The Team House - 13 Deployments, 1000+ Missions with the 75th Ranger Regiment | Nicholas Moore | Ep. 165

Episode Date: October 1, 2022

Sweeping from frozen mountaintops to dusty city streets, and everything in between, this is the gripping and deeply personal account of an elite Ranger who nearly lost his life “leading the way” in America's longest war. As part of an elite special operations unit at the fighting edge of the Global War on Terrorism, Nicholas Moore spent over a decade with the US Army's 75th Ranger Regiment on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. In this compelling biography now available in paperback, a detailed narrative of grueling life on the ground combines with accounts of some of the most dramatic search and rescue operations of the period to tell the true story of life on the line in the War on Terror. Charting his rise from private to senior non-commissioned officer, this title follows Moore as he embarks on a series of dangerous deployments, engaging in brutal street combat and traversing inhospitable terrain in pursuit of Taliban fighters and Iraq's Most Wanted. Including revelatory first-hand accounts of high-profile special operations missions including the tense rescue of Private First Class Jessica Lynch and the search and rescue mission for US Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell, Moore recounts, in vivid detail, the realities of life on the front line. Check out his book at: https://www.amazon.com/Run-Sound-Guns-American-Afghanistan/dp/1472827090 To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month  -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon! 👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch:  https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media:  The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #OperationRedWings #extortion17 #armyrangerBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, guys, welcome to episode 165 of the Team House. We're here tonight with Nicholas Moore. He is the author of Run to the Sound of Guns. He served in 2nd Ranger Battalion from the ranks of private to platoon sergeant, over 1,000 missions and 13 combat deployments where he was wounded.

He was involved in some very significant operations from Jessica Lynch to Extortion 1-7 to Operation Red Wings, the Recovery, to numerous other things that we'll get into tonight. So, Nicholas, thank you for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me. absolutely dude really appreciate you uh some uh some of your friday to speak with us uh no worries so let's start off man start we'll start start at the beginning the beginning of the story if you could tell us a little bit about uh sort of where you grew up and and and why you ended up in the military and why in ranger battalion uh so i grew up in uh newton kansas um and you know

just trying to figure out you know what to do and i thought you know college sucks but But if I join the Army and I want to go to school and, you know, I serve, then I can don't have to take a student loan and I can go and it's all good. And, you know, some of us do it and end up going to school and some of us don't. And we just end up staying in the military. But the whole thing was, you know, I had a recruiter, you know, that just based on the lifestyle that we had, you know, playing sports and being active and outdoor activities, hunting fishing and all that stuff. He goes, man, you guys love the Army. but you'll never be happy if you don't pursue the Ranger Regiment.

And so, you know, that was kind of, well, what's that? And, you know, so you do a little bit of research and you're like, okay, well, that's definitely what I want to do. And so, you know, you go do it. And, you know, there's the little mantra that goes with it, you know, as you continue to be in the Ranger Regiment, what have you done for the Ranger Regiment today? So, you know, there's always that little aspect, you know, as your career progresses through. It's always trying to better, you know, the organization as a whole.

Yeah. Did you do, was any of your family in the military? Was it something that you had been exposed to earlier than that? Or like, or is it just kind of, it seemed pragmatic at the time? No. My grandfather's both, both my grandfather served in World War II. And then, you know, we've had, you know, family members in the military. But mostly it's always been in the Navy.

and I had an aunt who served in the Air Force back in the late 70s, I think. But nobody really in the Army except for my grandfather's brothers. They were in the Army in World War II. But we're basically a Navy family. And then me and my brother decided we were both going to join the Army and be Rangers. So it was fun. you know, that part of it. My grandpa didn't talk to me for like three weeks

because he was mad. Really? We didn't join the Navy. Okay. So you and your brother, did you like have the same like entry date into the Army? I mean, was it that close? Yeah, we're identical twins.

So we graduated school and went through a basic training, Airborne school, Rip, and then got stationed together. So we did it all together all the way until, I think, 04, 05. and then he went down to his wife got restationed to Martin Army at Fort Benning. And so he went down to be a rip instructor. And that's kind of where our career split apart.

I stayed at second. And then he moved down to third for a while. And then, you know, went to some time in the big army and finished his career as an ROTC instructor at the University of Kansas. So what at that time, just to hit it up a little bit, going through base. training airborne school what was the rip experience like but that was 1999 pre pre 9-11 before the war kicked off what was it like going through ripter in that time frame uh you know it's uh i don't know if it's better or worse because now i think about it and just like god what i want to sit and do that for eight weeks the whole rass you know it was uh yeah the whole rasp thing it's like wow um no but it would

i had a i had a lot of fun there was really a lot of my ranger experiences that I didn't like. You know, some of them good, some of them bad, but they're all memories. And, you know, just kind of fun, you know, it's always that mental challenge through some of the things, you know, is can I make it to the end? And, you know, when you do, you're a better human for it and you're a better ranger all the way around. And you have, you know, a starting point to learn what suck is.

Yeah. So you get out of Rip and you go to the best company and the best battalion. Yeah. Right. BCO 275. Yeah. Right. Yep.

BCO 27 went to first platoon. My brother went to third. And so that was always fun. I mean, it was always, you know, all the way up until we both got our tabs. You know,

it was just, you know, who's got the better twin. And they were always, you know, putting us, pitting us against each other. And so it was, you know, nothing changed from school or, you know, sports.

And so it's just, you know. So 275, something different between 275 and 375 and I believe 175, and I believe 175 is you guys all have platoon names. And 375. Not every platoon, but yeah. In 375, I think my platoon was only one that had a name. But I'd like to hear what your platoon name was and how it got that name. Well, one bravo, it was eventually. it became the sea bass.

Okay. And it was just, you know, it was at the same, right, they tagged it right at, you know, the Afghanistan was just cranking off and Austin Powers had just come out. And it was, you know, our PL was calling us a bunch of mutant sea bass. And so it just kind of stuck.

And so that was that. And then, you know, I was in one Bravo till I, until I, in the middle of 03, and then I went over to three Charlie. and stay there until 08. So you actually were in Ranger's school during 9-11, right? Yeah.

So how did that get down for you? Yeah. You know, it's kind of one of those things. You know, sometimes you're like, now this can't really be happening. And we just thought it was some kind of weird, you know, false motivational thing that our eyes were doing. And we weren't, you know, nobody was really sure if it was something that everybody was, you know, accustomed to in every class that, you know, oh, we got to hurry up because, you know, the country's going to war and all this stuff.

And what kind of struck at home was, you know, when they came out and they asked people if they had family that worked at the World Trade Centers. And, you know, you kind of get the weird look like, why are you asking that? And then, you know, four, five minutes or so later, you know, hey, does anybody have parents that work at the Pentagon? and, you know, everybody's like, why would I raise my hand? I don't want to get singled out for something. And, you know, then they're kind of like, hey, no, this is, you know, serious. And they realized that we weren't believing them. And so they kind of called a couple of guys to go forward and just kind of see the newsfeed on a TV.

And for about five minutes. And then kind of came back and said, hey, they're not lying. It's, this is real. And so we have one guy who raised his hand and say, yeah, my dad works at the Pentagon. And, you know, they said, well, you need to call him. and so that really messed with him. It was a kid out of 375. And luckily his dad was out of the office.

I think he was at Fort Lee, Virginia that day. But he, you know, when he came back to work on the 12th, he didn't have an office. Holy shit. Yeah. And then how much, so how far into Ranger's school were you? And how much longer did you have to go? And how did that affect Ranger school?

Well, well, it. You know, we're basically day two. Okay. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. So, you know, we've just done the PT test in that morning. We just finished the five-mile run. And so it was interesting because you always hear the stories of guys, you know, you got to get, you know, 70% of your patrols.

You got to pass. Well, I mean, at that point, they were, you know, the RIs knew the writing on the wall. And so the whole point was to get the guys back to the unit. as fast as possible. So you pass one patrol and you never got another one. Yeah. So, you know, and then it became guys that failed patrols, you know, was putting the right guys in positions to help them get the next patrol to pass

so that they could go on to the next phase so that guys aren't stuck, you know, playing the, how many months can I be in Ranger school game? Right. And graduate and then get back to your units because we got to go. do business right yeah uh did you have any of those guys in when you were when you were doing a jack where they just assigned like four four bat guys to him and just say he's going to pass this patrol so you basically don't let him make any decisions i probably was that guy going through as an e2 had been in battalion for like two months i think i was that guy yeah yeah no but where

they basically give you the reins and say get this guy through this patrol. Right. You know, it's not the pick on people, but it's usually the young lieutenants that are just still trying to get their feet underneath them as, you know, what it's like to be a leader. And, you know, we've got, you know, guys from the Ranger Regiment have been there 12, 18 months. You know, some guys that got hurt, you know, maybe 24 months of experience.

And they kind of understand the game. So, you know, let's just turn them loose. Yeah. So you were, you were in Ranger school when the first, actions when Afghanistan kicked off, right? Like the, yeah, we were, yeah, we were just finishing up mountains when, when everything kicked off and we were getting graded patrols and who was going to go to Florida. And it just happened to be the night that 375 jumped on Rhino and the RIs wheeled the TV

cart out and said, hey, check this out. And all the guys from 375 were crying and the guys from first and second are laughing. And the guys from third are like, why are you, you know, why you laugh? and it's not funny, we're not a part of this. And it's like, well, guess what? Our battalions haven't gone yet. Yeah, yeah. Were you worried that it was going to be like another...

I'm going to miss the war, bro. Yeah, it was going to be like Desert Storm. It was going to be over before you were out of Ranger School. Yeah, there was a lot of us that were, you know, it was going to be the traditional like Renata, Panama Desert Storm, where it's going to be over as fast as it started. And, you know, you're going to miss it all. And, you know, you're going to miss it all.

and um but you know when you start thinking about the amount of time that it was going to take to to put everything over there you know and get it in place it was just a matter of you know when when's it going to be our turn and is there going to be anything left because the regiment's going to rotate everybody through at least once and right right so you graduate ranger school and how how was your reception when you got back the second bat what was going on at the time everybody just gotten back from Yakima. So it was kind of a, I got back like 24 hours before the battalion rolled back in from doing, you know, all the big fun stuff over in Yakima. And, you know, it was just kind of figuring out, you know, how the rotation was going to work because, you know, 175 was just gearing up to go.

And so we were trying to figure out what our training schedule was going to be and what it was going to look like. And then when was our window going to come to to go and was there still going to be anything to do when we got there? Yeah. And then 20 years later, it's still going on. Yeah. Yeah. So when did you get the word that you guys were heading over and like, what was it like jockeying up for that deployment,

getting ready to go out the door? We kind of got the word that we were still going to get to go. It was probably late November, December, you know, 175 is going to go. And then it's going to be our turn to go. And, you know, it might be the only deployment that we get in Afghanistan. But, you know, it's right as it stands right now, you know, we still had to go do a rotor wing, bilats and all the training that, you know, was normally, you know, gearing up for all that stuff. And so, you know, we did.

And then Bico led the push for second battalion because at that time it was basically, you know, there was only the need for like basically one company. we were still sitting, you know, split between Candahorn and Bogram, and that was about it. And then, you know, everybody realized that this was going to be the long fight. And so then we started kind of pushing out and doing the expansion for the American footprint and setting up bases and all that stuff. And that's kind of what we ended up doing our first deployment. And then after we've been there for, oh, I don't know, maybe a month or so, they rolled in with the rest of the battalion. So ACO and CCO came in and kind of helped expand the foot.

footprint and all the fun. So what was it? You know, like post-Hakugar, post-tacugar and, you know, at Operation Anaconda, there really was nothing going on in Afghanistan. You know, it was basically, you know, when you look at what was going on, you know, you hear about 175 in Robert's Ridge and then 375s jumping on rhino and doing all that stuff. And, you know, we're going over there thinking, you know, it's going to be game on.

It's spring, summer. And everybody's going to be fighting. And that was, you know, complete opposite. you know, say we're just as much as we were trying to feel out, you know, what was going on with the Taliban, you know,

they're kind of sitting back on the border and just watching, you know, how we're doing business. Yeah. So that first deployment was like pretty relatively quiet at the time? Yeah. I mean, we did one,

there was one operation where, you know, they got it, the platoon got in a gunfight. I was on a 50 cal. So I didn't, didn't get to be, you know,

on the ground for that one. But it was one engagement last. five seconds and that was it. Yeah. And the rest of the deployment was just setting up bases and driving around Afghanistan and Humvees. Oh, yeah. You mentioned,

you mentioned in your book that you actually had a guide, a tourist guide in a ranger who had been a Russian in Afghanistan. Yeah, there was a kid in, well, not a kid, but, you know, there was a guy in Thurpleton that it was, I believe he was Ukrainian, but, you know, it was part of the Soviet block at the time and he was 1819 and got conscripted into the Red Army and he spent a year in Afghanistan in like 88, 89 right when they were

shutting it down. But it was really cool because at the time, you know, he could tell you what everything was on Bogram, you know, all the remnants of what was left. So that was, I mean, for a history lesson, that was kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty surreal. So that was sort of your first trip. It was just, you know,

setting the footprint, there wasn't a lot of activity. What happened then after that, you went back and reset? And what was your kind of time between the deployments looking like at this point? You know, so we went back to reset, and that was kind of when everybody was thinking that, you know, this is basically a wrap up and, you know, we're not going to be involved in this anymore. But, you know, all the time has got at least one deployment. and, you know, 375 came back over and ripped us. And, you know, so when it came time, you know, throughout the year that it was, we were

going to at least go one more time. It was, you know, Iraq was ramping up. And so it was like, okay, well, who's going to go to Afghanistan? And so Charlie Company got picked to go to Afghanistan. And the whole preface for them to go was to shut down the special ops, you know, footprint over there. and then kind of if things did crank off in Iraq, then they were going to join us over in Iraq.

And, you know, they ended up staying for six months. You know, they did their three-month deployment plus the Iraq and, you know, and stuff. So they got stuck in Afghanistan for six months. So let's just say manning retention in Charlie Company was terrible after everybody got home. Yeah. Yeah. So then you guys were working up towards the invasion of Iraq, right?

which was that that was right of of 2003 so were you guys part of that initial invasion or did you get through shortly after it um we uh the battalion was infilling you know shortly before everything cranked off but we didn't

actually put wheels down you know uh over there until the night that it officially cranked off because we got a had a bird we are bird broke in Germany and what was you know it's always kind of of one of those those fun things are you know,

you're riding in on the C-17, you got your gas masks strapped to your hip and you're wearing your mop suit. Right. Right. So can you tell us a little bit about what a mop suit is for the people who might not be familiar with it?

It's a chemical suit that you have to wear. And, you know, it's a charcoal-lined suit and for gas and biological weapons and stuff. It's going to help keep it off your skin and they're terrible to wear. Yeah, they, they're like hot in the, they're hot in the daylight and cold at night. Yeah.

Yeah, they trap air. They're basically like sweats like the plastic suits that you used to wear for wrestling or whatever. Like they're not comfortable at all. No. Yeah. So when you guys, because your bird got hung up in, in Germany, when you landed for the invasion, did you guys go to Saudi or did you go, did you go someplace?

for since you know we landed in Saudi okay yeah so you know every everywhere where the special ops footprint was during Desert Storm was the same place that we went to and you know basically basically unloaded and then just got everything set and I think within a couple of days we were running cross-border ops out south and the west yeah and so then what was that like for you like moving into you know from Saudi into Iraq and what kind of vehicles were you guys in and and what were the last operation? We were running the soft skin, you know, Humvee gun trucks. We'd skin the roofs off and taking the windows out, which was stupid.

Because we caught one of the sandstorms right after it happened. And I know Thurpleton got caught out in it in the trucks and the windshields, and they're trying to hold MRE boxes up over their face to keep rocks from blowing in. And, you know, nobody can see anything. So they're stuck sitting out there in it until the sun comes up. and then they can at least try and attempt to get back. And so it was interesting. You know, we had 550 cord from all the tents to the latrines and to the chow hall

so the guys could follow the string and, you know, walk around and the brown out. Yeah. Yeah. Those sandstorms were something else out there. And then, so how long was your trip to Iraq and, like, did anything particularly notable happened during your tour? were there? Not of the first part of it, you know, until everything came down for, uh, for us to do the Jessica Lynch rescue. And we had just rolled in off a like a 24 hour op to go tie in with

375 and help them come back from H1, uh, where they, where they jumped in and then bring their vehicle convoys back. Um, so we drove out, tied in with them and then brought this like five mile long convoy back across the border. And then you were rolling in dog tie. and the commander comes out of his tent and he's like hey pack your stuff we're leaving in three hours and we're going to go do this and i was like how that's funny and seriously folks yeah i'm this stupid e4 what do i know that the commander's not just you know not being a jerk and and trying to get guys to have some kind of false motivation because you know you get in dog tired and throw down on the cot and start cleaning your rifle and squalier comes back in he's like no pack your stuff

because we're out of here. Yeah. And were you guys aware of Jessica Lynch of that whole situation at the time? Or was the mission? No, I mean, no, we hadn't really gotten any. I mean, we kind of got like a little brief of it. But the kind of the, you know, kind of the, the, all of the whole thing was like, how in the heck does a maintenance company get ahead of the front line?

Yeah. You know, it's like the, the unfathomable, you know. how does this happen? You know, we start kind of spitball in this whole thing. And you start, you know, talking to some of the maintenance units that are out there. And they just, you know, at the time, they weren't equipped with night vision at the time. They're still driving, you know, blackout lights and the way that, you know, everybody has since World War II. It's just slow moving and trying to navigate.

And, you know, only the combat arms units have night vision because that's a priority. Right. So, you know, it was just kind of like, how does this even happen? Yeah. And so what was what was the mission as it was brief to you guys? What was your role and what was the overall effort? We were going to set in as far as Bravo Company's part of it. We were going to infill on Marine Corps 46s on the west side of Nazaria. Kind of on this flat looked like a kind of a trash pit area on the west side of town. And then we were just going to run in a few blocks off the desert and establish blocking positions around the, the hospital while

175, a company from 175 was going to skirt all the way around on the east and then come in from the north and then bringing the, you know, the big guns on the trucks and just basically you know, lock it all down until we had

gotten her out and gotten confirmation and recovery of everybody else that was off those trucks. And I was, we were only on the ground for like three and a half hours and it was all done yeah i mean by the time the seals came in on the hospital and did the whole uh you know recovery of her we had just basically put the blocking positions on the ground we hadn't even gotten them established yet as far as how fast that that that whole

thing happened it was a matter of just moments yeah and uh because um you know but it was fun um you know it was fun to be a part of it and you know like we were saying earlier it says you know there's all these things it's just another day at the office until you get later in life and then you start talking to people about it and then it's like wow uh you know that's kind of a historic you know event that we got to be a part of uh you know it's the first successful pooh rescue in over 40 years yeah yeah and then what happened in terms of recovering the bodies were you were you guys part of that? No, that was a 1-175 with, you know, their guys on the trucks.

So they recovered them and then they ground ex-filled them out on their, on the Humvees. And so we just, you know, maintain blocking positions and stuff until, you know, that they were done and they had ex-filled the trucks. And then we pushed out for ex-fell on the 46s and, you know, got back on the air base there, and Nazaria and, you know, high-fives and handshakes and it was all good. and, you know, go find your friends in 175 and see how everything went on their aspect of it when they rolled back in. Yeah. And how, I mean, I can't imagine that that that was, well, of course it wasn't pleasant, but was it, was it pretty harrowing for them?

Because those bodies were in shallow graves, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it was, you know, they, they said it wasn't, it wasn't pretty. Yeah. Yeah. And I could only imagine, you know, I have, you know, later seeing some of the things that I've seen, you know, later on. It's just, you know, it's not fun. Yeah. So was there anything else that happened during that trip to Iraq that was notable? We did, you know, Operation Reindeer, which was, you know, the true, you know, the true Ranger mission smash everything, kill everyone.

and, you know, destroy it all and then, you know, come out high-fiving and handshaking at the end. We had our first wounded in action on that deployment, a team leader from second squad, got hit with an RPG and lost his lower left leg. So, you know, other than that, it was a, you know, it was a great. traditional, you know, typical Ranger training up, you know, shoot everything. I'm sorry, but do you remember many of the details of Operation Reindeer in terms of like who you were after and sort of what, how it's going to go down? Yeah. So what it came, came down to was that there was a, a SIGA collection that had, you know, large size force was kind of out training in the, in the, in the, desert kind of northwest

Afghanistan Iraq and it was just basically you know it was like 80 to 120 is what Intel was putting on that it was and you know you could tell they were holding formations and they were doing

training and things like that and so it was you know who could hit this first and you know this is at the big command level and this is you know what's been filtered down through the company commander at the time was that it was in the 100 first sale or area of operation and they were going to take like a week to plan it out and that what didn't make you know the powers that be happy and

so it kind of came into the special op side and you know we just said it well we can hit it tomorrow and so we you know just worked through our normal off cycle and planned it out rehearsed it and you know it it basically other than um matt getting hurt you know it worked it you know the same way it does in training um but even to that part you know we train you know casually play and all that stuff so it it just sucked that you know it would actually happen sure so i mean that was a pretty sizable force on that target yeah yeah it was um I don't, the exact count, I don't remember exactly the number, but, you know, it was over 80. So first and second came in on helos and third had launched basically about 10 hours before the half, the, the helo package launched.

And they drove up on trucks. They were going to do the backside blocking and set up the far up for the little birds and all the stuff. And so then they, you know, after we exfilled the half, then they stayed. and kind of did the BDA, the battle damage assessment afterwards and gave a rough count and handed the objective over to the 101st when they came in to take control of it. So it was kind of interesting when they came back, you know, kind of get the picture of what it looked like in the daylight.

Yeah. So after that, then it was back home. you become a team leader? Or were you over? Yeah, we moved over to Charlie Company and took a fire team over in Charlie Company. And then we did the winter surge in 03 to Afghanistan. We walked around in the mountains for six weeks. We always call it Mount Faye's research for those of us that were there.

And can you tell us about that? What was, was it similar to your first appointment to Afghanistan or was it completely different? I was different because we were up in the Konaar and in the Pesh River Valley. This is that big surge. This is the big surge Wesley Morgan writes about, isn't it? Yeah, I believe so. Yeah.

Yeah. So we were, you know, kind of expanding the footprint and just kind of getting into the mountains to kind of chase down some of the rat lines that people were, you know, Taliban and fighters were using to come in and just kind of deny the access through the mountains in the winter. and show that everybody that, hey, we're not afraid to come up here and we're not afraid to hang out for weeks on end and do our thing, which was, it was fun. I mean, you know, like I wrote in my books, you know, some of a lot of the people, you know, in villages at like 10,000 feet, you know, they're still thinking that the Russians are in there. Yeah. And so, you know, just to see the disconnect in that country at, you know, at that, you know, at that primitive point was like, no, they haven't been. here for like 10 winters now at least what was it like operating at that altitude and such like i mean that's some of the most difficult terrain in the world uh it was definitely um taxing if you will

some of the guys you know they never been at altitude like that some of the guys you know out of florida and jorda and you know never you know being on the mount yona and ranger school is probably some of the highest elevation that they've ever been on. And so you're getting guys up there, you know, 10,000 feet or above and guys are coming with altitude sickness and they're just not being able to adjust as easily as some. And, you know, manning is still low in Charlie Company at the time because it's just coming off the Iraq thing. Guys are like, I'm out of here. We got hosed over. And so we're in there with five-man squads. So we're still carrying all the gear for nine. and so

the only nice thing is we went in with no body armor we were just carrying chest racks and rucksacks but the rucksacks were still weighing in about 80 to 90 pounds depending on you know what is in there yeah yeah that land will break you too that's not easy terrain to move over

no you know then we did we did hire on some pack mules which is kind of interesting for a while. And that was, a lot of it was just to go to the resupply points and be able to bring back the supplies that we needed instead of doing the Ranger School Rup Dump

and then walking down and loading up and then carrying it all back up. It's like, well, let's just hire some people with mules and we'll pack mule this stuff up there. And all we have to do is just walk. So did you guys just hire like the mules or did you actually have people? Because you have to know what you're doing with them.

mule, right? Yeah, no, we hired the locals at the time. And it's like, hey, you know, here's however much in, you know, Pakistani rupees that makes them happy and it feels like they're justified to waste a day, you know, renting their mules to us and walking them up

the mountain. Yeah. And then bringing the cases of MREs and whatnot. One of those stories, oh, I was going to say one of the stories you told during that time, because you guys were on the HVT, the high value target, and the time sensitive target.

And can you tell us about when you went out with the seal team? Oh, so we had just coming out of the, out of the Pesh. We'd been in there for three weeks and it was like supposed to have like 72 hour rest and refit back at Blogger. So we all get back, you know, off the, off the birds and, you know, it's kind of standing around in line for showers and this HVT comes down. And they said, hey, the team's going to, seal team's going to go out and hit this. And we've got to go out and do blocking position.

So get it all back on and load up. And so, you. you know, I didn't get a shower. And so we roll in there, we hit this draw off the, off the Konar. And, you know, seals are hit the wrong side of the valley because Intel's just not very good in Afghanistan at this point. It's just, you know, it's humid. So there's a huge margin of error in it. And they didn't want to walk across the valley and go up.

So they just call the helo to come pick them up from one side and carry him to the other because they didn't want to walk it. In a nutshell, I guess that's the nice way to put it short. Yeah. Yeah. So was there anything else on that? And for those of you who don't know, I'm not really drinking. I'm on meds. I had surgery.

So if I'm a little like faded. But was there anything else on that particular trip that? Because you mentioned that that was. Up to that point, like sort of one of the best sort of all around sort of, I guess, military experiences you had just in terms of the type of job you guys were doing? Yeah, you know, it was kind of the, for those of us later on that, you know, that were still in the regiment or the battalion, you know, that kind of became the baseline for the word suck. It was like everything else, if it did, you know, meet that threshold of just pain and misery, it, it wasn't. that bad. Right. Because that was, it was just brutal. I mean, you know, got knee knees and ankles and, you know, guys are quitting. And it's like, oh, well, awesome. You can quit all you want. You ain't

coming off the mountain. They're not sending a helicopter for you. Right. Yeah. Where are you going to go? Yeah. Yeah. So you're private. They're not going to send a helicopter. Come get you. It's great. Awesome. We'll deal with, you know, you quitting later. And those are also the type of operations that you hold over the new guys head when they weren't on it. You're like, oh, you know, they started complaining like, you weren't there. Yeah, but then you made yourself feel like a dinosaur later on. Right.

Right. So then, so you guys are on this hopping schedule because that was in 2000, like late 2003. And then the spring, you're right back in Iraq again. Yeah. We did the winter, the end of 03. We were back in Afghanistan. And then we were kind of doing the spring surge as we, referred to it in 2004 and it was just a short little 45 day to kind of reinforce the

the special ops footprint so we could move some units around you know shift guys and not have a loss in combat abilities yeah so that was that was definitely interesting because that was like the the introduction if you will to IEDs you know at that point you know was starting to get armored vehicles and it's like, why are we driving around with this? You know, what's the big deal? You know,

they're like pop can size explosives. And, you know, like within a year, you know, we're, they're planting, you know, 2,000 pounds of HME under the roadbeds and blowing tanks apart.

Yeah. Yeah. And well, and not just that, but you talk about your story with the, the tanks, the Abrams tanks, right?

Yeah. Yeah. we had that trip. We were going from biap, from the airport into town, into the green zone to link up to do an op. And, you know, we're running blacked out. And, you know, we got the city light shining in our face. So you can't really see anything other than about 20 yards in front of you. But, you know, the highway is a long straight run. And so, you know, put it down and just go. And there was a tank that had been sitting in the median. and they traversed the cannon to look at something with thermal off the cannon, and they brought the barrel across at a zero plane,

and it was right at the same time we came in with the truck and almost killed the gunner out of my truck. He was in a medically induced coma for about 45 days, and his face was broken in about 13 places. Turned the Mark 19 on the lead truck into a, basically the receiver was a banana, and the barrel broke in three places. the strike plate we never found.

And, you know, it basically almost totaled the truck. It took us two days to get the turret, you know, reconfigured with strip parts off other vehicles and put it back together. Jesus, that's insane. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, and it's weird sometimes, too, in combat, how it's those, you know, in a war zone, how, how it's some of the most random events that, that, that, you know, you know, blue on blue isn't always just friendly fire. Sometimes it's just these incredibly random events like that.

You know, and it was just one of those things. They didn't see us because they were busy looking at something and we couldn't see them with the lights and just the, you know, the, we're all running, you know, the monocular PBS 14s. And, you know, it's like, well, hey, we're good. We own this section of highway between town and the airport. And there's nothing going on out here ever. And so, you know, we don't really need to, you know, watch out for for other forces. But, you know, there's a tank sitting in the median. Right, right.

Happened to be the, you know, I just had chosen to drive in the left lane as the lead truck, you know, and we hit it. Didn't damage the tank. I mean, we scratched the paint a little bit, but no damage to the barrel. Yeah. And so that was a. a fairly uneventful trip for you guys, right? Yeah, that one, that one was, yeah. As far as any operations that saw, you know,

any contact in it, you know, there wasn't really a lot going on at that point. And then your next trip was Mosul? Yes. Well, no, Afghanistan. Oh, Afghanistan? We went to Afghanistan. That's 05. That was Marcus Littrell.

Okay. Okay, sorry about that. So can you... No, that's right. Yeah, so can you tell us about that then? Marcus LaTrell, you know, it's a... Afghanistan targeting was, you know, still in its infancy. It's still a lot of human-based at that point in time in Afghanistan.

So there really wasn't a great targeting platform to go on. You know, we look for, you know, legacy targets and plan out some of that stuff. And as far as what the Rangers were doing, a lot of it, we were just on TSTs, time-sensitive target, manning for one platoon. And then the other was on CSAR combat search and rescue. It was a basic standard ranger taskings at that point in time. And we had just rotated off of the CSR tasking onto the time-sensitive target tasking. So we had just finished all the stand-ups for running through timelines and check. checks on all that stuff and got the word that, you know,

Marcus LaTrell's team was going to go out and do this, Operation Red Wings. And, you know, as Rangers always do, you know, we get enough information to have a conversation about it at Chow Hall table. And so started talking with some of the reckey guys. And, you know, they're, you know, they're briefing us because they've been following this a lot closer than like a rifle platoon has that wasn't kind of in our, in our wheelhouse as far as targets we were looking at,

but stuff that Recky had been looking at in areas to do some of their stuff. And they were like, yeah, we wouldn't do it this way, not four guys. No, we'd take a whole Recky section, you know, 12 guys, but we wouldn't do it without a rifle team and support, you know, even if it was a, you know, 5K standoff between the two because they can fight to us and we can fight to them. And it's a bigger footprint on the ground. Yeah, do we run the risk of spoiling the target?

Yes. You know, on the other side of it, you know, we as Rangers, you know, we're always going to bring everything in the kitchen sink to bear on an objective and turn the, you know, the odds in our favor. And, you know, did they do anything wrong the way they did it? No. They made judgment calls along the way and, you know, we can armchair quarterback this. Right. You know, years later and say, well, I wouldn't have done that. and I wouldn't have done this, but, you know, they did what they do.

Right. So, you know, that led us into, you know, them losing comms and them getting in the fight. And, you know, as the movie portrays it out. You know, and then we've got to go in and do the combat search and rescue on the turbine 3-3 crash site and then figure out what the question mark is. What was going to? on on your base with your platoon. I mean, are you getting word that this team is compromised? There are guys who are MIA. We might have to go look for them. Then you find out a bird went down. I mean, can you take us through a little bit of that? So that morning, so June 28th, that morning,

you know, we got up and we just did what Rangers do. You know, we got up to PT, went and ate breakfast going on with our training cycle. We were going to go out to East River Range, which is just outside of Bogram, the little town of Bogram. So we left the base, got outside there. we're going to go do some shooting drills and just, you know, have a good session on the range. We get out there and start throwing the target stands off the trucks, and that's about the time that, you know, we find out that the burst been shot down. And, you know, it was, hey, don't worry about what you've thrown off the trucks, get back on the trucks. We've got to get back.

And there was a lot of guys were like, what are we doing? And, you know, we didn't have any of the answers at the leadership level of what was going on. We just knew that, you know, we had to be back for something that was going to get briefed, you know, to us. And as the situation was developing, and so then as we were rolling back in, you know, we'd find out that the aircrafts had been shot down, that teams in the fight. And, you know, we're just on standby at that point. So I wouldn't really kind of understand the whole situation for, you know, probably another six years as I progress through through leadership. But, you know, as I tell people, it's, you know, as a young guy, you know,

it's not that we're not going to get in there and we're not going to be a part of this and we're not going to, but we're going to turn the tables. So that way, when we do recommit forces into this area, we've got so many assets to bear on the objective that nobody would be in their right mind to want to play. So, you know, it was probably, you know, about 10 hours or so after the initial shootdown that, you know, that night as we're getting ready to launch. And then you finally got the green light that we're going to go and we load up everybody that's going to fit on the aircraft at altitude and launch. And then we hit mountain weather on that night and have to divert infill and go sit at Jolabad for a day. and then wait to get infield the next night. What was your understanding at that time of the situation on the ground?

So the understanding was that the 47 had been shot down. There was no movement on that. You know, ISR feeds were terrible at the time. I, you know, don't even understand how people could understand, you know, what they're seeing on that screen. It was such a bad quality feed. even then, you know. And so we knew that the aircraft been shot down.

We were going in to do combat search and rescue on the crash. You know, Murphy's team was still a question mark as to what's going on because there had been no radio comms with them since Murphy's sat phone call. So the priority tasking was to recover the crash because we knew where it was. and then after that it would just be to figure it out, if you will. So we interviewed Tony Brooks on the show before. Was he in your platoon? Tony was in one Charlie.

So he was the other half of the element that went up. So it was a third platoon led the way because we weren't on the C-Sar. So we didn't have all the recovery and crash axes and all the stuff. stuff to do that. So we kind of plowed the way, if you will, and we were there to kind of take the brunt of any contact that was going to be made because we were just there to add security to what they were going to come in and do. As far as recovery, that was, you know, one Charlie's tasking at the time. So that was, that was where Tony was. And, um, okay, cool. Yeah, no, it's cool to get like some different perspectives on it. So, so then what was your

platoon, I mean, you just explained what your platoon's role was, but then walk us through infill and getting on the ground. So infill, we infilled somewhere about, probably about 8,000 feet and it was what we could get to with the package size that we had on the aircraft.

And so we knew there wasn't a way to land anywhere up there. So we knew it was going to be a rope and it was going to be at least a minimum of 40 footer. And it ended up 40. And then as a rope drifts, you know, it kind of goes 40 to 60 to, you know, as it works out.

And then when one Charlie came in, I know their rope started at 60 and it ended somewhere around 80. Tony said they just roped down into fog with like no idea of where the bottom was. Yeah, yeah, it was. Well, I mean, the fog came in after we were already on the ground. I know what he's talking about because, you know, it is just the way the weather was working. and, you know, it was just, it was, you know, one of those points where I never really, you know, after a private, I never roped with, with leather gloves, you know, fast rope, you know, the working work gloves anymore. I always did it in, I mean, no-mex shooting gloves. The hamburger helpers. Yeah, I never tried, like trying to take those gloves off and always felt like my hands got so much hotter. And, you know, I had a teen sergeant and said, hey, just, just rope in your shooting gloves because you don't have to grip the rope is tight. You, it dissipates the heat. as well and he said just try it on the fast rope tower so i did and that's a that's a 40 foot

rope and you know it wasn't terrible and then i was watching guys carrying 240s and stuff roping in and they've got the big thick gloves on and they're squeezing extra tight just to have a feeling on the rope right and so then they're burning in you know and their hands are getting so hot that you know they're blistering at you know still 10 or 15 feet above ground and they're just letting go they're like i'll just deal with it when to hit the ground and you know when one charlie came in you know, they had the same problem and guys were falling off and then they were just ending up in a big pile. And I know their RTO had had his arm broken because he got stepped on. Yeah. That's. And so, you know, he got guys that need to get medevac, but you ain't getting

medevac. Yeah. Yeah. So what was it like for your platoon roping in and getting on the ground? It wasn't, we didn't have any contact or anything. And it was, it was quiet, you know, and then when you when the brownout cleared and all the, you know, the wash of everything and, you know, you kind of look up the mountain, you know, you can see the crash because it's still on fire. Still burning. And it's just kind of one of those

ominous moments, if you will. You just kind of, you know, the gravity of what you're doing has finally set in because you're seeing it with your own eyes and not on a TV screen. And then, you know, it just becomes the all-night walk uphill through the nettles and, you know, the Scotchburn, or not the Scotchburn, but, you know, the pines and all the ground cover that's up there in the mountains. And it's just...

Were you guys, was there any intelligence that there were enemies on the objective or around the objective? We had, you know, any eyes around the area, but it wasn't anything like on the objective. there wasn't any movement on there, you know, throughout the day or, or anything. And there wasn't, there wasn't any, you know, people coming and going from it. I think, you know, looking back at it now, as they realized what they had done and what was about to happen. And so they just kind of got a little bit of standoff. And they really were, it was to observe, you know, how we were going to take care of it. Yeah.

And so, you know, as the, the, that day, into, you know, a week to two weeks, you know, at night, you know, you see little fires on the mountain and, you know, get eyes on it as best you can. And then AC130s dropping, you know, 105s on it. Yeah. So what was that first movement, that first night? What was the movement like for you guys? How long did it take? It took all night. We didn't get to the top until about an hour before, you know, sunrise and then we're sitting there on it and then kind of listening to one Charlie, you know, suck their way up the mountain. And then one bravo was still about halfway up the mountain because they had driven in from Jolalabad the night or the morning that it

happened. They drove up the 90K in their trucks. And then they started walking from the base of the mountain up. And they didn't make it until the next day. And, you know, know, only about half the guys that started to climb up the mountain made it up. The rest of them had to go back down and get picked up by the trucks and, you know, because they're just either heat, heat exhaustion or, you know, twisted ankles and whatnot. Yeah. Yeah. And so what did that, what was the next like week to, what, how, what did that set in motion for you guys in particular? So what has set in motion for us was, You know, priority

tasking was to accountability and recovery of all, you know, members of that aircraft crew and then the QRF team that was on there. So that totaled 16. And so we got those numbers, you know, kind of early afternoon. And there was a small clearing

on top of the mountain. You could put a small helicopter, like a little bird on it. But it was, you know, CDS drops for demolitions. And, you know, basically had to create in HLZ to be able to get everybody off that mountain that, you know, the remains for those guys. And so it was kind of a good distraction, if you will, to do timber charges and clear that

space to be able to make enough room to bring, you know, a helicopter in. And so we just finished our regimental breaches course. and so all that old stuff, you know, that timber stuff was still fresh in everybody's mind. So it was, you know, we're all sitting there trying to do the math and the first arms are like, use the peat method. Yeah. So we're sending a tree stumps and everything up, you know, like Roman candles. It was, you know, just pack as much explosives in these little burrow holes underneath and launch it.

And so that was fun. We cleared that. And then we got the tasking for, you know, what would turn out to be go down the mess. mountain and find Marcus. And so that started the fun of the mountain weather moved in that night and dumped on us and we're trying to walk downhill and, you know, the trail's a little stream bed at the time. And so guys are slipping and falling and guys are trying to not fall off the ridge. And then we end up just for safety reasons, you know, we end up spending the last few hours kind of huddled under pine trees waiting for the sun to come up so that we don't

lose anybody how many guys did you have left in your platoon at this point uh we had split the four so we had two two squads in the pls package so you know the platoon leader r to foe were with us and then the platoon sergeant had his you know uh one squad two machine guns you know on still on the top of the mountain and um close to the crash side We knew we were, yeah, they were still up there with one Charlie and reinforcing them. And we're just kind of the maneuver element, if you will, going down and trying to confirm or deny what this push-tock signal was that we were getting being triangulated down into this. I always forget the name of the village. So I can't ever remember it.

So you guys had to kind of like hide out, not hide out, but take cover under the punch. trees until dawn and then continue to move down to where this you know ostensibly there is a second hit that you had to go investigate right and so that was basically confirm or deny um you know was it enemy recovered american equipment or was it actually in fact you know uh murphy's team or you know what what the question mark was still for that and that was kind of where we were at for the tasking, you know, the crash had been accounted for us, and now we're just trying to figure out, you know, the fate of, you know, this four-man seal team. And so, you know, finally put you down in there. Was it a consistent signal that you guys were going off of? Or was it just like a single,

a couple hits and they're like, okay, around this general area? No, it wasn't like a consistent, but, you know, it was like somebody just key in the push to talk, you know, intermittently enough to get an orbital transmission to triangulate, you know, where it was. And so it was kind of confirm or deny what that was. So, you know, there was an SF team that was walking up that we tied in with. Okay. And then pushed back down into this little village. And then, you know, as we're doing the ranger smash through all the doors and clearing the village, you know, here comes Marcus, you know, up from where they had him.

hidden and kind of stashed and so um you know confirm that and then start you know doing the so so they actually brought marcus out to to meet you guys right and they knew why we were there they knew right right for and so it was to you know hand him over and then do the you know the kind of the whole s f thing where they do the you know let's drink some tea and talk and you know what what was that moment like what was that moment like when you first got face to face with Marcus and confirm this guy's alive and what what was your your perception of all that um i don't know the big question you know that we you know the first thing that we asked was once you know you went through the whole challenge and and kind of confirmed that it is him you know

through the whole you know m i p o w m i cards that you know we all fill out and going through that it was you know dude where's everybody else you know and then um you know he's like they're dead well, okay, great. Not great, but, you know, it's like, okay, but where? They're on the mountain. That's it. You know, it's kind of that, you can't give me anything more. The CEO has just started kind of a frustration thing, and I get it.

You know, he'd been, you know, that probably wouldn't have been fun to come down that mountain the way he says he came down that mountain. But, you know, I would like to hope to think that, you know, my friends were dead on that mountain I can at least remember some kind of terrain feature that I could at least tell somebody that they're, you know, they're up here in this area. And so what was the next step after that initial, you had that initial questioning of Marcus? What, what happened next? So what happened next was, you know, we just kind of secured the little village that we were at and, you know, confirmed that it was him, passed up, you know, over SAP that, you know, we had him and we were in control of him.

And then we just had to sit and wait for nightfall to come so that we could bring in the middle back bird and get him out. And then it just started, you know, days and days and days of sweeping and searching this mountainside. For the rest of the team. For the rest of the team. I mean, did you guys eventually find the remains of those three other guys? Yeah, we exiled Marcus in the next day. you know we were sweeping the lower portion of this of this spur and the other half of our platoon was coming from the top of the ridge down we were just kind of meeting in the middle and so after

we had met in the middle and you know kind of traded information they got a break you know they started to climb back up for the night and we turned around and it started coming back down to to finish our suite they stumbled on on two of the remains just by happenstance somebody lost their footing and slipped into a little wash and ended up, you know, face first with two of them. Oh, man. That's rough. And so

one of the rough part was is they still had to go like 800 meters vertically with, you know, two sets of remains. And all we have is the old school poncho method to carry them up. Right.

Because you couldn't do it with a litter. So it was wrapping them up into poncho and and kind of getting them up as best as possible. And, you know, then they had the carry, traverse them across the ridge back over to the HLZ. And, you know,

and that was the hard part is after that. Now we're just looking for one person. Right. And, you know, we ended up searching for, oh, man,

probably another 10 days before we got ripped out when 375 came in. Yeah. And at that point, you know, we're 14 days, or 12 days into this whole thing. And it's guys are just gassed. Yeah. And I remember Tony saying that, I mean, the weather, you guys weren't getting enough water, that it was just, it was just nonstop for you guys. Yeah, it was, you know, from sun up to sundown, you know.

And then you got to, you know, we're pulling security and small elements. And so you're not getting much sleep. and guys are getting sick with, you know, dehydration stuff or guys are getting, you know, you know what it happens and you get a bad MRI and then you got a little bit of food poisoning or whatever and work doesn't stop. You just got to keep going.

Yeah. I know you've got a little bit of food poisoning from an MRI that may have spoiled and you ate it anyway. Yeah. So. Yeah. So you guys get ripped out before. you find the

the final body. Yeah. And then, but we got ripped out and then, so I want to say it was probably eight hours later, you know, that 375 had found the, the last one. And so, you always, we were happy that we were upset that, you know, we didn't end up finding him, you know, because somebody else had to come in, but, you know,

we were glad it was over with. Right. Right. Well, you said, you mentioned earlier on that, you know, there were things that you pieced together years after the event, because at the time, you know, you're a sergeant, you're, you know, reacting on the ground as things unfold in front of you, doing the best you can. I just wanted to ask you real quick, you know, what's your perception of what happened out there today versus what it was when you were actually there as a younger, man. I mean, is there anything you've learned, anything that kind of like opened up your scope or offered a wider context that was surprising to you or that kind of, that you look at this event much differently today than you did at the time? I think just what, you know, it comes

in mind is, you know, the amount of effort that goes into this type of situation is one of those things that we never trained for when, you know, nobody ever goes into a training scenario. that, oh, we're going to have aircraft shot down. We're going to do this and we're going to do that and then all this kind of stuff. And so it's like the worst of everything, you know, as far as the circumstances. And it's trying to understand all the pieces, you know, the wizard behind the curtain, if you will, of what's going on. And, you know, it's all the questions that we asked after we got back.

You know, why did it take so long for us to launch, you know, what were the circumstances? And you know, it's, when this type of situation happens, it is, everything stops in, in, in theater, you know, and then it's, it's all assets shift, focus, and it's trying to put everything in place. So that way, you know, like I said, you know, when we do commit the force, it is, you know, with all the odds can be stacked in our favor as best as possible. And so, you know, not to jump forward too far, but, you know, it's kind of one of those things that always stuck in my head. And then when the extortion one-seven shootdown happened, you know, we're on the ground. And so then it's, I can explain, you know, because I'm the old fart at this time. You know, it's kind of explains the voice on the fly is like, hey, look, you know, this is what's happening behind the scene. You know, we're here in the middle of it right now, but this is what's going on on the backside. And so it's not that, you know, we're not going to get things that we need, but there are steps and things that have to happen.

And so it was one of those. That was the big learning lesson for me was, you know, what are all these steps on the backside of this type of scenario? It's, as we talked about on last Friday's episode, I mean, it's amazing the effort that the U.S. military will go through to recover our soldiers. soldiers, even if it's only to recover their remains, that will go through incredible lengths to repatriate every American troop is just incredible. Right. Right. You know, that was, you know, the Warfighter series on History Channel, we did a segment with this Marcus Lattrell Red Wings Recovery and, you know, something that he said, you know,

it's, you know, when they get in trouble, you know, it's, it's not expected, but, you know, when they say that the Rangers are coming in, you know, it's, they're coming in with everything, you know, because, you know, we're bringing everybody that we can and we're bringing all the toys and all the stuff and, you know, we're bringing a big footprint. And. Yeah. Um, it, I mean, and, you know, even though it was, it was challenging for all the Rangers involved. I mean, we, I mean, I'm grateful and I think, you know, obviously the

families are grateful. Like, everybody's grateful that those seals did come home, you know, that they were found. Because that would also be a horrible, you know, thing for a family to go, are they just out there missing, you know, are they still alive being held somewhere? Like to this day, I mean, DPAA, I mean, we deal with it with our Vietnam veterans, you know, there's like 150 special forces. soldiers alone, I believe, were missing somewhere in layouts in Cambodia. And I mean, that's just terrible. Yeah.

Yeah. So after, did it, aside from that, you guys ripped out. So you left Afghanistan at that point, correct? Yeah, that was our last off. You know, we were out of there with just a couple of days, long enough to, you know, download the ammunition, pack everything up, throw it in a pallet, and get on aircraft. We were, we were out. And then you turned a lot.

round and then you were in Mosul in 2006. And I thought you're, yeah, I thought that your, uh, your chapter name fast and less furious was, was funny. Can you, can you tell us why you, why you called your chapter that? Uh, you know, it was just a, I'm not really sure anymore. I was just kind of a play on, on words with, you know, I, you know, things are speeding up in in Afghanistan, but, you know, or in Iraq, but, you know, not necessarily are we having more fun, if you will. There's not, you know, we're smashing targets and taking guys in, but we're not really getting in the fight.

Right. There's no gun fights really going on. And part of that, the way, what I got from this chapter and the way you explain it, the reason you weren't getting in as many gun fights is because you guys had really nailed down how to do these hits and that 98% of these hits, were done silently where the bad guys never even knew you were there until

Exactly, you know, it was one of these You know, so we've just come out of Afghanistan We've been dealing with this and you know The other batons are you know kind of setting this new Trend if you will, this new TTP for this what we're calling silent entry And you know it's not the traditional ranger Below the front door open go in smash everything

It's you know how can we come in as sneaky and quiet as absolutely possible and, you know, basically we're waking people up out of a dead sleep to take these targets. And so, you know, at first you're like, oh, this is such a big letdown. But then as you start going on and it really becomes this thing that we're all kind of driving for is, you know, mission success is now not how much can we smash, but how successfully can we get in repeatedly, silently without firing any of these shots? because now we're getting all of this intel from all these people through interrogations and all this stuff. And so, you know, when you shift your mindset kind of away from the traditional, you know,

what we like to call the Ranger Smash, and now we're kind of playing on the same TTPs and kind of lines that, you know, Team Six guys are playing on and Delta Force is playing in. And they've been having success for, you know, years and, you know, all kinds of settings around the world that they're employed in. you know, we can, as a Ranger Resiment, we can employ these types of, you know, operational guidelines that we're going to go do this and we're going to do it as quietly. And mission success is now based on the amount of people that we can not kill on target, but we can drag off target. Right.

You know, and then it really becomes the driving force. Mission success is now can we do it and how many times can we do it? And then, you know, it's kind of the, not necessarily. necessarily mission failure, but, you know, if shots are have to be, you know, fired in, right, you know, what did we do wrong that, that got us into that gunfight? Because it's really impressive, you know, as a leader, when you can bring like 13 plus guys into a target building and roll up 14 or 15 dudes without anybody knowing that you're even in the room. Right. And so, you know, that was, you know, and then when we started going into two other techniques later on, you know, was like, but we're so good at this.

Why are we switching to doing this other thing? And, you know, I never really liked what we call prefer, you know, later on it would be the call out. And I understand the, you know, as a leader, the thought behind it is that it's less risk of force because we're now telling the enemy. for those of people who don't understand it, it's kind of like what, you know, a SWAT team will do. Or, you know, the FBI does, you know, when they surround a house or a compound or whatever. And then they're getting on loudspeakers and they're telling people to come out

and surrender and all that. But, you know, it's never the fun way to do. It's kind of, you know, if you will, it's boring. Right, right. Walk us through like one of those ops that really like stands out in your mind where you know, you just kind of like pride open the front door and Rangers and Night Vision just kind of slipped through. Well, there was, uh, Mosul, we, we had one op and I mean, we had been in probably four or five houses down the block trying to get the, the right house. And when we finally did get the right house, you know, we popped the front door open all nice and quiet.

And I mean, there was no, there was no reverberation off the metal door or anything. We had, you know, pressure and counterpressure working. And, you know, we ended up, you know, sliding in all nice and quiet. And then, you know, I had a whole squad of guys, you know, pulling security on dudes. And then it was, you know, we had the first floor, you know, secure as far as, you know, guys are, we got guns on the right amount of people. And, you know, we've got a whole other squad is sneaking in to take care of, you know, what needs to be going on upstairs.

And everybody's all super quiet. And, you know, we're basically we take the whole house down all in one shot and we end up of like 16 detainees. And, you know, the whole target's done in 45 minutes. We got everybody's tagging bag. We've done all the site exploitation. And, you know, and then we're on to the next objective. Yeah.

And so. That's amazing. When, you know, when you can look back at that and be like, wow, it was a part of that. And, you know, that worked out great. And, you know, when you can explain. You know, that that is, you know, mission success because, you know, Intel drives the targeting. And when you don't kill the intelligence, then you get more targets and you get to go have more fun.

And, you know, when you could explain that to the younger guys who are, you know, 19, 20 and just kind of chomping at the bit and it's like, no, hey, relax. We're being smooth. We're being quiet. it, you know, we started, you know, climbing walls and, and, you know, then it became the whole, you know, can we do a top down, you know, can we come in from one building or can we ladder up the side of the building and, you know, not only can we come in from the ground floor, but can we send an assault force in from the top floor and still do it all silent, you know, it just becomes a whole other side of, you know, this developing persona that,

we're creating in the Ranger Regiment. It's not just are we the ability to go smash things, but we can be as precision as anybody else, but do it with twice as many people. Right. I want to take just one second here to give a little advertisement actually for our own podcast. We have a Patreon site, and there's a link down the description if you guys check it out. And if you join, you will get ad-free episodes. You get all these episodes without out any of the ads in them. And there's also a couple bonus episodes and bonus segments that you guys can check out. So the links down the description. That's all I wanted to throw out there tonight. You get deep thoughts by Jack and Dave sitting in our smoking pajamas and

you know, talking about the way of the world. Plus a lot of great bonus content. Yes. But so then after Missouille, you guys did Ramadi, which is a lot more of the same. But now you guys are operating on boats. Yeah, we're on the on the SWIC boats on the sock ars. No shit. Yeah. So that, you know, it was a, it was different. It was totally fun. I mean,

you know, because at the time, you got to remember Ramadi and Flusi, and Flusi, they're still on the, you know, it's still a wild west out there. You know, Marines are still having it out all day long, every day. And we're trying to, you know, kind of squeeze in the seams and do what we're doing. And, you know, we had a company. commander at the time he was notorious for you know any holiday it was the day that you know he had

been blown up and so he didn't really like to drive anymore and so he's like the only holiday i've never been blown up on his Halloween and so we took the ground assault force out in strikers and uh hit a target driving back and uh his truck gets popped and um you know it was a what we call a catastrophic vehicle kill so it was a striker but it had a whole penetration and uh it was enough to penetrate the bottom of the floor and then what came through stuck in the back of the seat on the driver. But nobody was hurt. And, you know, it was a testament to the striker as a vehicle platform that we were using it, blew all the circuit breakers in the vehicle.

And all the driver had to do was just reach around, push the breakers in and start back up. And it drove all the way back to the gate. And then it gave up the ghost. You know, all the steering linkage in the front broke apart. And it was plugging the, the ECP there at the, at the, at the, the gate onto Ramadi. And so that was kind of fun because we had to move the T barriers out of the way to open it up so we can get the wreckery in there to hook onto it because there wasn't a way to pull it through the chicanes with all those barricades in place.

So we had to, you know, it was probably a three-hour process to get that truck through the gate. You know, we got all the Marine convoys and Army convoys and Romani. They're all backed up sitting outside waiting for us to move our piece of junk. And so, after that, you know, the team six guys were like, hey, we've got, you know, the boats are down, you know, at the little offsite, you know, on the river. And, you know, we can start employing those. And so we started doing, you know, boats in, helicopters out or helicopters in and boats out. That's pretty cool. And kind of, and riding the rivers. And it was definitely really cool because we could get way closer to target on the boats than you could with. you know, helicopters without the noise signature.

And it just, you know, opened up a whole other avenue of a technique that we had really, you know, been utilizing. And it was, yeah, I just, I've never been. The only thing I wish that it was, it had to been in the summertime instead of in the winter. Yeah, I bet. I've never been to Ramadi before. So I'm actually looking up on the map. So the Euphrates kind of runs right through the center of the city.

And there's a few, like, outlets. one of which it looks like it runs right into like the city center. Right. That's pretty cool, man. So you said you were able to get closer to target using the boats. Yeah, we could get within, you know,

a K of the target building or, you know, depending, sometimes it was within, you know, four or five hundred meters of the target. And so, you know, you have the last, you know, the LCC is, you know, basically at the boat drop-off point on the beach and then, you know, moved the target and take the target down and, you know, then move to Exville.

And, you know, just short helicopter ride back onto the base. And so it was, you know, it was definitely fun because we were the one of the first to actually implement it. And so, you know, we kind of got to be on the front side of that as far as what the Red Rangers were doing with, you know, boat, boat ops. Now, did you guys Did you guys have those? I mean, I know that boat offs was always supposed to be a ranger thing, but it really, we only, at least like in the 90s, we only used it for training.

Like, did you guys have those in theater? Did you acquire them? Did somebody else have them and you borrowed them? How did that all start? Well, it was the, there were the SWIC boats. So the teams brought them. And so the SWIC teams were the guys, they were manning all the boats.

And so they're the sock bars, the, you know, the 900 horse, power twin jet drive, you know, 40 foot assault boats. And so, you know, there's a whole crew, this Navy guys that drive the boats, gun the boats. All we did was just get a ride. And that's pretty cool. I never even knew the Rangers did that.

That's interesting. Yeah, it was, it was definitely fun. You know, and the boats of, you know, everybody's like, well, I wouldn't want to do that. Well, it's a fully armored boat. You know, it's 900 horsepower. It'll do 50 miles an hour on the water. And it's safer than driving down a road that's packed full of IE. Yeah, must or like deploying.

Yeah, mines or something. Mine, yeah, mine. Yeah, exactly. Well, there had been, there was a time, you know, early on where the enemy had been trying to figure out how to IED the river. And they couldn't figure out how to do it. And there wasn't any success with it. They had tried hanging them from the bridges.

But, you know, you can see that. And then they tried to. plant them in the riverbanks, but it wasn't anything that was going to cause any kind of lethality to the boat. So they just basically gave it up as like, well, if they're going to use them, then there's something that we can do about it until they come on target. So I know that, so we have like more Mazul and Afghanistan. And I don't want to leave too much out, but I also really want to get to, I want to talk about 2011. Okay.

I want to make sure we talk about that. Am I missing anything? I'll speak. Yeah. So can we talk about your injury, about how all that came about? Yeah. So do you want to skip the extortion? Oh, no, no.

Let's talk about the extortion. Yeah, let's talk about extortion. 171. Yeah, sorry about that. No, that's okay. So this was kind of the 2011 deployment, It was the last of the surge, the special ops surge into, you know, Petraeus's surge into Afghanistan and kind of increasing that force. So BECO is the last company and Second Range Battalion to surge, whether stay late or go early.

And so we just finished the KPEX at Fort Bragg, which is the big, you know, the Special Ops Dog and Pony show for congressmen and, you know, the president. and all that stuff, which was fine because it gave us, you know, an extra week of training with, you know, 160th and some, you know, platoon time, if you will, to run around and work fine-tuned some TTPs and some SOPs and bring some of the new guys a little bit tighter online with, you know, how we're going to accomplish these tasks when we getting overseas. So, you know, we got tasks to go to, um, uh, uh, uh, five. Bob Shank and be tasked with Team 6 under their command. And so we went over and did that.

And we had a pretty good working relationship with the Gold Squadron for that early part of that deployment. And then the night of August 6 rolls around. And so objective Lefty Grove comes up on the table was a, you know, it's a target that had been tracked and chased and kind of lost, but never could get a lot of fidelity to it because he's a pretty dynamic target, meaning he's constantly on the move and, you know, hard to nail down to one location, but he had rolled into the tangy valley on this, you know, this day, and Siggint had kind of pinned him into a certain

location inside the valley and a little cluster of buildings, and it was enough that probably about 70% fidelity on the on the objective targeting that it was it was still solid and we had just come off a few days of weather and uh we're looking at maybe some more days of weather on the back end of this so it was we had this little like two day window of of good weather to do an op and i just kind of you know looked at the mipel and you know we went to chow and we were sitting there having the conversation i'm like look i'm willing to take a swing at 70% you know for this target you know you know we're going to be stuck sitting for weather for a few days and I don't you know we've already been stuck sitting and Rangers doesn't do well

sitting sitting around with with weather if we don't have anything to do so you know I was like I'm willing to take a swing at 70 you know we're going into tangy valley so it's basically guaranteed gunfight and you know what do you think and he's like I'm willing to take a swing on 70% so we went back and pitched it that we'll take a swing at it and if nothing else you know we'll let him that we're chasing him and kind of break his pattern of life and and usually when we can do that and break the pattern of life on people that's when they start making mistakes and it becomes easier to you know launch launch a follow-on operation because he's not sure what he needs to do and so you know we drew up the plan and got approval and and and then

brief the plan, pitch the plan to the boys. And, you know, it was one of the only times I've ever told the boys, actually it was the only time I ever told them. I was like, you know, this is the tangy valley. And it's not an if we're going to get into a gunfight. It is a 100% we are walking into a gunfight on this night. And there's a reason why we only go into this value on the no illumination cycle. And that's because they're going to shoot at anything.

helicopters, aircraft, people. So, you know, switch it on, put it on straight, and, you know, we're going to get it on tonight. And so we had an uneventful, you know, infill when no rounds taken because we had flown in extortion 16 and 17 had been our infill aircraft. And so then they flew back, cycled through, and Gold Squadron was on QRF for us or any follow one objective that came up from what we were doing. And so infield, got the guys, got the boys on the ground, you know, started moving to the objective, got a word that, you know, there was eight to ten enemy fighters moving

off the objective. And so we hold the formation, got clearance for fires with the Apache gunships and lit into with the Apache gunships. two gun runs per aircraft and then push the target uneventful after that and then cleared through the the contact and had stirred up a bunch of you know stuff in in the valley and so you know I was it's just you know guys in there rebel rousing um trying to get guys to come out and you know gather a force to come and fight and so we're clearing through our target and uh you know you you know, it's looking good for what's being seen on ISR,

because they're seeing a bigger picture than what I've seen within, you know, a thousand meters circle of my objective. And so the call came from the jock to my platoon leader myself. It was like, hey, are you guys going to go, you know, you're going to go push farther into the valley and, you know, taking on this contact. And at the time, you know, we were working a pretty good objective. And we actually kind of thought we had what we were looking for on the objective

as far as who we went into the valley to get. And we said, no, no, we think we're working it. And we have what we want. They said, you know, do you care if, you know, Goldwater comes in and, you know, it starts their own movement to contact on the rest of this objective. And, you know, about 5K to the west of you. And I said, well, that's plenty of de-confliction of space for small arms fire.

So if they want to come in, you know, and that's what they want to do, good on them, you know, it had been a pre-briefed discussion between my platoon leader, myself, Jonas and Lou, the master chief and the commander for the gold squadron that, hey, look, if it does ever happen, then it's a single objective, but we end up bringing in the other element, you know, we'll link up and then we'll just kind of work exville, you know, as it plays out. And if we have cycle aircraft and we'll cycle aircraft, and, you know, we'll just get it done. And it's like, okay, great, awesome. So we knew how that was going to go. We kind of had a

pre-plan position where we were going to link up, you know, if that had happened. And, you know, we got the word that they were loading on the extortion. And we weren't sure which way they were going to come into the valley. And we kind of said, hey, we recommend, you know, if you overfly our objective, then we can at least, you know, provide ground cuts. or anything. And, you know, but that way, you know, we only get a small amount of saying it doesn't really carry that much weight as far as what the airplanes are doing, you know, because these are conventional aircraft.

So the pilots are only flying what's been approved through their S3 air shop. And so, you know, what we were saying to our jock is not necessarily making it over to theirs. And so we were like, well, okay. So you'll get the call that there are wheels up and they're 10 minutes out. and so we wanted to clear one more building. So we've kind of pushed to try and clear this building real quick and get the call that, you know, they're six minutes out and then three minutes out. And so we held our assault and what we're doing.

And we're just kind of sitting there waiting. And I'm waiting to see the birds flush after infill. And so that we're not, you know, if we end up shooting on target, that we're not going to ricocheting something into aircraft because they're within, and, you know, small arms distance. And then that never happened. And I would kind of wondering what's going on. And we get over the fires net from the FOs that there's a fallen angel.

And I had known what the, you know, the pro word, if you will, is. And it's just kind of dumpstruck by it. And I said, say that again. And he's like, we're a fallen angel. And I was like, okay. now so that my brain and my you know it's all connecting you speak it in English and he goes extortion has been shot down and I was like okay great so then it was you know how fast can we back out of this target building how fast can I get the guys on the load and get them to start

moving even though we don't know exactly where it is yet it's I just know the general direction that we need to go which was to the west and so we got to boys back out of the objective, off the objective, and we're moving in about three minutes, you know, as far as getting guys pushed out, and then it's trying to, all the weapons and everything that we had accumulated on our objective, is trying to take all that stuff with us

and, you know, get everybody and everything on the move and not leave, you know, all this stuff to potentially be shot in the back with it. So send it forward and find a point. place to blow it in place. And, you know, then the question comes to, like, what do we do with all these detainees? And so it just becomes, well, leave them. And, you know, people are like, well, are you going to untie them? I was like, nope, somebody will come over and cut them loose later.

I'm not cutting anybody loose. They can figure it out. Right. And so we got off the objective and started moving. I just, you know, I'll never forget, you know, when the lead element and the snipers and the dog handler finally got with. an eyesight of, you know, around the terrain feature. And it was just this, you know, I won't use the profanity,

but it was one of those, oh my God, moments. You know, the whole night skies just lit up with just fire and, you know, the burning wreck of it. And, you know, we're still trying to figure out, you know, the fastest way and, you know, should we, you know, so the tangy road that runs through this valley is heavily IED. I mean, it's IED, like every three to 400 meters. There's something planted in that road, and it's to stop, you know, the trucks.

And so there was this, you know, do we want to go overland? And I told the P.L's like, hey, look, sir, my recommendation, we got to assume the risk to force and we're just going to have to stay on the road because we got to get there. And he said, I agree. So we just, you know, I told the dog in the handler up front, it's like if it looks suspicious or he wants us, you know, to, you know, to. you know, say that there's something in the road and just market and market good and just tell everybody to stay out of the way because we got to go. And so it took us about an hour to go the 5K to get up there. And then, you know, it's kind of trying to put this whole thing together on the fly.

And, you know, everybody's radios are going nuts as far as, you know, PL, he's, you know, like basically glued to the stat radio and just like, hey, sir, we've got to, I need some information here, you know, we got to, you got to tell me how many people are on this aircraft, you know, so we're working through that and it's, you know, I finally get the numbers and I'm thinking, you know, it's half the force and I'm like, okay, so, and they, you know, but he gave me the number of 38. And I was like, so how many are on the other aircraft? You know, I'm not joking about it. I'm like, I'm in disbelief. It's like, how many people are on the other aircraft?

And it goes, empty ship. And I was like, oh. And I was like, for those people that donors, you know, that aren't listening that aren't, you know, in the military mindset of this is that, you know, it's a technique and it's not a bad technique. You know, it's a risk of force, risk to aircraft decision that leaders make. Do we put everybody on one aircraft and only risk one aircraft to enemy fire?

and get the force all in at once, or do we only put half the element on one aircraft and the other half on the other? And the problem with that split force on multiple aircraft is that that lead aircraft makes contact, that second aircraft is not getting on the ground. Right. And so then you only have half your force on the ground.

So given the situation that they were going in to pick a fight with anywhere 12 plus fighters on that side, it made more sense to just risk one aircraft put everybody on the ground all at once. And it's not a bad decision. It's just, you know, people ask me, well, why didn't you do that then? Well, I brought 55 guys to the fight that night. And we don't fit on one aircraft.

Yeah. So, you know, we finally get up there on the crash and we start, you know, calling for supplies that we're going to need. And, you know, the backside support, you know, from, you know, guys in a rigor shop to doing CDS drops because we're out of we're out of water by this point you know there are supplies that we just don't have and the whole way up there I'm in my mind I'm I'm flashing back to all the stuff that we brought in the night we did the you know the turbine 3 3 and the marks the trail you know that six years ago all that's flooding back into my mind and and

I'm trying to think of all the stuff that we had and all the stuff that one Charlie had and I'm trying to, you know, request this stuff because at this point in the game, as far as, you know, the G-WAT, this is combat search and rescue is not something that we have time to train on anymore. And it was something that, you know, back in the day when we assumed Ranger Ready Force One, it was one of those one day, two-day taskings that, you know, we all trained, you know, like crash axes and smashing through and this is what we do. Now we get fam egress once a year when we do rotary wing violats. you know if the aircraft has a hard landing not destroyed but it has a hard landing you know this is how we destroy the radios is how you destroy

you know the airframe if need be you know and so on and so on but at this point it's like okay well i need i need body bags i need water i need bio hazard you know and if you can find them i need class d fire extinguishers and so i'm trying to get all this information requested to the job so that they can build this weird CDS palette to hopefully help us, you know, get everybody recovered. Because by the time we got on the crash site, you know, it was still a fireball. It was still on fire for hours after. And, you know, it was one of those learning points, I guess, if you will, for the job that, hey, look, you know, this is the second time in less than 10 years that we've had this happen.

and we don't have any classy fire extinguishers to put out a metal fire. Right. And helicopters have a lot of magnesium in them. Right. And so, you know, we did correct that, you know, later on that all this stuff did make it into country. And thankfully, that never had to be used it again. But it was one of those where we probably should have some of this stuff, at least on standby. And given, given.

that you are already in a non-permissive environment. I imagine that you probably had a decent air package to start with. But what happened at that point? I mean, did they start pushing all the assets you guys needed? Yeah. So the air package, you know, we had a patchy's on station, and then we had an AC-130, and then we had fast-movers in the stack at altitude. And so what happens is when this kind of situation happens is everything in the country shuts down.

It doesn't matter where in the country it is. all operations are cease and assist. If you're not on target, you'd be calling for X-Pill or you're walking home. Because, you know, every ISR platform manned and unmanned, you know, fast movers, rotary wing assets, they're all coming to wherever that crashes at. And it was nuts, the amount of support that we had. You know, and so the big armies combat search and rescue element, the pathfinders in the book, they're not, you know, pathfinder, pathfinder, that was just.

just their call sign was Pathfinder. You know, those guys almost didn't make it in because they were shutting everything down. And so it was either going to already be there, which was us, or it was going to have to come in on a truck. So they made it in just moments before everything got shut down as far as Rotary Wing assets. And the strange part is,

that, you know, a transport aircraft have flying pairs or triplets. And so extortion 1-6, the other aircraft in the flight, I had to get special permission to fly back from the objective area as a single ship. Now, I must have misunderstood because I thought when you were saying everything in the country got shut down, I thought you meant because it was all pushed to you guys. Why would they shut down the pathfinder or the combat search and rescue effort coming out? The rotary wing aircraft are getting shut down. It's not the fixed wing aircraft or the ISR platforms or any of that stuff.

It is the, you know, the Apaches are getting grounded. All rotary winger assets are getting shut down at this point. You know, and it's a timing issue of can we get these in? And basically what it is is it's, it's, allocation of assets and we just had a helicopter shot down so we're not going to commit any more helicopters into this area. And so what their whole thing was is that they had to get on the ground after we had containment of the area to provide a ground force security element on their HLZ for them to be able to come in. And so we had that just, you know, right before the sun came up.

So it almost, I mean, it almost sounds like they get super risk adverse. Like we have one helicopter down. It is very risk. Yes. We have a helicopter down. And so we're not going to risk another helicopter to get you guys the assets you need because we don't want to lose another helicopter. Right.

And that so then a lot of it becomes like things that we were requesting that normally would come in like on the back of a 47 and just get kicked out in a kit bag. Yeah. It has to get put on a fixed wing aircraft. So C-130. and it has to get CDS drop, combat delivery system, it has to get dumped to us that way

so they can fly in, you know, A10s as air support and all that other kind of stuff. And it just becomes a risk aversion to more ground fire for Red Rewing assets. So how did this unfold as the sun came up and you're continuing with this recovery mission now? That's what this has turned into. Right.

It's, you know, so it, As all this is going on and we're trying to figure out, is there going to be anybody else that's coming in? So we're securing the crash site in a kind of a flickball-shaped perimeter as loose as we can. And to start working the recovery efforts of it, it's still dark and night vision is not working because it's so bright with all the fire. It just becomes this basically sent two-finding.

fire teams out, one on the north side of the creek that the tangy river and one on the south side, we just started doing concentric arcs. You know, basically fire teams online just kind of combing around this. And what we're looking for is anybody that has been possibly ejected from the crash, you know, whether they had survived or, you know, hurt or whatnot. And so that was the first thing is, you know, how much of this can we clear within reason, you know, get out, you know, 100, 200 meters and make sure that, you know, when we start pulling remains, we're not missing somebody because they got pitched out of the back. So that's how we found, like, the first six to eight guys were kind of in this arc pattern that had been kind of thrown out within, you know, 50 meters. and then we got started getting the accountability. And so then we started finding chunks of the aircraft,

the rotor assemblies, the front and rear rotor assemblies, you know, are in these positions. And we're kind of assuming that that's the farthest that any of this wreckage is going to get. You know, people aren't going to get that far, but, you know, the rotor blades are still spinning and torqued out. And they're going to, you know, wobble off and, you know, end up in an orchard here or get slammed into a tree. you know, a cluster of trees over here.

So then it becomes, you know, how can we work this problem while it's still on fire? And so then it becomes, you know, how long can we sustain, you know, the exposure to the heat and things cooking off and exploding and, you know, the risk of force for us to make this as fast as possible. And, you know, it's just kind of one of those surreal moments, if you will, because you start, you know, as the sun's coming up, you're starting to see the look on everybody's face of just, you know, horror and disbelief that, you know, I can't believe this has happened. And, you know, you try not to expose everybody to that. So you're really relying heavy on the guys that have a little bit more season. under their belts and the squads that are a little bit more mature. And, you know, so I was really relying real heavy on second squad at the time to, you know, to work this. And then as they started to get gassed and just worn out, you know, rotating one other squad

in to take over until we kind of got this all, you know, accounted for. Right. and I mean I don't want to get like too graphic but I mean they're actually having to recover the remains of these seals and attachments

yeah who burned up in the crash and we're picking them up out of the firing you know wreck and stuff so it's a pretty difficult job yeah yeah I mean

you know if you were for the guys that were there you know we had talked about later it's like you know Hollywood couldn't have written anything more graphic. Right. For people that, you know, want to imagine what this is like. I mean, you couldn't have written a script like this,

any more graphic than what it actually turned out to be as far as the way you know, movies are made now. It's crazy. Right. And, you know, and I give the credit to the boys because they, you know, they handled a lot. Yeah. that night. And, you know, for some of them, you know, it's their first deployment and, you know,

they're seeing the worst that can happen. And so, you know, it's trying, trying to make sure that everything was okay. Right. Right. And so, you know, I think it was probably about four, four and a half, five hours, and we had everybody, you know, pulled out and accounted for. And, you know, it wasn't, there wasn't a lot of some people left. So, because that was one of the questions, you know, later when talking with the jock and things after it was all said and done, you know, there was, you know, questions, questions over, you know, how did you get accountability? Because, you know, through the investigation, I mean, there was investigation.

that went on, this thing went on for weeks of, you know, there's everybody wants all these answers. And so then, you know, one of the questions comes is like, how did you, you know, come up with that you had accountability of all of these people, you know, and it wasn't prefaced. The statement wasn't prefaced correctly because they're getting information from like mortuary affairs that says, you know, you can't count it as a human unless you have 51% of the remains. and some of these guys are, you know, not to be graphic, there's, you know, it's sea spines and skulls. Right, yeah. And that was, you did the best you possibly could under combat conditions.

Right. Right. And so, you know, we go, you know, we go up for the ramp ceremony. And so anybody who's spent any time in the Ranger Regiment, you know, personnel and accountability of people and equipment, that is the senior NCO's, bread and butter. That's his baby. And so I just remember going into the jock and, you know, we're up there for the ramp ceremony. I'm kind of talking with the, you know, the regimental staff and the officers and, you know, bumped into somebody that I, you know, knew and I respected. And he goes, you know, hey, you did really good under the circumstances. And I said, so I got a bone to pick.

And I don't care if it gets me fired, you know, it was one of those. Since winning the Ranger regiment is personnel accountability of manned weapons and equipment, not the NCO's job. And when you grill my platoon leader over something that he's not involved in, I have a big problem with that. And so, you know, I'm being polite about it. You know, but it was one of those things where, you know, it's like, you know, we did the best we could under the circumstances. You know, I wouldn't have given you a false report in these circumstances if I wasn't sure that we had everybody. Right. And so your PL was taking heat.

Like they were trying like your PL was taking heat. Yeah, there was a there was a VTC so a video teleconference. It's like a few days later. And he was being grilled over, you know, accountability and how did we get these numbers? But they never prefaced where they're getting their questionable, you know. Right. numbers from or how we could say we had accountability. And so, you know, that came to light. And I just, I, you know, it was still short views from the whole thing. And I just was like, well, I don't care.

No, I get it. You're the platoon sergeant. And the buck stops with you. And you, you've said that. You know, I understand. Well, no, I mean, what was fun is that, you know, I excused myself from the big jock. and, you know, we went over to the ramp to stand by for the ceremony and somebody came over and they actually apologized to my platoon leader for, you know, that grilling, if you will. And I was, I actually thought that, you know, the, the fabled black Chinook was going to come in and carry him off and I was going to be without a platoon leader, but it didn't happen. And, you know, I felt, you know, justified after that, that, you know, he got raked over the coals for something that wasn't in his lane.

Right. And, you know, I got him in a. And so then everything was straight. Not trying to brag on the situation, but, you know, it's not his. Yeah, you guys speak up. And also that they are using an administrative standard for, you know, yes, you know, this is, this is a sailor, but it's not enough of a sailor to be counted. Get the fuck out of here. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. You know, like I said, you know, we, you can't, nobody can have more than one skull and one C spine. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, uh, I did, did the, did the army or did the military take steps to make sure that that your guys were okay after that? Because that, especially if you think about some 18, 1990, yeah, in his first deployment. So we, sorry. That's right.

We had, you know, throughout the rest of the deployment, we had, you know, the, the psychologist and the chaplains, you know, they were always coming in and checking on the guys. And, you know, as leaders, you know, we were constantly asking if they were, you know, doing okay. And, you know, if everybody was still having issues from the floor. But the hardest challenge as a leader was to, you know, look the boys in the face when it was all done and everything got. cleared to operate again was to, you know, tell them, hey, we're going out and we're going to load back on these aircraft and we're just going to keep doing business. And, you know, to see the look in some of their faces, it's just, you know, there's timidness in their eyes like you can see is, because they've seen the worst that could happen and, you know, ask them to step back on those airframes

and to, you know, assume that risk, you know, that was the hardest. And then it got easier for them, you know, as we kind of settled back in. But, you know, then we started. And we went back into Tangie like six weeks later and we lost one of our guys. Tyler Holtz was killed. Had another guy specialist who was wounded and all in the same area of, you know, where that crash had happened within about 400 meters, 500 meters of the, crash site itself because what we had done was we had gone back through all the video and the ISR and you know figured out where those rocks were fired from and so that became a target in itself a

very deliberate target and you know we brought the rest of bravo company up and did a big company op in there and you know we put 150 rangers on the ground and you know we were just basically what it was to just say hey look you may have shot an aircraft down we're not afraid to come in here And, you know, then, you know, unfortunately, we have a team leader that's killed, another guy that's, you know, severely wounded. And, you know, so it is kind of this big downer for that. And then, you know, and then I get hurt a few weeks later. And so it's just kind of weird. One Broadway just continues to just take a meeting either physically or emotion.

or mentally and it was a rough trip I always you know guys always ask you know what was that one like I was like well at that point in time you know one bravo had been in more gunfights that deployment than the rest of the battalion together all the other platoons we had been in more gun fights on that trip and guys were just spent yeah nigglitz before we get into the operation that led to your injury I I wanted to ask you because it's something we've talked about on the show before. And as a senior NCO, you know, you mentioned the one side of how the guys responded to the extortion one seven, the, the timidity or the timidness. How is an, how is an NGO? Did you have to deal with the other side of that, too, of reining in

the guys that wanted to get some that wanted payback and and would look. And that was a broad, definition of a payback. Sure. I know what you're I know what you're getting at. And you always it's to say, hey, look, you know, we're going back in here, but we're still going to be as professional as we possibly can. And there will be no shenanigans. You know, it is to beat that into them is like no matter what you feel, no matter what happened with those guys, we're not going to get shut down operationally because somebody wants to do something stupid as payback. We're going to get it and we're

going to give it to them in the right way. And we're going to do it. at our way, you know, within the rules of engagement and, you know, and that's going to be it. There's not going to be any shenanigans. Were there during your time in the Rangers, were there like leadership challenges? And if in that sense, and if so, how were they dealt with? Not really. I know what you're getting at. And, you know, as the Ranger Regiment or even just the battalion as a whole, you know, the kind of when you look back at the way things were when everything started in 2001, you know, we started kind of as a special operations support, you know, we're there to, you know, provide security and blocking positions and things for, you know, Delta Force and Team 6 and, you know, to get to the, you know, to the.

the point where we're now we're running and gunning on the same target decks and you know the same targeting lines and you know we've earned our right to to be in this point i most of the guys at this point as far as squad leaders and and you know even some of the senior team leaders but you know we we know what it's like to be the guy on the outside look at in and now we're on the inside right there there was no way that anybody was going to risk you know, ruining that reputation that we had of for anything. And so. No, that's, it's really interesting.

Because it sounds like it really was a matter of responsible leadership in the sense of, you know, setting the tone and making sure that that, making certain that that tone is stuck to. Right. And a lot of that, you know, it comes down to the, to the people that, you know, we pick as NCOs to continue to lead inside the regiment. It's not, you know, it's not just me. You know, it's all the other 11th platoon sergeants that were there at the time. And, you know, it's all the squad leaders that we say, hey, this guy has what it takes to be that squal leader. It's that guy that has the personal integrity to, you know, continue to. push the, you know, what we're dealing in the right direction. It's not to compromise our integrity or any of that stuff because, you know, when those kind of things start happening and you start getting questionable circumstances on target, you know, then your freedom of maneuver and freedom of movement and, you know, what you do, it starts getting, you know, put under a microscope. And so nobody wants to be under the microscope.

And so, you know, I give it to the guys that took over after I got hurt. And, you know, the guys that are even still doing it today, you know, it is carrying on that legacy of what we started 20 years ago and still continuing to develop, you know, where it's going in the future. And, you know, it's awesome to be, you know, a part of that. that history, you know, because I look at what the Ranger Regiment is now and back to what it was when you were there and, you know, when I was a young private and, you know, it is hands down a completely different organization. And, you know, we can do all that old stuff, but we are so

much better at fitting into the operational roles that we have now. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll just talk about the incident where you were wounded and then we'll take some viewer questions and yeah yeah yeah so can you tell us about yeah the operation which presumably a purple heart is in the works here so uh yeah so it's october six seven um 2011 you know we're taking a swing at an iED and weapons facilitator it's a mid-level target you know kind of the middle of the deck it gets you the guys above and the guys below, which the guys below are, you know, the targets in the pyramid that, you know, the BS battle space owners are dealing with. And so when you slice out the middle, you can work the targeting from both sides. You can get the guys who are providing stuff from across the border. And then it gives you the ability to pass on to the battle space owner who's putting this stuff in the roads and trying to blow their trucks up. So, you know, that's kind of where we're swinging across the food pyramid, if you will, is right in the middle. And so we're in Baraki Barak or, well, Baroquee Barak was the little, the town, but we're in Logar province, kind of on the east side of the Tangi Valley. And the target grids dropped in a little cluster of four buildings that all shared walls, so it's like a plus symbol.

And, you know, you had 25% chance of taking the swing right the first time. And so we swung wrong. And so we reset all the pieces to move and strike the next compound. And as we're resetting all the pieces, you know, I made a stupid decision that I preached a thousand times before and shoot houses. Don't ever put your body in front of an open doorway. and I had just instinctually I just stupidly put my leg across this doorway and as soon as I did it to hold the door open I took a three round burst. I took first round through the right thigh. Then I took one as I was getting spun out of the way.

I took one through the right armpit and entered in my armpit and exited out my bicep. And then I took the last one through that through my helmet. through the helmet well I mean it split the helmet like the Kevlar opened up so it hit right temple right here and then it blew my nods off my mouth holy shit came out right

right on the top I'm looking at the picture in your book I mean that's that's bad from your leg that's bad yeah so you know a dual tube dual tube night invasion you know when I when I got everything, when I hooked it back on and went to flip it down, everything was offset. And so people go, what did that feel like? I was like, well, I know what a baseball feels like when somebody hits a home run. Yeah.

I mean, and honestly, all those, I mean, all three of those areas, your leg, you know, with the formal and everything down there. And then your armpit, like around going to the arm is one of those. of the worst things, yeah, is one of the worst things. Right. So when I finally, you know, after it was all said and done, I got, you know, I finally made it to Germany. And I was talking, you know, had a chance to kind of talk with one of the surgeons who happened to be one of the old battalion surgeons. And, you know, he came in and he was kind of joking with me. I heard about this cranky old ranger, NCO who's down here just, you know, he's just giving me a hard time.

And so I was like, you know, I was asking questions. I said, I know I got shot through here, but, you know, what were the, you know, how lucky am I or how lucky am I? Yeah, right. And he goes, well, you have the, you know, the femoral artery and the femoral nerve. They run parallel to each other down the inside of your thigh. And he said that round went right between both of them. God. And I was like, well, okay.

all those ops and this was the one that got you yeah all that and this was the my stupid mistake and uh so you know that being said that night that gunfight went on for uh you know they brought in the krf to to bravo came in to back up uh first lieutenant because we had uh i was wounded uh urgent surgical specialist seros was expectant and then we had an afghan partner who was expectant he had taken a round to the face and you know we had two other guys that were wounded severely but they didn't say anything about it because they were still able to conduct op-sum and then we had 12 other guys that had received fragmentation because I got shot and then, you know, there was an exchange of gunfire and then the enemy threw a hand grenade out into this little

alley. And so then it went off. And, you know, I got a whole bunch of fragmentation in the back of my, you know, hamstrings from it. And then a bunch of other guys caught frag off it. But that, that objective alone that night, we gave out 14 purple hearts. Wow. Wow.

So even after you got shot, you kept getting him, like they just wouldn't leave you alone. You kept like you were going to my frang. you're like, I'm out. It's like, I got shot and then you, you know, it's like time out. Yeah, right, right. I'm already out, guys. Everybody goes, everybody goes, you know, did you have this, you know, surreal moment where it's like time slowed down?

Yeah, because what I perceive in my mind as being, you know, just a minute or two, it just turned out, you know, it's probably about six or seven minutes. Yeah. Because, you know, my bell's wrong. Yeah. The lights got real dim in the tunnel. yeah if you will and uh in my mind you know we do all this casually play during training but when it actually happens you got it's a conscious thought effort to go okay i have to put a

tourniquet on yeah you're like i know where they are but uh can i reach it yeah can i get to it because i'm kind of laid over on it and it's like well i can't really move and i knew my femur hadn't been broken because i stupidly stepped you know i put pressure down on my leg when i lost my balance after I got shot in the head. So I was like, okay, good. You know, in my mind, I'm like, my femur's not broken. And so then I'm like, okay, I've got a tourniquet in my mid pouch. And then I also have one down on my left calf, but I've got all this crap and I'm kind

in this weird position. Can I even reach it? Yeah. You know, because I've got a team leader and two other guys who are straddling over top of me trying to get guns through this doorway and they're, you know, in the in the fight. And I'm not in the fight anymore. and I'm trying to like reach between their legs and my legs and grab this turnicette and put it on. And then, you know, that is sucks.

And then you're like, okay, but I still have to crank this thing down and, you know, get it as tight as I can get it. And then there's a lull. And then, you know, I know that Saros is hurt. You know, so I know I can get, I can probably walk. And so, you know, I get help stood up. and then I try to get myself out of the way, you know, as best I can. And so I start walking back down the alleyway to where we're going to have the CCP. And then, you know, then my leg starts going numb.

And it's like, hey, Doc, come here. You got to help me. And, you know, really what I'm trying to do is just get out of the way so that the other medic can get in there and help Saros and get him kind of drug out of the way into the CCC. but I don't really start panicking about the whole thing until I got my equipment cut off and my radios came out and so then I lose all situational awareness to the fight. Right. And then it's like anxiety comes in. It's like I have no idea what's going on anymore and I am not in control of anything.

Right. You know, as a leader and that just sucks. Right. But I knew when we reorganized the priority for Medevac, and it became myself and one of the snipers who took frag through the nose, took frag through the brink of his nose. I knew that when I and him went from being on the second aircraft out to being on the first aircraft out and the Afghan and Saros ended up on the second aircraft, I just knew that, you know, things were not going well. and you know doc wasn't going to tell me anything anymore because i'm not in you know the first sergeant's on the objective so he's kind of taken over those duties and i just you know was bad at that point in my mind it's just you know everything that's gone sideways can go

sideways and inside out and and so they medevac you and then when did you when did you become aware of how the operation went um so i got medevac and got back to Shank. It was probably about 30 minutes after I had gotten shot. By the time we got, you know, from the CC, you know, point of impact to the CCP and then over to the HLZ, the medevac, and then loaded it on and then into the cache, and then surgery.

And then I didn't find out that Saras was killed until I got the Bogram. And then, you know, some of the guys. that were in the S4 shop come over to tell me what was going on on the objective and that the QRF came in and the boys are still out there and it you know the whole thing went for like six more hours before you know this sun you know it was done and over with and they were pulling both the teams out just as the sun was coming up yeah and so then you both you begin that long process of rehabilitation uh yeah yeah uh So, you know, it was probably three or four days in Afghanistan and Boggham waiting on the Medivac transport to go to Germany.

And it was a week in Germany. And then back to Madigan and, you know, another week to 10 days at Madigan. And, you know, by the time I was all said and done, it was a dozen surgeries. And then, you know, rehab. So I didn't make it back on active duty status until after. New Year's 2012. Did you, were you able to contact your wife from theater or when did she find out about it? I called her right after I got out of the first surgery in Shank.

And but they handed me the sat phone and I'm still, you know, trying to come out of sedation from that. And so, you know, sat phones don't work well when the intent is pointed to the ground. And so it's kind of frustrated, you know, my mouth's all cottonballed from. you know, the anesthesia and the fentanyl and, you know, I'm frustrated that I cannot be coherent enough. I just remember handing the phone up to the platoon, I'm like, just please tell her. And so he gave her the, you know, the, you know, the information that was going on. And then, you know, the battalion commander called her a little bit later while I was in surgery and in Bogram.

and so she she knew within you know a couple hours yeah yeah you're right in the in your book that you know probably the most difficult conversation you had to have was with uh the family of specialist seros and you know how yeah he passed away you know that that was uh you know it's always tough you know when you have to look you know them in the you know in the face and say hey, I'm sorry that your son died, and he died right next to me from, you know, not getting shot, but, you know, he died from fragmentation that just happened to catch him under the arm in just the right spot where there was a gap in the armor. And, you know, that I survived and your son's dead. And, you know, that's one of those tough situations.

And, you know, because they can go one or two ways, you know, they can be, they can hate you for life or they can embrace you and, you know, luckily enough, his dad had spent time in the army, so he understood. And so that was okay. And, you know, that was kind of one of the harder things. Last year, I got a chance to meet a bunch of the Gold Star families for the SEAL team that was killed. And, you know, I'm always proud to meet him, but it's kind of one of those double-edged things is that, you know, they're still holding on to anger or grief and, you know, which way is it going to go, you know, are they going to embrace you or are they going to hate you? And, you know, that's tough because I never not want to meet them. But, you know,

on the same side of it, you know, I'm, you know, their son is not here and I am. Right. You know, but regardless of the fact, you know, I have a sense of pride in all the boys that were there that night have a sense of pride you know that hey you know regardless of whether you like us or hated you know we brought them home and you know we're willing to accept you know your anger or or frustration at the situation you know that's just the way it is on the survivor's side of it right right yeah you i mean you can't blame people for their emotions and their circumstances you know So how did you end up finishing out your career after getting shot up pretty badly? I spent six months on battalion staff and running the S2 shop.

And then we had an incident happen where we had to relieve a platoon sergeant in one of the companies. And so I ended up moving over to snipers for my last year and was running the sniper platoon for the last year. and then I was on the sniper range. We were out in eastern Washington shooting on a Department of Energy range over there. And, you know, the company commander and the first sergeant come over. And, you know, off-site training is always fun because everybody gets to be out of the office. So, you know, I'm hobbling around and kind of drag him a leg. And the first sergeant's like, hey, you're going to see a specialist when we get back.

And so I went and saw the specialist. and he kind of just laid it out, you know, bluntly for me. He goes, do you want to walk when you're 40? And I said, well, yeah. And he goes, well, then you need to stop now. And so, you know, that started the whole, you know, med board process. And so that I was out of the Army about six months later. Wow.

So I know a lot of guys that take some a year or two or three to get out. but because I wasn't on any kind of pain medications or any of that stuff. You know, it didn't have to, you know, worry about substance abuse or any of that. And so my packet kind of went a little bit faster than some of the other guys. Some of the other guys from that had gotten shot that deployment, you know, were still in for another year or so even after I got out because they had to get, you know, through kind of a I don't want to say rehab

process but you know they kind of had to get leaned off the meds and you know and finish the rehabbing and stuff yeah I also I noticed it in your book you also are you involved with Gallant Few? I know that you

have the postscript for them they I'm friends with some of the guys that did gallant few, Tim Abel and I'm drawing a blank on some of the others. But it was one of those things. Yeah, Carl Munger. And so it was one of those things that he,

Carl asked me if we would put that in there. And I said I will most definitely gladly, you know, put that in there to kind of help, you know, all the fellows out. Yeah. I mean, since it's in your book, hey, folks, if you have a, spare five bucks this month or whatever.

Why don't you head over to Gallant Few? Yeah, I haven't spoken to Carl in a while, and probably I should correct that, but he's a good guy, and Gallant Fue does a lot to help guys out. But it's a Gallant to... They really do.

Yeah, Gallantfew.org. Check them out. Throw him a buck or two, you know. So I know we've kept you for a while here, Nick, but let's hit up these user questions real quick. Yeah, we've only got a couple. one from Jackson, thank you very much. Did you ever work with any of the tier one units, Delta,

Seal Team 6, HRT, and if so, which impressed you the most of the bunch and why? I work with all of them, you know, in some aspect or another. I lean towards, you know, I did enjoy working with Delta Force a little bit more, and a lot of it is just because there's kind of this, I don't know. And all the tier elements have their own personality. And, you know, we kind of sometimes fit better with guys in Delta Force because,

especially early on, you know, a lot of the team leaders and squad leaders and guys, you know, the career progression is, you know, from the Ranger Regiment is to go to that organization. So there is a familiarity with people who understand where you're coming from as a unit or an organization. whereas we didn't really have that for a while with Team 6. And so we always kind of got looked at as like the Kid Brother thing. And then as far as the HRT, I've only worked with a few guys from there. And that was in the kind of middle part of Iraq. It was only a select few.

And that was kind of we were building the terrorist database with the three-letter agencies for, you know, Homeland Security and whatnot. So as far as that goes, but everybody's, they're all a great bunch of guys. I mean, I know, you know, in certain aspects, you know, we all talk trash on each other because we can. And, you know, it's a cultural thing. And if you're not a part of the culture, then sometimes it gets looked at. It's unprofessional. But, you know, you're reading enough seal books and they take cheap shots on us.

And so this, some of this was a, you know, a chance to, you know, level the field, if you will, and take a few shots of them. And so, yeah. Crashed some shade down. If you want to call me unprofessional, then, you know, then still be it. Yeah. Um, ohms, thank you for the donation. So, Oms gave us a sticker.

And I'm not, and Oms later comments that sicker didn't work out right. Dang. So I don't, the sticker is either somebody raising us up and worshiping us. Or I'll go with it. Or it's, I don't know, it's like holding up a new baby. I'm not sure. But I'm going to go with the worship thing. I'll go with that.

Yeah. The three of us, the four of us, including D, the four of us are the new pantheon for Oms. Hey, can we take like a five minute break? Yeah, man. Yeah, go ahead, man. We'll put. I've got a cramp going on. Yeah, yeah.

All right, thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So guys, next episode is going to be, hold on a second. I'll tease this out here. Okay, so on the third, actually, we have an extra episode that we crammed in here.

James Leporta, who is an investigative journalist with the Associated Press. He is also a former Marine, and he's broken some of the stories about, what's that guy's name, Majuski? Guy running for Congress, who's a stolen, I shouldn't say, I shouldn't say he's a stolen. I shouldn't say he's a stolen valor guy. He actually did serve but it's still stolen valor if you say that you did top secret deployments and you

didn't. My deployments are classified. Yeah, that's still like I think that's still still in valor. I don't know. We'll let you guys vote whether a stolen valor or not. But if a dude makes stuff stuff about his military career, it's kind of not cool. Stolen valorish. And then next Friday

is Tim Weiner. Tim is a journalist he wrote, he's written a number of books. He's written some pretty definitive histories of the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI. And a history of political warfare between America and Russia. So that'll be a pretty interesting conversation, I think. And then on the 10th, another extra episode, Joan Barker. And she was facilitating some of the aviation foreign interstate.

internal defense in Afghanistan. And in both Tim and Joan, they will be in studio interviews. And so will on the 14th, John Fox, who he was a Marine and he worked at, or he went and he became an international volunteer with the YPG in Syria. And he wrote this book that I'm almost done with it now. He wrote a book about it's co-authored, him and two other guys who are foreign volunteers. and fought with the Kurds in Syria against ISIS. So it's a pretty fascinating book.

I think it'll be a good interview. Good stuff. Good stuff. And if you haven't joined our patron, join our patron. Like hook us up. Hook yourselves up. There's a ton of bonus content on there. Like I said, you get to see Jack and I in our,

I said smoking pajamas earlier. I meant smoking jackets. Smoking jackets. But we keep it casual. We don't have smoking jackets quite yet. We keep it really casual. But. And our white.

food pillows. We have the humidore and the cigars are on their way. So we'll see who wants to smoke it up. Yeah. Neglis, thanks so much, man, for for spending a Friday night with us. We really appreciate it. Yeah, quick, quick one from one of our- I appreciate you guys having me.

One of our, one of our Patreon users asks if, since you were in 275, did you ever serve with Pat Tillman and his brother. Yeah. I mean, they were an alpha company and I was in Bravo Company and Charlie County. But yeah, they were, Kevin and Pat were both there at the same time. Do I know them? Not really. I mean, I know him about as well as I, you know Matt Best, which is I know who he is.

And I know he was an alpha company and, you know, that's about where it's at. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. So everybody, some great, great war stories. I mean, on the ground stuff for so many things that have happened during the Gwatt first-hand accounts, run to the sound of the guns. Check it out. Get it on, you know, we say Amazon. The link is down the description. The link is down below.

But, yeah, we highly recommend it. Check it out. Do you have anything that you want to plug? Aside from Gallant Few, are you involved? in any charities or organizations or businesses that you want to plug anything that you want to do? Not currently, you know, no, I'm not involved in anything. I'm just a retired guy who got conned into writing the book, if you will. Well, the people ask me, you know, hey, would you write another one?

And I was like, no, because if I haven't known what it was going to take to write the first one, I would not have even written that one. Yeah, it's a great book, tons of references. A lot of great pictures, too, which is something, you know, you see a lot of pictures in Vietnam era books, but you don't see a lot of pictures, I think, in like modern GWAT books a lot of times, which is, I think it's really cool.

You know, it's something that a lot of really interesting, and that one of your wound, I've never seen a pump like that. That sucks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

It does suck. because it's a wound back. So it's sucking out all the fluids and whatever. Sorry. All right. All right. Thank you, Nick, so much. You know, again, I really appreciate it.

Appreciate your family's patience with us while we suck you away on a Friday. And, you know, if there's anything, you know, we can do, feel free to reach out anytime and hope to talk to you again soon. All right. I appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Have a good night. Thank you. Thank you, everyone to join us.

We'll see you next Friday. Or we'll see you before that with games.