The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – A Soldier Against All Odds: A Memoir by LT. COL. Jason G Pike by Jason Pike

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

A Soldier Against All Odds: A Memoir by LT. COL. Jason G Pike by Jason Pike A brutally honest tale of a soldier's unorthodox life, a rogue career, and an often-maverick character not easily aligned with the military credo. I Am a Soldier Against All Odds, and what follows is a genuine and frank account—the good, the very bad, and the very ugly—of my thirty-one years in uniform. Diagnosed at age seven with an acute learning disability and failing first grade that year, I was sent back to repeat it. At age nine, I was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a crippling bone disease dissolving the bone of my knee that added to my academic challenges and a significant physical disadvantage. With more than three decades of national guard and active service, after starting my military career at seventeen and retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel, I was told that none of it would be possible. For that advice, there were undoubtedly excellent grounds. My story, therefore, is one of survival, perseverance, and a refusal to quit, no matter what, a characteristic gifted to me by my father. Once I did it, everyone asked, "how the hell did you do it?" And many times, I asked myself the same question… In A Soldier Against All Odds, I show that It is possible, through determination, careful application, and bold strategy, to overcome or compensate for personal humiliation brought about primarily by my own mistakes, being haunted by investigations, academic difficulty, arrests, many ass-chewings, and physical frailty. I did pay the price for being me. This is how I did it, but most importantly, how I survived it. The chronicle of life will inspire you to wince, cry, and laugh. I hope that the lessons I learned through the course of my life and my military career will be an inspiration to anyone confronting the future from a place of disadvantage.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning by. Do you know that I consider you the greatest audience ever known to man on the face of the earth?

Like ever. Like the best audience ever. And if I can't ask you anymore, I'll ask that you go to YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, and LinkedIn. The big LinkedIn newsletter, the 130,000 group over there. You can check that out as well. As always, we appreciate you. At night, I think and dream of you as an audience.

Just as a whole, not individually, because that would kind of be creepy. Just as a whole, I just go, what a wonderful group of people my audience is. And thank you very much. I mean that. I might cry a little. Let me see. Can I fake a tear? Anyway, guys, we certainly appreciate you as well.

Amazing author that we have on the show. He's got an amazing story because we Google amazing authors in the Google machine. We just put them in there to copy that from someone I like on MSNBC. And, yeah, we just put them in the Google machine and out they spit and they show up every day. And today we have another fine person who in particular is a gentleman today. We have ladies as well on other days.

But we have a gentleman on the show to talk about his experience. His latest book that came out January 12th, 2023, A Soldier Against All Odds, a memoir by Lieutenant Colonel Jason G. Pike. And, of course, Jason G. Pike is the author of that book. At least that's what he's telling me so far. I'm going to believe him because he seems like an honorable man. Jason is a decorated combat veteran with multiple deployments. He served for 31 years in the U.S. military, Army specifically, including nine years overseas in five countries.

Jason earned over 30 service awards and badges in his diversity of Army jobs, assignments, and schools from age 17 to 48. Sets his military memoir up differently than most people will find out what that means. And he has a straightforward account of one man's journey. He inspires audiences nationwide and shows how to be resilient and to persevere no matter what disadvantages and life struggles may happen. Welcome to the show, Jason. How are you? Hey, Chris, I'm doing pretty good. I'm very honored to be on your show today. We're honored to have you as well, and thank you for your service, sir, as we owe everyone likes to say, because without you, you guys, we wouldn't have democracy. I think we can say that. I mean, not you personally, but I'm sure you were part of that contribution.

But, I mean, if you want to run with that, you can too as well. Oh, no. Just like you said, 31 years and nine years were overseas, and everything was from the bottom, not only in education, but in rank. I started as a private, 17 years old, because I had failed a grade, and I had to go to a junior college, and everything was from the bottom, and I worked myself up, and I had a lot of problems along the way, which makes this book a pretty good story. There you go.

And, you know, that's how kind of life goes. It's kind of interesting. Let's get your dot com out of the way so that people or I think it's your dot org so that people can find you on the interwebs and get to know you better. So my book and my memoir, audio, everything in four different versions, whatever you like it, e-book or audio, jasonpike.org, jasonpike.org, or just type Jason Pike in your Amazon account. I'm on Audible. I'm on Kindle, hardbook, soft copy, everything. And if you don't even want to read any of that stuff, I'm on iPods and I'm podcast like on this chris vasso show so that's that's where i'm at yeah jasonpike.org there you go yeah if you're not into reading too you get the audiobook i love audiobooks yeah

because i can't read and it's it's from my horse's mouth so i'm the audio and the narrator i'm the narrator and the author so you didn't do it your horse's mouth did i'm the narrator and the author. So you didn't do it? Your horse's mouth did? Sorry. We do the jokes around here. So what motivated you to write this book? What was the core thing that made you go, I need to write about all this crap? Not crap, but you know what I mean. Everybody was thinking, you know, how did a dumbass like you do all this?

It sounds like my biography. No, I mean, I went through college and I went through from a private all the way up to Lieutenant Colonel, which is a senior manager in the military. And everybody was thinking, how did you do this? How, how in the world? And I was thinking the same thing. And I thought, wow, this would be a good inspirational story. And I'm from a small town and from Fingerville, South Carolina. And I thought, well, you know, I thought I could give a story out, inspirational story of a small town Southern dude that came up and made it pretty good. Yeah. There you go. So tell us about your upbringing. I mean, you mentioned a little bit, I don't know if you want to give us more details, but what,

what, I mean, was there anything, was there a military history in your family that maybe drew you to the military or yeah yeah my dad served in the military but where i'm from everybody likes military but my dad he he my my book is dedicated to my father because he was the one who taught me a lot about perseverance and survival and things of that nature but yeah they didn't really like the military. My parents did back in that day. That military is for people, you know, you're white trash. You just got to be a piece of crap to go into the military. That's their thoughts. They thought that privately, but that's a way out of a situation. It's a way to get education. It's a way to get your benefits and things. And so I was not educationally inclined. I was not. I had a learning disability and I failed the first grade. English and writing are my worst subjects. Oh, well, by the way, I'm an author. so no no that's uh no but really that's kind of where i thought that everybody was asking the

same type of question so i figured that's a good it might be a good story yeah i mean the story of uh perseverance uh you know all sorts of different issues of life i mean i i don't i don't know there's anybody who truly goes through life completely sailing and like no rain falls on their parade. Right. And if they are, I hate that person, whoever they are. So evidently you were diagnosed with something to tell us what that was about. So it was from Emory University out of Atlanta, Georgia. I failed the first grade. My first grade teacher said, yeah, you know, this guy's got probably some problems here,

and you need to send him to a reading and writing center. And they went through a lot of tests, and they said, well, this guy just really doesn't understand his letters, his writing, his reading. And that was a continual struggle. It was considered a learning, a slow learner, a learning disability. At that time, they didn't know how to diagnose it. But I had to struggle with that throughout my career. Not only now and before and probably always.

It's just one of those things I had to get around. And I developed creativity on how to get around it. And I show you how I got into trouble and how I got out of trouble through various creative methods. There you go. And then you even had a crippling bone disease as well. Osteomyelitis. Osteomyelitis. So my left knee dissolved twice when I was 9, 10 years old.

I was on crutches a few times and a lot of times. And so sports was not really good. I was not athletically inclined and I was not, of course, academically inclined. And so I had to struggle with that. And a good question is if you got into the army with this problem with physical ailments ailments well even academically elements you could ask a good question when i was 17 when i signed up i lied and i told them i had no problems physically which i did but uh this was before the internet before they could check out my story so so i got into i got in that way just from my bone disease but on an intellectual level i don't now the question i don't know i know i

screwed up the the sat scores were entrance college entrances i i screwed that one up real bad so i don't know how in the world i passed the army entrance test that's something that's to me i don't know but i just got in but you know i was not joining the regular army when I got in. I was from the bottom. I was, I went into the National Guard. They used to call that the nasty girls, the no-goes. And they were the lower than, they were the less than. I've never heard that before. Yeah, they were the less than best. I mean, we were a bunch of yahoos.

And, well, and yeah, we did. And so I got stories on that as well. So everything was from the bottom. And I kind of worked and slid my way up to the, know to the top there you go there you go well i mean one way or another you're helping this country so i i certainly wouldn't call it anything less than oh it was you call it the nasty guard well the national guard was considered ng national what called it nasty girls or nasty Nasty Girls, wow. Another term was just no-goes.

A no-goes means you're a failure. But we were, yeah, National Guard was, it's like a reserve force, and we're weekend warriors. Yeah, so we're a bunch of weekend warriors. But I got out of that and went on to active duty. Yeah, so you went into active service service and you went in with which branch? Well, I was in the Army National Guard, so I went into the U.S. Army. There you go.

Yeah. There you go. And armies, you know, my friends, I actually have a friend who is training right now to become a ranger. And he's at the gym. This is how I made friends with him. He's at the gym this is how i made friends with him he's at the gym with his with his uh ruck pack is that what they call it and i've had my military friends over the years some that have gone to iraq they they love trying their love like saying to me hey you you want to see if you can wear the ruck pack and i'm like

dude i'm like a 40 year old 50 year old old man now and they're like uh i'll hold it for you i'll just we'll just let you feel the weight a little bit and i'm like and you know and and of course they they keep me from crashing to my knees and probably breaking something under the weight of it but that's a lot of weight how were you able to deal with you know being in the military all those years with the you you know, the bone issue. So what I did was I worked out in the gym a lot and I worked on my thighs. I worked on my calf, the muscles that surround the legs. I worked on that a lot. I was kind of a gym rat and I worked and I worked and I worked on it.

Just like I did with many other things. I just continued to work out and put the muscles. Now there were periods of time when I did the ruck marching with the heavy weights on your back that if I did that over an extended period of time without working out the muscles, I mean, I could feel clicks and clinks and things of that nature, and there was some pain, but I got around it. I did have some injections that were steroid injections that were put in there yeah yeah so i i worked around it but i never want to tell anybody about it

because i wanted to stay in the military that i figured this was my only option in life and uh so i wanted to run with it as best as i could yeah there you go so uh it says here on the pr uh sheet my story therefore is one of perseverance, refusal to quit no matter what. And it was gifted to you by your father. What was it that drove you through those early years? Because sometimes, you know, when we're younger, things drive us that we don't really fully understand. I mean, sometimes we just, sometimes we're moving from something or towards something or we think that this is going to pay off. And sometimes you look back on it afterwards, and you go,

there was kind of something there that was keeping me going. Anything like that? And what was the reference to your father and a gift from him? That's a good thought. I really didn't understand my father's influence on me until after he died. And then I started to start thinking more after he died about everything and how how everything evolved and started to put pen on the paper uh to try to put the stories together but my my father i'm dedicated my my my book

uh to my father and the reason i did and i have his pictures in my in there the reason i dedicated to him i don't want to get choked up, is because he taught me through example of how to survive and how to have fun. But he said, you know, you can have fun, and you can have trouble, and you can have fun getting into trouble. I mean, my father was a great father. I mean, he taught me how to steal watermelons, and he also taught me how to shoot bottle rockets at cars and do kinds of crazy stuff. I like your dad.

He was a great father. When you're nine years old and he's teaching you the term of trajectory and how to shoot a car, that's pretty cool. I thought that was myself. There you go. Then he says, if you get in trouble or if you have problems, you just do one thing. It's two words. It's the old term of never quit. And he was from a very, very poor white trash type of environment.

We're talking about poor. Everybody in the South was poor, but we're talking about poor, like stealing food poor. He came from, you know, finding rags and carpets out of the garbage can and, you know, trying to stay warm and healthy just from people's dumps. And so he was that type of poor and he taught us that if you have to do that, that's OK. But you just got to keep on trying and just never quit. And so he had a lot of influence and I didn't know the influence he had on me until after he died. Yeah, he was he was a good father, a wonderful father. He taught me a lot of good, crazy stuff.

Yeah. There you go. It's underappreciated in this world how much of a difference a father makes in a child's life. I mean, to this day, my father passed, what, in 2014? The more I live, the longer I want to just go back and apologize to him immensely and thank him immensely because i didn't i didn't realize the life lessons that he taught me uh and and some of the bullshit he had he put up with um you know the longer i live the more i'm like man he had some cojones for putting up with some of this stuff that i can't even deal with. But, you know, that's marriage.

Excuse me. So, anyway, there are several different stories that we can tease out there in the book. There's a story of you. What is the story of you with the whole Phil West animal feces in South Korea? What's that about? So, in life, a lot we have we all get down in life and we all have problems in life and there's a a term what we call i'm up neck deep in shit or there's another term where i'm neck deep in shit or i'm up shit

creek that's a term we use as if we're in a very bad situation so but personally with me uh i have uh i have been neck deep and almost drowned in shit literally and it ain't it ain't a figure it's a literal term i mean yeah so well how did this happen yeah you have to tell us so i you know i served nine years overseas and a part of that time a lot of that time was in South Korea. South Korea is a place where we have a lot of troops stationed to defend the region. I was there as a young buck lieutenant. I was probably in my late 20s and I was going on an exercise. And in the military, we have to show our competency of land navigation, how to get through the woods in the day or the night on a military map,

win a compass and be able to navigate out there in the woods or wherever you're at. Well, I was out there walking alone at night. It was it was an exercise. And I was alone, but they had dropped us off around nine or ten o'clock at night to go find our waypoints and find our places on the map to demonstrate our ability to read a map and a compass and things. Well, I was walking along this rice paddy and I could smell it. There was a ship. Oh, you know, shit over there. They use that. They use that as as a a fertilizer shit is considered fertilizer

and uh i was over there walking on along that rice paddy and i could smell it i tried to stay away from it and what happened was i slipped and i fell into it now i went neck deep up into it and what happened at that point was um i was thinking to myself you know i've never had a family um i'm i'm not married i don't have any children and i don't want to die like this because yeah but you sound like you're happy though that's a marriage i'm just kidding yeah i didn't want to i didn't want to die i didn't want to die and shit i mean my last name is pike and i you know i don't want to i didn't want to die i didn't want to die and shit i mean my last name is pike and i you know i don't want it like pike dies and poop i mean that's not at least not

literally plus i mean you think about the headlines you're like oh god the headlines are going to be man dies in pile of shit up to his neck literally exactly i i didn't want that at all i was thinking about that i was thinking about end of life and I'm going down. My gag reflux was like, you know, I'm thinking this smells and I'm going down in a bad situation. That's just Fridays for me around my house. Well, I didn't know how to get out of it. And I was alone. I was at night and i was in the poop and uh well

so what i did was start caterpillaring up on sideways a small very it was kind of a quick sand type of material and so i caterpilled up on the top of it and then i eventually low crawled out on it once i got out i was thinking wow i felt relieved i felt like i had saved my own life uh from shit and uh and then i i turned up and looked up at the stars and i looked up and i said god why do you put me in this shit and uh so uh at that point i i was a mob of shit uh it stuck all over me it was inside of everything and so uh well yeah so i started to roll around in the right stuff like a dog to get the bulk of it out of me i wanted to get that bulk out of it and then um then i uh i started figuring out and i had and then i started thinking

of another problem i was going to have i didn't you knowiers are soldiers and I don't want to be called pooping pike or I don't want all this stuff. I didn't want to have the ragging. I wanted to save my face. I was thinking about saving my embarrassment and how to get away from all the other people who are out there looking.

This is the military so a lot of people might know things so I had to keep it a secret of how to get around that stuff so well i was in south korea i don't speak korean just a little bit i saw a light out there it was a farmer's house and so what i did was i started uh walking toward that light and it was a i i didn't know what i didn't know what i was going to do i i didn't know if i was walking toward heaven or hell i was just going to go to the house and and maybe find help because it's not americans i know that and so uh so i went over there and i knocked on the door

and uh ajima the woman of the house ajima would call her and she looks at me i look to her and at the front door and she goes i go i go i go and i go ania hassel ania hassel and i don't and then it korean and it wasn't really necessary to speak korean or english at this point i was in a mob of so we kind of could understand that that so uh she motioned me to uh strip naked on a uh and i i strip naked and i gave her my equipment except i kept my rifle my map and my compass and uh i gave her all my clothing and equipment for her to wash up the motion it was a lot of hand motioning a lot of hand motioning and she said well strip neck and then she said she was going to find me uh the next morning and give it to me clean and uh so now i had another problem i had to walk back to camp naked and find my way back and also avoid the other people that were out there

finding their points i did i made it back to camp and uh naked and barefoot naked and uh i washed myself up and she came and delivered my clothes that next morning you should marry that woman oh yeah i mean yeah marry that woman any any woman who will take a guy who's who's uh you know covered in shit and wash his clothes and then bring him to him. That's where you're right now there, buddy. Pretty cool. And I got away with two things that night. I got away with,

uh, surviving. Uh, I didn't drown in my shit and, uh, so, and then number two, I saved my face.

I saved my embarrassment. So, uh, but I failed the course. It took me a two more times to get that course done. But, uh, but no,

uh, that's just one of a big example of things that have happened in life to me a lot of people things happened in life and uh i've i've had a unique way in my book you'll see uh of how to get in stupid stuff like that and how i got out of it some of it was my fault i slipped i fell down uh yeah that was my fault but i got out of it so yeah there you go i mean that's a little uh that's a little rundown of you know what people do when they virtually go through shit or fall into shit and then they gotta climb their way out of it you did it for real so it was real props to you yeah that's props to you

man uh so there's lots of different journeys that you go on in the book and great stories you tell about perseverance. At one point, let's see, there was a, you got electrocuted in the doorway of an airplane. You're running from a police helicopter after burning trash illegally. And you nearly broke your legs after a faulty jump and a parachute jump. And you got stabbed in ROTC. And that was just like on Friday. No, I'm just kidding. So lots of interesting things.

And then you even crossed tears with the U.S. military, I think. And they had some issues with you. Tell us a little bit about that on the teaser. Okay. So I was under a federal investigation with the criminal investigation division of the army and military intelligence. Now, in my book, I'm going to tell you the reason I want to be so brutally honest with everything. That's because when we go to this chapter, I'm going to tell you some things that I did not do, but I was accused of. And, you know, false accusations.

Someone says this or someone creates a rumor you might you might go to it you might be in a church or an organization and some might want to stir up some stuff and it's not true well that's bad right of its own but what if it's officially put into a hotline and a hotline in the military we got got hotlines for everything. We got hotlines for, you know, you got your suicide hotline, you got your subversion and espionage against the U S government hotline. You got hotline for everything. And so people can use these hotlines to just throw stuff out. And so that's what they did. I, I didn't get along with a particular person in South. It was a time in South Korea. When I was a senior person,

I had a whole lot of rank. I was a lieutenant colonel. I had a whole lot of recognition and awards, but still, even if you're higher in the organization, people can find ways to throw you under the bus or ghost light you or make your life miserable through accusations and rumors. And so they I didn't get along with someone professionally on a job. And what they did was they threw into the hotline that Jason, me, I was selling secrets or giving information to foreign nationals about the military, the United States military. And they threw this into a subversion in the espionage hotline, Saida. So I was brought up on the hill of Dragon Hill Lodge, the Dragon Hill where the headquarters was, where I had to meet. Well, my commander was in one office.

I was in another office. We had two sets of CID, Criminal Investigation Division, one with my commander, one with me, had two sets of MI, Military Intelligence, one in one office. And we were being briefed. It was an orchestrated product to, let's brief the situation that I was going to be facing, the wind that I was going to be facing of allegations of being disloyal to the united states military well this was of course all bogus and it really pissed me off a lot and um uh when and they said they said this is the situation you're facing and they they wanted they said do you want to have a defense attorney uh because that's your right i says hell yes I want a defense attorney because all this bull, this is all a bunch of goddamn bullshit. And it pissed me off. I wanted to kick somebody's ass and I knew who was behind it. So at the end of these hotlines, they have somebody that have to do their job. So, so they, if they get something credible or whatever, uh, that they need to follow

up with, uh, they have to go and do their job. And so they're just doing their job. But I was pissed off at them. They were the messengers, right? So they're giving me the message. But I knew who was at the bottom of it. It's in my chapter there. And I was pissed off.

And I really think that they thought it was bullshit, but they had to follow up with it. And when they were walking out, when that Cid guy was walking out the uh walking out the office he put his hand on my shoulder and he says jason try not to let this bother you i said well you go to hell like that's that bothers me i says yeah it's like you can check my record y'all y'all got all this internet and technology why can't you just understand what's going on why do you have to come and talk to me y my record. Y'all motherfucker. Y'all got all this Internet and technology. Why can't you just understand what's going on? Why do you have to come and talk to me? Y'all have y'all can see stuff that I can't because you've got all this technology. And that was.

And so for I went to go see my defense attorney and he says what he questioned me. He says, what's going to happen in the next whatever, how many years they're going to be following you around and they're going to be trying to get stuff on you. And that's what they did. And so for the next two years, I was followed around. I was monitored. I had boom, boom camera and people follow me around trying to get something on me that never occurred to anything. And the biggest problem I have, okay well i understand well i've never had this happen to me i've been trained for war and i've been trained for shoot a weapon

but i ain't been trained to be thrown under the bus i never had that and uh so i i never knew that existed in the military and uh that kind of pissed me off a bit it gave me a whole lot of anxiety and um at the end of the day what i was also pissed off about is it you know i once i left korea it just sort of went away no one no one said they were sorry to me no one says all this was a bunch of and that's what really that's what really got me if someone says hey you're cool and this is what happened we're sorry about it uh i would i would probably understand it, but that just didn't happen. It just went away.

Wow. Yeah. And so you tell the story about going through all these crazy adventures, your life, and everything else, and people can read about it in the book. And now you travel around and you speak, and you talk to people about the inspiration of your life. Is that correct? Yes, I do podcasts, and I'm telling about the book and about the podcast of the book, promoting the book and the story of the book, inspiration, survival, and

hope. And no matter what phase of life that you might be in, I felt that I've been in a lot of different situations. So yes, that's what i'm doing yeah there you go and i mean this is uh an inspiring story of serving our government serving our country uh defending uh us against uh you know what's what's the old line from the constitution against all all foreign domestic foreign and domestic and uh we've been domestic the enemy within it's like there is anything that is within i'm probably more scared of my own folks than the taliban so yeah yeah lately i'm scared of anybody who looks like me who's in a large crowd

and has an attitude uh you know i don't know i don't know i don't know where we went wrong that way um so it's a it's a story about hope, perseverance, and getting through stuff, and actually digging out of your own shit you might crawl into or fall into. Crawl into, fall into. Some people crawl into their own shit and like rolling around, and they post them out on social media. Anything more you want to tease out about your book and story before we go, Jason? No, Afghanistan's there, but Afghanistan is not the meat of the

story. The meat of the story really is the ups and downs of a life in uniform, starting from the bottom, not only in rank, but also education. So I think it's a story of hope and survival and persistence, no matter, you know, whatever. I think I want to get to that person who's a young person who made me not think that they're much, my high school guidance counselor told me not to go to college. Uh, but I did, uh, because I had been through some things that, that they probably couldn't understand. So I think that's, uh, I think, uh, it's an inspirational story, no matter what phase of life you're in and, uh, you'll, you'll be entertained. It's on audible and many other formats. And so, uh, that's, that's. And so that's basically it in a nutshell.

I served honorably for 31 years, and I got a lot of medals and awards, but I had a lot of problems along the way. There you go. Well, you know, what's the old Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times. I don't think there's anybody who goes through life on a perfect sale. Maybe there's a person.

I think some people are perceived to live life through a perfect sale, through with no issues, has no idea what other people go through and has not walked in their shoes. But stories of survival, stories are lessons to life and are our owner's manual for life where we learn, okay, so how does this work and where does it go and how do we do it and how do we make things happen for everything? And how do we survive?

I mean, really, life is survival, gamer survival, and doing the best that you can through it or trying to come out the other side, having survived it. And sometimes it's ugly. Sometimes it's not pretty. Sometimes it's a struggle, but in the end you can sit back and you've got a wonderful stories to tell around a campfire, I suppose. Yes.

No doubt about that. No, no doubt that. Yeah, there you go. So, uh, Jason,

give us your.org where you want people to find you on the interwebs. So I'm on Facebook, Jason Pike on Facebook. So, Jason, give us your.org where you want people to find you on the interwebs. So I'm on Facebook, Jason Pike on Facebook. I'm on JasonPike.org. I got my own website, JasonPike.org. The book and the audible, all you're going to find that is Amazon, Amazon. And so on Amazon, you just put Jason Pike. You're going to see the blue book there, Jason Pike, the A soldier, A soldier against all odds, A soldier against all odds. You're going to see the blue book there Jason Pike A Soldier Against All Odds

A Soldier Against All Odds That's where you're going to find it You can just put it in your browser A Soldier Against All Odds You'll find it there I appreciate it I'm very honored to be on your show Chris We're honored to have you Jason

And the service you provided the country That's what interests me in the book We need to celebrate And take care of our veterans more and do a better job of that. And so I've always been supportive of that. And we have a lot of people on the show that have talked about some of the issues that go on with our veterans and stuff. And so I think it's important to amplify the stories and celebrate them, you know, and the sacrifices people and the sacrifices people make, uh, for this democracy. And what we have freedom isn't free as they say. I'm not sure who says it, but I heard it once,

probably in the constitution somewhere. Freedom isn't free. Is that in there? I don't know. I think there's a way of saying it's in there, but Jason, thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, sir. Hey, thank you very much, Chris.

Appreciate it. Thank you. And folks order up the book book wherever fine books are sold. A Soldier Against All Odds. A member, I'm sorry. A Soldier Against All Odds. A memoir by Lieutenant Colonel Jason G. Pike. Available wherever fine books are sold.

Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.