The Pomp Podcast - #1426 Ephraim Mattos | Inside Life Saving Missions with a Navy SEAL

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

Ephraim Mattos is a former Navy SEAL, the Founder of Stronghold Rescue, and the author of “City of Death: Humanitarian Warriors in the Battle of Mosul.” In this conversation, we talk about how Ephraim went from a Navy SEAL to a humanitarian, what actually goes on in the ground in conflict zones, how he is saving lives on a daily basis, and all the complexities that go into this work.  ======================= Buy book: https://www.amazon.com/Live-Extraordinary-Life-Anthony-Pompliano/dp/0857199927/ ======================= Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join. ======================= The Pomp Podcast is powered by BetOnline.ag, the premier crypto-friendly place to gamble on politics and sports, casino, poker and horse racing. BetOnline.ag gives you the ability to use Bitcoin and more than a dozen altcoins to make deposits and withdraw your winnings. There are no crypto transaction fees, and processing is instantaneous and secure. Visit ⁠⁠⁠https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp⁠⁠⁠ and use PROMO CODE: POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline.ag is available in nearly every country around the world, making it the top global gaming destination for crypto users. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? Today we have a very special episode. You're going to want to sit down and pay a lot of attention. This story is not only inspiring, but it's going to make you think much more critically about the world. And it's

going to teach you so much about the intricacies and the complexities of many of the conflicts that happen globally. In this conversation, I talked to Ephraim Matos. Ephraim is a former Navy SEAL. He's the founder of Stronghold Rescue, and he's the author of a great book called City of death. In this conversation, what we talk about is how Ephraim went from a Navy SEAL to a humanitarian, what actually goes on on the ground in these conflict zones, how he's saving lives on a daily basis while being threatened by enemy fire, and all of the complexities and nuances that go into this work. Now, one of the interesting things about this podcast is that most people come on here and they talk about investing, how they invest their money, what the return on that

investment is and what their best ideas are. What strikes me about Ephraim is that actually he is investing a much more precious resource. He's investing his time and his energy. And the ROI on that time and energy investment actually has nothing to do with finances. He measures his success and how many lives he can save. This conversation is very special. It's a little different, but I promise you that it is worth it. So make sure that you listen all the way to the end and let me know what you think. What do you think about this work? And if you're so compelled, Feel free to go check out strongholdrescue.org at the end. Here's my conversation with Ifeam Matos.

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but you are very unique in that you're investing the single most valuable resource, which is your time and the roi calculation that you're making is not really something for you it's about how many lives can you save in these war zones and so in order to understand the work that you're doing today i think we've got to go back and really understand kind of your background and how you grew up to become the person who wants to go as a civilian volunteer into a war zone and gets enjoyment out of that maybe and so walk us through like where did you grow up and what was your early childhood like yeah for sure uh so first i'll say uh i definitely don't get that much enjoyment out of it that's one caveat uh for me it's uh it's definitely a a labor of love

um going into these places and and doing doing what we got to do um but uh yeah i grew up in i grew up in milwaukee wisconsin and i grew up in a uh a fundamentalist christian home um so a wonderful childhood um was given you know great morals as a kid uh tried to uh follow those morals as best i could you know in my early adult life um but uh yeah i had a great childhood um but a big part of of of that childhood was this kind of dichotomy between um you know serving others that was something that was heavily taught in church and in school and my father was also in the military um he was uh well he was he was in the air force reserves so he would uh you know normally normally home but then after 9 11 he was activated and he was sent to iraq and middle east

and several other places as well and so that got me realizing that there's other ways to serve and it kind of opened up my eyes to i guess the rest of the world opened up my eyes to the concept of the of the military and that there were there were other ways to as you alluded to sort of use my time use my life the the most finite thing that you have um how do how can you use that to the most effect to help the most amount of people and again the the value um sort of the moral value that i was taught as a as a kid was um we were always taught that the idea that the the greatest of these is the servant right it's somebody who serves others and um that doesn't mean you can't be successful it doesn't mean you can't you know do great things uh but it just means that whatever

you're doing you need to provide value to others and um so for me when i when i graduated high school for me that the the biggest way that i thought that i could um sort of upgrade myself and be the most service to the world at the time was uh to join the military and that's why or one of the major reasons why i uh i joined them i do think it's very interesting people always ask me you know hey why did you join uh the military and uh pretty much everyone that i know um has a patriotism streak or kind of belief but a main driver is i think this is good for me as an individual in terms of discipline or leadership or kind of upgrading the situation that i'm in and so it's this very kind of unique incentive alignment you know in economics or finance or business

people always talk about like you know show me the incentive i'll show you the outcome uh joining the military is one of those very unique situations though where like it is good for the country and it is good for the individual and so um did you understand that it was good for you kind of joining or was it more of uh hey i think that serving you know kind of the country is uh the driver and like how cognizant of you were were you of the maybe positive improvements that it would have on you as an individual i would say i was very cognizant of the of the hopefully positive changes that it would have i would say um part of it was service to my country um i was not motivated at all by the money or the uh the the school benefits well but also like the

school benefits like that wasn't i wasn't like yeah i get free college like i didn't even enter into my uh calculation didn't really care um a large portion of it was um i also wanted to fight i just legitimately i just wanted to go and take on bad guys and i wanted to do it at the highest level possible but yeah that sort of third uh portion of it was i wanted to become a better version of myself i wanted to challenge myself and i think that there's um something particularly with young men where our society today is not really set up in such a way where men or young men kind of pass from being a boy to being a man and usually that happens there's some sort of trial or tribulation right and it happens over time and it's not like it's not usually like a specific

moment um so for me i i looked at the military and particularly you know going through the seal program as my opportunity to sort of become a man prove myself as a man do it early and set myself up uh to i guess have a to live an extraordinary life as uh as some would say the what's interesting is uh that is something that people have done for a very long time right there there's societies after societies throughout history that uh there was some sort of training there was some sort of test there was some sort of you know event where uh sometimes as young as 12 to 14 years old sometimes as old as 18 to 20. But some period, people were told, hey, you now have crossed the chasm and become a man. With the SEALs, training is intense. You did it at a time where you knew

there's a high probability of being deployed, given the wars that were going on. Did you join and think that you were going to be there for 20 years? So 20 years for those that don't know is kind of the magic number of the military because you could retire. Or was it something where you're like, hey, let me sign the first contract and kind of see how it goes. And then I'll make a decision after that. I was open to the idea of doing 20, but by no means did I go in thinking this is what I'm going to do forever. I thought if I love this and it is something I want to do forever, well, then great. I get the opportunity to do it forever.

And there's even a part of me, too. I wish that I had loved it. wish that i had uh found that as sort of to be the right spot for me long term because i mean honestly it's a it's a has the potential to be a really great life if you like that uh environment and you and you like that job um but i i was open to i was open to either but either way i wasn't thinking too much too far in the future because all i cared about was becoming a seal and i want to go to war so yes i joined during a time of war but i joined a unit specifically for war because i wanted to go to war i wanted to and again it was there's a part of me as a young man i you you're

looking for that adventure you're looking for that you want to prove yourself yeah everyone's kind of has a chip on their shoulder and you want you want to see how you're going to react when the bullets start flying and uh but there was also a level of service i wanted to serve as well at the highest level possible and then just sort of see where life would take me from that point it always cracks me up uh whenever somebody from the military describes like hey why'd you sign up like because it looked fun right right you know like if you look at the commercials they're like jumping out of planes and shooting guns and like all this stuff and and there's a certain part maybe of our country that like gets that and there's a very large portion of the population that's like wait

what do you mean that sounds like that's dangerous that's risky that's you know whatever you're like that's the point right is that like you know you you don't try to become a seal because you want to be safe right right it's almost like show me where the danger is and i will go um which you know one is important right that our country has those types of people but also two um i think that it's a psychologically different view of the world where um you know in again in investing uh i talk a lot about uh people see volatility and they say volatility equals risk if i see risk i run away but the best investors in the world they're constantly seeking out risk right they want the risk because if there's risk that means there's volatility if there's volatility well if

something goes up a lot it means if i'm on the right side of the trade then i could make a lot of money yeah and so you know investing your time in something that is high risk is uh also a very asymmetric type investment you know if it goes well uh it's very rewarding for you it's obviously very good for the country and so um that's why i kind of think of a lot of what you've done in your life is through that investing lens it's just time energy you know kind of focus uh more so than the military as of yet will not let you you know kind of make financial bets on uh certain outcomes yeah and i think that i i've never heard it put that way sort of analogizing it with finance and risk but you're absolutely correct uh and as you were talking i was just thinking yeah you have

some guys um many guys who are astronomically you know uh better better than me in every single way and they for whatever reason you know they they got hit in during the war or they were killed in training or they got injured in training and never made it through the pipeline right so there's there's this massive amount of risk so you talk about specifically risk of joining the the seal program in particular um if you make it through the program you're a navy seal and that's a really cool uh and a really that's that's a really good place to be in life um but if you don't make it again you get sick you twist an ankle anything happens you're now in the navy right so it's not like if you fail out of you know green beret selection or ranger selection hey

you're still in the army here's you can still have a rifle and you can still go be part of a pretty elite group of dudes that can go fight and if you're in the navy it's like most likely you're going to end up on a ship right so there's high risk high reward in that in that regard and so you it ends up and guys are very aware of that so it the program ends up attracting guys who are i guess looking for that volatility you talk in the book um which uh is called city of death uh humanitarian warriors in the battle of mosul and uh highly recommend everyone knows that uh if i read a book and i don't like i don't tell you about it so i highly recommend this one but um in the book you talk about during steel training uh it's hard it's cold it's dark it's you know

kind of this very difficult uh training program um and i think you're laying in the water and you have this almost vision of uh kind of a future self or a future warrior and you say that that was the moment you decided no matter what happened you weren't going to quit talk about that kind of moment and like was it the environment and in the training and like was it like the steel teams working right like it was almost like hey this is how we harden a warrior to not ever want to quit or do you think it's something that was like already inside of you and in that moment you kind of had to decide what type of person you were going to be moving forward in your life um i think it's probably more the the latter so again just quick quick summary it was monday

night or i think it's sunday night or monday night of help like i don't even remember at this point um uh you're sleep deprived and i had just injured my back and i was also sick so i was vomiting projectile vomiting um i just injured my lower back so i've got a bulging disc at that point wasn't ruptured so i could still function but very painful we're laying in the water and i'm i'm sitting there contemplating the idea of quitting and i'm thinking i wasn't quitting was like oh this is too hard my thought process was there's no way i'm going to make it through this this is they're going to kick me out i'm going to i'm going to fall on my face they're going to drag me out of here and i'm going to have to do this again so might as well just quit

because i'm not going to make it anyway um and so in that moment i i it was i don't know how else to explain it other than maybe a hallucination because i'm miserable i i don't know if you're sleep deprived you're in pain all the stuff dehydrated and i yeah i saw sort of a future vision of myself as a as a warrior alone going into these jungle mountains and on a helicopter and um that that moment i i think it was important because it i was able to see myself in the future and i was able to see sort of my it sounds super corny uh but it was like i was able to see sort of my warrior self i was able to see my true self and then the choice was um at at that point i saw who i truly was and i didn't even make a decision of like which am i going to go left or am i going

to go right am i going to quit or am i going to stay i just saw my i saw who i really was and i was like oh yeah i'm not i'm not the guy who quits and it doesn't matter um became an identity it became an identity absolutely yeah it became an identity because i saw myself in the future and um yeah so that that was the moment where uh i just was like yeah i'm never i'm never gonna quit i'm never gonna make it or i'm sorry i'm not i'm they're never gonna make me quit yeah one of the other things about the seals which um you know you can kind of visualize this idea of you're laying there in the water it's cold your back hurts you're throwing up you know you've got all these kind of problems um i forget if it was sean ryan or somebody had said to me at one point um you

know seals are unique in that they constantly fall back to the water almost every other military unit every you know bad guy in the world they don't want to go in the water right they want to get the high ground they want to go and get a fortified position and they want to uh hide in tunnels like there's all these other things they want to do going in the water is actually to them death because they're not skilled they don't know how to operate there etc seals are unique in that they see what many people look at as risk or as kind of difficulty as safety to a degree and obviously the training is very uh involved in the water uh seals are kind of tested quite often um but a lot of missions um a lot of kind of stories that people have told over the last 20 years in

in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan were raging on, they were going around the world and, you know, they were running to the beach. They were coming out of the water. It was just like constantly like safety is in the water. Did you get that sense in the training? Like, was it something where you started to realize like, hey, this thing that everyone else seems to be scared of, like that's our home? Or is that something that maybe people tend to, in hindsight, you know, kind of talk about if maybe their personal experience in certain missions or whatever kind of aligned with that? I actually, again, this is a great question too. No one's ever asked me this. I viewed, I started to view the water, I guess, subconsciously as a tactical

advantage. It was this environment that other people didn't take the time to learn how to, to learn how to operate in, didn't learn how to function in. And it was, that was the exact area that we were supposed to excel in and were tested in. And so what that did is it sort of, it opened the entire it opens up the entire globe it opens up the entire world it opens up um everything so on a tactical level when other people like you said are running away from the river we're thinking oh like perfect let's swim across this river and we can you know we can do this tactically or we can do that um and it takes it opens up the entire world it's like and then also we also operate and are able to hit targets that are centered around the water so docks ships ships out at sea gas and

oil platforms and so there's all these other opportunities in life or not in life but in war there's other targets that op that open up because you are comfortable and able to operate in those environments and i think there's a great lesson there in life um the more sort of tactical advantages you have the more skill sets that you have it opens up all these different opportunities people are always looking for opportunity in life and they're looking for that element of of luck um which as you say is not real um but what is real is opportunity and the more skills you have the the more sort of tactical advantages you have the more complex and uh the more complex things you can do and the more opportunities that come your way it's um it's interesting we're talking

about this today uh last night i was uh at an event and i was talking to a guy um who's very very successful most people would know the companies that he owns and i asked him i said you know what what has been one of the secrets or advantages to your success everyone knows about the wins but you know are there certain losses or skills or whatever and he said to me he goes He goes, I know how to operate in environments that most people run away from. Oh, that's great. And I said to him, well, what does that mean? It sounds awesome.

You're rich. What does that mean? He said, the best investments I ever made is I bought things out of bankruptcy. And so his whole thing was, this is somebody else's trash. This is the thing that isn't working. It's broken. It's losing money. Oh, he was buying bankrupt companies.

He's going in and he's buying the bankrupt companies. So his whole point was, everyone else wants to buy the company that's working. Everyone else wants to operate the thing that is going well. He goes, I look for the things that are literally left to die. And I go there and that's my specialty is I go and I'm able to fix this thing. And so it's the equivalent of, hey, I don't want to go in the water, right? But the SEAL says, no, that is the advantage, right? Is I have a skill that nobody else has. Let me go and use it. And so it's just interesting how that kind of framework applies across life. You're unique in that you deployed with the SEALs in these combat zones.

And when you left, as we'll talk about, you go back into the combat zone as a civilian. So the SEAL teams with the uniform or without a uniform on, you're not scared to go into the combat zone, right? But talk about the difference of experience of like doing it as a SEAL versus some of the work that you do later on the humanitarian side.

You're in the same locations. yeah you don't have a flag on your shoulder maybe uh you know later with the humanitarian work but are there major differences that people might not really understand of kind of what combat is you know as a seal versus uh some of the stuff that you're doing now yeah absolutely so so just quick context there yeah I got out of the military 2017 bought a one-way ticket to Iraq uh I thought I was just gonna be doing humanitarian aid work uh let's repeat that for a second so you're in the seals you deployed you get out of the military and the first thing that you do is you buy a one-way ticket to iraq but you're now going as a civilian yes to meet up with a group and act as a

humanitarian in the heart of one of the worst areas of iraq during the war yeah absolutely so uh yeah interesting life choices um uh talk about yeah high risk high reward but um yeah my intention was to go do you know humanitarian aid work and whatnot and so it was very different so was obviously it was extremely different and and a huge culture shock completely getting out of my comfort zone which was the which was the seal teams and you have all the backup and support of the entire yeah us military at the at the highest level um and anything that you're doing and so landing in iraq as a civilian uh to just show up and help you lose that entire protective cone of of of the government of of everything else you don't you don't have your team anymore you

don't have the air assets they don't you know they're not there to protect you so you don't have the you don't have the weapons the body armor like literally everything said we don't have night vision anymore right like when you fly you don't even have a gun with you at first right you're like meeting up and then getting the gun on the ground when you're there yeah yeah yeah i have nothing so i literally just show up i have a backpack with some camping supplies uh and that's it and you know some of the details here probably will uh kind of help people understand just what the situation is so when you're flying in um to iraq you have no weapons uh you have no body armor or any of that stuff uh who is driving you out to meet up with you know debut banks and kind

of the free burma rangers and all that like are you just renting a car right are you hitching a ride like how are you getting uh out there and and uh obviously uh that's a very dangerous part of being in these areas is when you're in a vehicle that is exposed you know without the might of the military behind you yeah so the way it worked was uh i landed in erbil and at the time uh, the group I was meeting up with FBR, uh, they, uh, they had basically had a safe house in Erbil, Northern Iraq. So it's in Kurdish controlled area. Um, and yeah, so that's, you literally just, uh, walked out of the airport. Someone was there to meet me. Um, it's actually my buddy, my buddy, Scott Barkley. Um, and then I was just driven to the safe house,

which is just a normal, you know, kind of rented house. And then a few days later, we ended up getting on a convoy of vehicles and just driving outside of Kurdish controlled territory straight into literally no man's land. I mean, we're talking about driving through hostile Shabi checkpoints, which is an Iranian backed militia group. And we're driving through their checkpoints and they hate us. They'd happily kill us, but the Iranians haven't given the permission to do so. So yeah, you're driving through the Iraqi countryside in a small convoy. And to be clear, we were intentionally meeting up with an Iraqi army unit and we had interpreters with us. Everything was pre-planned. The calls were made ahead of time. So if we got stuck at

a checkpoint, which happened very often, you call the local Iraqi army commander and he knows who we are and all that kind of stuff. So I'm going to be very clear, it's not guys just running around willy-nilly. You're there essentially as on the invitation of the Iraqi military. They're very happy that you guys are there. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Because at the time, the Iraqi army, didn't have medics and they also didn't have the humanitarian support needed when they would liberate a village when they liberated town so people thousands of people would break free from isis positions and the iraqi army has no has no food to give them they don't have medics to treat the wounded they don't they have they have nothing um and so we provided that for them um and that

was that was a great way to to work in conjunction with them so um the safe house that you mentioned uh people watch movies they see the cia safe house in the movie and it's got all kinds of you know biometric scanners to get in it's got hidden doors it's got uh weapons underneath you know the tabletop or whatever um that's not the safe house that you were in no no it was uh it was a condo and a neighborhood with a bunch of trucks parked out front yeah i know it's just a normal just a normal condo kind of thing it wasn't undercover it wasn't uh anything uh secret you know all the neighbors knew exactly who we were the kurds obviously knew who we were so um yeah it wasn't like that at all and i think maybe for people to understand the humanitarian

work that goes on in these war zones um the way that i think about it is uh there's really kind of three parties in a war zone there are the two sides that are fighting and um i'm gonna make it simple and say there's two sides iraq specifically but many other places there's usually kind of a multiplayer you know battle going on and depending on the day or or the season uh who's on whose side sometimes is a little confusing but um you basically have you know one side fighting another but many people forget there's this third group of people which is the locals and sometimes the locals are on a side or not uh but many locals you know i would say well what would you do if somebody invaded america and the american military was fighting there's some

people who say i'd pick up a gun and i'd go fight there's a lot of people who say well i would have to live my life i'd have to support my family i'd have to you know get kind of live and try to survive um the humanitarian work is really focused on that third group right on the on the locals and and uh providing support and supplies and that medical aid etc um when you think about like the day-to-day obviously in the book you talk about many days but like what is an average day from a humanitarian standpoint what are you guys actually trying to accomplish there um every day is going to be very different so basically in a nutshell in one sentence is you're looking for problems that you can solve that's it sometimes it's a group of people just got freed from isis and now

you they need food because they're going to be camped out in the middle of the desert for a week or so until the iraqi army can kind of go through and do a security check on everybody or it might be um somebody just broke free from isis and they've been shot or it could be um you know you're working with the iraqi army to um you know do like a um do like a medical clinic of people who are in the villages everything's fine their area's been secured but you just kind of go and help and help the locals do do a medical checkup or something like that so each day is is going to be very different but the overarching thing is you're looking for a problem and you're and you're solving it if we bring it back kind of again to kind of business and finance

you know one of the things that's interesting is that sounds a lot like a founder it sounds a lot like an executive absolutely of like hey every day i just wake up and actually the things that are going well get none of my time right it's just like all the problems um and you know this is obviously very unique uh kind of problem set and uh dangerous area uh but when you're trying to solve those problems i think another component um you know people understand that the military is dangerous but the humanitarian work um is uh probably just as dangerous if maybe not even more i would argue uh because you're trying to provide aid to the locals and many times that means that you are a threat to the other side that the military is fighting right they see it as hey

you're here to uh provide aid you're here to actually make these people's lives better they don't want that right whether it's isis or whoever like they are ruling based on chaos and the threat of violence and kind of destruction is a very big part of their strategy um and so you know if we make this tangible for people there's um a famous video that you know when you and i first met uh i told you we were talking and and uh somehow uh the video came up i think somebody else who was at the table said hey you know have you ever seen this video and i told you that i'd seen this viral video which um i believe is uh yourself and two other guys um uh you all are uh in front of a tank and the tank is kind of moving down the street um and as that tank is moving uh all of

a sudden uh i think it's you pop out from behind the tank you start laying down cover fire somebody runs away it appears in the video at first and they come back a couple seconds later and they have what appears to be kind of a young teenage girl or young girl and in that video you see see the danger of humanitarian work right and um what I didn't know is that at dinner you then showed me uh another video from the same day uh where as you guys continue progressing down the road and you're trying to pull these people literally take civilians off of the battlefield who have been injured I think even maybe one of them had lost some of their family members um, in this battle, you're then shot by ISIS. And so talk about maybe like that situation as a way

to, um, exemplify for people that, you know, it sounds awesome to go and provide medical aid and food and kind of do this stuff. And it sounds kind of like a, a great charitable work, but you also have a gun in your hand, you're getting shot at, and like, this is super dangerous to be able to do this in a combat zone where people want to kill you. Yeah. So first I'll, I'll, I'll qualify the question and say a little more that the so we were working as working as humanitarians um and then we ended up basically embedding with the iraqi army as frontline combat medics because they didn't have medics so they gave us weapons the iraqis allowed us to carry weapons and such that is not traditional humanitarian aid work most humanitarian aid work they're going to be

as far away from the fighting uh as they need to be to keep it keep their personnel safe um and then they'll have someone else sort of responsible for security um the the work that that we were doing in iraq was sort of filling that gap between the front line and sort of the traditional uh humanitarian group so it's a totally different animal uh it's a one percent of one percent are actually going to carry weapons and do the kind of stuff that we were that we were doing um to to do those life-saving operations and treat people on the front lines um but yeah what happened that day was again we were embedded with the iraqi army we came across a uh huge huge, sorry, maybe a four or five lane highway where about 200 people have been killed in the

street. And I remember when I first saw, we got up in the rubbled buildings and we looked out over this road and we had to hide in the building because ISIS is right across this highway. And I remember looking at it in my brain for like two or three seconds, couldn't understand why I seeing the image in color and i was like why my brain just couldn't comprehend what i was seeing in color and then i realized the only time my brain had ever seen images of piles of slaughtered dead people in the street or in a mass grave was only black and white photos from the past and so my first thought was why is this not in black and white and so i realized of course after two seconds oh that's obvious this is real um just a funny thing my brain did um but then in the piles

of bodies that isis had massacred so isis had killed 200 people who tried to leave isis controlled territory and they do that to force people to stay with them as human shields and so in the piles of bodies there was a little girl she was actually about three years old um and a couple of men as well who were wounded and hiding in the piles of bodies and so yeah the the story there was uh we talked with the iraqi army and basically we the iraqi army sent a tank straight down the road um right at isis headquarters which of course was in a hospital um and so we get you know 50 meters away from the hospital and uh so that viral video um myself and sky barkley we laid down covering fire and then dave eubank the guy who runs fbr he ran out and grabbed a little girl and and brought

her back and then we also grabbed two men and started to move back toward uh iraqi army positions and this entire time the iraq excuse me the isis they're firing at us from two positions high ground four of us and on our flank and um so they're also firing pre-sighted mortars which are landing behind us um and around us and so as we move back the the tank is being manned by iraqi army soldiers they can't see us we can't communicate with them and so the tank is just backing up it's gonna it's it's just backing up slowly uh to get back to iraqi army lines isis is firing. And as we moved back, we ended up losing one of the men who we were trying to rescue. He fell off a tabletop that we were dragging him on. I moved him out of the way of

the tank. And then the tank just kept moving. There was no way to get him. So then as I stepped back behind the tank, sort of that cone of protection, another burst of machine gun fire came in and took my leg out from under me. It was a through and through, shot through the calf. So wasn't it wasn't a major wound but i fell down behind the tank the tank almost ran me over stood up in the video you get up very fast yeah absolutely and the funny thing is i had no intention of getting up i was like well i was like i was sort of shocked that my my brain was just thinking okay did my leg snap it i don't think i i don't know if i had the ability to put weight on my leg i didn't know because that as bullets when they come in they make the snapping noise and so

this you know the snaps of machine gun fire had you know gone through our lines and hit me and so i don't know at that point if my leg is snapped because it's just the same i guess i imagine it's the same sound of the bone snapping so uh but the tank was gonna run me over in about two and a half seconds so um had to get up and put weight on it luckily my leg held and um uh you know we were able to um able to get out of there where we were able to rescue one little girl and then and a man as well but um yeah that's not that's not very typical but you know you want to talk about again high risk high reward um in that situation um the roi so the the risk is you're going to die your risk is your life but the reward is those other two people might live and there's a 100

chance you're not going to get the reward there's 100 chance that they are going to die within the next 24 hours um if you do not go out there and get them in particular the little girl who'd been out there for i think at that point like 36 hours or more um just baking in the heat um and so yeah you you know we felt it was our job to risk our lives to to save those to save those people yeah you have a uh a quote in the book uh this comes from uh hamodi uh hasim who's a sergeant major of the iraqi army hamidi jessim yeah how many gems um which is uh in combat it's not about the number of lives you take it's about the number of lives you save yeah which i think is very counterintuitive for many people when they think about war they think about kind of an offensive

hey we're going to kill people um but this quote of in combat it's not about the number of lives you take it's about the number of lives you save i think is you know pretty uh descriptive of the situation that you're describing here yeah absolutely i think that actually just brings to mind a uh if i can quote saving private ryan um so there's uh there's a movie there's a great movie right but remember tom hanks's character he's sitting there and he's kind of constantly he's thinking about the number of men under his command who've who've died and he says for each one of those guys he's like that means if i've lost 100 men he's like that means i've saved twice as many maybe three times who knows 10 times many right so he's justifying the fact that all

these men under his command have been killed and he's trying to rationalize it with not you know how many he's not talking about how many germans he killed he's sitting there thinking well okay that means that we've probably saved 10 times that number of lives from death but certainly from um you know life strangulation under the under the nazi regime right um yeah so yeah it's it's that's the thing too uh one of the one of the things i always say about war is you know people think that uh like there's that world peace is this thing that can is is sort of attainable and it's going to happen and it's just the reality is like that's just not true it's don't get me wrong it's a great um impulse to want to have world peace i want world peace

as somebody who's fought in too many battles i can tell you i wish there was world peace because i'm sick of doing it right um and it's a horrible it's a horrible thing but what i would say is you don't go to war to end all war you go to war to purchase a limited amount of freedom for a limited amount of people for a limited amount of time and then unfortunately you're going to have to do it again because wars aren't going to end bad guys are going to continue to come back and so if you are not doing a war of conquest you're not doing a war of greed right because that's that's the bad guy if your job if you are fighting to save and protect lives um then that you know that's a that's a justified war but um that needs to be your your mindset and your motivation to go out

there that war is the ability to purchase a say it again a limited amount of freedom for a limited amount of people for a limited amount of time and then you got to do it again yeah yeah i mean it's very true and you know another quote you have in the book is uh war's not an adventure it is a disease right and um this idea that like bad guys will keep coming back right um you know if i walk down the street and i ask people uh hey who are the bad guys in name a region around the world i mean you could even do iraq in 15 years it went from al-qaeda to isis right and there's probably a lot of overlap right of you know who's in those organizations yeah um there's a lot of of differences too. Right. And so you start to look at this and you say, okay, well in the Middle

East alone, right. If, uh, again, you walk down the street and ask a random person, how many terrorist organizations or, you know, bad organizations can you name? My guess is that people probably couldn't think of them off the top of their head, but if you start rattling them off there, yep. I heard of that one. I heard of that one. I heard of that one. And so, um, that's one region of the world. Yeah. Right. And we're talking about 10, 15, 20 major organizations. We're not talking about, you know, local gangs. Right. Oh, yeah. And so it it is this kind of, you know, multi headed snake that you cut one off and two more appear. And so what do you think is kind of the solution there? Right. you could philosophically think about uh the humanitarian who's willing to pick up a gun protect people save them i think a lot of people get behind that and they say you know what

that's like a uh a very um uh big important you know action that i can get behind what is maybe the military you know solution to uh to some of this um i guess i'll answer that in in sort of two ways so first and foremost i'm very aware that the work that i do uh now as a humanitarian running stronghold and the work i've done in the past a lot of that is sort of just throwing a tourniquet on a bleed right you didn't stop the gunshot you're just throwing a tourniquet and and literally but also figuratively as well it's like you're just sort of managing an emergency situation um so the the real solution to to prevent the real solution is prevention how do you prevent the war from happening how do you prevent people from um joining these groups and

the answer that i've come up with in unfortunately having been in so many of these different situations it all comes down to ideology it all comes down to the ideas ideas have consequences we have this perception all humans do it um but we have this perception of the other we look at we look at isis and we go they're a bunch of psychopaths no they're not like they're a bunch of crazy people they're a bunch of like no they're not they are normal human beings who believe that they are doing the right thing and they believe it so much so that they're willing to i've seen them do it strap a bomb to themselves walk out and blow themselves up they truly believe that they are that they are doing good things these are not mentally impaired psychopaths these are normal

people who have been embedded with a virus of an ideology that manifests itself in these evil demonic ways and they do these evil horrible things because of the ideas so more important than um fighting and sort of trying to stop the bleed it's well why why are people doing this stuff in the first place so morality ideology philosophy all of that in my opinion is astronomically more important than dealing with the sort of the symptom right as opposed to the the actual problem so and then on the military side on the military on the military side the the way of handling a lot of these problems is um it's similar in my opinion it's similar to uh peace through strength but i would say a little bit more nuanced i would say stability through deterrence

and you're never going to have peace but you can't have stability things are going to things are going to wobble but you can bring it back right you're going to have groups are going to act up but you smack it down immediately and you do that through deterrence you let them know whether it's whether it's through crime policy or foreign policy you let people know you act out of line you cross this line here's what's going to happen every single time right to use an example if you look at the war on drugs how effective is it for us to send out tons of troops or soldiers overseas or police officers to go and raid drug houses and such it's like well you're just dealing with the symptom um but if you change the policy and let's say anybody who deals drugs death penalty right

you have a reduction of the problem by 90 95 right um a lot of other countries have done this and it works right so it's it's stability through deterrence there's still going to be people do there's still going to be people doing drugs there's so many people dealing those drugs and infecting people but you're going to have a 90 95 reduction because of deterrence because guys are going to go you know what i'm not going to get into the drug business too much risk not enough reward you got to pay me a lot of money right um and so that i think is the is the way to stabilize the situation but fundamentally why after you stabilize the situation you have to um expose people to good ideology and good moral ideology and they need to make the decision to accept it

themselves as alexander sultan eats and said you know the line between good and evil runs to the heart of every man you get to choose you get to choose which which side which side you're going to be on what it makes me think about is um in the technology world there's so many people who will point and say you know facebook or telegram or signal or twitter name your platform it's being used by bad people to coordinate bad things and objectively that is true but nobody ever talks about how impactful those platforms have been in getting what many would consider kind of western ideals uh into some of these areas right and so if you know if you're growing up in an isis controlled area where you're literally being brainwashed into believing x or y thing and then

you get an internet connection and all of a sudden you start to realize that the rest of the world doesn't think exactly what you think, how many people have been saved, right? Through that internet connection. And it's an impossible number to get, right? You can't measure it. But we do know that, you know, in North Korea, as an example, if people start to realize that there's another way of life, some people are like, well, maybe I want the other way of life, right? Maybe I don't want this thing. Not everybody, right? One of the things that's really interesting is there's a lot of people who understand. I think there's certain religions where, you know, people are kind of indoctrinated in that religion. They then are allowed to leave

for a year or two, but there's a very high rate of return. People say, hey, I went and I tried that other thing. It was fun, but this is, you know, how I grew up. This is what I actually want to live in. And so, you know, these are tools, right? Like, you know, going back to the ideology thing, if you have a platform, any ideology can spread. And so, we focus always on the negative component of it, which again, we should address, but there is a positive side to where maybe actually our ideologies are able to penetrate into these areas uh via the internet uh where otherwise they just don't know right if you're a 15 year old boy who grows up in an isis controlled territory everyone you know is in isis and it's seen as the kind of heroic thing to

do well what do you expect the 15 year old boy to do yeah right absolutely he's just going to follow the cultural norms it also reminds me of uh uh the saying um you shall know the truth and that you shall make you free right um exposing people if if on the market of ideas everyone is exposed to all the different ideas right let's just take some extreme examples like okay you've got nazism you've got isisism you've got communism you've got capitalism you've got you know different religions you've got all these different ideas right on the marketplace of ideas when people are exposed to all the different ideas equally let's say or they're given the opportunity to