The Team House - 20 Years at War: A Ranger Regiment Story | Luis Saucedo

Episode Date: July 25, 2026

Luis Saucedo recounts his journey from the streets of Baghdad to high-value target raids in Afghanistan as a sniper in the 75th Ranger Regiment. He shares stories of brutal firefights, near-death experiences, and life inside one of America’s most elite combat units. Luis also reflects on the injury that ended his career, the difficult transition out of the military, and his new mission helping veterans rediscover purpose and brotherhood.Today's Sponsors:GhostBed ⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 10% off! Stash ⬇️https://www.stash.com/HOUSE for 15% off your monthly subscription or 30% off your annual subscription.GLD ⬇️https://www.gld.com/code "teamhouse" for 40% your first orderQuince⬇️go to: https://www.quince.com/housefor free shipping and 365 day returns For ad free video and audio and access to live streams...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________GRAB JACK'S NEW BOOK "THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN" ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803651/the-most-dangerous-man-by-jack-murphy/paperback/Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featuredJack Murphy's book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 – Start01:02 – How 9/11 Put Him on the Path to War05:57 – Iraq in 2004: Welcome to the Wild West13:00 – Baghdad During the Bloodiest Years of the War17:48 – The Night Their Outpost Was Nearly Overrun23:12 – The Haunted Iraqi Base No One Wanted to Enter31:15 – The Brutal Moment That Pushed Him Toward Regiment40:58 – From Ranger Selection Straight Into Combat42:41 – Surviving the Ruthless Culture of Ranger Regiment50:29 – Brawls, Booze and Life Behind the Brown Fence01:07:16 – Inside the Ranger Sniper Selection Process01:15:31 – Hunting High-Value Targets as a Ranger Sniper01:31:05 – When the Afghanistan War Began Feeling Pointless01:34:50 – Learning He Wasn’t as Good a Shooter as He Thought01:40:18 – Inside the Army’s Controversial SFAB Experiment01:53:21 – Running Sources and Watching Spies in Kurdistan02:01:29 – The Injury That Ended His Military Career02:10:08 – Turning Combat Veterans Into School Protectors02:17:31 – Why So Many Veterans Struggle After Leaving02:26:50 – Rebuilding the Brotherhood After the WarBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, welcome to the team house. I'm Jack Murphy here with our guest tonight. Louis Sosito. He served in a number of different infantry units, worse, and then went to the 75th Ranger Regiment, served in 375, went over to snipers, lots of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and some other interesting stuff too, before he went over to the SFAB, which was a new unit, a train and advise unit that will get into. But, Louis, first off, thank you for joining us on the show. Hey, man, thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. I love everything about your books. Oh, thank you. Yeah, awesome. I really like the genre and everything.

I know you, I've met Jack Carr a couple times, and that dude's an awesome guy, too, but just how y'all writes, fantastic. Oh, thank you. Yeah, no, I really appreciate that, man. So let's start at the beginning. If you can tell us a little bit about how you grew up and how that took you into the military. Man, so yeah, so that's a funny story. So I grew up to my dad's a cop in Dallas.

It's like a 37-year veteran of the Dallas Police Department. My mom was a dental hygienist of all things and kind of middle class. But we had the, I always tell people it was like we had the, me and my brother had the picture us. like growing up, kind of American experience where we went to high school. I played soccer. I played a ton of sports. Me and my brother got into wrestling roughly about the same time. And we did wrestling all through high school.

And so that, I think, especially the wrestling portion because you hear a lot about guys. I think I ran into mostly guys in regiment that they were all wrestlers, every single one of them. And so it's, I kind of laugh about that. I think the same amount of suffering that you did in wrestling kind of translated into suffering in other parts of your life so you could do it real well. Like when you were a lot of the times we were running around not eating, sitting in bags and wearing cash bags while we're doing everything. So it's like it was a level of suffering that you put yourself through to attain a goal to just get out and fight on the mat to get to that wrestling match. And that, I think, really, really translated into the type of suffering that you would do later. Past that, like, my dad had had a lot of aspiration, big aspirations for us.

He wanted us to be an officer or one of us to be. He was like, hey, if you're going to go into the army, I always knew that I was going to go into the military. And so he had always had big aspirations for, he was like, you're going to go an officer. We're trying to send you to West Point or Annapolis or this is. I wanted to be a pilot until I found out I was dyslexic, and that doesn't work real well for the pilots. So I'd gotten into all of that wrestling and everything, kind of knew that my path was going to be in the military, and then 9-11 happened. And I was a junior in high school when 9-11 happened. So everybody, you get the same kind of response from everybody where they're like, hey, where were you?

11. And I can remember exactly where I was. And then the thought process of, okay, now, now I know I'm going into the military. I didn't know how long I was going into the military for. I thought I was going to do a, like a four-year stint. And I was going to follow my dad's footsteps and go to the Dallas Police Department. So that's kind of really like the growing up portion that led me into going into the military. Had there not been a war, I probably wouldn't have stayed as long as I did. But definitely the way my father and my mother raised us, we were Americans. We lived in a place called Little Mexico for a little while, and then we moved to Carrollton. And my dad was always like, you're not a Mexican. Like, don't listen to what everybody says, you're not Mexican, you're an American. So me and my brother pretty much raised on that, took that into heart. And then we just like doing the hard stuff.

We got to, I had the risk factor that was always there. I think with all guys that do what we do, I got into a lot of trouble, like a ton of trouble. I went to parties, I drank, and I really knew that college kind of wasn't going to be for me. So I didn't never planned on it, plan on it. And then, yeah, so I joined. I tried one year, one semester of college and then I called it. And you and your brother both joined, were there a few year gap between the two of you? So there's a two year gap between when, so me and him are actually two years apart and

there's a year and a half to two year gap between when we joined. So I had joined in 2004 and graduated everything in May. And I was, stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. And then as soon as I got there, I was gone probably. I think it was like three months later. Like I got promoted to Sarin First Class, or not Sarin First Class, like on the airfield when it was snowing, getting on the bird to go to go back, go into Iraq. And what was Iraq like for you in 2004?

Oh, gosh, that place was the Wild West. like the so everything it just had just stopped and it just transferred over to ohio two uh we got there landed in biop they're still doing the i don't know if you had ever gotten into biop uh probably did but they were still doing the drops so they were got the the combat drops when they would fly and they just they'd take that that crowd aircraft and then they'd be like okay everybody hold on and they just nose that thing right to the ground. And we, that was, I think that was the first time I realized like that, hey, this could be real because I'm sitting there and I'm just like,

how am I like 19, 20 years old? And I'm looking down the road and there's people throwing up into their shirts on the floor. It's going all over the place. You've got the Lodi's or laughing on the other side. I know, it's like, okay, so this is, they're, either trying to scare us or we're scared of something. Yeah, we landed in the middle of the night, got there, and then that deployment was pretty,

I was in Camp Taji, Iraq, and so we're right there on MSR, Tampa. And it was funny because we just knew that that was the big IEDs, the EFPs hadn't started going happening yet. I would meet those later on early 2006-7. And so we were really just scared of the 155s, and it was just random fire fights. All of it was super surreal when I think back about it

because we would go down Route Irish. We'd do stuff. We'd be heading down into the green zone, taking people in or pulling people out or going on mission. And right there on Route Irish, there was a bridge. And as soon as you cross that bridge, first little tick I got into was we're coming out. And as soon as you cross that bridge, everybody's shooting.

From both sides of the freeway. and it's just all fires coming in on you. Everybody's, you're driving you, the gunners are shooting. We're shooting back at them. They're shooting at us. And then you cross probably about a mile over. You cross back over and it's over. It's like somebody turned like a picket off.

And so I was just like, this is, it got really surreal at a couple points where it was just like, this isn't real life. Like we're living in some alternate universe where this is happening. Where you're just sort of like, I can't believe that happened. Yeah, like it's like, I was like, so that's my first firefighter is me sitting in this like the rear of this vehicle. And we're just getting dinged, you know, we're getting stitched up a little bit, but we're not really scared of what they're doing. And it was funny because the unit that was bringing us in because we were ripping out with them was just like, everybody good. And they like it was a normal day. Like that was just like, hey, somebody passed me that rip it down there.

We're like, I'm like, sure. Like, here you go, buddy. So yeah, so just a very surreal experience as soon as like how Iraq was then. And then through the entirety of it, it was that, it was kind of that the entire time. We had a couple things. There was a road right on MSR, Tampa going north towards Anaconda. There was a mosque. It was called Mashada Mosque.

And for some odd reason, they really like shooting down Blackhawks. And they did it a couple times. And so every time it happened, the response was we'd go down there and we'd get a huge firefight with them. And it'd be like a two-day tick. And then we'd be like, all right, that's it. The show's over. Everybody go back home.

We did what we said. And then we'd go back to Taji and hang out there. And the surreal part about it was funny. And later on I thought about this was that we were having like Friday night boxing matches at the U.S.Os, or at the MWR right in front of that PX right there on. camp Taji. They were having like volleyball tournaments. So it was like a little town. I think we had a haunted house in October. I didn't get to go to it because we were running missions out. But

like they put together in these old abandoned buildings in on that camp. They put together like haunted houses and stuff like that. So we were getting I was getting like this weird feel of like, hey like outside the gate a lot. And it's like every man for himself, the wild west. and then you come back in here and it's like, hey, there's just people. It's like a Boy Scouts jamboree or something. Yeah, like it's, it was, it was a introduction that I probably will never forget because you go into, you read books and you watch movies and you think war is one way and then you get there and you're just like, oh, this is, this is nothing like what they told me

it was going to be. Yeah, those were the mad if you didn't get the, the next Hodge DVD, you know, that month. Those were those were the years where like you guys would be playing video games, hit the pause button when you had to go on a mission, go and do it, get into a firefight, come back, sit right back down on the couch. Yeah. Start the game again. Yeah. It was all, yeah, you just come right back and you'd start playing or, um, what was the, my favorite thing was we would just come and hang out and we had chess games going on for like days and we'd go leave. just like that. We go leave and then we come back and we play chess and we'd be like,

all right, who's move is it? Or the biggest one is you start a fist fight over risk because somebody moved your part. I think our platoon got banned from risk a couple times because they started a massive like fight. It was like, you're a cheater. They were like, all right, well, we can't do this anymore because the privates are out there getting wild with each other. And that was the other thing, too. The army was a lot different than it was I would say it was more kind of what we knew it to be. We're like, if I had a problem in another private, I just walked outside and we just fought it out. So wall-to-wall counseling was a thing.

Oh, yeah, like E5 would, I'm not going to say they'd hit you, but they would, they'd rough you up a little bit just to get it through your head. Some privates were physically corrected. Yes, they're physically into the wall several times. I was one of those hard-headed privates. So I think any good, I think any good NCO when you get, when you did well in the military, you always remember, you're like, yeah, I was that hard private. I was the one that was slightly out of control. And me at 20, I had the biggest ego on the planet.

I was like, I can outdo you at everything. Could I? No, not really. But I try. Well, that's a good personality asset that sort of have that, to take you into special operations. But we'll get there. But you, after that deployment, you went over to LERS. Yeah.

So I went out to Fourth ID. I was started. I was an E4. And it was funny because you get there. I'm pretty much volunteering for to get on to the next thing. So I moved from Riley to Hood. Get there. And I was just like, hey, like, like I want to get on to the next thing.

got picked up, physically fit. I'm at that point, like I'm in a good place, kind of, like I said, physically, which is really the only thing that matters. I could have been done as a box of hair, but as long as you can run your two-mile in like, you know, 11 minutes, you're great. Like, you're the, you're the next best thing. So got into that, and immediately 2006, we deployed over to Rustamaya, Iraq. So we were right in the middle of Baghdad.

And we get there and this is not the most scared that I was ever, but when I realized I was just like, oh, things are slightly out of hand here because the surge was just starting up. We get in there and we get into us. So the normal thing, we get into biop, get taken to biop. By this time, I've done it already. And so we're getting in and they get us in in the middle of the night. Well, as we're coming in, there's rockets slamming into this camp.

And if you know anything about Restamaya, it sat in between two large radio towers. And so bracketing, that's a bracketing, that's perfect for bracketing. And so we were getting at, we were driving in that night and getting rockets, rockets were hitting, like, hitting vehicles that we were coming. Not our vehicles that we're coming in on, but were they having a motor pool. You can see them slamming into the motor pool. and as we're coming in they're like the people like get it's it was almost like a Vietnam movie where they're just like get off

get off we got to go and we're getting off and running right into a bunker and getting into these bunkers and that's hey welcome to rest of my Iraq and it was funny because that day the next morning we're getting everything set up we hadn't slept we're getting we're getting finding where we're going to be living for the next year and this guy uh they come

and tell us. They're like, hey, we had a casualty last night from one of the other companies. And we're like, what happened? This guy has been in country for 18 hours and a rocket had snuck its way between, because it was built, it was hard stand buildings, but they had the sandbags that were built up with the barriers. And one had snuck right between the barrier and the roof of the building and hit his door and frat, put frag all over him. So he was in, I think they said he did the country or 18 hours and was being evacked that day. Jesus. And so that was kind of the realization that we were in.

Things, things weren't at, like the surge was real. Things were getting kind of crazy. And we, as soon as we got in, they were like, hey, y'all are going out. I think we did a sort of left seat, right seat ride. And then we were, we were to the races. This podcast is brought to you in part by stash. You don't accomplish a mission by winging it. You have a plan.

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Bitcoin 10. The link is in the description. Thank you, Kasha, for supporting the show. I actually use the product and I love it. Thanks, guys. Enjoy. What was that? I mean, what did that consist of? Because the worst team, of course, is long-range reconnaissance.

I mean, that's what they're designed for anyway. But what was the actual mission that you guys had when you got to Iraq? So it was, it was strange because it was, we were, but we were basically like an area denial. We sat in a cop and then we were running operations out of that cop and we were we were tasked to watch an MSR. We were tasked to do operations on that MSR. So they essentially we got used as just a a normal infantry company. So not saying it was mismanaged, but I think that was the sign of the time. It's like that that time during the surge we were just trying to regain control and Russamai that area was one of the areas that was

really contested at that point in time. I can't remember the cop's name, but we were in a cop, and we had been in this cop for maybe this is a great one. And we actually have a yearly retelling of this story. So we're in a cop. We've been in there for maybe like four or five weeks, running operations out of it. It's pretty much like there's a barracks on the top floor.

The bottom floor has another set of barracks. And then we have like a bay that operated and all of our trucks were in this like courtyard. And that's kind of where we did everything out of it. We had fuel tanks. We had like small guard shacks. But this thing wasn't very, this thing wasn't very big. It was maybe five, six hundred meters. Yeah, those cops were like Vietnam era fire bases.

Yeah. No. And so one night a guy named Pritchard and another guy named Sprouse were they were sitting on top of this deck smoking and normal night like we had gotten out of the mission everybody comes in some people are eating I was in I was in the barracks playing cards and so we hear a thump-thump and then like explosions on the building like not not around the building it was on the building and then we start hearing the guns go off on the towers uh as we're running out sprouts and Pritchard are running back in and they're screaming at everybody like don't

go out there. So what kicked this off was they were smoking and Sprouse and Pritchard look up and Sprauss even says, and Pritchard says this every day. He's like, he told me, he looked at me in the face and told me this. He goes, man, that's a weird shooting star. As they're looking

at it, it keeps getting closer and closer and closer and closer. And as it does, it lands right in the middle of their smoke pit. It's an inner mortar. It doesn't go off. And by all rights, that things should have killed both of them. So they're running in, they're scared. Like they've just had this near-death experience trying to keep us from all running out. So we're pinned. That's the only way out is that little stairway. We're pinned inside

of that, that little thing while there's a huge fight going on. And the tanker company that were attached to who's downstairs, they're trying to get, they don't have tanks at this point. So they're doing their best. They're out trying to get out to the walls. And it was funny because my best friend, he was the best friend, he was my best man at my first man. wedding in true ranger fashion. He's the best man in my first wedding. His name's James Dyer. He's now major, which this man, he's an amazing, he was an amazing soldier. He still is. I laugh every time I say major because I'm like nobody should have ever given him that. But so James is luckily enough, James had been had been a washout in EOD school and like the last week washout.

Like he got drunk and they got upset at him. So he washed out the last week. So he's got, he knows a little bit. So what does he do? He's like, okay, well, I'm going to go out there and I'm going to see if I can at least put some sandbags around this thing. So he goes out there, does the EOD thing, puts a bunch of sandbags and we all take off and run. We spend the entire next that night repelling an attack where they knock down of the four walls that was out that cop. They knocked down three of them.

Holy shit. And one of the major things that happened, and James and Sean Myers, another guy, so we were all in the same squad. Sean was the squad leader. Me and James were his team leaders. And so during all of this action, the trucks are all sitting right there.

They get hit by mortars, and they get a fuel tank goes off on them. And so they're burning on the side. And so we now have no vehicles either. but all of the AT-4s are in there. And somebody's like, is the eight, they're like,

hey, are all the AT-4s still on the trucks? Like, yeah. And they're like, if those things go off, we're fucked. And so James and Sean run into this raging fire and start plucking out all these AT-4s.

Both of them end up with Bronz Stars for it, which was one of, one of the many actions that they did during that entire deployment that actually got recognized. But that was, one of the nights where it was just like, holy crap, it was like this is like you said, like Vietnam style attack on a

base. Were you guys like preparing to be potentially overrun? I mean, was it that bad? So once they are I want to say that our own maybe mortars had knocked down our own walls at some point in time. And so

I wasn't sure because we're busy on one side. But there was a point where we, yeah, we had thought we were like, hey, like, if this, if this goes down the way everybody thinks is, luckily we had gotten air support overhead, so we've gotten attack helicopters. But we end up like, we're saying, hey, like, if we have to, we're going to have to drop back into the buildings. And once that happens, like, we are in a bad way. Luckily, we had repelled enough of the attack, and I think we had had enough firepower out there.

We come with a bunch of machine guns or everything like that that we had gotten them to get away from us and once the attack aviation shows up that was their episode like hey we're not we're not messing with this puts the kibosh on that yeah

what ended up happening with that cop is they that was unusable anymore they weren't to send anybody out that thing was gone and we ended up having to move to another one that we lovingly called Castle Grace Gold because it was a all it was was a five-story unfinished parking garage. Holy shit.

That they put barriers around. And you finish your deployment out of there? What's that? You finished the deployment out of there? Yeah, we ended up finishing the deployment out of there. Lots of good stories with that. Actually, have you heard of Tales from the Grid Square? No.

It's a collection of ghost stories from the GWAT. Oh, really? Super, yeah, it's on IG. I love reading their stuff, and I listen to wartime stories, gets a lot of their stuff off of YouTube. But I love reading the stuff. I'm about to write one because we're pretty sure that place was haunted.

What it ended up happened is the parking garage. Yes. Well, so the reason why we had gotten it at such a good price was because during the invasion, before the American forces came in, the bathists had taken all the people who were not, friendly to the bathist. And the story was, and we've gotten to tell this by an elder,

was that they had gotten all these guys and rounded them up in that building and then took them to the top, right above the top floor. So you had the overlooked and the top floor where all of our machine gun nests were, but right underneath that, they brought them all up there. And then they had shot them and set them on fire in there. And so what was the crazy thing is when we were first looking at it, we walked up to that. And I've smelled a dead body or two,

burned before. And I walk up there, I was like, hmm, that's a familiar smell. And a couple of the other guys who have been around burning bodies, been like, this smells weird. And then we were like, what's all these marks on these, these burn parts on the ground? And turns out like any, the, even the Iraqi police, the IA, they would, whenever we were staging to do missions, would not go into that building at all period. And we definitely heard some weird stuff up there. So I don't know It was like large animals or something, but there was a point in time where guys would not go up there with their nods on. They would turn their nods off. They would follow the stairwell and then they turned their nods on as soon as they got to the very top.

I mean, were they like hearing voices or something? What do you think? So at night when we knew nobody was up there, you would hear like things moving around. One of the big complaints was either nods would completely go dead. they were the old PBS 14 so like they would go dead for any any reason but the it was the everybody had seen and I saw a little bit of something and I'm you know you never want to say that you saw something to anybody else outside of it but you would see shadows do things like they weren't really supposed to be doing and so and I would always chalk it up to oh there's a light

somewhere way out in the distance it's shining and it's it's moving shadows like that but But a lot of guys would be like, yeah, I just don't turn my nods on. Yeah, like you're trying to talk yourself out of it. Yeah, you're like, I have to go to this guardship. If I don't go up there, somebody's be real mad. And I'm more scared of that sergeant than I am or whatever's up here. So I'm just going to go up there and just pretend it didn't exist. I did many years ago now.

I did a Halloween episode for a different podcast where I kind of cover some of these stories. And I got a guy to tell a pretty cool story about Okinawa. There's a lot of ghost stories out there. Oh, about the, what is it, Gate 3? I hear a lot about... Some abandoned buildings and stuff. Yeah. Some weird stuff.

And actually, from Iraq, there are quite a few UFO stories, which is probably, probably it's our guys seeing our own aircraft, you know, more than likely. But there are some stories that you hear in, like, things that an entire Marine battalion saw that, like, doesn't really make sense, you know? Yeah. I like too how a lot of these stories get, because you'd hear a lot of stuff. We spent a night out in the old Iraqi intelligence. They're complex.

So on a lot of the videos, you watch Tomahawks slamming into like a almost triangle building. And then there's a, they would be like that's still Iraqi intelligence compound. And we actually stayed the night in that. and they have legit cells that were very strange and that's where we were sleeping and none of us slept in there we went ahead and slept in the we went ahead and it's jail it's jail cells cells and then there's a walkway that you go up and you can see that there's um uh islet uh metal islets on the ground and you could pretty much guess what they were for but you would look up and it's a walkway and it's completely there's no cover there's no nothing it's a

walkway and then there's these islets on the ground and their at their space pretty evenly uh and what later on we asked about that we're like hey what's going on with this and they're like oh that's where they chained them that's where they just sat them out in the sun and chained them down there and i was like yeah and it was funny because our platoon sergeant is like yeah we're not sleeping in there like we'll just we'll just sleep out on our trucks man i think i know some platoon sergeants that would have loved to lock their privates up in that Oh, God, yeah. There would have been private chained in there then.

Oh, man, it's so wild. I mean, Iraq does have this, like, parts of it have this quality. It does have a haunted quality to it. I remember, like, seeing places where you can see just the very top of the foundations of buildings that no longer exist. And then the new buildings built, like, perpendicular or opposite to it, like, the city plan actually changed. And these new buildings are built over these old ones. It's just like, this place is so ancient. It's unreal.

Oh, man, we got into, so one of the ticks that we got into was right outside of the Babylon gates. So there's Babylon gates right to the north of, to the north of Biaup, right at right when you're getting into the green zone. There's like ancient, there was a wall there that they were like, yeah, that's part. that used to be, this is where the Babylon gate was. We got it. I was like, I remember like being by that gate or by that wall and being shot at from it. And be like, this is, I was like, this must be where he said that this was. I was like, this is super cool.

So, but yeah, I think that's one of the coolest things about the military in general going to that area. Like the GWAT was the GWAT was the GWAT. But the things that you got to go and see, like who, how many people can say that they've been to Baghdad. and Baghdad was almost the, that's in the cradle of civilization. So all of the history that you hear about and read about, the Bible, everything like that. A lot of that stuff went through there. And I was, so I love history. And I was always really a really cognizant of stuff like that.

When I was in northern Iraq, I'd be looking up names and stuff like that. And they can almost get translated into the Bible. And that's part of, Northern Iraq is part of where, like, a lot of the old, Testament. I mean, Nineveh is in the Bible. I believe the Nineveh forest is actually in the Bible. Yeah. And so that's, it's, it's weird because you're traveling all through these places. And like one of the cooler trips I did is we were going to check on, uh, on some of the Kurds and we were going towards the Iranian border. It's gorgeous, beautiful. Like mountains, like, there's a couple pictures of us where we're, looks like we're at the top of the world there.

exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. And you're just like, and I'm like, man, it was like, it's crazy that there's this much conflict and war going on in such a gorgeous place. I think like part of where we were at, there was an old ski resort there. And it's like these people used to be pretty, especially Iraq. If you think about Iraq in the 80s, that was like a thriving metropolis.

Like it was, they had nightclubs. They had, they had industry. And then, you know, the wars kind of set them back probably about like 60 or 70 years. But, you know. Yeah, man. And so after that deployment, you get back. And when does, like, the 75th Ranger Regiment start sort of, like, entering into your mind? I'm fantastic.

You ask that question. I know exactly when it happened. So we were walking down a route that had an ID strike probably. it wasn't an idea, it was an EFP. So one of the terrible things about the EFP, when that started filtering in from Iran, was that they were blowing holes and chunks through all of our armor.

And so I was there during the period of time where it was like all our vehicles looked like they had come out of Mad Max because they were trying to find any crazy ways. It was like ammo cans with glow plugs in them because maybe we can catch them if they have heat if they're not victim operated. So going through that, we would see these vehicles just get crushed by EFPs, you know,

a couple of them the size of like 55-gallon drums that would just nuke an entire thing. You'd hear about all. They would drag, I think that was one of the worst things that they'd drag them into Russiaya, and they're still blood and gore all over it. You were like, yeah, they didn't. And it's funny because whenever I think about that, did you ever see the movie Memphis Mel? No. World War II movie about the bombers, the bomber crews.

and it was about one one bomber that had made it all the way through. But it reminded me, because I saw that movie when I was a kid, and then it reminded me of that, of them pulling these planes out, like back down the runway after they'd gotten to a fight, and you could tell somebody who died in it. And that was a lot of when they were pulling these vehicles out from EFPs, was that you could tell nobody, like, there's a hole that goes in one door, out the other, through the radio mount,

and there's gore and blood everywhere on it. No one made it out of that. So that was happening a lot. So what do they do? Instead of it, they're like, hey, they're going to walk us in front of it because we're going to do a route reconnaissance. So in a V, in a inverted V, we're walking down a route, picking at things, hoping that that EFP doesn't hit us first.

And when I asked the question, because there's a, you know, a million dollar vehicle behind me, the Buffaloes. And I was like, these things are meant to take that. Yeah. I was like, why am I walking in front of it? You cost less than that would to blow it up your whatever we have to pay your family. I never understood why they did that. I mean, if you study World War II, the Nazis always have their infantry behind the tank.

It's not in front. Nobody does that. That's stupid. Yeah. It was, it was, and we were doing it down the routes. And I think the, whenever we got the training and everything for it, it was that you did that. And maybe that first guy would be far enough away from the road to catch anything that was victim. operated, but if it was pressure plate or anything like that, you're done.

Yeah, you're toast. So I'm walking down there and I'm just like, so wait a second, that, that Buffalo is more important than I am at this point or any of my friends or anybody else. And it was, they were like, yeah, yeah, pretty much. So we've gotten into a couple things and command, I think, was making some bad decisions. We had a friend of ours get killed. I won't put out any names, but in an instance where a person of leadership, had put their TC into the back position,

or into the TC position, because they knew they were targeting those, they were targeting the TCs. And that's exactly what happened. And then that guy, that leader survived, while a bunch of our friend did not. And so we had taken a couple casualties at that point. A guy named Josh Plaseca,

who was a E4 at the time. He got killed by an EFP. And so we had had a lot of, we started getting casualties, and that's when it started becoming real. And I had an epiphany at one point in time where I'm sitting there. I'm just like, like, I got to get somewhere where like my life matters a little bit more, like, that I'm up the price tag on, on me and myself. So that if I'm going to keep doing this, like, I'm going to survive. So my brother had just gotten in the Army and just passed Rip and had gotten into three. And so that was one of my phone calls to him.

I was just like, hey, I was like, I think I'm going to go to selection. Like, and if I don't make selection, I'm getting out. I'm not going to do this anymore. My brother was a very liked person in 37, even from a private, everybody really liked him. He's just one of those guys. And so as I'm talking to him about this, I'm getting close. I was just like, hey, I'm going to selection as soon as I get. The second I get back, second they'll let me, I get off that plane.

I'm going to selection. My brother's like, so you want to go, what? Be a teacher. He's like, you want to go teach people to do stuff? And I was just like, what does that mean? I'm the regular Army dude. So I are at this point, I think Green Beret is just like, I'm going to be kicking indoors. I'm going to be doing all the cool stuff. Like, it's going to be fun. And my brother's just like, yeah, he's like, so here's the thing. He's just like, Green Berets don't do direct action. He's like, and he's in the resume. He's like, we do direct action. He's like, that's all we do. I was just at that point, I was like, cool, how do I do this? He's like, oh, he's like, let me, let me get back to you.

Let me figure some stuff out. I'll, I'll email you here. But the next email I get is from Ben Durham, from 375. Or he was at the point, I think at that point he was the career counselor. And it's basically an email. I'm the most positive I know Durham. You probably do. Ben is.

He was on a jump into Iraq. Yes, yeah. I know Durham. Yeah, he's a good guy. Durham's one of the best guys in the world, one of the most shadiest people I've ever met. Maybe that's why they had him working in the arms room. So he was actually, he climbed up all the way to be the regimental career counselor. Good for him. Yeah, he did real well. He was in charge of the fight teams. Yeah, yeah, he was a boxer.

For regiment. Yeah, he did all of that. Yeah, yeah. ran his own fight program and everything. He did a lot, but I didn't know him at that time yet, but he sends me, it's just an email, and it's like, click here to apply. And it's like, I click it, and they're like, have this printed out, have your commander sign it, give it back to me. So I'm just like, all right, so I go get my commander to sign it.

And it was funny because I was, at that point, I was really good friends, me and my friend, my squad leader at the time, Sean Myers and James, We were kind of all at the same point where we were disenchanted with the war and how things were going and kind of the regular Army lifestyle. So I get everything together. I get it. Everybody signs my paperwork and I'm pretty much on board. Like I think I was going to get back. I was going to have the two weeks to leave.

And then I was going right to rip. And so I, we do that. I'm having a conversation with them. I'm like, hey, I'm going to do this. And they were both like, no, I think we're done. And I'm like, I was like, why don't you just come with me? I was like, I'm pretty sure they're looking for people. We can all get into this.

Both of them said no, I'm the only one that said yes. And to this day, when I talked to James, Sean actually died a couple years ago. But when I talked to both of them, when he was still alive, they were both like, I should have gone with you. Like, we should have done that. Because it was the, we were in a squad that was like-minded like regiment was. Like, and I always tell people, like, the thing you can't, the thing, the difference between regiment and the big army is in regiment or the big army, you'll find one or two guys that are about it. They're, they're about the lifestyle. They are warriors.

That's what they wanted to do. For whatever reason, they didn't get into that. They couldn't make their way. Because getting into regiment's luck, too. I tell people that all the time. Like, it's like getting through selection, that's luck. Like, partially luck. You could, I watched the guy walk out and rip and he was wearing the wrong t-shirt.

That was the end of his rip. Forgot your two-court out. Yeah, like, yeah, you bring the wrong one. You don't like, oh, wait, you didn't bring X, Y, Z. Yeah, you're done. Thanks for playing. So, but that's the difference between what I thought, the difference between regiment and big army was that I in the big army I found a group few and far

between but I found a group that was going to watch my back during combat was going to fight like we were always fighting we were always trying to get to the forefront of the fight we were trying to do close with and destroy the enemy um regimen it's everybody every single swing swing guy out there is about that like that's what he does and if he doesn't he doesn't belong and he won't be there anymore. So it's like a very stark difference between the big army, but you can still kind of find those pockets. But going back to it, that's pretty much

my epiphany. I was like, this is what I'm going to do. And then I, because I was an E5 at the time. And it's, I don't know if you ever heard of E5s going through as a import hard, very hard.

They go through rope though, right? Or RAS 2 now. Well, so no. If you're an E5, you go through RIP. Oh, no kidding. Or not RAS, you go through RAS1. Okay. I went through RIP, so that's still the four-week course.

I get, and the way it happened was is I got back from Iraq. Two weeks later, I'm at Benning for Jump School, and then immediately picked up. It was in August, immediately picked up, and then I got into, and then you go, I went right down to, got into, RIP and then four weeks in RIP, the four weeks in RIP, and then immediately after that, it's because I'm an NCO, and I can't be an NCO in regiment without a tab. So right after RIP, I'm right into CERT. Right after CERT, I'm right into Ranger School. And then it was funny because I got out of Ranger School and Sergeant Major Merritt was the,

it was first arm, Bowhannon. comes in pretty much tells us we didn't do anything special. Like, you're not special. Everybody does this. Immediately after Star Major Merritt walks up, and he's just like, he's like, congratulations, Rangers. And we're like, yeah, he's like, who hears in Deco? He's like, raised my hand. He's like, you'll be meeting your platoon in, in 72 hours. You get a pass, and then you're going to be on a plane. I was like, perfect.

And then a week later, I found myself since I was, That was my first deployment, and I didn't do any of the train up, but I still have to shout out and they still needed guys. I found myself in Deco, and they were like, you're a goose, you're the AG for a goose, and you're going to learn how to be a team leader. So there I am with goose rounds, like walking up the mountain a couple weeks after Ranger's School just being like, well, this is great. If upgrading your full sleep setup has been on the list for a while, Ghostbed's Fourth of July sale is the time to actually do it. Right now, you can get $250 off mattress bundles, which means you can add cooling pillows, cooling sheets, or an adjustable base, and still come out well ahead of what you'd pay anywhere else. And as a team house listener, you get an extra 10% off on top of that using the code house. Ghostbed is a family-owned company with more than 20 years of mattress making experience.

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the right mattress, then build from there. Go to ghostbed.com slash house and use the promo code house at checkout. That's ghostbed.com slash house promo code house. Some exclusions apply. See site for details. So you mentioned some of the challenges of being an import coming as an E5 rather than kind of grown up in the regiment. I mean, what was that experience like for you? Oh, rough. The learning curve was just massive, especially not having been able to do any of the workup. Like I wasn't in the trainups. I didn't do any of it.

So my first induction into the regiment was meeting them overseas in Afghanistan and starting to go out on missions. Like, here's your kit, here's all your stuff. Like, follow us. Don't get, don't fall behind. And that's kind of when, like, I kind of pumped myself up. I was like, all right, like, it's going to be normal. It was a, the beast of regiment as far as going and actually doing operations was something

just wildly different. In the big army, you sit around and it's like, you know, hours of bored, or days, months of boarding with a couple of stark moments of terror mixed in here and there. There it was like off the gate. And I was in, I was in, I was a deco. First Arm bully was the first sergeant. And we, we did not like walking at all. So everything was X landing, like, we called it the deco bum rush where you just took off off the back of that bird and beat feet right to that target.

Like if they're shooting at you, it doesn't matter, keep going, get to the doors, like, we'll be fine. But yeah, the learning curve, that, it was a rough learning curve, and I can see where a lot of guys don't survive that. Where it's like, hey, you just can't keep up. You're not, this isn't for you. It is a very different place than the big army. Just what they expect of you, what the knowledge you're supposed to have as an E5, the, getting anybody to actually respect you at that point because they know you're an import. So I got lucky again because my brother was well known.

And so they were just like, hey, like this is sauces. By that time, I think he was a TAP spec 4 too. And he was just like, they're just like, hey, he's, you know, he's sauce's brother. So I probably got a little bit of leeway on that. But it was that deployment. And as hard as it was, though, that's kind of where I knew. I was like, no, this is where I was supposed to be. Yeah.

This was the road I was supposed to take. But that road, I did eight months of schooling to get into the regiment as an E of five. Because I don't know if they do it anymore, but it was almost a gauntlet. It was the airborne school, rip, cert. Then it was Ranger School. Then it was deployment. Hey, cool. You get 72 hours or two family and then you got to go.

Yeah, it's hardcore. Yeah. But I mean as a Ranger, like, again, like, and especially like right after getting, I was pumped up. I got a Ranger tab. Hell yeah. And then I was, and as soon as they said, hey, you're going, I was like, fantastic. This is going to be great. I'm going to get to.

And the biggest thing I was impressed was the Chow Hall at a, man, where were we? We were down in a helmet, damp leatherneck. I love the Chow Hall there. It was great. That's what I was doing. I was just eating the whole time. So this first deployment, you guys were doing time-sensitive targets, I take it, and you're learning the ins and outs of doing direct-action raids? Yeah, so it was, we were doing a lot of direct action.

In fact, it was all direct action. And so I had actually gotten there right. Kubik and Centora had gotten killed probably about a week and a half before. and we had gotten sent to that mission set because Marsoc had had two snipers killed in that area. Like it was when they'd gotten actually surrounded, tracked down, surrounded killed, almost kind of a Red Wing situation. And then they had been like tossed off a cliff, I think, at that point. So that's what they brought two strike forces in to go and start like handling that mission set. And that was a, it was a really kinetic, that was a kinetic, kinetic deployment where we were out getting, getting into fights going to me.

And we had to have been a, it had to have been a, we got there pretty early right after, right after the, what's called, nighttime and fall. And get there, land, and immediately start fighting. And we didn't leave until that next morning. We'd been fighting the entire morning. or had been fighting that night into the morning. And that was one of the, and I'm sure you've had it. I had one of the most, again, going that, like, weird but surreal things that I'd ever seen. And it's the moments you take.

So I always tell you guys or guys getting into it. It's like, hey, take that, like, even if you're in a firefight, don't, you know, don't get dangerous or anything. But take a moment to look around and realize where you're at. And one of the things I realized when I was there is so it was like a movie. We had ex-filled. These guys had decided to follow us because we had kicked up to Hornets Nest. It was right out, I think it's right outside of calf. And we get on top of this hill and we're fighting, like the back of our formation is fighting the entire time and pretty much just withdrawing to our HLZ.

Get onto our HLZ. It's on the top of this hill. The sun's coming up over the back. mountains. So you can, on the right side, you can see the mountains. And the sun's already lifting up. We're already, we're already in today. And there's bombers, F-15s that are making runs on the top of these mountains, dropping bombs on the side of these mountains. And we're in this kind of a half-moon shape. I'm a goose gunner at this point, so I'm helping load a gun. And then I'm shooting, and we're repelling on another, an attack on this hill. And like, I look around and everybody's

shooting and you see A10s come over. They're, you see A10s just laying ways to people. We're all firing on the side, or we're all firing. And then I hear the wump, wamp, wamp, wump, wump, and we look back and this Chinook comes right over the top of us,

turns its ass around, and the gunners just start shooting off the back of it. And we all, like, soon as they land, we all start running onto the birds, we get it. And we got, we got the guy that we were looking for, like I think he was like at the time he's like number two or three in the country. And we get him on, we're on and we're flying away.

And everybody's just jacked up. We're we're high-fiving each other. We're sitting there like everybody's fist bumping, high-fiving each other. We're all sitting on the ground. And one of the things I did is I looked out and we're flying pretty high at this point. And both of these 8-10s are pretty much doing circles around the formation as we're doing. And I'm like sitting there. And as I'm like thinking,

about all of that stuff. I'm like, this is like a movie. Like, this is unreal. And this is my induction into regiment. This is my first employment. I was just like, at that point, I was just like, I'm going to do this forever. This is all I ever did. So it was, I think if you can, especially as an import, if you can make the road, it's worth it at the end.

Yeah, yeah. If you can get through the culture shock, as you mentioned. Yeah. And a lot of guys don't. Not their fault because Big Army, that dropped from Big Army's roads. Yeah, yeah. And then you get, after that the first deployment, what happens when you get back to the States

and now you're kind of like that Ranger Battalion garrison life at Fort Benning? No, man, completely different from, again, completely different from the Big Army. A, you're always training, but the good old boys club, like, I'm at that point, you know, I'm a tabby 5, so, you know, the world is my own. oyster. You know, I'm getting privates, you're running around, and I just remember it being, you just wanted to be the best of everything. Like, you wanted to do the fastest runner, you wanted to do all the rucks, you wanted to, you wanted to be the team that did the best, so that you could get the best missions. Everything's a competition. Yeah, and then, especially then being there with

my brother, too, was a good time because we paled around a lot. Like, I'd always go and hang out with him, I think he had just made the move over to Rekke. And so I'd always go and like hang out with him in his office and stuff like that. And then just kind of the small stuff that you would see where it's the, you're walking around through tambouret at that point and you're nearly untouchable on that base. Like everybody knows that they give you the wide berth. They pretty much, hey, you know, you're behind the brown fence and everybody knows it. Everybody knows who you are, which is kind of the difference in the big army as if nobody knows who you are, nobody cares.

And I had an interesting thing. So when I graduated RAS and was going to SERT, I graduate RAS and they're saying, hey, you know, you're, or no, it was Ranger School. No, it was RASS. It was RAS. And I graduate RASS, so I have a tamburay at that point. And they're like, hey, I got a, I got a couple weeks before my class picked up for cert. So they were like, hey, you need to go out to, you need to go back to Fort Hood. I'll process that.

So I'm walking around Fort Hood with a tambouret and a scroll on. And man, like, couldn't get any better. Like, I didn't have to do nothing. Everybody was just like, oh, God, that guy, they didn't know. And it's funny because in the big army, you know, especially I didn't know anything about it. And then I didn't know that like if I if you would have been in the know you would have looked at me and be like that dude doesn't have a tab So it was funny because that was the Garrison life was so much It was fun but it was also hard and it was definitely that warrior culture

Yeah like you everybody's trying to be the best everybody's like I never seen so many guys go to the gym in my life It was like we went for morning PT and then you see everybody in there going to the gym if they were in A-Co, they were all getting hairless and tanning out somewhere. The drinking was a lot. Like that's another part of the culture is, man, we drank. When we got back from that deployment, that was the funny thing, too, is that they always had pizza and kegs waiting for you when you got back so that you could have a couple drinks while you're trying to go to the...

Queen weapons, yeah. Yeah, the rigmarole and getting all your weapons in there. And then you'd have the... we'd always get into the platoon fights over in the zoo where people are going over. They block off all the stuff on the side so nobody could get through. So it almost looked like a World War I movie where you got people blowing whistles. They got the caving ladders that they've extended so that they could go over the top. It was great.

Yeah, the platoon brawls get a little out of hand sometimes. Oh, it was so much fun, though. We got into one while we were doing elevators out on the airfield. with Seco of all people. And I was in H.HC, but I was attached to BCO as their sniper. And we get into this huge platoon brawls. And they have their guideons there. And the first sergeants are talking shit to each other.

And I remember getting into that fight. And I don't know, do you know SESNA at all? No. Uh-uh. So SESNA, he actually went to tag later on. Giant. He was a giant. He was a, no, he's a SICO dude. He was a massive man, like, six, three, 200-something pounds.

I am at that point probably 170 pounds in kit, and I'm, I'm all, every bit of five, like five, six, five, seven maybe. And during the whole role, everybody, you know how it is. Everybody's, like, falling, they're beating each other up. And I, like, lock eyes with SESNA after he had just flung somebody else. And he comes running at me, and I just latch on to one of his legs. And so he's dragging me around. It was great.

We had, the platoon brawls were probably the most fun I'd had. But the medics probably hated it because they were always fixing somebody. Like all these things, these fingers are broken. What was it when we had, like, Battalion Field Games? You remember that? Oh, God, Field Day? Yeah, Field Day, yeah. Get those banners, you know?

Yeah, the Banner Day, that's what it was. Our battalion, I'm trying to think now, was it the battalion or was it between companies or was it from platoons? I think it was platoons in my company. And he had us play this game, Washington over the Delaware, I think he called it, where they put like, or maybe it was two different companies. Because I think it was our first sergeant and the company commander in one Zodiac from our company and another first sergeant and company commander from another company and the other Zodiac. And the NCOs had to hold the Zodes up and go from like point A to point B, like 200 meters. And all the privates were lined on the edge of the field. And if those boats, God help them, got too close to those lines, dudes were getting pulled in.

Bam! Bam! Guys getting thrown off the Zodiacs. I mean, I saw guys get their PTs ripped right off of themselves. So they're walking around naked. It was totally nuts. We did, I think one of ours was Dodgeball, and that got like, super serious.

Like people are sitting there calling other people cheatered. They're like trying to like slam this ball. There was one guy who was going up to get a ball slips and gets his face like demolished by this ball. Like somebody stands like runs right over and hits him with the ball. It's in true Ranger fashion, everybody takes everything just as seriously as humanly possible. Like any advice I'd give to like a young like Ranger lieutenant, it would be, you've got to be very careful. when you pit Rangers against each other

and tell them like, hey, it's game on, go get that, you know, win that banner for us. Like something really bad is going to happen. It was, so when you got new guys, it was like their first week was rough because it would be the, you'd get all these new guys and in the company, you'd get them.

I remember I was a quad leader. I'd get new guys and I'd be like, hey, go into first platoons. I want you to fight every single one of them. And I'll give like I will give those guys Credit the new guys didn't wouldn't even blink at Roger Sargent and they run over there and tackle the first person they saw And it was in then all of a sudden it's more brawling other people are coming in

And I think one of the best ones we had was in Seaco We almost had a hostage exchange at one point in time We're all the squad leaders and team leaders sitting there and we're like we had them locked in the lockers And we're like all right I'll trade you the fat one for a my skinny guy and they'd be like no he's gonna be two like when we got bored we got bored yeah no my my privates did that in iraq where they were um they were kind of sneaking around they put on their bala clavas and were sneaking around if you remember the old cold weather gear was all black so they're dressing up like ninjas and stuff and they were going out in the middle

of the night in those shoes and they'd wait for guys from other squads to go to the showers so they're like walking with a towel around them waddling over there and privates would just ball this guy up and flex cuff them and drag them into their chew and they'd take like trophy photos with them and stuff it was yeah it becomes a hostage negotiation we're like you got to let my guy go oh fuck you i'm not doing it oh gosh uh yeah we took everything from i think that's what i missed about it. It was fun. The culture was always like about the fight, but it was

everybody was in good even in snipers. We did stuff like that. We had a guy named Baker who had a birthday. And this is my favorite Starge Major Merit story. A guy named Baker had a birthday. And so right outside

of the Chow Hall, they had those pull-up bars. And we caught Baker out there and we had duct tape and and buckets of water. And so we toss them up there. We duct tape and then we throw rag over his face. We start like waterboarding him right there.

And so we're sitting there doing all this stuff to Baker. And they drive, Sergeant Major Merritt drives by. You know, Sergeant Major Merritt drives by. Baker thinks it like, oh God, thank God somebody's going to stop this. Looks over at him. And Star Major Merritt like rolls down his window, like looks from side to sign, goes, happy birthday Ranger and then just drives him.

It was just like, we like kind of look around like, all right, I guess we're going to go back to what we did what we're up to. So. The sergeant major merit was awesome. Oh, yeah. Everybody loves that guy. I don't think there's a, I don't know anybody who didn't like him. I'm sure everybody has like that Sergeant Major Merritt story on, yeah, on objectives. He went out a lot. He always went out on mission. There was a guy in Bailey and Decoe that we were. up on, we were pulling security out

because we had already taken the compound. So we're pulling security out. And there's a big moon out. Like it's pretty high biz. And Bailey's on the ground. We're wandering around on the ground too. And Bailey looks up and he goes, he goes, hey, whoever that is,

he starts cursing at him. He's like, get down. And all you hear out of the darkness is a, oh yeah, yeah, Roger Ranger. And like gets out. And he goes, shit. Like that was hard to me.

And so we go back to, we're going back to get the DBRU, like download all the debrief stuff. Sarmajor Merritt walks in and he's just like, where's that Ranger who told me to get the F down? And Bailey's just everybody looks over at him and Bayley's like, like that. He's like, good job Ranger coins him. And like, Wausen. My Sergeant Major Merritt story was when we were doing airfield seizures. And I was in snipers at the time.

And I mean, it's dark out. It's on Watson Airfield. you have no idea who's who in the air. But I came underneath Sergeant Major Merritt and sharked his air. And he dropped, he dropped like an anchor. I don't know how many feet, but came all the way down. And I heard him come down and like, blah. And you can hear it.

Yeah, that Sergeant Major Merritt, like, rah! Yeah. And he told me later, all of his pens in his pocket exploded when he hit the ground. I felt so bad. I was horrified. but he was a good sport about it he was like lower jumper has the right away that guy

yeah good times man that was a yeah yeah I miss him a lot so I after that first deployment to Afghanistan and you know now you're living the range of life what was the next deployment for you so

after that deployment in Afghanistan the next one was back to Afghanistan to where we I'm trying to remember where we ended up. It was Salerno. Oh, yeah. So we ended up in Salerno out there doing a bunch of missions. At that point, I was with 2 Delta, and pretty kinetic.

That one was also pretty kinetic. We were actually there with then Sergeant Major. Oh, man. I just brain dumped his name. We were just talking about him, not Merit. Then right now the current Sergeant Major. Oh, yeah, your buddy. I didn't know him, I'm afraid. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, he was the platoon sergeant there for one alpha or two alpha. I can't remember which alpha goes.

So, but we had like, we were all there. Major Taylor was there, one of the, he was the HHC. And that was a fun deployment because my brother was actually supporting Salerno 2. so he was the recky guy supporting them. So, you know, he went out on a bunch of missions. We tried, we didn't go out on missions together as much on that deployment just because I think they were being kind of cognizant of the atmosphere of what was going on during those deployments. And so, yeah, did that deployment.

And that was a fun one. Had a real good time. We got into a lot of stuff on that, Like kind of the normal thing, though. There wasn't anything like big about it. It was the normal. We got into ticks. We did a bunch of stuff.

There was a bunch of shenanigans on Slarno as a base. Just that the Rangers do kind of like. I think one of my, we were talking about people playing video games. There was times where the weather was because Salerno is right there by the KG past. And that's what we were doing a lot of our operations. But during that time period, you know, weather could come in and they'd be like, weather's red or you'd be waiting for weather to clear so that we could go on mission.

And so there was a lot of times during that deployment where we were sitting there playing like Nazi zombies in full kit. Like we were just all sitting there like playing Nazis zombies. It was like, is the weather since it's still black? And they're like, yeah. He's like, all right. Like push two hours. It was like fantastic.

I think I saw, I think it was one of the medics and Charlie company. I saw him get flex cuffed to the chain link fence. at Salerno on his birthday. We had a guy named Tujo, who's also an officer now, and we found out that it was his birthday, but he kind of knew it was coming.

So he went and got tasers from the box, and so as soon as the privates rushed in, he started just tasing the crap out of the first couple of them. Eventually, he went down, and they got him, and we put him on a backboard, wrapped him up,

and then pink-bellied him, put all sorts the stuff on them and then paraded him around the camp. And that was funny because that was the, they were just testing out CST on that deployment. And so we had one and she was horrified. He's naked, getting drug around this thing. And she's just like, I'm sure she was like, oh, my God, what have I done? Yeah, you're shaving the guy's eyebrows off? Oh, gosh.

We did that to a guy. I feel bad. To this day, I was the squad leader. I watched a team leader do that to this day. I was just, I'd actually pull them out. I was like, hey, like, maybe not shave one of his eyebrows off before he goes to Ranger school. Because he's kind of a representation of us, and right now it looks weird. But yeah, like, they found out his birthday, and he, like, I just remember the first guy that came in,

because I was outside watching it because all the team leaders or squad leaders are outside watching all these privates rush in. and that first dude came in, God, it took it right in the neck and went right down. I was unconscious for a little bit. And like some of them stopped and then the team leader started like, why are you stopping?

And then they just all rushed in. And it was funny because one of the tasers that he had actually ran out of bat. He had paid so many guys that actually run out of batter. So, but yeah, that was a really fun deployment too.

I think by that time I'd kind of already gotten my feet wet, went through an entire workup for the deployment. So I was getting better at being a team leader. And were you a team leader or squad leader around this time? So I was a team leader around that time. Gotcha, got you. And then after that deployment, I went into snipers. Okay. So actually went over to snot.

Yeah, so tell us a little bit about that. What was the process like for making the transition from the line company to snipers? So snipers was looking for people. I'd actually wanted to get into Reky because I wanted to go be with my brother. But they had been like, hey, you know, maybe you do something in HHC, but you're not going to do, we're probably not going to send you over to Rekky to do that. So I was just like, all right, that's cool. Went over to Snipers, got it.

They talked it up. I never thought I'd be a sniper. In fact, for a long time, I'd been like, yeah, I don't have the patience to do any of that. But we did the selection, or you do another selection to get into snipers. So you do the R-PAT. You do your PT test, you do your R-PAT, and then we would do a group-in, just to kind of see if you could. Luckily, I was an okay shot then. I wasn't a great shot by any means, but I was okay.

but did well enough to get in and then started getting in and then they started putting us through almost like a pre-sniper of so 375 that you would be in the section and they'd be that's all they're doing is getting you ready for sniper school so a lot of shooting a lot of just learning Mike Pemberton was my pretty much my training partner he was my early training partner so and Nick I think had just left as I was getting in there so kind of the whole mic you've ever met P-Murder. I've never met Pemberton, but I've just heard many stories about him from guys over the years.

But I'm really happy to hear that, you know, they had a really good like induction program for you. Because when I went to snipers, it was kind of like, okay, you're here. Now we're going to haze you for a year. And, you know, maybe we'll teach you something at some point. But I mean, I had to wait to go to sniper school to learn my entire job.

Yeah. And what's crazy is that you don't learn, especially in Regic, like, what we did was a close-in support. Like, we were a direct support. And so we really didn't, as the shooting stuff, which is, I think, what Regiment really concentrated on was making accurate shots at distance under pressure was one of our, and that was, this is before all of the PRS stuff and everything, all that stuff was coming out. But we did, we concentrated on that because I think they knew that, I think they knew that that's what we did.

We made, we made, we were having to make accurate shots under pressure around an assault force. And so when you go, it's funny, because when I went to sniper school and then having done a, kind of a process to get to what they wanted us to be and then go into sniper school, I was like this is two different skill sets like of what they're asking us to do like this is oh because in sniper school you're still doing like stocks and gilly suits and stuff yeah you're doing stocks and gilly suits and stuff like that and but in regiment I'm a you're a direct support for the assault force I'm trying to make like I'm trying to figure out if I can make this shot like into this building as guys are moving in and how far off I you know how far off their barrels I have um then Also, too, you're kind of doing a scouting mission. So if the assault force is walking in, you're pretty much up there with the dog. I have a funny story about that. But it's the skill set is completely different from what sniper school is.

But I think you go to other schools in the Army, and then you kind of realize that that's more, it's more of an assaulter mindset there than it is sniper school. But I think everybody should go to sniper school if you're going to be a sniper because you have to traditionally know how to do the job. Did you find that the ranges also were quite a bit shorter in your job as opposed to like, I think the, you know, kind of the standard at sniper school is shooting out to a thousand meters. But when you're doing direct support, it's more realistically like, what, 300 meters at most? I think, yeah, I think. So it was funny because during the, any of the TFTs or the VALX's for platoon, live fire,

you have as far as the optics then could get you. So they could probably get you 600. So you're shooting out to six. You're making shots out 600. If Loom would let you do it, if you have the right optics for it. We were making those shots out to about 600. But on mission,

there were sometimes guys, I've heard of guys that were shooting out to like four or five, but nothing really past X. because you're really focused in on, like, A, when everybody's going up, you're probably, you've climbed a roof and you're sitting on that roof watching doors, watching windows, making sure that, like, there's nobody in. And then making that shot into those windows, if you have to, you really become, I think, an asset as far as target identification,

like, hey, this is what you have here. This is what I'm seeing, you know, kind of calling out door heights, well heights, where entries are if things are locked. They used us a lot for that kind of setting up the assault force to get into the target. Yeah, yeah, as Overwatch for the assault teams. Yeah. Any other sniper courses that they sent you to where you had some interesting takeaways? No, I think during the time period that we were going to, we did rifles only.

And then the Todd Honnet, we went out there with him because he was out in Texas. We did those courses. we really didn't get sent to a lot of like army army courses and then towards the now the guys go to uh saparctic uh they go to sodyk i think and some of the guys had actually gotten into sodick i know chris tofer who was uh had been my partner he had actually turned out to be my partner for the longest uh chris had gone to sodic and done all that stuff so it's uh i think it was at the point in time they tried to get you to what they could but during that point in the war like we were we were getting out we had a we had a we had a couple guys that

they sent to a marine scout sniper no uh man we did we had one too and that's all he talked about it was rough it was rough being around him like he's a marine yeah we're right he was just like oh it's so great and this is the things they do and i was just like when's the last time you gillied up man so uh we were just like and not to take any way i think those guys are fantastic Yeah, they are. Again, I think that school from what I saw later on, really concentrated on skillcraft. Like skill craft was their thing.

Yeah, yeah. Falking, getting, gilling up, how to move. And I think the Army, and especially because they were going more towards the, like again, the rifles only Todd Hadnett stuff, they were going a lot towards more. more accuracy. They were going to accuracy first. We were going to accuracy first. We were going to rifles only, stuff like that. And that was, we were really concentrated on accuracy, getting the ABCs tuned up and actually pushing that gun to the limit. As opposed to, I think, from what I saw from

Marine Scout sniper, it was a lot of field crap. We were a lot of shooting. And right now, I want to say that sniper school, that's what it's based off of is a lot of technical shooting. Yeah. Which I think is great. I think that's kind of what you needed because this day and age, if you're talking about warfare now, a sniper is a dangerous thing.

But as far as skill craft is concerned, like we have thermals. Everybody's got thermals. Everybody's got all sorts of things. So it's like you can sneak around the woods all you want in a gilly. Like if that thing doesn't have thermal shielding on it, then you're kind of dead in the water. And then what was your first deployment like with snipers?

So again, going back to that was another one where it was learning a new skill set, having to readjust my mindset from DoorKicker, always wanting to get into, hey, like, you've got to look for, you're almost a Vanguard, you're ahead of everybody, you've got to get into, you got to get into good positions, you've got to climb, you've got to look for where you're going to climb, and then afterwards, after everything's set, you got to kind of get yourself into a position that you could be able to defend the assault force

and make shots, whether that's on, like, you put yourself on BPs, or whether you put yourself up on top of a roof or wherever it is going to be on the target. I always thought the interesting thing about, especially being an E5 coming from being a team leader and then being an E5, as an E5 in regiment, you kind of get told, hey, this is where you're going to be at, and then you have your left and right limits of the decisions you get to make right there and then on that spot. As a sniper, it was new to me because I went into mission planning,

and then I told the P.L. where I was going to be. I was like, hey, I think I should be here, or I think I should travel here in the formation, because I have the best. So that was the growing up and having that experience. But that was, I think, the learning curve was having to realize that, hey, like, now you have real input into this mission set, into this mission planning, especially as a sniper because, you know,

you got to decide where you got to think like the enemy, where's that contact going to come from, and where can I place myself best to make the best shots on that to end whatever contact that is as fast as possible. So a lot of, you know, you didn't always end up at the BP, sometimes you were out of BP. Sometimes you were on a roof, like I said, or you were in some area, or you had to decide,

hey, we had one mission where they decided that the building next to us was higher than the compound and that we were going to go in. And so we actually went in, made entry, pulled pistols, cleared all the way up top, got on top of it. And then they were like, hey, we don't want to clear back down because we don't know what's down there. We don't have anybody on the bottom floor because we were pulling our own security. So we shimmied down like a pipe, which was probably one of the more

sketchiest things I've done. I did that. It was a app. Did you know Paparola? No. B-Co Paparola. He's a, now he's also a sergeant major. And so, but that's,

That was one of the things where he was like, Pap was the platoon sergeant at that time, and he had put himself on that mission. And he's like, let's go. And we did that. And I was like, this is one of the scarcier things I've done. I was just like,

and I've done some sketchy stuff. I've kicked some rocks that were real suss. And this is more sketchier than that. Yeah, in full kit. That doesn't sound fun. Oh, no, it wasn't. But that was one of the things, too,

is that as a sniper, you started kind of learning, like, your kit set up and, like, what you need and didn't need, and what, what was advantageous for your mission. As a team leader, it's shooter preference, but hey, this is what you're going to wear.

You're aware of all of this stuff, and you got to carry, by the way, you got to carry the shotgun, you got to carry a skekko. Yeah, you're, or yeah, you've got a skedko on you. And the, as a sniper, it was, I could tailor my kit to my mission. I could figure out how best, what was going to work for me, and they let you do that.

I think as like, that's part of your learning process as a team leader, like, you pretty much, you're getting told a lot of what to do. You're just like, hey, you're going to be here and you're going to do this. And then, like, that's it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you're, you're, like, dropping down to a plate carrier and a couple of magazines. Yeah.

Or you're running plate carrier a couple magazines or you're running, you're trying to figure out, like, how you're going to carry some stuff on your belt differently or where your radio really needs to be because you don't have all that stuff. So you have a lot more relay. a lot of the time you know I think one of the biggest things with snipers is that that's where I learned is like hey you don't want a lot of stuff on the front of your

plate carrier you want to be as light as you can on there because I got to climb up walls if you're on squatter and addiction I got to go chase somebody like that's you know how hard is that in full like in with your carrying everything known to man any

any memorable missions from that deployment uh man not particularly. I remember one where we almost got left. We almost got left for a remain over day because we hit the target really late and then some stuff happened on the target

where we were looking for a couple things and they were just like, hey, like, if we don't get to the HLZ and like, I think the HLZ was like 3K away and I think we have like 25 minutes to get there. And so it was a legit kit run that we just, the entire assault force is running. And you could see the sun coming up and everybody's sitting there trying to get everybody. Like guys are like, the gun team's just dying.

And so people are trying to take stuff from the gun team. And I just, I remember that the only reason I remember that is because, A, snow everywhere. It was just the most snow I've ever seen. And a lot of that deployment was like my first appointment with snipers was like that, where we were, everything was snowy because we were in deep snow. I hopped off one of the birds on one mission and sunk right in. I'm a short guy. I sunk right in the snow and real far enough to where it startled me.

I was like, I'm going to get left in here. And so I took my, I took my rifle rifle and I just shoved it up so that somebody could grab it and pull me out. And I was like, don't leave me. It was like trying to get somebody on the radio. But I remember that one because the air crew got on to Arnett and was like, hey, it's negative 25 degrees, boys, have a nice night. And they're like, thanks.

Appreciate you. But that deployment was relatively quiet. We got into some stuff. We didn't do anything real crazy. And it's funny because the relatively quiet for, regiment is we'd get into ticks but nothing was ever like you never really thought too much about it um it was the next deployment when i was in snipers where i was a senior sniper that it got it got like real we got to some hairy stuff where was that so i started out in shank uh with bko

but they weren't doing too many missions and so um we had two snipers that were down in jbad and as they were in J-Bad, there was a really bad strike on J-Bad where, so two of our guys, it was two of our snipers had gone to, they were doing something. It was a normal morning, and mornings are night, so everybody's getting kind of tying down, getting ready to go. And so they go, they're getting ready for bed. And a Tick starts off on the Legion, we were on the Legion air side of J-Bad, And so they're outside the gate. It tick starts. And so a couple guys run up to see what's going on.

National guards on the towers. And two of our snipers run up to the tower because they're like, hey, maybe we'll get some trigger time in. They get up there. And one of the National Guard, it was a girl. And she was from the story that we were told by these guys, she was cowering down on the side. Because they were shooting out that time. they were putting effective fire on the tower.

So one of our guys gets on the machine gun, takes the machine gun over, starts shooting. The other guy sitting there, he's on his rifle calling out shots. And they look down, and as soon as they look down, they're like, hey, how long is that box car been here? And as soon as she was just like,

oh, it pulled up like 15 minutes before this started. And as soon as they had said that, the box car blew up, ended up throwing both as a sniper, kills they kill the female throws both the snipers out of the tower and one of the guys was it took it almost took his arm completely off so it blows a hole inside of on that that side of the thing and the it was elements of the it was the seals elements of the seals and then the rangers end up fighting over a like four foot hole in the wall trying to push these guys back one of the one of the tyrant, the J-Tax ends up getting like, I want to say you got like a silver star for calls in a random flight randomly going by, gets them to come and respond to it and actually repels the rest of the attack.

So at that deployment, on that one, we have lost two guys, ended up getting going home because they were both really messed up. So me and Chris get the call and we're down in Shank and they call us up. and they're just like, hey, you guys need to head up to J-Bad. So we take their spot down there. And then the rest of that deployment was a little crazy. We had gotten into a lot of ticks. We had been kind of running around J-Bad.

And that was around the time that UBL had gotten. 2011-ish. Yeah. And so that was just a, that was the deployment where I think, I'd kind of learned, like, how to maneuver under fire a lot better. And then me and Chris, or we're still best friends to this day, but me and him, like, hung around each other is kind of where we learned to trust each other a little bit

because that platoon, like sending the snipers up. And there was one where I'm, it was actually, it was funny because there was two twins in regiment when I came through, when I came through Rip, and they were called the Drotty brothers. and one went to B-Co, one with the Seaco, and I went through Rip with both of them. And so we're good friends. And one of them's in the platoon with me.

And they end up sending, he's a team leader at that time. They send me, they send me as a sniper, him, and one of the dogs and one of the canines up. And we're operating 400 or 500 media. We're walking through a town, like in the middle of the night. And we're sitting there, like, whispering each other, like, this is it. This is how it is.

So, but kind of the being in that sniper role, that kind of, that was the deployment where I really got used to it. And actually being able to move like it, operate like it, get to, that was kind of the identity that I had taken on. And I did snipers for a real long time after that. But yeah, that was probably one of the more memorable moments in that deployment. And again, I go back to memorable moments. We were getting the fights every night. So it's one of those things where from the first part of my career where I can remember every single firefight that I got into towards in regiment,

it was just so. Blending together. Yeah, it was just like, oh, like you'd be, I remember being in one fight and being ducked behind a wall going, trading shots and ducking down to reload or just kind of move positions and looking over at one of the guys and be like, what do you think they're serving at a midnight chow like you people get back before this like so it's just it you just became numb to everything at that point yeah just how how all that would

happen and and then I think you take that for granted too when you got new guys in and then you'd see them kind of reacting a different way you just be like what's his problem and it's because he has it his his uh you know uh neurological system hasn't gone like because CNS is not tuned up. It's not tuned down to it. He's still hopped up on it. So I think that was the psychologically, I think that was a cool point where you go back to the first part of your career.

You think about your first firefighter. You're like, I remember what it smelled like. And then you go to the middle of your career and you're just like, I can't even remember this one. Like this one blended in with that one, bled it in with this other one. It was just really like some of them were just like anti-climactic. Yeah, yeah.

But now you're learning like the operational art of the job, it sounds like. Yeah. I think at that point, like I was, you always think you're good, but at that point and during, with as much as we were doing it, we go back to like Green Berets and all like that. Other other like Tier 2 units, regular army units. Like, I think we just were better because we did it so much more on And like every night we went out, we were looking for a fight or we were going to get into a fight, one or the other.

And so it's the, I think it's really that, that's what sets us apart from it. So you have the green berets, and it's not their fault, but they weren't getting into things like that every single night. The operational, their tempo wasn't that bad. I think the worst part for them is they were just stuck out all the time because you'd always hear the transmissions where they'd be like they're off on their own in the wild west. Doing like three or four-day patrols sometimes. Yeah. And as opposed to us, when we were sitting there, and like any time we got into a fight,

it was we could just bring the might of everything that we had in country down on top of you, depending on where we were in the mission set. Yeah, yeah. If you really get into it, I mean, AC130 is going to be overhead. Oh, gosh, we saw one. It was my, and that was one of the first times, the first time I'd ever seen it was that first deployment

was watching an AC-130 and then the green beam of death that they put out there where it's just like playing whack-a-mole with people is basically all it was doing. It's like some guys would pop up. We saw a group running parallel to us. And, you know, I'm tapping Haley, who is one of the gutters. He gets it and he starts firing on them. And as he's firing on them, you see the blinking light and then just the ground exploding and disappearing around these people.

And they're gone. or you see the gun go off and the 30 millimeters and it looks like they tossed somebody into a blender and I was like that was the but then you're on these missions where like I don't have to worry about too much because I know somebody's coming for me

it's the Green Berets I think that's where I give them a lot of credit is that like there's times where they didn't know if anybody was coming they were their exiles right so But yeah And what were your other trips with snipers? So I did

Man So I did one more after that And it was to Cath Okay So And again that was another one where it was me and Chris We kind of just piled around

We were out with Biko again And again, it was, we were just kind of hanging around and getting into these like little ticks, but it wasn't, I think during that point in time of the war, everything was starting to not wind down, but kind of settle into a very, at that point in time, the networks, the Haqani network, you know, ISIS, all these people, not ISIS yet, but the precursors to it in Al-Qaeda, where they kind of realized that like, we were the guys that you didn't fight because we would kill you. It was almost better for you to just get captured because then all we were doing is we would detain you, hand you off to the Afghans, and then the Afghans would release you. And we'd pay you for the pleasure. And so they were kind of figuring that out around that time. So it started to be less fights, not dry holes, but we were actually going in and be like, yeah, this is the dude.

And the dude would, we have one at that deployment. where me and Chris climbed, we climbed ladders, we're going in. And this guy, like, popped his own hemlight, threw it out there, had zipped cuffs, put a zip cuff on one hand, and then worked the other one and it walked out. And all the females and males started separating each other. And I was just like, hey, it looks like they've done this before. Yeah, yeah, they know the fire drill. Yeah, so we're like, they know what's going on here. And the guy just seems like, yeah, it was like, you know, the turp, they get the EQM bit out there.

You got the turf out there. And they're like, yeah, he knows we're here for him and he's ready to go. That's crazy. So, but I think that was the sign of the time. This was the futility of what we're trying to do over there. Yeah, it's like 15, 16. Yeah. And it was almost the, they're just like, it's better off for us to just go with you guys.

Like, because we were just going to show up and kill you. we weren't if we showed up at night to come and get you that was bad and you'd rather not just deal with that and so you were still have i know the bso the battle space owners um the regular army guys were still having a lot of ticks and stuff like that like small attacks on their cops or other forward operating bases but they would uh pretty much like like that pretty much everything was settled into a even keel lull. And we thought that we were gonna, that was what like 15, like 18 years into the war,

something like that. Like so like everything's pretty much settled at that point. We're just, it's, we were almost doing like, hey, here's the, we killed the last guy in an air strike, you know, two weeks ago, here's the new guy, let's go get him. And so it was like, every time they promoted somebody, we would just either kill them or go get them.

And like I said, I think at that point, they'd kind of realize that it's pretty much better off if we just go get you. Yeah, the game's rigged. Yeah. And then when you went to Europe as an SME, was that with regiment? No, so it actually, it was almost a detachment off of S-Sum. Oh, okay. We'll get to that.

I take it back off the first cab. Yeah. So when you got back from that deployment to CAF, you went to the Army marksmanship unit. Was that the next thing? Yeah. So kind of just like anything else, you get offers to do stuff. And so me and my partner, Chris, had actually gone there together. Went down to the – I had done some deployment – a deployment with CECO, was an E6 now, had done my squad.

leader time and it was an offer that was on the table. And I was just like, yeah, sure, that sounds fine. It's on base and that sounds fun. So we went, me and Chris went down to the instructor training group and we actually were there with other regiment guys. A lot of snipers were there. There was a couple Delta guys there. And it was basically they hired people who were to go out to the Army to teach them marksmanship. And I always say this. I was like, I thought I could shoot when I was in the regiment. I basically didn't, I realized I didn't know anything because they start training you up there. So I get there, I go through a shoot through, they look at my resume. It's almost like applying for a job and then they say yes or no. So they say yes. And so we immediately,

we come in and we start training with, oh man, Iron Swins. We start training with like Dan Warner. And there's a couple other like green is there. And all these are like kind of superstars within the the shooting world is there. And so we start going through all the shooting. And I was like, I thought I was a good pistol shooter. I had no idea what I was doing with a pistol until I got there. And you start learning that you don't know what you, you didn't know what you didn't know. and I was always like, because I was a, I had gone through Armite, the regimental Marksman's instructor course, so I thought I was a good shooter at that point. And then so I get there, I do that and realize that I'm not nearly as good of a shooter. So that's almost the

kind of work up to what I started doing, especially with Stuyperst. So I did, the time with the ITG trained, went around and started teaching regular Army units how to train. We were in charge of teaching I Bullock, or the Infantry Basic Officer course. We started teaching the captain's career course guys coming through, the Sergeant Major's Academy is coming through. And I really appreciate this about how regiment does it, they want to send guys out to know, to get to know things. We want to be the best at our craft.

So any ranger does. And where do you send, you got to send them to the guys that are going to know how to do that. So we started, we learned to shoot really well. And when I mean, we learned to shoot. Like, we were shooting every day. They had a really cool program where I could go to their bunker with my gun. I signed my guns out from my cage. I would walk over to the bunker and we'd walk up and I'd be like,

oh yeah, I want two grand of five, five, six, and I need, you know, four grand of nine mil. And then I would take that, and I would go and shoot all day long, just all day. So it was great just that, but you learn the skills of actually marksmanship, of how to run a gun, how to hold a gun, all the small nuances of footwork when you're shooting.

And that really, I think, is something that Regiment later on took back home and said there's like one of the biggest things we got taught from AMU was that shooting marksmanship combat shooting is a almost like a martial art there's footwork involved in this there's where you place your foot where you place your hand the little movements that you make with your head those all come into play and that's something that you all have to train so that you can optimally take targets down and make good shots on good shots on a body and And so we took all of that out. We went and we were giving that to the Army because, like I said, coming out of regiment, I thought I knew how to shoot. I did not. And if you look at the Army holistically, there's a lot of NCOs, officers who think in sergeant majors,

who really think that they're very good at shooting and they are not. They were not the best. And so having an instructor training group like that to go out to the Army to actually do that was great. One of the notable things I did is I was the NCOIC for the XN17, which became the M17 project. So I went down to Aberdeen, and I actually did a lot of the testing for that. And while I was in the AMU, or me and Chris also shot International Cyper together. So it's really cool. My partner from Regiment, we both go over to AMU and then we both shoot an international Cyper, which was a great time.

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, so, but I really appreciate my time in AMU because that's where I learned to do to actually enjoy the skill craft, the craft of marksmanship. And then that actually carried me over into kind of the rest of my career. That's what I ended up teaching and being known for wherever I went. And how did that take place that you went from AMU to the SFAB? So I went through some stuff. personally as most rangers do a marriage fell apart

and I'm from Texas and so the closest place to Texas is or the closest base of Texas is Fort Hood. So there's an S-Fab standing up at Fort Hood asked a favor and they let me come, they let me leave

and come kind of the fall of my family. So as soon as I got into that it's actually a strange place because there's a lot of Rangers. if there's a ton of rangers there. Not RFS Rangers. It's guys who are like, oh, hey, I need to get out to do something else. I need to go somewhere else and do for whatever reason they had.

So I ended up in there, the SFFAB, and started doing pretty much to control the marksmanship program there, got a team, and started running that. And that's how I ended up in the European deployment. Do you want to tell folks out there what the SFAB was? So the SAB is a is pretty much a security forces. Advisory battalion? Yeah, advisory battalion. So we would go to partner forces and we would advise them on how to do it. So they're really big into troop leading procedures, operations procedures.

We were teaching at first I think it started when it first got kicked off. Guys were doing low-level taxes, almost like a. SF job without having been SF. Right, right. But then they kind of started taking, when I got there, it was more strategic level. So it was battalion and brigade up for the partner forces.

Oh, I got you. Teaching like their staff. Yeah, how to move formations, how to actually be able to get your equipment and sustainment out to that. That was one of the big things. They were sending you sustainment courses. And they had

for each operation for each level in operation they had their we had a counterpart for us so whether that

be intelligence so each part of the operations order we would have like we had an intelligence guy we had a sustainment guy

we had a command and control guy we had a maneuver and so they would take people from each part of the army

who were subject matter experts in that and then they would put them in those positions to be able to

advise other units. So essentially it was taking, I don't want to say it was taking work from SF, but it was taking the strategic level work from it. So now they wouldn't have to put people strategically in their commands. There could be this overarching. And it wasn't for, I think special forces kind of had their knit their thing in a special operations mindset. This was a big, like we were a big army mindset. We were like, hey, like, this is how you put an army together. There's another organization, I believe it's called Smatko. Does that bring any bills?

Yeah. I mean, did you guys dovetail with them at all? We ran around with them, but we weren't, we never really like work, work with them. But we, we would be in common places. Because those are like, as I recall, that organization would have like, here's our expert on the Bradley fighting vehicle. and they'd send them to like a country like Ukraine and be like, teach these guys how to do that.

Yeah. So and that's what I said is I think that's taking the you're starting to take it down more. We were more on the end of the operation. So like when we were going to set guys over, it was just like, hey, here's how it comes up to defense. Got you. This is how we defense. This is how we do offense.

This is how we do route reconnaissance. And we would take that and we would have our, whoever our counterpart was, we would be training them on that point. of it. So generally your maneuver guy was a infantry guy. Generally your sustainment guy was somebody who did

sustainment at whatever brigade he was at. He did a high level brigade operation. So it's that's where we were going. I know that's where S-Fab was going with it. I think they're kind of coming away from that now, though. I know they're closing down a lot of them. But when you were there, you were the sniper.

SME, I take it. So they had stuff that was going on. They got requests for things that were going on. And so I was a sniper. I'd done all the stuff. And as much as I was that, I'd done a lot of shooting too. It was funny because when I got

sent over there, I competed in the European Best Warrior while I was there. So they actually pulled me out to go to Germany to do European Best Warriors. So I do European Best Warrior there, but I'm not allowed to win it. Which was funny. They actually told you that?

They did. They told me they was like, hey, you're competing, but this is more for us to get our name out there and not for you to, like, you can't specifically win because you have to be the European Best Warrior has to be in a unit that's currently stationed, like home stationed in Europe. So I go there and I do the whole dance,

which was, it was fun, but like, I got top shot and I did really well in combatants got top and I got the top shot out of the thing. It was out of the competition. It was funny because when they were giving the award, they were like, hey, no surprise here. You know, Sarm first class, El Sado blew y'all out a little bit of war with the shooting. And so it was funny because during the quarrel, I was really cocky at that point in time because I knew I was winning. I got down and they have this known distance range with an M4 and it's Iron Sites and 4.

And so you have so many shots and I was knocking all of them down. I was just out there. I was just like, bam, down, down. Hitting all of them. I was like, this is super easy. Hit the last one out at 400. And as soon as I do it, I immediately like unload my rifle. I'm like, yeah.

And the cadre looks down at me. And he's like, target up. And I look out. And I had, like, the last round I had ejected, and the magazine's empty. I had ejected this round. It falls on the floor. I look out and this pop just goes just right up. This popper's right up there.

And it's like, it's the, it's like a hundred meter popper. I immediately reached down, grab the bullets, shove it in, finger, put my finger in the magazine, well, slam the bolt shut and then fire from almost the shoulder position. I wasn't even on the top. Thing goes down. And I immediately go, yeah. staked up in the it was funny because the cadres there was like i've never seen anything like that he's like that's he was like that was crazy so you so you kicked it you kicked ass the first

couple days and then the last day you had to go get drunk off your ass and not show up so that you you lost the thing no man no it was the the road march uh i didn't prepare at all for it so i came in top of the pack but not first but so they did i'll give it to them like the the way they put this competition on, it was good. There was an unknown event at the end of the competition after the road march. We all knew that. So I was just like, man, I was like, it's probably going to be an O course or something weird like that.

I was like, I can handle it, of course. Came in probably top middle of the pack, not great but not terrible. Like in true ranger fashion, I'm like, I'm kind of sprinting the whole time. And I got like short little legs because I'm a 375 Ranger and all of us are tiny. And so we get to the end. And as we're getting in, they had made us have a uniform on the very top of our ruck. So I get in and they go, hey, go inside. As soon as you get in, it's immediate.

Like as soon as everybody gets in, they're like, go inside to the gem, get into that new uniform. And then you guys are going to line up underneath the stadium steps. And we're like, all right. So we go and do it real quick. They give us something like 10 minutes to do. So we get dressed. We go out there. Well, as soon as we go out there, you walk out and they're introducing everybody.

and there's a mat on there, and they've got shin guards and gloves. And it's a round robin combatives tournament. And it is, you can do, you can kick, and it was fists. You could do fists to the body, and it was open hand slaps. And we had, so it was a European best warrior. So it was a little bit of everybody. There's females with us, 110 pound females, and they were, it was a round robin fight. So we're going out there watching like a chick get picked up and hooked across his mat on one match.

And then everybody had to fight each other. And so like, and it was right after a ruck march. And I was just like, it was, I think it was like my third or fourth match. I was just like, I'll give it to them. This sucks. Like this is rough. Like I'm so tired of fighting this guy. But it was an experience.

That was a really good experience. That whole deployment was a good experience. being able to work with a Eastern European army who like didn't have the equipment but definitely had the guys like the want and the want and the know-how without the equipment and then kind of showing us how we showing them how we do things and then showing them how they do things and it's a completely different mindset like we talked earlier about like the close in support, like direct support for assault forces.

That's not a thing to them. When they talk cybers, Eastern Europeans talk like old time. Yeah, we're shooting a Nazi general from the bell tower of a church. Yeah, and then you're ex-filling like, you know, back to your lines or you're in it. Like they, we did one scenario where we talked about. they had it on their actual compound where they had a bell tower and it was like hey you're going to shoot from this belt park it's from this belt tower and they were just like yeah so we go over mission planning because that's our job we're like all right so how would you do this and they're like

oh no so what's your exfil plan and he's like exfil because i was like no i get it yeah they're i was like you're on a bell tower you're probably not getting out of that tower like maybe you should make some kind of plan or maybe we don't even do it from his belt house Like, so that was, that was a really, really cool experience. And then just the ability to travel Europe, because in regiment, we don't really do that. It was all, it was all mission, mission, mission. And we were the only place we went to is, you know, bad third world countries. Not a lot of opportunities to meet women in the Ranger Regiment.

Oh, no, not, not even a little bit. And then you go to this other place and it's like, it's, you know, Germany. It was, oh, man, the base was MK and that was in Romania. And I always tell people, it was like, hey, if you want a good vacation for a bottom dollar, go to Romania. It's like you're having a lot of fun. We had, it was, it was bad. There was like a beach there that was a topless beach. And so, like, nobody was that unit that was there, nobody was ever there.

Like, we were like, hey, it's, you know, Wednesday. Where is everybody from the summer? They're like, oh, they're all on the beach. Like, of course they are. What kind of PT are we doing? Oh, we're doing BeachPT. Okay, cool. Hey, ask the Secret Service about Moldova.

They had a great time out there. I have a buddy that I work with now. One of the guys that I work now on the team is he's an ex-seeple-service guy. And I always get him hell about Columbia. Oh, yeah, Columbia. It's like, you know, if they'll just pay the hookers, they won't tell on you. My understanding was that was kind of like a setup, like it's a scam. where like the girl pretends that she's just a normal girl that wants to sleep with you

and then you get to the hotel room and it's like oh but yeah you got to pay me yeah yeah yeah I would have been like I just get out and here's some money I'm gonna pay you to leave how about that yeah yeah here's a five spot see you later yeah yeah those guys though it was like sF though like sF like those guys like constantly getting the seventh group man just constantly getting in trouble I know I always give uh I think you know Alejandro Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, me and him are good friends. Like, me and him are good friends.

Every time I go to Colorado, we stop and visit him. But, and I talk to him all the time, but I always give him that. I was just like, yeah, man, it's like a ranger, a ranger and a green beret. It's like, sounds like you might have had a hooker problem. So after, or no, you're still in the S-Fab, and you got deployed to Urbill. Yeah, so my last deployment was in Arbill, Iraq, and we were working. hand in hand with the courage. So at that point, I kind of worked my way.

And being a sniper, I think everybody kind of says that they're just like, oh, you're kind of like a scout intel guy. You know stuff about Intel. And then I went to a school or two. And then I found myself as the chief Intel guy for my, for the SFAP in Irville. So apart from a lot of the stuff was, I wouldn't call it humid stuff that we were doing. It was a lot of checking in on guys. And then that's kind of where I learned a lot about the culture.

Like liaison. It wasn't a liaison because we were definitely, we were being used by other entities to collect to give up, like, good information. So there was a lot of entities that we'd get downloads from. be like, what'd you see? What'd you do? Okay, I need you to ask for this when you go back. I need to do this. There was points where we were pretty much running sources just because we were very in with the Kurds. And so we talked a lot to them. And like I said, like we try, like as, as we are an army, we trust people to a point. But then we're also keeping tabs on everybody too. So that's a lot of what we were doing. So we had our side reports that we were writing, kind of

collecting on other people, which was a super interesting job, especially for a ranger, because I'm going out there and I'm just like, okay, like, you know, we'd go and look at their storehouse as one of us to peel off and go look out what they had. And then you'd compare it to numbers of what they actually said, and you'd be like, this dude just lying. And then not only is he lying, he's asking us for more stuff. And it was funny because one day I asked one of our courage counterparts, it's like, what are you getting ready for?

I was like, like, you got enough, I was like, you got enough AT weapons in there to, to kickstart the next war. I was like, so what is it? And he was just like, oh, y'all are leaving soon. And he's like, straight up looked at me in face. He's like, he's like, as nice as you guys are, he's like, y'all aren't going to be here for very much longer. And he's like, and then the Kurds are going to be left alone. Like, Kurdistan is going to be, they called it Kurdistan. Nobody else wanted to call it that.

But they're like, the Kurds are going to be left alone and we're going to have to fight him. And I was just like, there was a point where I was like, now you're right. Yeah, fair enough, man. Yeah, yeah. And it's always like one of those things were like, man, can you guys not like start a war with the Arabs, at least while I'm here, please? Yeah, like, and then so it was funny

because the, that was right when I think the precursor to what's going on in Iran was going on then. Because we had an ICBM, like, alert where we all had to get in. They were like, hey, is this when we smoked Soleimani and then they fired the ballistic missiles? They fired the I, they fired an ICPM.

And they were like, everybody gets to a bunker. And I was like, why? Because it's like, you know, we should really just get on top of one of these, one of these chews and enjoy, enjoy what we, while we can. But it's, it's that deployment kind of, as far as my military career is concerned, really kind of opened my eyes. I know people get to do a lot cooler stuff, but like having a career kind of like that where you end it. You're in like this Intel world of you're playing, like I was playing checkers, and now I'm watching chess getting played with everybody. And it was, it's funny to come from kind of that,

to be able to see all of that in a career. Just very odd. Like I said, there was times where I was listening to things, and I was just like, this should be in a book. I was like sometimes somewhere like this is like the truth of stranger than fiction, like as much as we can write about things and make these stories up. It was like stranger things are happening. Any stories like that that you can tell or that you can share?

One of my favorite stories was me and my partner got sent out to with some other agency guys to talk to two people. And it was because we were the only ones around. So they were just like, hey, we need you to go look at this. it ended up being two Russians that had stuffed their face full of they were trying to get in they had fake accents they were trying to use fake accents saying they were from Tennessee but in a really bad way and what they were trying to do is they had gotten a bunch of dip and they were putting in their mouth the chaw in their mouth so that they would they were spitting and trying to do it one of them never done it before so it's peaking and throwing up everywhere yeah and cursing in Russian So like they called, the gate guards like, hey, can you all come and talk to these people? And we go over there and just like, oh. And immediately it was what you think.

They were trying to gain access to the camp and get on. But we had a lot of stuff like that going on because our offices were outside of camp. Like we weren't on Urbeil. Yeah. We were out in the town. So we were like constantly going. We were in civilian clothes going around doing. Yeah.

The Russian SVR had. as a station out there in Curtis. Yeah. Yeah. We knew exactly where it was, too. So, but the, having been there and to see all of that and other, other stories of, you were watching international play happened kind of right there, like, in Portugal, like, and you can't, I can't really get into a lot of it.

but in 25 years maybe I can write a book about something. Yeah, I hope so. But it's the being, going from like, like I said, where we were talking before, going from the start of the war, me getting there as a 19-year-old and being in Baghdad, fighting and stuff like that. And then the end of my career, I think one of the times I was sitting on top of the,

one of the airfield, not bunkers, but we climbed up. on top of the, oh gosh, I'm trying to remember what was, the hangars. And we were, there was a group of us sitting there smoking cigars on a hangar. And I was just like, it was, I didn't know at the time that that was going to be my last deployment, but I knew I was coming towards the end. Just I had out of back injury. And it had progressed to the point where I didn't know if I was going to be able to keep

going. And I was up on the eight list. but it was just like, I knew it was, I was like, hey, my time's coming close to the end of this. So standing up there on the, again, going back to that, like, you take snapshots of your service and the times you do stuff. And you think about like from the time, from the firefights to the guys laughing to watching sunrises come up over the, like, Hindu Kush,

or, you know, watching suns go down, like the sun go down over Baghdad by the Babylon Gates or doing all of that and then being cursed and, you know, being on the over by the Iranian border, but watching, looking down and out of the mountains and seeing how gorgeous it is. And then I think one of the last things I remember is being like on that hanger and smoking a cigar watching these Cairams go off and being like, this was cool. This was a cool experience. And realizing that like the things that you touch through it, maybe it didn't affect so much, but it affected a lot to you.

So I think that was kind of the end cap to my military career. And when you got home, you went through the medboard process? Yeah, so went through med boards. The worst thing I think you can ever do. The, what was rough about that was, I thought I had more left than me. I was still doing a bunch of stuff. I think I was in my, I was like 36. I did Best Ranger at like 36, 37 years old.

And I still had, I was still doing a lot of stuff. Like I was still going out and training, running, cross-fit. I'd gotten into Jiu-Jitsu. And I started competing in Jiu-Jitsu. And I was just like, man, I got a ton. But there would be times where I couldn't get out of bed and I had to call somebody to my house to be like, hey, I need you to come and help me out of bed. And so I had been getting shots in my L or my S, it's like L5S1.

Yeah. And I'd been getting upadrills for a long time. And when we were in Rebeel, we'd gotten into a little car wreck. We were with the Brits, you know, crazy, crazy Iraqi drivers, don't know how traffic circles work, want to go in the wrong way, hit my car. Back was a little messed up after it. And I was like, I'll be fine. I'll get back.

can be good. I was on the E8 list, you know, getting ready to look at where I was going to go next, what I was going to do next. And I was actually looking at selection, another selection. And a doctor comes in, he's like, I've done all the x-rays and stuff. And she comes in and she's like, hey, she's the first thing she says is like, do you, do you want to walk when you're 60? I was like, what kind of question is that? Yeah, I want to walk when I'm 16. She's like, okay, then you're done. Like, you're made bad, med board. We're recommending med board right now. we're going to start going through the process and essentially you're finished

and I was just like that took that took a little bit to kind of internalize yeah that took the wind out of your sales in that moment didn't it? Yeah I wasn't ready for that I was just like I didn't think I was going to do in fact I'd made a promise to my ex-wife

that I was going to die at my desk so that she didn't get any in retirement so I was like I was fully intending on following through with that So, you know, I had, that had kind of taken me back a little bit, but then at that point, I had met somebody, she was in Dallas, and I was just like, I was over the moon for her. And so I was just like, okay, maybe this isn't too bad. Kind of started getting the feeling that I was on my way out, trying to make peace with it,

and then started trying to like make those plans. but the Army makes it really hard to make plans for that. So eventually they approved it. I got out. What I will say is the Army does need to do a better job in TAPS. The Regiment does a fantastic job. I will say that. Regiment is, I think, one of the,

and that's just because now I work a little bit with them, but the Ranger for Life program and the way they do it is so much better for Rangers in general. I didn't have that option at that point, or I had the option. I just, I think there was a point in time where I was in a little bit of a denial. I was like, well, maybe this won't go through. And then it came to a point in time where it was just like, oh, no, it's time for you to leave now. Like you're done.

So, yeah, Medboarded out, started my transition. The transitions probably, like I said, one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. It's, I can see where guys just self-destruct at the end of it. You come from, you're coming from like me, I think I have 71 months deployed, 71 to 75 months deployed overseas. Holy shit. And it's, that was like, you can't tell me that like at 19, like when my frontal loaves not even really developed, at 19, this is the way of life I learned. And then at the end of it, say,

hey, thanks for playing. Talk to you later. Yeah, good game. And then all of a sudden, one day you find yourself and, like, I'm not that thing anymore. I'm not, I'm not a ranger. I'm not a, I'm not operating in austere environments anymore.

There's no next deployment for me. And I think that's kind of what took a long time to, even when I got out. So I got out, actually, I did the very private thing. I feel like when I got out, I did everything in one year. So I, like I said, met somebody. I was over the moon for we have a very, that's an interesting story,

and that's something I'm kind of writing about now because of how funny that was. But met, got married, blended families, bought a house all in that year that I got out of the year. right before I got out of the Army, and got out of the Army. So it was that probably didn't help the situation any much more, but just going through it and having to realize that that wasn't me

and then find a new purpose. So that was the hard part. I mean, how did that come about? You mentioned to me that you worked in project management for like six months, and that helped teach you what you didn't want to do. Oh, yeah. I don't recommend it for for men of our ilk and people, men of our stature and,

I don't say men of action. I don't recommend going to be a project manager. Like that's the, like you got kind of be dishonest to everybody. Everything's the lowest better. And then like, you're like, yeah, this building may fall down. But like, like, I got it done under budget. Yeah, we got a lot of that here in New York City.

Oh, God, yeah. And so I hated it. I hated. When I realized what it was, I was just like, this is not for me. And I would go to work and just dread it. I would, I'd wake up and tell my wife. I was like, I don't want to go to work today. Like, I really don't. And then, you know, being learning that, like, nobody was going to yell at me if I didn't go to work was fun because then I would just be like, you know what, I'm not going to work. And I don't have to give you a reason why. And so that was the funny part of the whole thing. And it was fun because I was working with one of my best friends, Anthony Wilstrom, who's a mentor in Jiu-Jitsu for me. And me and him kind of worked together a little bit too. And we had those conversations all the time. I was just like, man, I was just like, what would happen if I just, you know, broke my leg and didn't show up?

And he's just like, you don't have to go that far. Just don't show up. So it got into that and really learned that that's not where I wanted to be or what I wanted to do. I wanted a little bit more purpose in my life. So kicked around being a cop, talked to my dad, he's a, he retired Dallas police officer,

and he's like, don't be a cop right now. He's like, it's like, it's rough. He's like, and you stand a good chance of going to jail, like, more than you, but I was just because of our service. Talk to some other guys, and it's like, I think especially coming from where we came from, violence is a thing that we do well,

and it's our spoken language. And so with normal B-Cops, that's something that they have to learn over time. When you put a guy like us in it and we already know it, our threshold for I'm going to kill you is so much lower. And so when it's the, when that threshold is lower, you,

I think we don't understand why, like, the, you know, this guy pulls out a knife and I blast him, like, but I did it. Like, I shot them 20 times instead of like, like the cursory three or four. You don't comply in the nightstick is coming out, bro. Yeah, like, yeah, like it's that or like, ooh, a fight. Like, I'm in the day.

So it was funny because my dad was just like, hey, maybe that's not something you want to get into right now. And honestly, I still kick that around a little bit. My wife is in law enforcement. She's in federal law enforcement. And so, you know, she's always the one kind of I'm just like, yeah, maybe not that. I think maybe we don't get sued this month.

So learning that, though, from the project managing point and then trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I got really lucky and stumbled into what I'm doing now. And so essentially, that is, I work for Allegiance Project Security, and it is a security company, security company that takes veterans, and we try to put them into schools and churches, which is it's funny because after Yvaldi happened, I remember having a conversation, I was in AMU,

having a conversation with my partner, Chris, and it was just like, hey, what, like, we should put like special operations guys in, like they don't want to be cops or anything like that. They should, we should stick them into schools. Well, Matthew Easter, who's the president and the owner of the company, had that idea. He's not a special operations guy.

He's never been in the military. He never, did anything like that. What he does have is a wife that's a teacher that he's worried about. And he was just like, why aren't we taking these guys who already did this and put them into these schools and churches? And it's funny because I say that when I think about Yvaldi and situations like that, because now it's my job to think about those security risks in schools and churches and red team that, take that intelligence background, red team it and say, what would I do. If I really wanted to cause damage, what would I do? And I take Yvaldi as a, I always tell the

story around people, but people were talking to, I take Yvaldi. And what I take from that is it's not that police officer's fault. He learned that he was not about that life at that door, at that breach. We've realized that's not what he's built for. What now kind of the, the, the, the mission is to take guys that are built for that, they pretty much did a year, years in their lifetime of running through doors. And not only that, but made that decision of life or death. Like, hey, I could die in this room.

Because you remember what they told us when we were doing CQB and stuff like that. They're like, you're running into a room with four guys, like four or five guys. You're running in a group with four or five guys on your team. And then a room with a couple guys who have guns, somebody's getting shot, somebody's getting killed. And there's a really good.

a chance that a lot of you are getting shot in that room. So the, that when I say that that, it's not that cops false because he had that thought right at that door. We had this, probably the same thoughts that we did during training where you kind of internalize it. You're like, oh, God, but we got indoctrinated into it. We lived it. We were, that's, that we understood that that was our purpose.

Like, our purpose was to run into doors, like run into danger, run into doors. We were going to breach that threshold. we were going to jump out of that airplane. So the question of life and death never stopped entering our mind. And it was like, how do I get in here and how do I stop the threat? So that's what this organization basically does, is we're trying to take guys like that, usher them into civilian life by easing them into it,

not taking everything away that they are, not taking the gun away from them, not taking the brotherhood away from them, not taking that culture away from them and slowly kind of saying, hey, like, you're not running through those doors. There's not, this isn't a TST right now. Could be.

But what your job is, is we're going to give you that new mission to protect these children, protect these churches. Once you do that, like, you start kind of easing them into it. And then eventually the point of the whole thing is for that guy one day to say, hey, I'm done.

I think I got it out of my system. I think I've transitioned enough to hang. that's down yes so it's almost like uh essentially we're drug addicts when you leave the regiment when you leave uh the military we're i'm an adrenaline junkie i still do i fight i go fight people on my off time for competition because i like it because i like the way it makes me feel um i'm a drug addict as far as like that adrenaline i'm always looking for that next rush that next thing we are all like that and you got to kind of step yourself down from it so you never just take a dude off

cold turkey. And essentially, that's why I have a problem with the taps in the military, the way they do offloading in retirements and pushing people out of the Army, because they essentially just drop you off at the bus stop and say, hey, good luck, man. And so getting into that, though, has really kind of made me really kind of given me that new purpose. And then aside from that, I do the mercenary thing. I'm a gun for hire. I always tell guys we'll have gun, we'll travel. I've done a lot of executive protection work,

done some overseas stuff. And that's, I think for a lot of us, especially Rangers and special operations, that's where we end up there, not because we want to, but because that's what we know. I know a lot of guys that do a good job in the transition. I just stepping away from it,

it's always been one of the things where it's, it's hard to do. And I'm only a year out. So, yeah, yeah, I'm still in that point where I'm not looking for a fight, but still kind of stepping myself down from it. I totally get it, man. And I mean, like you said, you're a year out from retirement. And, I mean, I swear to God, I was only in the Army for eight years, but it took me at least another eight years to, like, de-army myself.

No, that's not, yeah. it becomes something else and do something else. So for a guy like you, you know, somebody that did 20 years or whatever, it's just fundamentally a part of who you are. Like you said, I mean, it's, you can't really deny it, you know. That's who you are. I don't think you're ever going to really get away from it either. Like I tell my wife all the time, I was like, I still have dreams.

I dream and green sometimes. I dream a runoff a ramp. I dream in, you know, white phosphorus. Like, I dream in those colors. White hot, yeah. In those places that I don't think they'll ever leave you. I think that'll always be a part of us. And it's just figuring out how to combine those worlds, if that's what you want to do.

There's some guys that get out, Kyle McMaster as a farmer. You know, and he was in B-Co for a long time, did a lot of stuff. That guy's a farmer now. One of my buddies, Chris, he's, I would say like, I used to say that that got killed more people than the plague. And he's a therapist now. That's amazing. There's people who do well at it. Well, sometimes people go into a profession because they're trying to learn it for themselves.

Yeah. No, and that's definitely, that is definitely Chris. And he's another one that he got injured at just the beating that your body takes from a lifetime of that. You're not going to be able to sustain it. You're not going to be able to keep going. There's a point where your body's going to fail you. So, yeah, so it's the, I think for guys like us, the most important thing is, and again, that's what Allegiance Foundation does, is where we're trying to offer you, or we try to offer the guys a community again, to say, hey, don't step away.

Like, we isolate. Every Ranger that I ever knew that killed themselves, isolated themselves. It was a, they took themselves from the path. They decided that they were going to do it by themselves, and then never made it. And we don't make it through Ranger School by ourselves. We never made it through those deployment by ourselves.

So I don't understand why guys think that you're going to make it through the rest of this by yourself. Yeah, yeah. So three Rangers, Allegiance Projects Foundation. both of them are offering that tribe. We're a tribe, especially in special operations. The big armies, their own tribe, or whatever service that you did, you have that tribe in there.

And then I have friends, I have really good friends that are seals that I met here. And they're their own tribe, they have their own jokes. And then we have green berets. They're their own tribe. They have their own jokes. Rangers, we have our own tribe. We're all tribal and we stay with them.

Those, but as well, especially when you get out, it's important that I don't have friends that are just Ranger. I don't just stick around Rangers because I never find them. There's not, they're feeling far between out here. Most of us are scattered. I have friends that are seals and we sit around and talk about everything, anything. So finding organizations, A, that's, I think, one of the biggest things that's helped me is fine because I was in a deep dark hole to you. My wife, God bless her.

She married me and probably at the worst, B. furthest down I could be at that point. And so, but finding, A, finding those communities, getting with those, getting with your tribe, find your tribe, find the other special operations guys, and then fight off the drop zone together, which is now life. And then the other thing too is that like a lot of these guys,

I don't know what it is, we get divorced, like it's going out of style, just maybe that's the Ranger way. But realize that like you've made mistakes of your life, and to find that person. Like you said, my wife, I met her. This is actually a really funny story and something I'm writing about. But we met on Hinge, and I'm not afraid to say that. Like I was getting out kind of new.

I was coming back to Dallas, so I get on Hinge, and we meet each other. And it's funny because at the time, I was still working kind of some of the Intel piece. And her Hinge profile said, like, law. something like that. I didn't know what that meant. And so we start meeting, we start talking. And through conversations, we're not being 100% open with what we are. But you can kind of tell. And so I go to the first date. Hager realized that there's a gun on her. And so when I hugger, she brought a gun to the date. I was like, there's a gun. I was like, there's a gun. I was like,

maybe he's just super 2A or something. And I was like, I was like, this is Dallas, you know, maybe. And so we sit down and we start talking and I start realizing from training, I'm in an interrogation. Like it is going, it is going exactly interrogation. I'm in danger. Yeah, it's immediately this like, oh no, like who is she? What is this? What have I gotten myself into? And so I start going through your usual, like what they train you.

You like, you start answering with one word asking like certain questions, like if you're going to ask, questions, you're asking questions, and then, you know, if they say anything, it's, you know, deny, deny, deny, make counter accusations. It's like, no, you're gorgeous. Yeah, you're ready to karate chopper in the neck and run. Yeah, yeah, I'm like sitting there looking at exits being like, all right, so how am I getting out of here? I was like, because she's definitely armed. And so through the course of this date, we're kind of very subversive. And during the speaking to each other, just texting. Meanwhile, I don't know that later on I find out behind the scenes, like an entire dossier is getting made about me.

She's like open sourcing me. She's looking up all this stuff. She's found a video that was in that I had made in AMU like years before about like teaching. And so we start going through this song and dance and there's a point where at the end of it, I was just like, yeah. I was like, I think you're something else. And she was just like, I think you're something else. I was just like, I was like, I am in the army. I was like, I work in Pell stuff.

And I was like, I'm a ranger. I was like, I was a ranger. And she goes, and she just comes out with it. She's like, oh, yeah, I'm federal law enforcement. So then that starts the whole thing where we've, we kind of have grown in that where I did all that. I made a mistake one time where we were, we were talking. And I hadn't sent her this, but this picture showed up. late. It was at Halloween and I was like, oh, I'm a Navy SEAL. And apparently so many Navy SEALs have

said that they're Navy SEALs here that as far as dating is concerned that she was just like, oh yeah, she another Navy SEAL go great. You know, that joke that there's, you know, a thousand Navy SEALs. I've all, I've met all 7,000 of them. So she kind of went through that, almost dropped me off the app. But it's kind of cool because I found somebody who understands the work understands me. And then we actually started, she's a firearms instructor too. And so we actually trained together.

She got me into this police week thing where I went in and got to shoot with her in armor. We got did some stuff. And so I have this picture. It's pretty funny. We're sitting on a car, a shot up car. And it says, I have the black box over our eyes. And mine says Merck and hers says then. So it's, But the stories too that I think we're hard on ourselves in our lives. As a Ranger, you're, oh, you're so hard, you know, you're so hard that you don't find

the connections and you don't connect to somebody. And so I think as far as finding your tribe, finding your community, the other, like, important things is like, find that person, like, find that person for you. because we do a lot of damage to ourselves in our relationships in while we were in the regiment we put everything first like you everything nothing serpent invented the mission nothing circuit you wanted to go on that next deployment you wanted to do the next thing and to survive all of that

you had to put your family on the back burner so once guys get out they still get in that mindset and it's like hey you don't have to ruin everything now. You can go be happy. So I really think, out of all the friends that I've seen that have Rangers, that have taken their lives, those are the two key components that I think they need to realize and reach out and actually say, hey, I'm going to give life a try and help that.

That happened. That's like such a, like when we say it out loud, It's such an odd thing to say. But it's totally true that, you know, you have to give yourself permission to enjoy life and to find something that you like. You know, it's beyond, you know, that sense of duty, but something for yourself. Yeah. It's, and I think it's just hard for us.

It's because you don't do all of that without coming out of it, without some kind of identity crisis that can take it away from me. it's just a it's so ingrained in us everything like if you think back to like anything we did in the regiment it's funny because I laugh about the like it's so indoctrinated in us

and anything in the regiment we sing songs about us like we like and not only do we we sing songs about us the army sing songs about us so we're this big giant thing and we don't stop to realize that we're also human in that yeah there's a point what we got we have to say

hey, like, I was that for that reason for that time, and now it's time to be something else. It's time to, and I'll admit, it's not time to lose the Ranger in you. It's not time to lose that identity, but it's time to take on another mission. I'm a Ranger, and I can be used at anything. And that's, I think, our biggest strength. I can literally do anything. I can do anything that anybody wants me to do. And I've suffered so much, and I can suffer through a whole lot more.

but that gives us a unique skill set in this world now where now you can you you are probably more driven than 99.9% of society absolutely and then all you have to do is go out and find that thing so yeah Louis tell us where people can go to find what is it alliance and three ranger so three rangers foundation is the one you can go to Three Rangers Foundation.org.

Dot org. Yeah. Yes. org. And then I'd ask my better app. And then the Allegiance Project Foundation is a dot org. And then there's Allegiance Project Security.com. But the security side is actually a security company.

So guys need any help with like, getting into the security industry, man, I got it in space. You guys come to me and I'm sure there's a way we can leave my email up. Email me, talk to me. I'll get you to know how I'll even help get you your level three, level four in Texas if you need it. We have guys for that. We'll put some links down in the description, but if you want to give out your email, I mean, feel free. Yeah, so my work email is Luis L-U-I-S-A-L-L-Egitge project.

dot org uh all one word and uh just like i said email me there uh for any guys that want it and i can we're very connected uh the other thing we're doing uh if anybody's in texas uh during october 3rd everybody knows what october 3rd is uh i'm assuming it's the uh gothic serpents so we're actually putting on uh three rangers and uh allegiance project foundation is actually putting on the first mogades um mile in dallas So we're going to be in Corinth, Texas. We got a great place. We're trying to get as many rangers out.

And again, that's that community thing, finding your tribe. We're inviting seals. I'm going to make fun of some seals. I'll be like, hey, do you need me to carry you out of here? Like, do we get to the halfway point? You want me to carry you back? Like, how are we doing it? Don't get on a ridge or anything.

But it's finding that is being able to kind of chat it up and find that. But we're putting on that run for the guys that aren't at Benning that think that can make it here so that we can get communities going everywhere. The goal is that one day, like, on October 3rd, we're celebrating all of that. Like, all of us are celebrating Gothic Serpent. We're celebrating that portion of our history

and actually just making it almost like a big reunion. We don't have to get together during funerals. We can get together. Hell yeah. Are you also on social media at all? Anywhere else people can go to find? mind you? Yeah, so IG, from the later days, is Diego Del Vega. So I'm a reader and aspiring writer, too. So Diego Del Vago was a real name of Zorro, but that's my name on Instagram and Facebook. So anybody

can go on and find me there. Also, we run a company, a training company, Sand, Strategic, And that's on IG too. And you guys, I can answer there too. And anybody's in Texas and just wants to come out and shoot, that'd be awesome. Well, Louie, thank you so much for this interview and telling your story. It's been great. Is there anything else that you'd like to bring up anything that I didn't ask during this interview that you'd like to talk about? Oh, man.

There's some, like, again, you go through that. And I'm sure you run into this. It's like, you remember things. You're like, oh, remember that story. and remember that story. I'm sure I'll be sitting around one day and I'll be like, oh, I could have said this is this, you know, X, Y, and Z, or I could have gone through something else.

It's okay. You come here to the studio if you're ever coming through New York City and we'll smoke some cigars and we'll tell the other stories. You know, I saw you were smoking cigars. I'm a big fan of cigars too. I smoke a lot of them. I smoke them out back because my wife hates to smell. I have to come in and shower if I do do it,

which was great because when we were dating, so two months into dating, my now wife says, hey, you want to go to Vegas? I was like, yeah, what for? I've never been to Vegas, but sure. And she goes, oh, we're going to go to Shachow. It's like, this is like two months into dating.

And I was like, I'm going to marry you. So the cursory thing is two months into dating. You don't know a lot about each other other other than you like each other. so I don't know some things and I was just like oh man I really want to go to a cigar bar in Vegas and so she's like yeah let's go little did I know that she was in the bathroom like snorting a

a Zyrtec because she's extremely allergic to cigars and then let's meet we go into the cigar bar and like she's a champ about it like I didn't realize it until like a year later where she told me she's like yeah I'm super allergic to cigars yeah there's like 30 people in there puffing away

Oh, yeah. And she was a champ, too, when I was deployed. She goes to every few, like every month she would go over to this place with Cigar International's. And she would get the cigars I like. And she'd buy them in boxes and then ship them over to Iraq. Bless her soul. Do what? Bless her soul.

Oh, yeah. She, fantastic. I realized that I was getting married real quick. But it was funny because she ended up winning a Drew Estate Cumador and she doesn't smoke cigars at all. And so she had got, she had entered this, they'd given her a couple tickets because she buy cigars there. And they call her and they're like, oh, you won this. And she said she was walking out of there. She was like, I almost got jumped.

Everybody wanted this thing. It's really cool. It's if you do any of the Drew Estate stuff, they got the Deadwood series. and it's all the like the old deadwood hookers basically and but the the humidor that she got holds i think it holds like 240 cigars but it's uh spanish wood and it's in the shape of a coffin i have seen those yes yeah yeah so she won that and like she doesn't smoke they were just like oh do you smoke cigars she's like no it's for my boyfriend that's awesome so super cool uh but yeah well i'm gonna go and check out druid state human doors

uh louis thanks again man really appreciate it yeah thank you i really appreciate the time guys um to be able to tell my story and and really to get them uh kind of the reliving of the mission of a rangers and helping out my tribe because I owe everything to the Ranger Regiment. And then the other thing is being able to get that message out of helping the guys at the end of it. We should all be able to tell our stories, tell how we got there, the times we got to look at things, the hurts, the pains, whatever it is. And then at the end of it, say, because of that, I'm this. And I hope that everybody, like you, you're like spent like a writer, which amazing.

Like I want to do riding too. I'm just, I don't think I'm as articulate as I could be. It's a skill. It's a learnable skill like anything else. Yeah. Promise you. But I think being able to say, get the message out there that we, we are Rangers, but that means that we can do anything.

We were given the, we were picked. We were specially selected to do that job. But specially selected means we, we, we can almost do anything we want. It wasn't just for the Ranger Regiment. It was a specially selected person, a type of person who would have succeeded at anything. Yeah, to not pigeonhole yourself that if you want to go and get MBA or you want to become an astrophysist, you can do those things. Yeah.

Don't get down. You know, some of the guys I find get down on themselves and think, I'm just a dumb Ranger, I can't do anything else. It's like, no, that's bullshit. No, just you're a ranger, you can do everything. Yeah. Like our, we have innate abilities that were, that were given to us, A, by the generations before, other rangers that we learned from, and then we passed down to other rangers that learned from us,

that we are the type of people. I think this is true of most special operations. We're the type of people that would have been successful almost at anything. You could have put us anywhere. You always look at these other rangers that are, or other special operations guys that are doing businesses, doing this, and that, you're literally taking somebody

who would have been, he would have been a professional athlete if it wasn't for the war. He would have been a, like, if he had gotten the college education, he can still go and get. You would have been a Fortune 500. You would have been leading,

leading titans of industry. We can do anything. I think it's just, we pigeonhole ourselves into what we were and being that warrior, the fighter, the soldier and we say that's that's the only thing i could have done is like no yeah it means a lot more so absolutely i appreciate being able to get that messes out anytime i can yeah yeah yeah

absolutely man and thank you to everyone who joined us tonight uh appreciate you coming by and checking out the team house again and uh we will see you guys next week so thank you louis hope you have a good time hit us up if you're ever coming through the city yes fair i will Hey, guys, I want to take a moment to tell you about the Team House podcast newsletter. If you go and subscribe, it's totally free. And what it will do is aggregate all of our data, all of our content that we put out, the things that are on the team house, on our geopolitics podcast eyes on, things that I write journalistically with Sean Naylor on the high side, anything else that we have going on, books we recommend, upcoming guests that we have, coming on the show and also, you know, filtering in some fun stuff in there as well. If you go and check it out, we send it out just once a week.

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