN allowed him to create decrees with the power of decrees. So decrees are only usually used by despots and dictators. That's do this with no explanation of what's doing, and he disbanded the Iraqi military. on his third day in country that he had never been in before and put 150,000 military men out of work. They already don't get barely paid anything. Now they have no money and they're part of the no power, you know, no sewage, no water, no hope for jobs. And who are they pissed up?

Exactly, us. And then on top of all this, I told you it's six weeks later, there's still not, there's no messages going out to the Iraqi people, you know, the human animal can, can suffer for unthinkable amounts of time and can accomplish feats that, you know, no one can ever believe. Someone who, a ship sink, can swim forever if they just know there's an island up in front of them. So what the most important thing that should have been happening during that time was someone, a combination of radio and pamphlets and guys going out to neighborhoods telling them, hey, here's what's going on. Everything's about to be rebuilt.

We're putting these people on water, power. We've got to rewire the electricity to your house. And as Saif said, you can have the garbage picked up in hours. Just tell the guys on each block, if you move that trash to a certain location, you'll make this amount. And you can pay them next to none. They'll do it because that's the way Iraqis are. So he's also sharing cultural, you know, knowledge. Yeah, knowledge of these people.

And that's a great solution. We should have picked that trash up not six weeks, you know, the first week. We should have picked it up and then had these guys, okay, every Tuesday. You guys bring the trash to the central location. You'll get paid by weight, however much you bring will pay you. And, you know, same thing. That's why we said all the Iraqi Americans who work in sewage plants, water treatment plants, electric generator plants, they all should have been deployed over there, waiting,

and then on the word, they should have gone to those facilities, hired other Iraqis, use their knowledge, their language, and turned the whole city back on. And a guy named Spider-Marx, who was the head Intel General during the initial invasion and those initial months after the invasion, along with his Iraqi Intel counterpart, wrote a paper. And they said in that paper, and you can still access it online, it said the insurgency didn't, it's not an organic insurgency. We created that insurgency. the U.S. through Bremmer's bad decisions created the insurgency that we ended up fighting for, you know, 15 years and thousands of lives lost. So I think that's Iraq. That is fucking unbelievable.

Yeah, so learn from it, you know. Listen to the guys on the ground. Never stop brainstorming. The time for new ideas never ends. Through with and by. expeditionary warfare does not work. It never has, never will. You have no idea what people you've never lived with

or spent time with need and what they expect. You've got to do it through with and by and you've got to trust your subordinates and you've got to use common sense and all that was violated in that war. That is unfucking believable from start to finish. Water truck, AC, guy pissing on a wall.

The tanks. That's why we have to look at whenever they say there's Intel. We created our own fucking enemy. We created our own fucking enemy. Yep. Wow. For a logistics company. Yeah.

And in those first six weeks, you could drive anywhere you wanted in Baghdad. We drove, we always ate at the open air cafes. Everyone we ran into would come up. And we were in civilian clothes. We didn't want to, you know, create that sense of we were an invading force. Everyone came up to us. Thank you for what you've done.

Saddam is a tyrant. All we need is just some help getting back on our own feet. We can do this. They wanted to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but we were the ones preventing them. We wanted to do it. And it goes back to your logistics thing. You know, we've got these contractors

who should never have been focused on refurbishing the palaces. the palaces. So his decree, his second decree after disbanding the military was a decree that repurposed all Saddam's property, all of his palaces, and there were a lot in country as new military and State Department headquarters. So the infrastructure moved into all the palaces. We couldn't have done a thing more counterproductive to, you know, not losing the hearts and minds of the people. Now we're in palaces. And for the state department who ran the green zone, it just became a self-licking ice cream cone. Their real mission became forced protection. And with every IED, every car bomb, they ordered more people, more sandbags,

thicker walls, higher walls. And when you order more people to do that, you got to order more food to feed them, more medics to take care of them, more facilities to house them. And so the green zone, became a self-licking ice cream cone. It was just a thing whose mission was force protection of itself, not making the best decisions for the people, not figuring out, you know, where we needed combat ops and where we didn't. That entire fucking war was bullshit. I don't even know what to say. Yeah, except learn from it, you know. I wonder how much money KBR made. Billions. Every cafeteria, every Every cafeteria, every, every hooch that was made, every conox box, every air conditioner, every window, every shitter, the mail, the food, the bathrooms, the gas, everything, all of it.

And it was really focused on the wrong thing. We should have had minimal headquarters in that country. We didn't need, we certainly didn't need Bremer. We certainly didn't need these massive military headquarters. orders. We should have been using that effort to rebuild the infrastructure, the primary aspects of it. Water, power, trash pickup, sewage, get that shit going. People got to live and communicate with them. You know, they need to hear, they need some hope, and they were given no hope. And during that period, it changed from spring to summer. And the average temperature in Baghdad in the summer is 107 degrees. So it gets higher, a little lower, but it's always over 100. It's like living in Phoenix in the summer with no water, no power, no sewage, no job, nowhere to go, no safety, because now you've got criminals and, you know, gangs, terrorizing neighborhoods. So just, you know,

the most important thing is that we learn from it and we don't ever allow that to happen again. And no wonder they fucking hated us. Yeah. Want to take a break? Sounds good. Well, Pete, I just, I just, all that context that you just gave and it's a lot of shit for people to listen to in one episode. Yeah. Wow. The whole fucking war, man.

So, I can't remember if I asked this on the break or if I asked that before we took the break, but I said, I wonder how much money KB. are made off the Iraq war. And I've always thought or known, that's why we went in there, was to enrich Cheney and his buddies. But, um, so are you familiar with Claude? Yeah. Claude, yeah, it's like probably, not probably, is the best AI consumer product out right now. So we pulled up Claude to see how much money. Halliburton made off the war. Halliburton was by far the biggest corporate beneficiary of the post-9-11 wars. Here's a breakdown of what's known.

The headline figure. KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton, was estimated to have received at least $39.5 billion in federal contracts related to the Iraq War alone. Unbelievable. $39.5 billion fucking dollars. The broader GWAT pitcher, by 2008, Halliburton KBR had received more than $30 billion just for logistics work under the Pentagon's log cap, logistics civil augmentation program contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

the $39.5 billion figure captures the fuller decade long picture, how it grew so fast. In 2003 alone, Halliburton received DOD contracts worth $4.3 billion, more than it had received in the entire previous five years combined. That year, it posted a record total revenue of $16.3 billion. Wow. The political backstory. The concept of privatizing military support services was first initiated in the early 1990s by Dick Cheney. When he was Secretary of Defense and Halliburton got the contract to develop the model. Cheney later served as Halliburton's CEO from 1995 to 2000, then became Vice President under Bush.

The controversy. Once it secured its contracts, Halliburton proceeded to vastly overcharge the Pentagon for basic services, even while doing shady work that put U.S. troops at risk. The Defense Contract Audit Agency flagged major billing deficiencies, and the Pentagon's Inspector General launched a criminal investigation into fuel overcharging. Many of the deals were awarded without competitive bidding from other firms. Wow. In short, roughly $39.5 billion in Iraq related contracts over a decade

with an additional Afghanistan and broader GWAT work on top of that, making Halliburton KBR the single largest contractor of the entire post-9-11 war effort. The honest answer on a full total. The Afghanistan only number was never as large or as cleanly tracked as the Iraq number. Most reporting on KBR's massive totals, the $16 billion KBR won from 2004 to 2006, were the overall $39.5 billion figure that covers Iraq and Afghanistan together, with Iraq being the far dominant share. Afghanistan was always the secondary theater for KBR in terms of contract value.

A rough estimate based on available data would put KBR Halliburton's Afghanistan's specific work in the range of $4 to $6 billion over the full 20-year war. But that's only an approximation. The bulk of the $39.5 billion figure was Iraq. The two wars were financially lopsided. Iraq was a far bigger contracting bonanza. Wow. I wonder if anybody has any questions.

Wow. On why we went to war in Iraq. Yep. Even though the guys in the ground were questioning, what are we doing? Why would we leave Afghanistan? He saw it as a money thing. It's incredible.

Water trucks, air conditioners, and people taking a piss on the side of a bucking building. Yeah. And we found the YouTube video of Colin Palbrie from the UN with the slides. Awesome. What the fuck. Yeah. Decision-making problem solving.

Thanks, Claude. You know what the next question on my outline is? No. What? When did you know it was time to leave? Well, you just heard it. Twice I knew. You know, I was trying to make up my mind anyway.

I never joined the military to be a general or to, I didn't have any, I just wanted to serve. So for me, every year from probably, you know, the first time you can get out is when you're a captain like four, four to six years. So that's the first time you go through and I've, I had fun every assignment that I got, especially those first years I was, I couldn't imagine a better job, a better profession, better people to hang out with. So I never, but then it was always, hey, developed a situation, you know, I'll stay as long as there's a purpose and I feel like I'm fulfilling that purpose. So then you get up, you know, you get up into your past 10 years and you start heading for 20 and you naturally think about it again. You know, am I going to stay?

Am I going to get out? And so it was always on my mind. I told you, you know, I got my MBA through a program that was offered on Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and I did it on Saturdays and weekends, Saturdays, and then you had to do a two-week thing at the end. You had to take leave to do it. I took my organizational behavior textbook to Afghanistan with me, kind of nerdy, but I needed some reading material. And so, you know, business also. always fascinated me. I never wanted to be an old military guy, you know. I never wanted to be one of these hangers on. I thought, you know, when you're when you're not operational in the military,

you really, you know, there's really no reason to stay in. So all that played into me, but then, you know, first thing happened was Afghanistan. And, you know, I was told. stop coordinating with CIA in the 10th Mountain or commander's going to bring you home. And like, well, I'm not fucking going to stop coordinating because that'll get my guys killed. And I'm not going to change, you know, what we're doing because we're about to attack the largest pocket of foreign fighters in Afghanistan. And it's an opportunity cost. And so I knew right there because if there's a general that doesn't like you, that's, you,

you know, in your chain of command, they're going to be in that chain of command, they're going to be on every board. And so it just, it wasn't like I thought my career's over. It was more like that, you know, I knew what I was doing when I said, no, I'm going to keep going. And then Iraq, you know, that phone call in the desert and him screaming at me, he's the same guy. And, you know, I wasn't going to get my guys killed there either. And so again, you know, there's, you know, They're selfless and their selfishness, and they're actually very similar. You can call it selfless, but it's also selfish. You know, you get your guys killed.

You're sentencing yourself to you're going to pay the price for that the rest of your life. You better be able to look at every decision you made, even the ones that didn't work out so well. And you better be able to look back and go, I made it for the right reasons. I made it, you know, I was trying to take care of my guys. I was trying to accomplish the purpose. So even when things don't go, you know, as you expect them, you know that your motives were pure and that you did what you did

as part of trying to take care of your guys. When you don't do that, you know, I think you're sentencing yourself for a life of guilt and, you know, PTSD-like feelings. So, you know, by the time I hit 20, it was just kind of like a fate accompli and I, you know, I'm glad he asked it because like I don't want people to think I was, you know, an outcast or anything. I was a benefactor of the system. I got promoted early to every rank. By the time I was a colonel, I was four years ahead of my contemporaries. And, you know, I never, I didn't get in any shouting matches with generals. I was never like that. Even that one. I basically got along with them pretty good. except when it came time to, you know, execute shit. And he tried to micromanage or do senseless, you know,

make me follow senseless orders. So it wasn't any of that. And then, you know, just like we're saying with Cheney and Halliburton, decisions are made not by one thing, by a whole bunch of things. And so, you know, when you look at a big decision, You never make a major life decision based on one single variable. So getting out's a huge decision, as you know, no matter when you do it in your career. And you've got to think through it.

And I luckily, you know, knew how to do that, how to make those big decisions. You sit down and brainstorm with yourself, write down everything you can think of in bullet form that has to do with, should I stay or should I go. And you see in front of you, your brain can only think of one thing at a time, but your eyes can, connect things and make five things one thing. So when you put a bunch of bullet points down, your eyes are going to see the usually five to seven most important things in there. And you kind of, you know, put a checkmark by them, rise them to the top as your priorities. And so, you know, I never wanted to be a general. I was always intrigued. I always believed that, you know, life's not worth living unless you reinvent yourself every couple of years.

couple meaning you know whatever makes sense five it can be two but you should reinvent yourself challenge yourself in new ways and so it also intrigued me getting out but i also had you know kids at the time i felt uh you know some guilt about my kids not not being there enough for them and uh i knew that if i stayed in uh you know my marriage was was not working out i knew i would rarely see my kids So, and I didn't want that. I wanted to be part of their lives, take care of them. How old were your kids? When I got out, they were 13 and 11.

So, you know, just hitting adolescence and, you know, great ages that you want to be there, take them to events and stuff like that. So it was all those reasons. You know, I never regretted it for a second. People are always saying, do you miss it? I'm like, no, because it's kind of like aging. It doesn't, not that it sneaks up on you, you know, you're aging. So when you're going through your military career and my military career, you know, I can't even,

I can't put an adjective on that either. It was beyond anything I ever hoped or could have imagined the opportunities I was given in those 21 years. But, you know, you're done. When you make Colonel, you've, you know, there's no more great jobs. There's no more operational jobs. There's no more operational leadership. Someone can maybe disagree with that because a major general occasionally

strolls onto the battlefield. But there's no more, the stuff that I came in for is not relevant anymore. And so nothing jazzed me about being a old general. You know, being some Boy Friday as a one star and a two star and, you know, genuflecting at the altar of, of, you know, wokeness, compromising your integrity, which you have to do to, you know, I hate to say it, but you do to be a general. You've got to agree with those things. When a higher rank in general tells you, you've got to say, yes, sir, and that's it, or you're not going any further. So I just never had any interest. It sounds even worse than being a fucking private.

Yeah, I do. He won. Yeah. I mean, if that's all you do, is a one two-star general is just... Do what you're told. I mean, I guess it's nothing new because they were like that the whole... Yeah.

I mean, the ones like you always leave. Always fucking leave. Yeah. I'm not trying to guilt trip you by any... No, no. And that's, you know, the number one thing that made me want to stay was guilt. was in guilt to guys. I knew, you know, all the things we've talked up, we've talked about,

I knew about all the fucked up decisions that get constantly made and these generals who micromanage and push these fucked up decisions down. And so I felt, you know, I had a role in, you call what you will, being a shit blocker. You know, shit rolls downhill unless there's something to block it that's going to land on your guys. And so part of a leader's job is to be a shit blocker. You get hit by the shit so they can stay clean and continue to operate. And so I felt guilty about that. And, you know, like I said, I was on the command list.

So, but it was still tough. And, you know, having everything together just made sense for me. It was the right time. And like I said, never regretted it, never looked back. you know, every second I've been out has been great too, so no remorse at all. How was it reintegrating with your family? It was, you know, it was good. It was, you know, they were happy that my kids, you know, that I would be home regularly.

They didn't know what that was because, you know, I've been gone a lot for, most of their lives. And I think Iraq was the first time, you know, when we went to Afghanistan, it wasn't really a war, but Iraq was a war. And like, if you could go back and remember the media depiction, we were going to war, you know, kind of like World War II. And I always remember that because when I got dropped off at the unit, I turned around and my kids were both crying in the car, you know, and I always remember I can still see him crying. You know, and I always remember, I can still see him crying. you know, worrying about their dad. And, you know, when you're in combat,

I just cannot remember many times being scared or having trepidations about things, but I was always, the thing that always kept me, you know, making me double sharp was I gotta get back, you know, to see my kids, I gotta see my kids, I gotta get back home. And I believe, you know, you always hear, people say it's kind of a platitude now.

You know, guys fight. They're fighting for the country, but they're really fighting for the guy next to him. Yeah, of course, you're always fighting for the guy next to you. But you're really fighting to get home, to get back home. You know, war sucks, no matter what any take you want to have on it, it sucks. It's a difficult time in your life. And every human craves normalcy. And home is normalcy, however your home life.

is. And then kids, you know, are your, your offspring, you know, your genetic code, your responsibility. And so it's hard to reconcile yourself not being there for them as much as you possibly can. So, you know, a lot of guys struggle with purpose after service, especially guys that spent 20 plus years. I mean, how long, how did you find a new purpose? Yeah, it's a great question. I was lucky. You know, I started working while I was still on terminal leave.

So I went and worked big biotechnology company, Amgen, in Southern California. How the hell do you get into biotech right out of Delta? Yeah, it was a convoluted road. I did that Secretary of Defense's corporate fellowship. I had my MBA. I did that fellowship, and I did it at Amgen. I got sent out there, and I just established relationships. A couple executives said, so when are you going to get out?

I was like, I don't know. It might be a couple years, might be five years. I don't know yet. And they were like, well, if you ever do, give us a call. You know, we'd love to bring someone like you in. And the CEO of Amgen was a Submariner, Naval Academy guy, you know, really good guy. I owe him a lot for trusting me and bringing me in. And so I had another, I had two other great jobs.

One was Triple Canopy. I was going to go to work, you know, for Triple Canopy in a pretty great position, great paycheck, all that. I had another one at a consulting company. Triple Canopy was Delta heavy, right? Yeah, it was founded by Unite guys. Yeah, ex-unit guys. Before my time, the two founders, they left before even 91.

And then the Sarm Major, who was also my Sarm Major, even during Iraq, he became the president of that company. Great, super-intelligent guy. And then they had a bunch of other super-intelligent Sard Majors beneath them. I mean, they were, they were a, they could have done, they could have been successful in a lot of different businesses. So they, they were a good company. And I, you know, I would have been honored to go work there. But I also had a principal, you know, I told you I wrote things down. So the next phase of that is write down what will kind of make you happy.

And one of things was purpose, a purpose I can believe in. But the other was, you know, I wrote it. It was like the last bullet I wrote. If it all possible, I would like to do something that has no tentacles to the federal government. So I just did not want to, you know, deal with government bureaucracy anymore. And, you know, maybe I was a little shell-shocked from all that. But I just, I didn't think that was business. You know, I mean, it is business, obviously.

But not pure, true business, you know. And so as I then had this choice. of three places to go because I called Amgen up. I called my point of contract. He was in an airport. I'm like, hey, I'm getting out. I just want to let you know. And if there was anything available, I would be, he's like, what? You're getting out? Why didn't you tell me? He goes, you got anything lined up? I go, yeah, I got two things. He goes, oh, Jesus, I told you to call me when you got out. You see, like, yelling at me on the phone and sent tickets, you know, a couple days later. I flew out there, did interviews. And it just, you know, it was,

other side of the country from Fort Bragg it was zero government interaction it was totally reinvent yourself learn new information new knowledge you know a real purpose you can believe in take care of patients do things for people who are sick and so you know I just decided on Amgen and again I was never regretted it It was a great company to work for. I worked in multiple functional areas, but most of my time was in sales and marketing, the commercial side. Sales and marketing people are just great people, especially in pharma.

They're very value-based people. You and I've talked about business, the expression, you eat what you kill, salespeople. You know, good salespeople, that's the way they are. And, you know, good salespeople are good value-based people. They're hard workers. They're funny. They're personal, you know. And so it would, you know, and I was put in a leadership position too.

So I didn't, you know, I didn't have any expectation for that, but I realized how important it is also to go back to leading. Because, you know, leading's just what I said before. it's, you know, using common sense to make good decisions and solve complex problems that set the conditions for your people to succeed. And that's the same in the military as it is in business. And if you can do that as a leader, you'll be a successful leader. So, you know, I just used common sense, the thing I was taught in the unit, right off the bat to lead these teams. And I also had a great beginning because we had a new product, never been,

No one had ever used it before. No one had ever sold it. No doctor had ever heard of it. It was kind of a breakthrough technology. And so, you know, there was no protocol. So it was like, you know, untrampled wilderness in front of you, you've got to find a path. Lewis and Clark type thing.

And so that was a great part of it too. But to your point, you know, I think it's so important if there's, if there's one thing that, you know, all of us can do to help vets and that, you know, the military can do when they counsel vets who are getting out, it's get them engaged as quickly as it possible when they come out of the military. What you said is exactly right. Make sure they have a purpose, a purpose they believe in that makes sense to them. But get them engaged. You know, don't give them time. Idle minds, you know, create chaos.

And, you know, part of that getting away other side of the country, getting away from the federal government is you're not thinking about stuff anymore. You're, you know, you just wash that behind. You're too busy learning mechanism of action and, you know, how a molecule communicates with your genes and, you know, how it either accelerates or stymies a disease. And you're learning all this stuff. It's something new. It's stimulating. a molecule communicate with your genes? Through, you know, through proteins.

The cell uses proteins. The proteins are the communicators that send messages that, you know, send the code back and forth. And your genetic code is riding hurt over everything. And you understand that. You know, molecules are what, that's why a mechanism of action is when they isolate what's causing a disease or what's curing it, now they can they can reproduce that molecule and they clone the cell that does it.

They clone it in a fascinating way inside hamster ovaries, Chinese hamster ovaries. Yeah, and then they make that cell, reproduce that cell in this massive fermentation process. And then that's what a biologic is. A biologic is not a chemical. It's the cell's own chemistry. It's your cells or the specific cells. cell, recreated, going back in your body to replace the ones you're deficient at or have too many of, which is what, again, causes disease.

So, you know, I could believe in the process. It was complex enough. I got to lead. So it was just, you know, as good as it can get. But I, you know, my goal has always been to try to do something to pass that on to vets, try to hire vets as much as possible. I hired over 500 people at Amchin, and whenever I had a chance to hire a vet, I did. So, yeah, it was a great, great, you know, great commercial career.

I was an executive, just did really. I mean, as far as leadership, I am curious. I mean, you're coming from Delta where, you know, guys have interviewed enough of you guys to know, you're competing to keep your job every single day you walk through the doors. It's a very high caliber person. What is it like coming into the civilian world? Or maybe people aren't as motivated. Yeah, for me, well, they're not motivated, but at least at this company, they're like elite.

You couldn't just be out of college and get a job there. You had to have had a successful track record five to 10 years usually for salespeople at another company. You had to be good. And it was hard to get hired, you know, by a company like Amgen. So I had good people. But, you know, that's the thing about leadership. And that's why I think that CEOs in a lot of big companies and especially like billionaire CEOs, they stop leading. because you're not leading anymore if you don't have to persuade people.

And, you know, one thing about the unit in U.S. last time about being an officer there, you don't just flip your hand and tell guys what to do because they'll go, it fucking doesn't make any sense. And, you know, they'll go, why do you want me to do that? And if you haven't thought through it, if you don't have the logic of why ready, they're not going to accept it. And there's a good reason for that because if there's no logic of why, it's probably a senseless decision.

It's not thought through properly. And so, you know, you learn the power of persuasion. You learn the power of logic. You learn the power of seeding. You know, you go, you talk to a few guys first. What do you think of that? Well, shit, man, we should do it. Can you put together something and, you know, you get guys involved?

And I think it's the same thing in the corporate world. You know, you've got to have spend time with the relationship part of it, but you cannot be one of these, you know, choose the tag, micromanage, sociopath, do as I say, no matter what, or I'll fire you. And the worst thing about doing that is those people are your checks and balances. They're the ones who are going to keep you from making a massive mistake that'll tube your business, tube your reputation, whatever it is you care about.

So, you know, it sounds weird, but like because I came from AFO and then the Wolverines, these unconventional, unconventional forces, you know, it was just natural for me to go into this thing I'd never, you know, led before and had no real experience with. Because same thing. Common sense is that common sense. ground and common language that connects us all. So if you're operating off a common sense perspective, and part of that is the ability, the ego that allows you to say, fuck, I have no idea. You know, and you should be saying that to your people because you hire your people to be

experts at things and trust is the most important aspect, the glue that holds any organization together. And you trust is not a one-way street, you know, getting your people to trust you. You got to trust your people. It's reciprocity. And you show trust when you say to people, you ask them questions, hey, how does this work? How do you actually do that? How, you know, what's part B? What's part A?

And let them tell you because what you're saying without saying is, I trust you. I trust your knowledge. I appreciate your knowledge. Can you share some with me? And I think it has, you know, a compounding effect. Because, you know, my guys, I was obviously different. Some people thought it was, you know, heresy that I was put into positions I was put into with no real experience. But I'd always explain to people, I do have experience.

I have experience in decision-making, problem-solving, and using common sense. And that's what sales and marketing is, no matter what the product, you've got to immerse yourself in the product. You've got to be a subject matter expert, but that's another advantage military guys have. You've got neocortical discipline. You can engage your brain. You can read shit. You can study shit. And what you find in most corporations is most of people have stopped doing that.

They're not up on the latest, you know, product breakthroughs or research and development breakthroughs. And you can carve your own niche by just learning that stuff. and being competent at it. So, you know, it was, again, I couldn't have designed it better, but, you know, going right away, I'm still on terminal leave when I started my job. And, you know, just having good people, learning something new,

being away from all the things that frustrated you so you can kind of get them out of sight, out of mind, all together, just made it an ideal situation for me. What got you into writing? Like my right away when I was there, so, you know, we talked about guilt. I was still had all my friends who were in. They were still fighting. This is, you know, 2005, six.

So, you know, my buddies, I'm talking to them. I'm meeting them. I've traveled to D.C. a lot. So I'd meet guys in D.C., both military and agency. And right off the bat, from all the aggregation of all that, I was angry, frustrated because we weren't learning anything. You know, all the things that are in my first book, always listen to the guy in the ground.

You know, when in doubt, humor, you know, creates insight, develop the situation. You know, all these principles, guiding principles, were not carrying on. And that's what they were not carrying on? No, they were, you know, so we talked about it. Like, you know, Tucker Gar, Shai, Code, Anaconda, all those lessons were, you know, spit out. I gave 50 presentations after that. And, you know, always listen to the guy in the ground, you know, you don't have to, you

don't have to do what the guy on the ground says, but you always should defer. And it's that selfish, selfless thing. Again, if you want to do what's right, you better use the best check and balance available to any human, and that's the people around you. Bounce it off them. And you better have created an atmosphere where your guys can walk up to you and go, boss, you're fucking, you're smoking crack, dude. And, you know, yeah, you laugh like that. And you go, okay, tell me what, you know, tell me what crack pipe I'm smoking on, and they'll explain it to you. And you go, fuck, man. All right, thanks for coming up to me.

And you guys save you from doing stupid shit. And that's everybody. That's not even just leaders. It's everybody. We need wingmen. We need other perspectives. We need to have some sort of check and balance on our emotions, which are usually the main driver of senseless decisions. I just did that the other day.

which one of my main guys advised me not to do something and I fucking did it anyways and I paid the fucking man for well but you came back I apologize to him for not listening wow good for you man and you made that video you and that's what that was about good for you dude yeah so you not only trained yourself that that's that's the common sense way to to act when that situation happens, but you also modeled common sense behavior to your guys. And they'll probably remember that for the rest of their lives and pass it on and do it to their own subordinates the same way. So, you know, it just makes so much sense. You're shafting yourself from being a tyrant,

being a micromanager, being a sociopath. And so, yeah, I wrote it because I felt like there were, you know, we weren't learning the fundamental, foundational lessons of the global war on terror. So I wrote the mission of the men of me. And, you know, it was an out of the blue thing. Like, if you had asked me before that, you know, what kind of writer? I'm, I'm a shit writer. You know, I don't, it's hard, you know, I have to sit there and struggle through stuff.

And so, you know, I did a bunch of research on writing, talked to a bunch of people who wrote. And then like anything, you just start, you know, and this is again where military discipline comes in. I was working full time. And so it takes time to write a book, you know, 1,000 hours minimum. And so I realized the only way I'm going to do this is wake up early. I'm kind of more of a morning person than night. So I'd wake up between five and six and start writing before I had to, you know, go in. to work. I didn't have to be to work till eight, so I could, you know, leave 730, 745. So I'd get that

time in. I wrote all weekend. I'd wake up the same time on Saturday and Sundays right till about 2 o'clock. You know, I had some vacation time. So once I got close to the end, I was, I started taking a day of vacation a week to write full time on that day. It was exhausting. And when you take on something like that, something in your life has to give, you know, professional, personal, social. So I became, you know, I call it monk mode because I had a deadline, so I went to monk mode, which is, you know, you're a freaking monk.

You don't go out anymore. You're, you know, and you can't really work out because the main thing that keeps at least me and a lot of writers from writing is you're tired. And that's why, you know, you either turn into a coffee addict or, you know, people do all kinds of. of stimulants to stay up and write. But stimulants don't work. When I'm physically exhausted, which I usually am for the rest of the day after a workout, you know, I can't write. So my

writing's got to go before the workout. And for a book, I begin cutting my workout back. You know, instead of six to seven days a week, I go to four and, you know, have full days where I do nothing but walk at the time I lived near the beach. So I'd walk down to the beach in the morning and the evening. But you have to stop workouts and curtail your social life. But then you get it together and, you know, it's anticlimactic. I didn't make any money off any of my books, really, which I didn't write them for. But like the mission of the men and me, within like six months,

You know, there was nothing initially, but within six months, I just started getting this unbelievable feedback from people, you know, hey, I've read your book, I gave it to, you know, every guy in my platoon. Thank you for writing it. I've always thought all this, but I could never put it into words, which is, you know, the ultimate common sense compliment. And I still get that. That book, the Mission of Men of Me sells like the same. It sold when I launched it. No kidding. Yeah, I launched it in 2009, so it's, you know, a 17-year-old book. The guys inside the institutions are using it for the knowledge. Yeah, yep.

It's good shit. Yep, it is. It's a legacy. It's a legacy. You know, what better reward is there than that? So, and then, you know, I worked for 10 years in the corporate world, and, you know, you asked me this morning, you know, why did you get out? And it was to write this second book.

common sense way, a new way to think about leading and organizing. And the reason I got out was because this one is much more, my first one, most of it was, you know, like written in my head. All these guiding principles were guiding principles I used constantly, and I had all these fresh examples, so it was fun. This one, I have to explain the biologic underpinnings of common sense in it, and I have to do it in a way, you know, great science writer. write so that an eighth grader can understand what they're saying. That's what makes a great science writer. He can explain, you know, a cell's mechanism of action to an eighth grader. And so, you know, I was neither well-versed at writing science and I wasn't really at writing either. And then I did more

research on biology to write this book than I did in probably the 10 years. of working in a biotech company, which I did a lot of research, but I had to intensely research this one just to prove it, you know, and to validate what common sense is. And of course, it's all easily validated. I was just, you know, one of the first ones to put it all together into a book. It's also an interesting thing about writing. You know, writing's a muscle. And it's your neocortex thinking brain is what you write. with. It's the only part of your brain that can produce or process language. And so, you know, the way you strengthen your brain muscle is the same way you strengthen your body muscles,

resistance training. You have to discipline your brain and the way the neocortex gets stronger and gets an ability to override your emotional brain. You know, emotional brain is the reason you do most of the things you later regret are from emotions. And so, you know, your neocortex has to get strong so it can override them, you know, the second you think about it. And the way you do that is resistance training. You resist the temptation to act on your emotions, usually and think of all the things, eating, drinking, shopping, you know, chasing, whatever it is you chase.

those all those things all those things you have to you have to practice resistance training on and you know

micro habits or how you get to a macro habit and so it starts small and you know you don't drink but if you're drinking you should get in the habit if you're only halfway through your drink and someone says let's go

leave that half drink not doing you any good to guzzle the other half you know you're going down to get I went down and got dinner you know last night and the guy is you want something to drink and I'm like um no thanks because I don't drink during the week and you know I didn't get there by just instantly going I'm not going to drink during the week you have to make the micro habits and eating's the same way people with eating problems you know shoving a bag of Keebler rich and into your mouth is an emotional thing. You're, you know, trying to relive your childhood.

It's a crazy thing. And you're getting fat, and you know you're getting fat while you do it. So you just need to apply resistance training. And, you know, for people with weight, that can be as simple as walking with your shopping cart past the dessert aisle. You know, don't go down that fucking cookie aisle because you're going to start throwing shit into your basket. it. So all that kind of stuff. And, you know, just very briefly on learning, becoming consciously

aware of what common sense is and how to access it, the value, especially for first responders. And that's what motivated me. I do, I speak to quite a few large corporations. I talk about how to use common sense to make good decisions and solve complex problems. But I, I also do it to all first responder organizations. And I prioritize them whenever they ask. So police, fire military. And everything about staying alive comes down to understanding how to engage your thinking brain.

And to give you an example, first go back, what is common sense? Well, if you ask 100 people what common sense is, you're gonna get 100 different answers. But if you ask those hundred people to write down their definition of common sense or say it out loud, you're going to get a hundred different definitions. And you have to ask, why is that? And the reason is because common sense is highly contextual.

You can't say whether something makes sense or not unless you have a full understanding of the context of the moment that it happens. So, you know, what makes sense in one situation can be absolutely senseless in another. So back to what common sense is. Common sense refers to the common way we humans make sense. You see, we all make sense a common way via patterns and relationships that we perceive through our common senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, which is why it's called common sense and why we all have two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth of brain, and a spinal cord, elegantly wrapped in skin. If we made sense any other way, we'd be another species. And what does that tell us? It tells us that common sense is the common ground and the common language upon which our species stands.

And the question it begs is, shouldn't it be the way we lead and organize to? And that's the question I set out to answer. You know, how do you use common sense to lead and organize? And as I already mentioned, the beauty of common sense as opposed to any other, you know, leadership technique or decision-making problem-solving technique is you don't need a special degree or pedigree. to live and lead the common sense way. You have everything you need etched inside each and every cell, each one of the 30 trillion cells that make up your body and brain.

All that's needed is conscious awareness of how to access it and put it into practice in the context of the moment when you need it the most. And the way, you know, very briefly to arrive at that level of knowledge is to understand this thing called metacognition. And the metacognition is simply how our brains think and make decisions. And it's not complicated. It's not left brain, right brain. It's not memorizing the different cortexes of your brain.

It's just when you hear the definition, it makes total sense. Most people think of the brain as one homogenous organ. So it might surprise a lot of people to learn. We actually have three brains. And they sit one on top of each other in our head in order of evolutionary development. So the first brain that evolved before we were even humans is our reptilian brain. That's why it's called reptilian. We share it with reptiles.

The reptilian brain is like reptiles, it's cold-blooded. What it's doing right now for both you and me is it's monitoring our survival, our bodily survival functions, heart rate, breathing, metabolism, body temperature. your reptilian brain's monitoring all that. Any blip in any of those, it's going to react with a negative emotion that you're going to feel. It's, in essence, though, what it's doing to learn that is your reptilian brain is constantly sweeping the environment around you. And its only algorithm is it detects unfamiliar things with negative emotions and ignores familiar things. So familiar faces, familiar places, the route you drive to work every day, the way you tie your shoes, there's no blip from your reptilian brain that's telling you problem, problem, avoid. But when you try something new, your reptilian brain is going to react.

So strange faces, strange places, just the thought that you're lost. And everyone knows the feeling. We're lost. You know, you can feel in you. The feelings are called feelings for a reason because emotions are neurochemicals that physically exist inside our bodies. That's why we feel them. That's why your face flushes when you're embarrassed. So, you know, the feelings are what your feedback loop is.

That's how you know what's happening. But, you know, the reptilian brain will tell you if there's a problem with one of those. And the easiest way to see your reptilian brain is the action is to hold your breath. Even in, you know, so Wim Hof, did you have Wim Hof on here? No, I should get him on. You do, man. As you're about to hear, he's one of the heroes of human evolution. And he did this all on himself, the basis, a big part of what I talk about.

He discovered himself. And so Wimhoff's known as the Iceman, because he's got all the world records for swimming, under the polar ice cap for the longest distances, staying in freezing cold water for the longest period of time. He's hiked. He takes people up Mount Kilimanjero with nothing more than workout shorts on and boots. He wears no pants, no shirt,

and he gets his people to do it. Why? Because he's teaching them how to override their reptilian brain. That's your reptilian brain panicking as soon as it feels any gradient of water. And I'll tell you how to, test that in a second when I get to the neocortex. So that's the reptilian brain. And just remember, the reptilian brain doesn't understand language and only reacts to visual stimuli. So, you know,

advertisers know this. So advertising so to political propagandists, they know that images are what stimulate the reptilian brain. And the reptilian brain, again, only reacts. with negative emotions. So think anger, fear, and panic. Those are the reptilian brains go to for any of those things that are happening, whether it's bodily function or unfamiliar face, place, or situation going on around you. That's why people panic. The next in order of evolutionary development is your limbic brain or emotional brain. And the emotional brain evolved to enable us to learn from our experiences because a reptilian brain, reptiles don't learn. So a crocodile doesn't learn anything. A crocodile can leave its nest, have all its eggs eaten by a snake, and it'll come back and

go not learn a thing. It'll just lay another satch of eggs and then they'll get eaten too. Oh, shit. Yeah, they don't learn. They've got no ability to learn because they have no emotions. That's what makes a reptile cold-blooded. That's why they are cold-blooded, but we call them that, and that's why it's synonymous with being a murderous madman. Yeah. So the emotional brain evolved to enable us to learn through experience, and it does that by attaching emotion to everything you learn. So we definitely need our emotional brain.

It's the file system for our memories. So every memory you had when you were happy is filed in the happy memory section. Every memory you have when you were in danger is filed in the, in the fear section. Every memory you have of getting in a fight is filed under the anger section. Why is that important? Because the reptilian brain is also called

a one-track mind. When your emotional brain, when your emotional brain is riding herd, which is most people, you're only capable of accessing memories that are tagged in that same file cabinet. So when you're angry, you have no memory of the,

times you won the day through compassion and calm. You only remember other times you were angry. You have no ability to remember the times when you're afraid of that it turned out to be a false alarm or you showed bravery and, you know, squashed that fear. You only remember times that were you when you were afraid and fearful. So that's why the emotional brain's one track. Like the reptilian brain, your emotional brain doesn't understand. language, nor can it produce language. And once your emotional brain reacts, it takes all its cues from the reptilian brain's radar. But once it reacts, it's stuck on that moment. So whether someone's jumping out at you or it's the first sight of a bear on the trail ahead of you, that fear now

is riding hurt over your body. If you allow that to ride herd, you're only capable of accessing seeing those fearful memories. And if someone next to you is trying to talk to you, you're not even understanding it. That's why it's so hard to describe what love is or really any emotion. Words don't apply because your emotional brain has no ability to correlate the emotions it creates with language. And that goes both ways, understanding and producing. So the third part of our brain is the wrinkly giant thing on top. That's our neocortex. Neo is new, cortex is brain. It's the brain that enables us to think logically, to reason, to problem solve.

It enables us to do creative thinking, language, and math. So those alone would make you think, man, that's the only part of, that's the part of the brain that makes us human. But there's one other thing that makes it just absolutely indispensable to first responders or anyone in a life or death situation. Again, it's the only part of the brain that can understand language, and it's the only part of the brain that can monitor ongoing sensory information. So let's go back to that bear that just popped out. If you allow your fear and panic to ride hurt over you,

what the bear is doing is not registering with you. You're also not queuing your memory to go, what kind of bear is it? Are the cubs with it? You know, is it black bear, a grizzly bear? Is it standing up? Is the hair on the back of its neck? All the things that tell you if a bear is going to charge. And then more importantly, all the options, you know, make yourself big, stay calm, talk calmly to the bear, back up.

You know, all the things that are going to save your life, those are only available through your neocortex. So your neocortex, because it's the only part of your brain that can monitor ongoing sensory information and understand language, It's the only part of our brain that can make sense of what's going on around us in a crisis and sensible choices about what to do next. So how do you turn your neocortex on and override your reptilian and emotional brain? Luckily, biology to the rescue again, it's incredibly simple. There's three time tested. They can work.

They'll work anytime you test them, techniques, and you can do them all at the same time. The first is what's called diaphragmatic breathing, which is belly breathing. So, you know, the proper way to breathe, put your hand on your belly because it adds another neocortical connection. You're feeling your belly. Breathing through your nose. Usually I do a count of four. Your belly should go all the way out like you got a cannonball down there and then breathe out through your mouth. And it should be six or seven, a count of six or seven.

and do that four times, and you vanquish, anger, fear, and panic. So, you know, to top that off, that's just the breathing. If you breathe while speaking calmly, when we speak calmly, we calm the way we act. And counting, remember I said neocortex, the only part of our brain that can count. So you can calmly count while breathing and completely vanquish even the worst situation you've ever Benin, and more importantly, engage your thinking brain to avail yourself of all the options that are going to allow you to get out of it. So, you know, the best example, contemporary example of how our three-part brains work,

happens on the highway. So you're driving down the highway and someone cuts you off, and your first reaction is always going to be reptilian and emotional. And the reason for that is this. although your neocortex is three times the size of your older non-thinking brains, your emotional and your reptilian brain, three times the size, it's last to receive bottom-up sensory information. All our nerve endings come up through our spinal cord and then enter the brain through the brain stem, which the brain stem is the reptilian brain, then pass through the emotional brain and then into the neocortex. So MRI studies show that your reptilian brain is alerted of sensory stimulus, what's going on around you, the bear in 20 milliseconds, which is not even the time it takes to click my fingers.

It's a flash. While it takes 240 milliseconds to reach your thinking brain, about a quarter second later, what does that tell us? It tells us that your first instinctive response, no matter who you are, no matter what what unit you are, how elite you are, your first instinctive response to any type stimulus is always unconscious, emotional, and without context. And so what training and what conscious awareness teaches you is to make it second nature that you immediately breathe, and you'll do it naturally, you don't even have to think about it. You immediately breathe. Whenever you're talking in a crisis, you talk calmly. That too, you have to use practice. You have to do micro,

habits to make the macro. And that's why special op guys are naturally able to stay cool, common crisis because we do, you know, stress inoculation. We train to stress ourselves to a point where there's nothing left. You're like, this will stress the guys. You're like, no, it won't. You know, really the only thing I ever thought toward the end of my time in the unit, the only thing that can get you in that condition red anymore is, is Halo, is jumping out of a playing, you know, where it's all on your own volition, you're either pull the rip cord or you're going to burn in because that's the mindset and that's 100% neocortex. You've got to breathe.

You do verbal repetition. Look grab, look, grab, pull, pull, check. You go over that a thousand times. You do it with your hand and arm movements. So, you know, learning how to engage your neocortex and turn off your reptilian and emotional brains. Every first responder should be taught to do that. It's breathe, talk calmly, count. By the way, Thomas Jefferson's famous quote, when angry, count to 10. When very angry, count to 100. And that's, if you go back in history, people who can write down what they think have been saying

that for a thousand years. They've been talking about counting, speaking calmly and breathing. And up till now, we just thought it was, you know, yoga and everything else with some voodoo magic. It's not. Yoga is neocortical. It's turning on your neocortex, turning off your emotional and reptilian brains. That's how you be in the moment. And you can be in the moment any time by just breathing deep and intensely focusing on something. So here's the way to kind of put that into practical application to see for yourself.

The first thing, you know, I told you about the road rage thing. And everyone should know that because remember the first, the guy cut you off. So in 20 milliseconds, your reptilian brain is reacting. Anger, fear, panic. He fucking could have killed me. That's where road rage comes from. Your emotional brain's taking signals from your reptilian brain going, motherfucker, adding emotions onto that.

You know, again, rage comes, all that comes from your emotional brain. Whereas if you just, a quarter second later when your neocortex turns on, you understand your neocortex makes sense of your emotions your neocortex suddenly goes the driver that that guy's 80 years old or he's 17 years old uh or it looks like a uh a husband driving his wife to the hospital you know or they may not have just they just might not have seen me that's your neocortex making sense of your emotions and and how appropriate is it because if you're getting mad at another driver you're not thinking about driving anymore. You're a hazard to yourself. Your job is to get to point B, not to get pissed of people. So that's the order. That's how the three-part brain works together.

But there's other things to do that allow you life-saving capacities. And the first I'll talk about is in Wim Hof's expertise, it's cold water. And I will tell you, my entire military career, I've already said this. I just am not a guy who gets scared, and maybe that's constant neocortical training. But the one thing I was very apprehensive about is falling into cold water. You know, I hated cold water.

I don't have a lot of meat on me, so I feel like I get colder than a normal person. I always remember, you know, not the modern Titanic movie, but the old ones, you know, them dudes swimming. in Newfoundland iceberg water and it's like, how do you survive? You know, what would I do? Well, Wim Hof has got the answer for you. You breathe. You talk calmly and breathe. And you,

and here's how you can understand it. People probably listen to this going, yeah, whatever. I'm not, that's not going to work. Well, here's how I want people to see for themselves. Next shower you're taken. Take your normal shower, whatever your temperature is, everyone's usually, you know, hot to warm somewhere in there. Go through the first begin, why the water is its normal temperature. Do five deep belly breasts, diaphragmatic breathing. So while you're in the shower, do it five times. Then reach up to the hot water nozzle and turn it down.

I started with going halfway down. You're going to feel what feels like very uncomfortable cold water. Go right back to diaphragmatic breathing. five breaths. On your second to third breath, you're going to be shocked. You're going to think someone's playing a prank on you, someone set up an automatic temperature control device, because the water turns hot.

Even on your first time you do, it turns hot. You're going, what the fuck? You're checking the nozzle out, and I still do it, although now I'm so advanced on it. Then go down and do what you're coming. with your first couple of times. I didn't go all the way down till, you know, my third or fourth time. And then go down and breathe again. And you'll find that cold water is actually very comfortable. It's not bothering you at all. I used to jump into, you know, a cold pool or whatnot. And, you know,

you scream when you come up, ah, and you act spasticly, right? You try to rub your body. You don't need to do any of that. But see for yourself in the shower. And if you want to take an ice bath, that's how you do the ice bass and Wim Hof will train that. He teaches it on his app. He's got a great app. I do Wimhoff every morning. I wake up. I do 30 diaphragmatic breaths and then I hold my breath. And remember what I said about breath holding. That's why he does it. As soon as your reptilian brain detects that carbon dioxide panic sets in, you'll feel panic set in in the first seconds of holding your breath. But William Hoff teaches you you've already built up, you've already oxygenated your body and your lungs. So now you can survive and you just have to believe. And I can go three

minutes without breathing. I can hold my breath. But eventually you're going to breathe. And by the third, is the end of the third minute. If you're feeling, you're fighting panic like a fist fight. you know, the reptilian brain is telling you, you are fucking dying. You're not. And as Wim Hof explains, there's all kinds of benefits of holding your breaths. They're finding now it lengthens the telomeres on your cells, the things associated with aging. So hugely important. And it's, again, it's neocortical discipline. So whenever I tell that to people, they say, yeah, well, what about swimming underwater? How do you breathe then? That's a good question. So I did the research on that too. And it turns out, I don't know if you've ever heard of the sport of free diving.

Free diving? Yeah, free diving is, it's huge in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. And it's big in the U.S. too. It's, you know, usually it's in a lake or in the ocean. A cable attached to a buoy is set down to whatever depth they're going for. And then it's anchored to the bottom. and then divers, the competition is they take turns. They guide themselves down along the cable. They get as low as they can touch the cable or put a tag on it at the spot they're able to go down to. And then they have to return to the surface

without passing out for the dive to be qualified. Now, some of those guys in the Philippines, I know can hold their breath over seven minutes, seven to ten minutes. Yeah. Yeah. And so how do they do it? So I couldn't find anything online.

So I went out and I interviewed and I happened to be doing this gig in Philippines and I went to a competition and I started talking to these guys. It turns out every free diver uses the same technique. When they're underwater, the way they turn off their reptilian brain and turn on their neocortex is they sing a song. And so you can try this too when you do the breath holding thing, do the Wimhoff, I do 30 deep breaths, then hold your breath. When I hold my breath, I sing a song.

So I started with Christmas carols, the only songs you know the words too, because you need words, right? And the words, you're saying language, right? Remember, so singing adds another. I didn't add it, but your neocortex is the only part of your brain that can sing or produce music. So a free diver, every free diver, is singing to themselves as they're diving down and back up. And the song's important. I got rid of the Christmas carols. I learned a couple of rock songs that I sing.

It works more than just underwater. So if you're doing anything that requires, you know, strain to get to a certain time limit. So a good example is planks. you know, do you do planks? They're generally considered one of the best ab exercises total. Not anymore, but I used to. Yeah, well, they're great, and they do them anywhere.

So planks, you know, my goal is always to do the plank between a minute, 45, and two minutes, to hold the plank. So same thing happens to you. When you get into that position right off the bat, it's your reptilian brain. It's not breath, but it's going, hey, I'm hurting. These muscles are going to give out. You can't keep supporting yourself like this.

Panic is setting in. So I sing a song while I'm doing my planks, the same song I use to hold my breath, and it works just as well to get through a difficult, arduous thing. So again, pain is coming from your reptilian and emotional brains, the perception of pain. Neocortex turns that off. It makes sense of the emotion.

I'm not in pain. I'm not going to die. I can breathe any time. All I've got to do is open my mouth. There's no reason to panic. Hold. hold hold and the micro you know habits turn into macro um so then the final thing i'd tell you that's that it allows you to apply the the triune brain and the common sense way is in a in a life or death

situation everything comes down to situational awareness right uh and that can be you're walking through your wife's walking through a parking lot late at night you know at the grocery store if you're not Situational aware, you're vulnerable. So situational awareness is hugely important. Walking through a parking lot is a moving example, but you're still scanning your horizon. So what do you do? How do you make sure you're scanning it?

You're not allowing fear, because remember, I got a bad feeling about this. When you say that, your emotions are creeping into, your thought process, your emotions are beginning to try to ride hurt over you, and you've got to shut them off immediately and use your neocortex. So how do you do that? What's the optimal way you do it? Before I even knew about this, before I learned it, it was taught to me by a unit sniper. Pay attention like a cat. And all you got to do is imagine a cat sitting on the edge of a field looking for a mouse. They sit, I wish I had a picture right now. They sit perfectly symmetrical.

Their ears are peaked up facing the direction. Their eyes are wide open to get all the light in they can. They breathe little short breaths through their nose to smell. Their hands are down to feel the ground, you know, and to feel the temperature. So in any life or death situation, tell yourself, pay attention like a cat. And the other part of that is important for your neocortex, your neocortex only engages if it has a purpose. So other than the conscious ways of breathing and talking and counting, it needs a purpose. So when you're hungry, you tell your neocortex, I need to find food.

When you're thirsty, you tell your neocortex, I need to find water. Neocortex needs a purpose. So telling your neocortex, pay attention like a cat, can save your life. And where I feel like it's made a huge different for me is driving. When I was taught to me, I was in a static position. We were looking for Piffwicks, people indicted for war crimes in Bosnia. We were in a static position. There was an old guy, went to the market every day, used disguises.

We were overlooking the market. And we just, with his profile, we had to look at everybody. And then imagine, you know, is that him in disguise? And I found it gets pretty boring after day one. and his pay attention like a cat worked like a charm for me. That was the first part. The second part was in Bosnia, the thing that took the biggest toll on the unit in Bosnia

wasn't enemy forces, it was driving. Because we drove everywhere. We followed people. We drove to meet sources, and they drive like crazy in Bosnia, any country that's been turned upside down. Drivers become even crazier. And so we had a lot of, lot of guys getting crashes. And I remember we had a drive from Tuzla back to the safe house

that was very common. And many times I was tired as hell. You know, you're like literally feel like you could fall asleep while driving. Well, next time you're drowsy while driving and you've got to get home, tell yourself, pay attention like a cat and then do it. And you will see because you're breathing, your eyes are wide open, your ears are peaked to try to listen to sounds, suddenly your hands and your feet become part of this equation. You get better coordination between your foot, gas, and brake and your hand on the steering wheel, and you'll feel a more in-touch sensation of your steering wheel once you start breathing and paying attention like a cat. So those are just a couple of the examples, and that's what I teach in that.

book. And that's very informative. Yeah, it's and it's nothing. There's no science, you know, you don't need a multi-syllable words to describe it. You like the shower thing. To me, it's the most fascinating experiment I've ever conducted. And I still am amazed at it today. Today I automatically breathe. I can go all the way down to cold water. It doesn't bother me. It feels good and and just you know a few years ago I would have been spazin out you know if you threw me into into cold water so it works man some some really great knowledge there thank you man yeah passing it on you're doing a hell of a good job thanks man yeah get Wim Hof on he's uh he invented he came up with all that shit himself

Do you know him? No, I don't. I'd love to meet him. He invented all that stuff. He can do amazing stuff. He actually can control his immune system through breathing. And he shows, he teaches you how to walk out into the freezing cold. He can do this fast, deep breathing that turns him like red.

It fills him with air. Wow. But it heats his body so he can go out and sustain and, you know, not die in freezing cold weather. right off the bat, and that's how he does that Kilimanjero thing. Holy shit. And it goes, you know, it's validated because, you know, if you read what the pilgrims wrote, the most fascinating thing they wrote about the Indians was their disbelief, how in the dead of winter Indians can come walking up to their village with a loin cloth,

you know, a bow and arrow, shirtless, pantsless. You know, how were they doing it? Well, humans used to have this capacity. And we have this capacity that once you exercise it, once you establish it, it burns what's called brown fat. We don't do it anymore. It's like a lost trait of humans, but you burn brown fat to keep you warm and the freezing cold. And that's how Indians did it. But Indians were cool, common collective.

You know, they were breathing. They were doing the breath work. I'm sure they were talking to each other. all these secrets have been known, you know, for a long time, but just lost in modern society. Man, damn people, what an interview, man. Holy shit. Thanks, man. I didn't want to talk to you about Venezuela, but maybe we should do that another time.

Yeah. Would you come back? Yeah, of course. I do want to ask about that damn discombobulator. What the hell is that thing? Well, I can't go into complete detail, but it works. It's an offshoot of the noise thing that was canceled between the years 20 and 24. Why didn't they cancel it?

It was thought to be inhumane. And, you know, some, it was 2020 to 2024 is when senselessness reigns supreme in our country. And it is. And, you know, the DOD, it's a DOD weapon. and, you know, remember what's his name, Millie or Miley in Austin, you know, enough said you only need to say their names, and they canceled it, and it was brought back, as it should be, because it can, it's got all kinds of purposes, and certainly crowd control is one that, you know, it should be looked at.

Have you used it? I've done, I've been in demonstrations, and I've seen it used, yep. What does it look like? Well, the original ones were, big, you know, almost look like radar dish type thing or bullhorn type things. But, you know, they come in different configurations. I don't know the ones now. I know they're smaller now.

They've made them more compact, more powerful, and they figured the whole frequency thing out. See, I did a very small stent doing some anti-piracy shit contract. If I only did two trips. the most boring job I've ever had in my life. But we ran into some British guys that were doing it too, but they didn't have weapons. They had a little satellite dish that would... Wow.

Yes, shoot a soundburst or something. Yeah. Did that work? They didn't like it. They said they would rather have the guns than that thing. We tried this thing a bunch of times and didn't fucking do a damn thing. Well, it seems like... It must have been a different thing, but...

No, it seems like it wouldn't work in the ocean because it's totally directional. That's why it's a dish. It's, you know, has a cone-like shape, the ones I've seen, because you've got a direction, you've got to, you know, send it in the general direction of whoever it is you're, you're shooting it at. And then I can't remember all the acoustics of water, but I know there's huge things about water. So, you know, if you're short, it might, the water might be totally.

neutralizing the effect or long or not right on. Who did they demonstrate it on? We had them demonstrated on us. Are you serious? Yeah. All right. What's the experience like? It sucks, you know?

Can you move? Like the first time someone demonstrates the chokehold on you. Yeah, you get discombobulated. You're, it works on the brain, the same thing we just talked about. and there must be a frequency that takes your neocortex out of it or whatever because you're confused. I remember confusion, anxiety, you know, especially anxiety, like you don't know whether it hold your ears or, you know, rub your hands together. It's bothering you. And, you know, at those levels, that's why it seems to make so much sense as a crowd control device. Because, you know, you

can't defeat a crowd and you're not going to want to slaughter them with machine gun fire. So, you know, use something non-kinetic that's not going to cause permanent injuries. So, you know, but that was a while ago. And the last time I, anyone told me about it was in 2018 or 19. And that's what I mean. Then it was ready for prime time, but they killed the project. Interesting. and killed all the, all the, uh, devices that they had stockpiled at that time.

I'm sure that was a hell of a lot more advanced than the shit the Brits were using for an anti-piracy. Yeah, I, I am too, especially if he had it hold a little thing like that. It's pretty funny. Well, Pete, seriously, what a fucking interview. And, uh, so much knowledge, so much leadership knowledge, so much uncovered lies. And man, the arc of your, just your life is just like no other. It was a real honor, man. No, I'll go back at you, dude.

Thank you. Totally enjoyed talking to you. You too. Thank you. Cheers. No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe.

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