The Team House - Advanced Force Operations in Iraq with 10th Special Forces Group | Mark Giaconia | Ep. 129

Episode Date: January 22, 2022

Before the Iraq war in 2003, Green Beret teams infiltrated Northern Iraq, linked up with the CIA, and embedded deeply with the Kurdish Peshmerga to prepare for war. These special missions were called “Advanced Force Operations.” Subsequently, these special teams brought in the rest of the Green Berets during an operation called "the Ugly Baby."  Then, one of the most significant battles in Special Forces history occurred: "Operation Viking Hammer," where six Green Beret teams along with a handful of CIA and Air Force Special Ops personnel, combined with approximately 8000 Peshmerga, took back hundreds of square kilometers from almost 1000 Ansar Al Islam extremists, and secured a poison production facility of national level significance. This book is the only firsthand account of these essential Unconventional Warfare operations, written by an operator who was there.  In addition to describing these historically significant Special Operations missions, "One Green Beret" also details a 15-year career in the Green Berets that includes many unique experiences, such as joint operations alongside Russian Spetznaz on the northern border of Kosovo, and postwar operations in Bosnia embedded deeply with the locals. Mark Giaconia questions everything, and provides a VERY humble, sobering, and human perspective on war, military service, and strategic considerations. One Green Beret is very inspiring, and conveys the author’s personal evolution from gunslinger to educated computer scientist; a true tale of “post traumatic growth.” https://www.amazon.com/One-Green-Beret-Extraordinary-1996-2011-ebook/dp/B07D1V9XRL Today's Sponsors: 👇 A-TAC FITNESS (Veteran owned and operated) https://www.ATACFITNESS.com Use the promo code "TEAM10" for 10% off! Selection Starts Here. MANSCAPED https://www.MANSCAPED.com/ Use the promo code "TEAM20" for 20% off and free shipping! Your balls will thank you! Thanks for supporting the companies that support the show! Want 2 bonus episodes per month and access to the bonus segments? Subscribe to our Patreon!👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media Links:  The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room...Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents,

and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Special operations, covert ops, espionage, the team house, with your hopes, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Team House. This is episode 10029. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park. Our guest this evening is Mark Giaconia. He is the author of One Green Beret. I finished reading this book last weekend. It was super interesting, a super detailed account of Mark's career serving in Bosnia, Kosovo, and then going into Iraq ahead of the 2003 invasion, doing the Advanced Force Operations Mission. And then, participating in the actual invasion and attack on Ansar al-Islam and on Saddam's forces.

And then the book also talks about Mark's career coming back from the war, getting into big data, some of the fallout, the psychological fallout of the combat that he experienced and basically trying to return back to civilian life and to find some way to exist in this world. So, Mark, welcome to the show. I really appreciate you coming on today. Yeah, thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Yeah, absolutely.

Looking forward to digging into it. Dave. Oh, so first we want to start off with a word from our sponsors. Our friends at ATAC Fitness, hey, if you guys are getting ready for selection of any type, or if you are just getting back into shape or staying in shape, check out our friends at ATAC Fitness. They sell these great fin kits. and finning is something that you have to do in most selections. But also, fitting is a great way just to stay in shape.

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All right. So Mark, first question that we always ask our desk is about their origin stories. Tell us about your upbringing. and kind of how that led you towards military service. All right, yeah, I kind of, I guess I'd describe myself as a New England Hick. So grew up in the sticks of eastern Connecticut, which, yes, there are sticks in Connecticut. And, you know, kind of a country, country boy, fishing, trapping, hunting, you know, shooting an AK off the patio in the backyard. You know, not a full auto one, though.

So I grew up like that. My dad was in Vietnam. He's a combat vet in the infantry. Actually, a lot of my early childhood was watching him recover from a ton of inch. You know, he got shot five times, three Purple Hearts, a silver star. You know, he had a rough go at it. So I grew up watching him teach, you know, coach our soccer team from a wheelchair. And at one point, I think his jaw was wired shut because he got shot through the jaw.

And he was like, used a chalkboard to coach us. So I grew up with that kind of awesomeness, I would say. And my grandfather was a Marine in the, he was a Marine during World War II. So I had veterans, you know, going all the way back. So I always thought about the military as a thing. School bored the crap out of me. You know, I could not imagine myself. myself like going from high school to this thing called college that I didn't even know what it was really.

No one in my family even knew what that meant. So I was definitely, you know, on track to join the military. And I did at 17. So, yeah, it's kind of my, I think it's probably a fairly typical background, actually, for like a military. Two questions. One, so when your dad was coaching soccer and he wanted to yell at you guys because you weren't doing your job, would he write in all caps with exclamation points? Yeah, kind of furiously right, you know, with the little chalkboard.

That's awesome. He's on crutches sometimes, too, so he was famous for throwing the crutches. We won the Connecticut Shoreline Championship, like three years in a row, though, when he coached it. It just goes to show what all caps can do. Well, yeah, that was only one little stretch of it. And then when you joined the military at 17, did you leave? high school early for that? Did you graduate? How did that? No, I graduated. I was only 17 in boot camp for like a week. Okay. And I was, so I was 17 when I graduated, but I left for boot camp before Benning, like,

I think it was less than a week after graduation. I don't remember like July of 1991. And then you did, what, five years in the infantry before going to SNAS? No, that's right. I did. I went. to Hawaii. It was my first, so I went to Fort Benning, 11 Bravo. I loved it, actually. Like, I was friggin pumped, you know, coming out of there dying to go somewhere. I went to Hawaii for my first five years. I'm a pretty big dude, so I was a 60 gunner immediately back then. And then I actually went from the, you know, like the regular line platoon infantry to the, I tried out for the scouts, the scout platoon. And, uh, I'm, I'm,

I got into the Scout platoon. So I did actually most of my infantry time is like a recon team guy, like a five or six person squad. All the leadership was Ranger Bat guys. I think my first squad leader there was a corporal who had like jumped into Panama. Well, I think first Ranger Bat. So that's what got me interested actually in going into like special ops was the scout thing. So I went to like Ranger airborne air assault, EIB, sniper, all that. that stuff while I was in the infantry.

But, you know, I wanted to do something, special ops. I was kind of fascinated by the Green Beret thing. It was kind of mysterious. And, like, everybody told me about the Rangers. And I was awesome, but it sounded very infantry to me. But Green Beret sounded like a totally wazoo kind of thing, you know, with the whole resistance forces and all that kind of stuff. So that's where I went from there, you know.

What did you think about the special forces training once you went to the Q course? This is the 1990s. I want to remind people prior to 9-11. It was a quote-unquote peacetime military at the time. Yeah, so I went to your point. I went in 96 was when I went to selection, right? 90, yeah, 96 started the Q course in 96 and graduated in 97. So I don't know.

Then it was very geared towards kind of your. classic UW scenarios. I don't think people that showed up there thinking they're going to do like door kicking and stuff were very disappointed. You know, it was, or at least that was my take on it. I expected to learn how to like, you know, infill a country and a donkey card and like train indigenous people to like to do stuff. I'd always, I've always read like the Montagnards, Vietnam SF stories with like the Nungs and all that. I don't know, so that was what attracted me to it as well, reading all those books. So when I went, you know, it was kind of what I expected, especially Robin Sage, actually.

And I don't know, it didn't really surprise me, to be honest. I was, you or that or I was too dumb to really take that much notice of what was going on, and I just kind of rolled with it as very possible. And then you got assigned to Tenth Special Forces Group. What was your language? German. Okay. Yep, I did four-month German.

This is back, too, and we didn't go to Sears School as part of the pipelines. I've never, I never went to Sears School through my whole time. But, yeah, four-month German language was my thing. And then we were kind of... Go ahead. I was just going to say, when you got assigned to your team in 10th group, what was it like getting there at the time? Was there a mission that your team, was it signed to you that you were training up for? Yep, it was, we were, you know, I knew that we were destined to go to Bosnia or somewhere in the Balkans, like, while we were in the Q course.

Those of us who were told, I think we got told right before language school, what group we were going to. I guess obviously you would have to then. And then, like, somebody contacted me from 10th group at some point, and they're like, you're going to Bosnia, like, as soon as you get to 10th group. That was the flavor of the day in 10th group. doing this mission called the Joint Commission Observer thing, which was, you know, I wrote about this in my book. It's where the Green Berets were living in houses, like rental houses all over Bosnia, just really, you know, building rapport with locals and reporting what was going on. So I knew I was destined for that. I mean, I was still, you know, at that point, I was kind of your, what it was, I was like 23, I guess, kind of dreaming of the big war, you know.

Right. You don't become a Green Beret. because you don't want to go to a war. Right. You know, like, it's like an NFL player. You want to play in the Super Bowl. So, you know, I always dreamed of doing something like I always read about in like the Vietnam era, SF guys. Bosnia, I probably didn't pay much attention to what Bosnia was going to be.

But I was pumped to go, you know, I was going somewhere. And that was cool. And so, yeah, Bosnia was not the big war. that you were hoping for at the time. But there was, in your book, there was a lot of interesting things that you got to do. And you kind of did do the real SF mission there in a sense, that you were living off the local economy,

embedded with the local population, just kind of rubbing shoulders with people and saying hi and seeing, today we'd call it gathering atmospherics, I think would probably be the term. Right. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

But it is like all those core things that go into UW were definitely like exercises. there. Going into an area brand new, you got to build rapport with people so they tell you

things. Living completely, you know, living off the land, I guess in the modern sense of the term. Like, we got per diem

and we lived completely local. We rented a house. And we had neighbors that we like wave to. You know, we bought beer from the dude on the corner.

Like, you know, it was, we lived there, basically. So like the whole, you've heard the term going native.

you know, too, in the in the SF world. And I would say that we were totally going natives all over Bosnia. And yeah, you know, I also learned some stuff about just war, like hearing from the Bosnian people about the war, you know, how that whole thing went down. It was crazy.

But yeah, totally. You know, at the time, I think we were all kind of disappointed in that mission. Like, oh, man, we're not, you know, we're not slinging lead and we're not, you know, leading people on charges against whoever. But in hindsight, when I look at that, like that was a super valuable, like, mission.

I mean, it actually related to stuff we did later in, like, Iraq, you know, or you just get a cuss. A lot of people don't realize how important, like, people skills are to the Green Beret, just mission compared to other, I think, soft units. I don't think it's comparable. Like, you need to be able to, be friendly with people and like um so they help you and want to do stuff for you i don't know

and bosnia was a big one for that you said in the book that you developed a huge resistance to alcohol because you'd have these meetings throughout the day and everyone busts out the rachia yeah dude like anybody who hasn't been to the bosnia like you don't go there and not drink like it's always like going to russia and you don't drink vodka that's not going to happen so yeah what we did like the way we operated there was we would meet with different kinds of people, like mayors, chiefs of police, religious leaders, and just regular normal people, military too. And we would deliberately meet with these people. It was like our job to go meet with people.

We were almost like an NGO, but with the job of reporting what people say and what's going on. So we were literally, like, through our interpreters, and we had business cards and stuff, they would hand out. and like we would usually do like two or three meetings a day with different people. You know, like for instance, in the morning we'd hit like the chief of police. Then we'd go have lunch with somebody, some random, maybe military guy. And then afternoon we'd hit like, who knows, like a church or something on the way back. Each time though, to your way you're saying, you're busting out the Rakea or what they call Sleevitz. Rocky is like the plum variant of Sleevitz.

And man, you get you get hammered. You're hammered all day almost. Like by the time all of us left there, not just me, like, man, we could put down like some serious wicker. And this stuff is all homebrewed, hardcore stuff. It's kind of like moonshine, I guess. You can compare it to. But yeah, I have a ton of memories with that stuff, you know, just hanging out with people and listening to them tell us tell us about like bosnia and the war and how the how the how yugoslavia felt

apart some people didn't even know it was happening and next thing you know there's like a croatian tank like rolling through your town or and they don't even know why like just amazing stories uh from people yeah did you guys do a train up prior to that like the people would now going to iraq afghanistan they'd train for the environment did they have something like that in place for you for Bosnia? Yeah, we did what we used to call PMT. I don't know if they still call it that. You know, pre-mission training where we, what

we did for that mission, so when, as that mission was called JCO, Joint Commission Observer, all we carried was a concealed pistol. We had no long guns, no equipment, no head gear. We also didn't wear any patches or rank.

So we were, our status was like we directly reported to NATO command. So, like, it was kind of cool because I was like, I think I was an E5 on my first tour over there. And I would go to like brief like senior officers on like what's going on with no rank. They knew we were like spec ops guys. And we would, you know, just we had almost like a special status. It's kind of neat over there.

Was your second question you just said? That was it. If you guys did a train up basically. The PMT, so for that mission, since all we had was, you know, we're walking around town like normal people with concealed pistols, everything was geared around reactionary stuff, like a restaurant scenarios. Like we did whole restaurant scenario PMTs where you got two dudes sitting at a table, then you get threats from different angles, and we went through drills around that. Another one was like roadblocks and stuff were kind of a threat because we were a freedom of movement. so it's possible that somebody could like block us and kind of like a more unconventional threat type scenario

car shootings, motorcyclers with like submachine guns those were the threats that we PMT for I was wondering Mark if you could tell the story about because I mean this was a war zone or had been until recently where some really horrible atrocities had taken place about the well full of heads yeah so one of the things we did was a company, a bunch of these NGOs who were there doing, like, demining.

But also there were people just uncovering and finding mass graves of people. So, you know, for people who don't know, Bosnian war was horrendous. You know, you had the Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians. The Bosnians are Muslims. And at different points, they all fought each other. And the area I was in on this first time with this heads in the well, scenario was that was in an area actually where the Serbs, Croats

and Muslims fought each other at different times. And yeah, there was one in a mass grave of probably, I don't know, 20 people or something, and everybody had had their head chopped off and with their hands tied, you know, and then

a well over you don't know, 100 feet away or something was full, a well, like a and there's like an old school well, like probably hand dug type stone. thing was full of these skulls and heads. And at that point, this was 97, so there were still some skin and stuff on these heads. So that's the kind of horrendous stuff. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to

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That we saw over there. So we're watching people dig this stuff up. And there were other ones with like people shot in the back of the head and pigs thrown in the grave. And those were probably Bosnian Muslims with the pig desecrating them. You know, there's just a lot of stuff like that that went on there. And we got, you know, we got to see some of that. I was.

Could you also talk? about Operation Vaca Chaser where you guys were over there when the Russian military decided to make an incursion into Serbia and that kind of changed your mission in a lot of ways. Totally. Yeah, so this was the second

time my team went over there. I was on ODA 081 by the way. And the second time we were in Birchko, Bosnia, which is on like the northeastern side. And the Russians were over on the eastern side of Bosnia, which

borders on Serbia. And you got, this is 1999, so we're on the verge of bombing Serbia because of Kosovo, what's going on in Kosovo. So the Russian, this is almost like a major international

like incident that took place in 1999. The Russians picked up and started moving into Serbia from Bosnia. So like we went from doing this drinking, you know, drinking buddy mission, you know, where you're getting hammered every day.

three times a day to the Russians are about to cross into Serbia all these different SF teams spun up to just go you could call it like a weird recon like a totally overt recon of these Russian troops so it's almost funny you know in hindsight so we we spun up my team and we got kind of assigned where we're going to go watch there's this area I think the town was Balina, which if you were to look at a Bosnian map, it's basically eastern Bosnia, right, alongside Serbia. And we went there to watch,

you know, we got tasks to go find where they're crossing, how many are crossing, and just, you know, report what was going on, kind of just reporting movement. You could call it like the weird salute report, you know. So we go out there, you know, SUV, like three or four of us and pull up,

we pulled up kind of you know we're thinking we're doing some kind of recon a little bit or I was I'm like hey we're about to recon the Russians what we end up doing is just parking down the road a little bit from their huge convoy that was lined up and just kind of hanging out

and then funny like these there's one Russian guy I think I put this in my book like blonde-haired Russian dude comes up and wants cigarettes so we start talking to them and like next thing you know like we're bringing him pizza and like or smoking and joking with some of these guys

and then eventually they rolled out and they went into Serbia and like they told us they were like yeah I guess we're going to Serbia you know there's like regular regular troops you know they don't know what they don't even care what's going on most of those guys were just like pumped that they weren't in Chechnya so they're like hey you know

apparently we're going to Serbia I like waving at us when they when they drove over I love the part in your book where, like, you guys are all trying to, like, feel things out and, like, do a recon and see what the Russians are doing. And then, yeah, like you said, he just comes right up to you. And, like, yeah, we're here to find out what you guys are up to. And he's like, oh, we got 89 people in our unit. We have these trucks here.

We're driving here. Like, it's totally. It's not, you know, how it is. Like, when you go to war and stuff for real, it just doesn't ever happen like you think. I'm like these guys were just basically just regular dudes who got sent there and they're like whatever we're we don't care but it was weird like what were we what was I thinking like I'm going to go recon these guys but where am I going to recon them from like what are you going to do like stop on the road like a mile back and like sneak through the woods was like minefields everywhere in Bosnia you know so it ended up like we're just going to drive up behind them you know, parked the car on the side of the road and just stand there. There was one incident, though, that was really dumb of a guy on my team who was using his, like, ACOG on his M4. We were carrying long guns on this part.

He uses ACOG to, like, look at the Russians, which means you're pointing at them. So there's like a little bit of a tense spin-up moment there where imagine what, would have happened if somebody like perceived a threat on that and like popped a shot at us and we sort of you know in hindsight I'm like man that could have been like a big deal yeah imagine russians and americans getting in a firefight because the russians are rolling into syria and we're about to declare war on them could have been pretty epic there's another story that i really got to ask you about that you make a brief mention of in your book and i had heard this rumor from special forces guys myself but

never heard the real story, is you mentioned the seals being sent on a real secret direct action mission to blow up some train tracks. Yeah, there was a, I don't remember when that happened, but it was part of this spin-up to go to war with Serbia while we were in Bosnia. And I guess they got sent on a, you know, call it a direct action mission, whatever you want, whatever cool guy term you want for go blow up train tracks. So they went in blew up train tracks. Then they got in like a firefight with somebody. And we're listening to it on the radio. And all of us are like, why didn't we just go there? And like we could have disassembled the train track or something.

Yeah, like, why did it need to be like a super tactical kind of mission? Like a jet-gerton operation. What I heard was that they disguised themselves as locals or something when they did it. But I don't know the whole story. I don't know about that. I remember vaguely listening to that over the, SATCOM in like our ops room and just all of us maybe it was just one of those seal green beret things where we just wanted it to be dumb because they were seals and like we were we were like

what are they doing this for by the way the first time i did that mission in bosnia i was with seals like we we did split team ops with with seal teams so that first uh that first you know bosnian trip my patrol buddy most of the time was like a seal e7. Him and I were like, we were patrol buddies. And then after that deployment, you write about how you and your team, or the entire ODA got really tight that you guys have been training together for a long time on all these different exercises, winter warfare exercises. And could you talk to us a little bit about that and then kind of the run-up to being deployed

to Kosovo? Yeah, totally. So, you know, when we got back from Bosnia, actually a bunch of people left. And then we got a few new people. Got a new team sergeant, new captain, and like three guys retired or something. And we ended up having a new team that was all fairly younger guys. And then we went through like winter warfare training, went to Alaska. We jumped into Alaska to go.

of the mountaineering course up there. And just did a ton of training together like crazy. And we went to Kyrgyzstan. It was one of our big things too. So an OEF kicked off. We actually, no, that was after Kosovo. Sorry. That's okay.

My timing. My timing is messed up in my head. Yeah, no, but we just got super tight as a team. You know, we did a ton of training. And Kosovo is kind of the, new flavor of the day. Everybody was pumped to go to Kosovo. Because there was actually a couple different things going on over there.

And our team was kind of a, you know, we got a good reputation as a, you know how it is. Each team's got almost like its own little culture. You know, and a lot of times it kind of circles around the team sergeant's mentality at times. We had a really awesome team sergeant, Frank Sosha, was his name. He ended up as a sergeant major. Actually, he died of cancer not too long ago. Amazing guy.

But anyway, we built up like an awesome team, awesome reputation. And I'll tell you, we were ready to just go slay it somewhere. Like, that was just our mentality. We were out in Kosovo was like going to be the thing for us. Like that was kind of how we got pumped up for that. And so what was your mission when you hit the ground in Kosovo? This was like early 2001. Yeah, this is, yeah, I think we left in like February 2001, something like that.

Yeah, our mission was the what's called the Russian liaison team, which, you know, at that time, it was almost like a coin mission to get the counterinsurgency mission. Because the Russians, so the mission was to be basically embedded with the Russians. in the Russian sector of Kosovo. Because the way it all materialized after 99, the Russians went in there. Russians ended up owning like a sector of Kosovo. And it was the Northeast sector.

So the Russian liaison team was an SF team basically embedded with the Russians. And that particular mission was kind of, you know, how things were kind of famous in groups. Like, you know if you get a certain mission, that's like where the action is. Like that was the Russian liaison. on team mission. Like the team before us had gotten into some kind of little firefight.

So that was like a, you know, so we were excited about that. I mean, you know how it is. Like you want that. Especially at that point in time, it was pre-9-11. Hardly anybody had like a CIB. Right. You know, everybody wanted to see some action. I was one of them, of course. So our mission there was to go in, you know, live with the Russian. We lived in a house, but right next to the Russian base. And then we patrolled the DMZ with the Russians every day. That was our thing. And at that time, there was a insurgent group called the UCPMB, which means like the people's army of these three villages in the Presivo Valley. Presivo, Blyanavats, and I forget the other one, Medvedia or something like that, PMB, that's what those are. It's basically three towns. So it's kind of like the Kosovo Liberation Army, which was 99, pre-99. These were, I think they were kind of like the, you know, they were like the next-gen, UCK.

But they were kind of, I think they were more geared towards Macedonia and stuff too at some point. But I don't know the full history on those guys, but they were operating inside this DMZ. and our mission was basically to drive around with the Russians on patrols and, you know, report where these UCPMB guys are and, like, disrupt them if we encountered them. So we weren't allowed to go into the DMZ. But you know how DMZ goes. Like, insurgents love DMZs because it's like a safe haven for them. Right. So that was a deal.

We went into Kosovo. It's like a gun-free zone. Exactly. I want to get into that because there are some really interesting interactions between your ODA and Spetsnaz. I just want to hit up another one of our sponsors real quick and tell you guys about Manscaped. One of the sponsors of the show, they are a male grooming company. So you need to take care of business. This is the company to go to.

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They also have a nice nose and ear tremor. There's a body wash, a shampoo. and the shampoo, which both smell really nice. You can get my shampoo, by the way. They also have a ball tonic, ball deodorant. Like, they'll keep your jimmies fresh. And if you guys go to the website and you use the promo code Team 20,

you'll get 20% off plus free shipping at manscaped.com. Guys, check them out. There are a lot of benefits. So back to you, Mark. I want to ask you about, you know, your ODA did probably the only joint special forces green beret with joint operation with Spetsnaz. And I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit.

You kind of started telling us about this group that was hassling them on the DMZ. Could you tell us how this mission came about and what happened? Yeah. So one thing just to say is the, I have still not understood the structure of Russian spetsnots. So the unit that was there was called VDV. But some of those guys refer, they were referred to themselves or whatever as Spetsnots. So there was this one like squad that we kind of, you know, routinely patrolled with. It was kind of like our guys that we always went out with.

One of the guys had like the equivalent of the Russian Medal of Honor, by the way, from like a Chechen. He did like a hundred mile E&R route. or something. The guy was a badass. He called him shaky because he was all shaky from like combat. But anyway, so the way that that happened, like it was kind of completely by ad hoc.

So it was like a normal day where, you know, the Russians come over to the house in the morning. We jump in vehicles. Sometimes we just rode on their vehicles. Like they had BMPs and BTRs. Those are those like six wheel or track little vehicles. So we'd either jump on top of those.

Like people have seen like the Russians how they drive around sitting on top of these vehicles. So we would ride on their vehicles. Sometimes we would drive ours and they would just trail behind us in one of theirs, whatever. We would just ad hoc figured out. So that this particular day, we took a Humvee out. I was in the, I was in the, I was in the, I think I was behind the Mark 19 or something on our up armored hover. And behind us was one of the Russian vehicles. And we encountered this, like, dude, walking on the road who had, like, an army belt around his way.

So this guy's, like, a Kosovo, Albanian guy. And the Russians just stopped and, like, asked him what he's doing. And they ended up kind of searching this guy. And they found, like, military-related notes or something on him. And it ended up being, like, the Russians took this guy into, like, custody and questioning. Because they knew he was, like, a UCPMB guy, and he's walking into Kosovo. So they took them back to their headquarters and basically interrogated them or something. He wisely acquiesced to party wishes.

That's right. Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's possible to those Albanian, you know, Kosovo-Albanian guys. I'm putting words in their mouth. But a Russian is very similar to a Serb, I would say to them. So I'm sure they were scared. And anyway, this guy gave us the information to where like some base camp was. I don't know, base camp might be too big of a word, but some kind of camp where there was between like, he said 40 and 80 UCPMB guys, like some little place.

So we rolled out on it. You know, we're like pack up our shit and let's roll, you know, and go, you know, go bust this thing up. So I think we had two Humvees. We had me in the front on a Mark 19, another Hummer behind us with a guy, my team, and a 50 Cal, and the Russian in a, I think it was a BMP. I could have been a BTR, but I don't remember. And like, so we head out to this area where this guy pointed at a map, you know, to the Russians. And like, I guess to make a long story short, we ended up finding this spot and we're sitting there looking around.

We've been here like a thousand times. You know, and remember, we're not allowed to go in the DMZ. So where this guy is like pointing to, we bust it out like five different maps which have slightly different versions of where the line of the DMZ is on.

And we decide that we're able to like try to go up over this hill because one of the Russians was like, yeah, there looks like tire tracks though, like going up into the woods right there. So we're like, all right, let's drive up there. We think we're in bounds if we go up there.

So we roll up, I'm in the lead vehicle on the turret, and we come up over the crest of this hill and it was like heart attack. There's like a gate across this. This trail turned into like almost a little dirt road. You know, kind of like

if you've ever been in the backwood somewhere in like the deep south, when I say road, that's what I mean. Like barely two tire tracks through a forest. And there's like this little wooden gate across that that road with a sign on it that says stop UCPMB. And it says in English stop, which was kind of...

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Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Weird. But anyway, and there's this dude, young, like, you know, UCPMB guy in, like, full uniform with a beret on and stuff and an AK. And we would come rolling up over the hill, and this guy was like, oh, my God. you know, NATO's here or whatever, you know, they're probably super surprised. He didn't actually like pull the AK and try to shoot at us or anything. He was so stunned. And by the time, it was within seconds, like the dudes in my vehicle had dismounted and, like, disarmed this guy.

My team sergeant, like, broke this gate down. It was like literally a log on a, it was almost like a stick with a sign on it. So it wasn't like a big thing to do. So he ripped, he also ripped the side. sign off, of course, to keep it for like a, you know, to hang it in the bar. Because you have to. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We had a bar in our house.

We called the big whiskey. That sign ended up later being put up in the big whiskey. But anyway, so we rip that down. And then we're like, what are we going to do now? The Russians, like, dismounted. And they're, like, flanking through this. This is like a thick, evergreen forest up there. Kosovo is beautiful, by the way.

It's like, have you ever been in, like, Vermont? I would say it's similar to like that. Anyway, Russians dismount, like flank left. My captain has a Russian radio, I think. My captain was like fluent in Russian. He went to DLI. So he was awesomely, like, just fluent to talk to these Russian guys. So anyway, they flanked left.

And, you know, I don't remember how we decided, but we just, we just cruised into this, through that gate and down this road. out and we quickly realized we're in like a, you know, I don't know how big it was, but maybe a couple acres. All these little pockets, like little tents. There was a car like pulled into under trees and like camouflaged under the trees. Reminded me of like these old Vietnam books where the Ho Chi Minh Trail, they like tied the trees together over the trail and stuff. I mean, it wasn't obviously jungle like that, but there was a there was a little car pulled in and like covered with leaves or branches.

there was a tent, there was little cooking sites and bed down. If you've ever been in the infantry and you go into an area and bed down for the night, think of something like that, but quite a bit bigger than like a platoon would be. So anyway, we were all in there,

I don't know, maybe 150, 200 feet. And there starts to be, you know, small arms fire. Like pop it. You know, I'm on the turret. I'm like, holy crap. At that point, I had never been shot at, you know, and I wasn't even sure we were being shot at. They could have been signaling to themselves if I get out or whatever because that happens.

But bullets, you know, we decided, bullets are actually flying towards us. So, you know, I admit I was scared shitless. Like I'm sitting on a Humvee, like completely exposed. We're in the middle of this thing. I don't know what to expect. A Russian guy had been killed, by the way, like a couple weeks earlier that was, the story at that point was that guy had been sniped by somebody. So, you know, there was a reason to be scared.

You know, so I unloaded like a whole box of Mark 19, like, down the end of this trail and, like, swept it a little bit. It looked, it reminded me, it's kind of trivializing it maybe, but it's kind of like the scene in Predator where they just light up when they first see the alien and they mow the forest down. it was kind of like a super lightweight version of that but that's kind of what we did and then you know the Russians meanwhile have flanked

most of these guys probably just ran away the UCPMB guys but the Russians did capture like five or six of these guys and brought them back in and brought them back to their base you know we hauled them back in so we basically you know you could say we captured them

and even though that wasn't what we really set out to do. I was kind of like what the Russians. The Russians were in charge, by the way, in our sector, not us. So we didn't tell the Russians what to do. That's not the way it worked. We were along for the ride. So anyway, we capture these guys.

You know, a couple of them had been, like, wounded. You know, it was the first time I've seen wounded people. And I'm like, they're hauling them past me. I'm just kind of moving out into the wood. Oh, I dismounted with the M240, which we had in the vehicle, and went out kind of to the front, you know, kind of your classic raid and then set up for a counterattack kind of scenario that you learn in the infantry, like day one.

Did that. Nothing happened. I mean, it was probably no more than, like, 30 seconds of, you know, quote-unquote combat, no firefight or whatever. So anyway, we hauled. them out. We also discovered like a pretty big weapons cache there that was in this one tent that I'm in my

mind's eye is right next to that car I'm talking about. Luckily I didn't hit that with a with a grenade. Like I could have been a serious thing. It was like land mines in that thing. All kinds of stuff was in that was in that tent. There was a mortar tube there which is a

place they'd been mortaring like serve positions from. So anyway, I mean that was how it went down. It was like one of those things where we got Intel from this guy and we immediately rolled out with our usual

crew of Russian buddies at that point and we you know we ad hocily just kind of rolled into this joint you know fired off some rounds exchanged a little fire and then hauled a few people we captured

back to back to the Russian base actually the Russians took it over really And this was a pretty big deal at the time because, I mean, as you said, not too many firefights going on at the moment. Totally. Yeah. I mean, there are people who, you know, the last firefight anybody had ever been in was in, if they were lucky, like Panama or Desert Storm.

You know, maybe you'd have a rangerback guy who was in Somalia. You know, but that was a rarity, you know. So this is, you got people in there. Or, you know, you got, like I said, NFL players, starving. for the Super Bowl, you know, going back 10, 10 years. So, like, when we, when we experienced what we did, that was like an awesome thing, you know, man, those 0-8-1 guys frigging got to get in some, you know, got to get in the shit, you know, or whatever.

So do you guys get your CIBs out of that? No, you didn't get CIBs, didn't get combat patch, but weirdly, you know, and, you know, honestly, whether we deserve this or not, it's debatable. But we got ARCOM with V device for that. But without the CIB or the combat patch. That's wild. Yeah. Which is weird.

Like, Jack, I sent you a picture of my like shadow box thing. If you look real close, you'll see that ARCOM with V on there. And like, that is where that came from. So, yeah, in hindsight, like after being in Iraq and all that, did it warrant an RCOM with V? I don't know. Maybe. Yeah, relative to the. times.

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing that's a relative. If you guys are the only people like in contact, like over this extended, you know, peacetime military, then that's a big deal as opposed to, you can't compare it to, you know, post-9-11 when everybody is always in it. And then, you know, back in the States, 9-11 happens while you're doing sniper sustainment training, talking about that in your book. And the next deployment.

for you ends up being to Karegistan. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that. Specifically, I'm interested in the palace coup that you attempted on your ODA at that time. Yeah. I think this would probably go down as one of the dumbest things I've ever done. And there's a lot of those to like rank, by the way. But this one was. So this is how it went.

I remember I described you how tight we were as a team. Like we were, you know how teams can become insanely like tribal? and you don't even realize it at the time, or at least I didn't. And then we went to, you know, Kosovo and did this. We were the only SF team in the last 15 years to get in a firefight. You know, we had a massively inflated ego probably. And our cohesion was just crazy. So then our team sergeant left, and we got a new one.

And the bottom line is, like, you know, at that time, We didn't like the guy. Let's put it that way. He wasn't our old guy. He was way different mentality than us. He was a lot more laid back than we were. We were a fairly young team with, I don't know, we were ultra hardcore. Let's put it that way.

And this guy was, you know, he just wasn't that kind of team sergeant. And we didn't like him is what it boiled down to. In hindsight, I don't think he was really a bad team sergeant. He just, what he was, we didn't like him. and I was kind of like the I don't know I was kind of like the de facto lead actually I was the acting team sergeant in between

the old one leaving and this guy coming in I was an E7 you know of course and I you know I had like almost this I don't know I was protective of like my team and I didn't like this new guy I was like territorial

so when we went to Kyrgyzstan this guy, we didn't think he was doing a good job. I didn't think he was. A bunch of stuff happened. And basically, we almost kind of mutinyed this guy, where we were like, we're good. You just hang out. And we're going to run stuff the way we always do it.

And I did like a one-on-one with a guy to do that. So if you've ever been in the military, the degree of run, wrongness of me like doing that is almost unspeakable from like the rank structure perspective. So anyway, obviously the sergeant major got word of that. There was a cool mission by the way, though, the Kyrgyzstan thing. It was a fit, fit thing. When we got back, basically the sergeant major royally chewed our ass, primarily me.

I was like considered the ringleader. And I got banished to the B team. They basically broke up our team to some degree, not everybody, but like one guy went to the arms room, I think, and I went to the B team. Some other guy left, too. Anyway, basically my team got, you know, rogered up in a serious way because of that incident. But then, you know, things kind of came back together, but, you know, go ahead. Yeah, you were, like, kind of banished. And then they also tried to send you to SWIC and you declined it.

Yes. You lost rank over that. I did. So you got busted down to E6. But then the big war is coming for you, Iraq. That's right. You tell us about how you finagled your way back onto your team before the big one happened. This was an amazing time.

This is how bad I want to go to war, though. And everybody's like this. So the way it is a complicated story in the book. I actually, I think I dialed down the detail on this in my further editions, by the way, Jack. You got to read the full brain. You got to read the full brain dump. The spicy part of it. Yeah.

So here's how it works. Like if you get promoted at E7 and you have not yet been to A-Nock and you come down on order. to go somewhere. I came down on orders to go to SWIC. I'm pretty sure my sergeant major helped that happen because of this incident.

I don't know, but I, you know, if I was drinking beers with him right now, he'd probably say it was, that's what happened. And I wouldn't blame him. But what happened was, I came down in orders for SWIC

and I knew it was coming that we were going to go to Iraq. It was in the rumor mill. And I didn't want to miss. that for anything. So I signed what is called a declination of continued service statement,

which is basically when you as an enlisted guy deny a new assignment. So that's what I did. And I did that to stay in my team to the length of my enlistment. So then two things happen. One, I find out that in the

fine print of that thing, it says, if you haven't been to A-Noc, sorry, buddy, you're not an E-7 anymore. You're an E-6. now. And also, you can never be promoted again for as long as you're in the Army. And by the way, you just got stop lost

until 2035. I don't know if you guys remember when that whole thing went down, the stop loss. So here I am. I'm like, I just gave up my rank. I can never get promoted because of that thing. And by the way, I'm stop lost.

But all that didn't matter to me, because now I was going to be able to go to Iraq or Afghanistan, whichever one we got sent to first. So it's funny how all that happened in the span of like a couple months. And also, my wife got pregnant and my grandmother died, like, during that time. So, yeah, that's that chapter of the book. So tell us about your team getting spun up for the AFO mission in Iraq and start taking us through the infiltration. Okay.

So this is like, well, you know, I won't bore you with any more detail and the other thing. But I ended up back on my team when a new team sergeant came in, awesome guy who actually came from Delta as like one of the support guys. You know, they have like the, like demo support guys. Yeah, I think he was, I think he might have led the whole thing. But yeah, all that stuff. He came from there. He was an awesome guy.

He took over the team. and the team got assigned this AFO mission. AFO is advanced force operations. It's kind of like what happens on the tail end of a pilot team mission prior to when UW starts. It's a very classic kind of thing, actually, from the UW perspective. So I got back on the team. We got this mission. You know, and this is one of those things where you get red on and stuff.

Like, you know, it was a serious ordea. By the way, I only talk about the things that are in my book because those things went through pre-publication review. So I'm only going to say stuff that is in the book. I don't know if you had to do that with your book, probably Jack. But I went through that whole process. The stuff that's in my book is the only stuff I can say. So what happened was we were tasked to do this AFO mission, which was to go into Iraq and really set. the conditions with the Kurds to bring in the rest of the Green Berets and basically do UW.

So it's kind of like the people, you know, probably like the people that set up for the Northern Alliance type stuff. I mean, we were basically the Northern Alliance of Iraq was Task Force Viking. So the way it went down is like we flew over to Germany and then over to deter. Turkey. And we got set up with, you know, rental cars, civilian clothes, you know, and we drove into Iraq in rental cars. And this is like three months before, you know, the shock and awe, like the war actually kicked off. That was epic, man. Like, I wish I'd have been like smarter then and actually reflected on it as it was happening as much as I think about. things now that I actually have a brain.

You know, I'm like, the magnitude of it was pretty awesome, man. Like, there's a war about to start. We're like, I don't know if you'd call it covert or clandestine or low visibility, whatever word you want to use, but we were going in there to set the conditions to, for the northern front of the war, you know. And, like, we drove rental cars for 27 hours straight. all the way across Turkey. The way we crossed the border

was weird to me. None of us knew what was really going on. I think my captain did. Or maybe everybody knew but me because I was, you know, again, I wasn't the super aware guy I am now at that point. I kind of just floating through some of the stuff. But we went through the border

like super just casually. It was as if we were kind of shuffled through there. Linked up with the KDP and some CIA guys, which I didn't even really meet those guys much. My captain did most of the talking as we drove through this, you know, through this infill. So anyway, I drove 27 hours through Hobbard Gate, northern Iraq, linked up with the KDP Kurds with the CIA guys. who are with them and our pilot team guys who were already there too. And then they drove with us all the way. I don't even know where this was exactly.

It was somewhere north of like Mosul maybe. I'm not that familiar with that side of northern Iraq on the northwestern kind of tip. But anyway, they brought us to like a place where we bedded down for the night. And we're driving through mountains and like white out conditions snow, which you wouldn't, that's not intuitive. You know, if you're talking about going into Iraq, you're driving through a white out snowstorm through the mountains. We drove for, I don't know, hours, 27 hours to get to Iraq and then however many more to get to this little, you know, call it a safe house or a bed down site or whatever where we stayed. stayed the night there, slept maybe an hour or two.

In the morning, we drove all the way from there to the P-U-K sector. So historically, if you don't know, like, there was the KDP and the P-U-K, Kurdish column factions up there. They weren't too friendly

with each other. They just happened to have a common enemy. So the KDP dropped us off with the P-U-K. Our mission was with the P-U-K. They handed us off to the PUK, and then the PUK and the CIA dudes who were with them already there picked us up, and we drove with them all the way to a Sula mania, and then up to a place called Kuala Shalamb, which is north of a Sula mania. I don't know, like an hour or two. And that's where we started doing what we did. And our main mission there was a couple things.

One was to do the shock and awe targeting. So those people who were around then, the 2003 Iraq War, the shock and awe buzzword, well, we were, at least we were registering those targets. So I spent a lot of time, you know, CIA guy and me or a couple of dudes, you know, weighs in targets and writing down coordinates. So our mission was to do that shock and awe stuff on, both Ansar Islam, IGK, IMK, these are three different, like, blatantly operating, you know, terrorist groups up there, and as well as the Iraqi Army.

So that was one of our missions, who register all these targets. The other mission was what was called RSOI, which stands for reception, staging, onward movement, and integration, which is basically when the rest of 10th group arrives, where are they going? going and like who are they going to be with where should they stay like what curtish units are going to be with them what sectors are going to be going to cover down on somebody had to figure all that out on the ground there and that was our mission so out of qualichelan we tried to do all those things you know like I was personally the lead you know lead being a relative term I was a, what was I, an E6 or E7? And like, my job was to take care of when our alpha company showed up, where's

alpha company team's going to go? And why are they going to go there and who they're going to link up with? Kind of like your typical Robin Sage stuff. You're a member of Robin Sage when you link up with somebody and they bring you to the G-base. Well, we were the guys you linked up with to bring you to the G-base, basically. So my job was Alpha Company. and so I was out against like the where the KDP border was down to the Iraq was the Iraqi green line and then all the way up to the border with Turkey. So it was insane driving.

Like we spent months, you know, like two months just driving around trying to figure out where are their Kurdish units? How many people do they have are the little villages they live in like suitable for an ODA that live there with? them. We were trying to figure out like composition, disposition capability of where to put these Green Beret teams. And from Qualichelon, it was so long to drive that it was virtually, we weren't going to like, I don't think we were going to succeed. So I think at some point my captain, who was an, by the way, I think my captain is the 10th group commander now. Brian Rowan. Awesome guy. But we moved down to the airstrip.

Oh, by the way, our third mission was to fix the Asulamania Westirstrip so that the other teams can fly in and land, which is the whole ugly baby mission, by the way. If you've read about the ugly baby of 2003, that was them flying in and landing on the airstrip that we got tasked to fix. So we infilled with like 300 grand cash to pay Kurdish construction workers to like fix that thing. And we had an Air Force

STS guy to like certify the runway and all that. It was awesome. So those were our three like missions there. So we moved down to a Sillamania and stayed at kind of this P.UK headquarter building there for the rest of the AFO mission. And that put us more central to like all these areas.

So we ended up, you know, we, we succeeded. You know, it was a pretty, I think it was fairly successful. You know, we found places for all the teams. We had like a packet of info for them. Like when they showed up on the airstrip, we had buses ready for them to go to their, to their Kurds. We shipped them out.

We targeted Ansar Islam, IGK, and the Iraqi Green Line through a bunch of interesting. There's a couple interesting things in the book. the, you know, like when we, the Kurds made a deal with IGK, which is one of these terrorist groups at that time, for us to go inside their lines to target Ansar Islam from their enclave. But while we were in there, we targeted them. So, like, when the tomahawks flew in, and there was like 70 Tomahawks hit,

I don't remember what day that was, but I remember standing on the building, but we killed like 100, IGK guys in their headquarters with Tomahawks. So it's pretty interesting, man. To me, that was like the Super Bowl moment of being a Green Beret. Like, sneak in somewhere, find the, I mean, the courage you didn't have to train them and make them a fighting force. They already were.

But we had to figure out where they were. Some of them liked us more than others because we hosed them in like 91 or two. So we had to get past that on a couple occasions. where people are like, why should we do anything with you guys? Like, when are you going to leave again? You know, so you have to deal with stuff like that. I'm probably all over the place, man. These are great, like, recollections, yeah.

Yeah, they're like micro histories, you know, of like, there's just these little interesting things that happen. Could you tell us about the night, the ugly baby mission? I thought that was pretty hair-raising, and I didn't realize, like, how close to call that was until I read it by your book. Yeah, I, I was glad, honestly, that we were the AFO guys who were already there and weren't in those birds. It would be cool to talk to somebody who was in those birds.

I'd never have, like, post. Because I left group literally like three weeks after we got back from Iraq and went to SWIC. So I never really, like, debriefed people that much of what that flight was like. But those birds were shot up, you know. They took, like, inner aircraft fire. significantly, like, to get to where they landed. And then, yeah, like, the way that went down, too, is typical Murphy's Law stuff of, like, so we had the lights on the runway were run by a generator.

The generator died, like, right as the birds are coming in. And these birds are coming in, like Colonel Tovo, who later became a general, actually retired now, I think. awesome guy too was on the radio you know and I'm there I was I was the 18 Bravo making sure that we had blocked off the roads for like no traffic could come in there for where this thing happened

and they were like dudes on my team out on roadblocks with the Kurds and like we sealed off the entire area there was like thousands of cars backed up it was a major event so anyway the generator died and then some curd had an AD with an RPG. So there's this big explosion. And now the, or it wasn't a huge one, but you know, RPG explosion in the middle, you know, at nighttime on an air strip.

It just got blacked out because the generator died. We thought, you know, something was happening. The planes started questioning whether they should land. And then I don't know why or how this happened. In hindsight, I don't really understand why we. did this. But our Air Force guy, for some reason, he, he did what he called lead to the bird by the nose down the runway, because the runway was blacked out. Maybe the NVGs weren't working or something. I don't know. But anyway, so this STS guy, who was awesome, by the way, Air Force guy, you know, Afsock guy,

jumps in one of our, I think it was like the Jeep Cherokee. And he's just driving down the runway towards like where the plane's land and then come. And he somehow coordinated with the birds, and he was, like, driving in front of them with his headlights to, I guess, help them know where the runway was. I don't, that's my assumption. At the time, I was like, I don't really know why this guy's doing it, but he's the Air Force dude, so he knows what to do when planes.

You know, that was kind of my mental model. If that's to do with a plane, the Air Force guy knows what he's doing. So I didn't think about it much more than that. But in hindsight, I always have wondered why he did that. I'm sure he had his reasoned. But that was part of that hecticness of bringing in the ugly baby. And then finally, like these birds land, right? And there are these massive hulking C-130s pulling down onto our end of the airstrip.

And there's literally hundreds of curts, you know, just staring at this thing in this, like, dim light, you know. as if like a spaceship landed. It's just amazing. And then you see guys like pouring out the back of this thing. A couple guys are like kissing the ground, you know, when they got out. There's a couple dudes I knew from like back in my company. Some of them didn't even know we were there. And then, you know, then we linked up with mostly the team leaders and like sent them on their way.

We had buses waiting for them. Yeah, it was awesome, man. Like when I look back on my career, one of the reasons why I was able to just kind of move on and feel like completely satisfied with my career. You know, I'm not one of those guys that, you know, was crying in my beer about how awesome the military was. Because I got in my mind, we did on that mission what you are what you dream of doing as a Green Beret. You know what I mean? I just wanted to add also throw in there for the audience. you guys may also really like to watch the interview we do with Sam Faddis, who is one of the CIA guys there.

And you can hear everything Mark's talking about, but you'll hear it from the CIA perspective and what they were doing on the ground. And I think it's very interesting to kind of like just look at both of these perspectives. Yeah, I talked with Sam a couple times. I think there's a YouTube video of him interviewing me somewhere. But yeah, we were spitballing together for a couple hours one day, or at least an hour. in a parking lot when I was in D.C. like over the phone, like trying to figure out where our paths crossed. Because I don't remember seeing him there, but we were definitely there at the same time.

Yeah, so, yeah, it would be cool. I wouldn't mind watching that. I'd love to see how that comes up. Can you tell us about when the shock and awe did happen because you write about standing there watching these tomahawks come in? Oh, dude. And then what will get into Viking Hammer? Yep. Yeah, it was awesome.

So where I experienced that was in Halabja, Iraq, which is, you know, way over on the eastern side right next to Iran, you know, the southeastern part of northern Iraq. And my experience of that was it was me, one of our pilot team guys, a couple CIA dudes, and Ken Tovo. standing on the roof of the Kurdish little, you know, call it headquarters, a tiny, it was a tiny little place, standing on the roof, because we knew it was coming that night.

And the way that it happened was, we're up there on the roof, kind of, you know, typical SF dudes shooting the shit, drinking tea with the Kurds, you know, doing our thing. And we start hearing these things flying through the air. You know, it's like a small,

small aircraft kind of sound and we're like, you know, you can hear them coming. And then, you know, they get closer and then there's more of them. And man, I'll tell you, a lot of them came almost all at once, like within a couple minutes, probably 30 or 40 tomahawks, like flew over us, you know, over being relative. I mean, we could hear them in the sky above us. and we're from halabja that's we could see like the mountain scape of where onsar islam there were you know that's where they they operated they had a huge area where they overtly just lived um people have equated it to like torrabora like this area where just a bunch of

bad guys live train and there was a chemical facility in there which we'll talk about in a bit with viking hammer um but anyway it's nighttime pitch black standing on the roof with the curds, drinking tea, shooting the shit. Then we hear these things buzzing over our heads. Then they're headed towards the mountains where the Ansar Islam, IGK, and IMK, enclaves are. And there's like a huge area. It's not like a small thing.

If you've ever been in like Colorado Springs and looked west, it's something like that where you're looking at a massive mountain range. anyway the things start hitting the mountains like just concurrently you know just unbelievable destruction i tried to describe it in my book i try to describe a lot of things in my book and i'll tell you i don't know i don't know if i succeeded ever in like conveying how awesome this stuff is or like how massive but it it was like the whole mountain area was just ablaze almost simultaneously with these things hitting

in rapid succession all over the mountains. And like you could feel them all in your gut. I don't know. We were probably like two or three kilometers maybe, you know, straight line distance from where they're hitting. Which seems far, but it's not that far in that terrain.

So yeah, that was my experience personally of when the shock and awe actually went down. Like that was it. You know, and there supposedly was about 70 tomahawks that flew over us and into those targets. And we had registered all those targets. And how long after that was it that Viking Hammer kicked off? Let's see.

For the Kurds, not soon enough. They were getting hiss to the point of where we were worried about, like, rapport. It took us so long. They were getting antsy in their pansy. Yeah, they were worried about Ansar Islam, like, well, first of all, the Kurds weren't convinced that those Tomahawk did all that much damage. Because they were, you know, those guys are so insanely practical with, you've been over there, right, Jack? You've been with the Kurds? Yeah, you know, like they're the most practical, pragmatic fighting force, probably in the world.

Maybe the KLA would be close. but like they were like okay you're an on-sar guy you hear things flying through the sky things start blowing up are you just going to sit where you are or like run away from

anything that you think might be a target so they didn't think we killed that many guys but one thing we did do is probably take out quite a few heavy weapons like a mortar that was like dug in and stuff like that so that was good

But then it probably, I don't know how many days it was. I want to say it was at least five days before we actually launched Operation Biking Hammer. And the Kurds were worried about the timing. They're like, they're just going to rebuild like stuff. I mean, you guys are taking too long. Let's just go. They were pissed for a while. When you finally got everything up and running, I mean, this was a significant operation.

and you talk about when you get out to the rally point, you just see like these human wave of birds, you know, in the traditional MC Hammer pants, as we Americans call them. But where their traditional clothing, like just spread out as far as the eye can see. Yeah, it was epic.

You know, and I'm not like trying to brag by saying it was epic. I mean, I was, it was staggering in scale. Like, so I remember, you know, it was still dark when we rolled out. to on bike, you know, the morning of Operation Biking Hammer, you know, we, you know, got up at like four in the morning, you know, ate some quick breakfast with the curds, like eggs, you know,

fried eggs and rice, jumped in the back of these little, you know, high-lux type pickups. And, you know, with a bunch of curds and drove out to this little town or village, whatever you want to call it, called Dacon. Or if you were to look at a map, you'd see that is a little bit east of Halopja. And that was basically like the, you would call it like the assembly area. And that wasn't the only one. There was another one further south that was probably close to the size of this one. Whereas we're approaching, it was like the sprawling mass of people, cars, motorcycles, you know, however anybody could get there.

You know, that was a huge area. You know, I think in the book I probably described it as like a square kilometer, literally, of people. Like, standing around with, there were dump trucks and land rovers with 106 recoiless rifles on them. There was one truck with a ZSU, you know, 23-2 bolted to the bed of it. You know, really just awesome UW stuff, man. like you got this rag bag thousands of ragbag curds

um carrying you know they're scrappy AKs uh and then when we pull up we're like rock stars like they're cheering us and we're driving through the we're driving through this thing you know

and uh so anyway we dismount and we're we try to link up with our general curd who was uh kind of the lead so the way we broke down was we had like three dudes, me and two dudes on my team. There was my team sergeant and one guy

our medic, one of the medics, and then my captain rolled with the CIA lead guy. So my captain was like, it's so funny, you know, in the army, who would think a captain would be like, you know, call it in charge or whatever, of like

10,000 people. Like a division size element of fighters and you've got you know staff sergeants as battalion commanders and you know it was awesome uh so we just kind of got off the the truck and linked up with our little groups uh somewhat at that point it was super loose and fluid of who's going with who that didn't really materialize until we got closer to the mountains and started really moving up the up the valley um so the white viking hammer was structured do is we had what we called prongs. There's a couple maps out on the internet of how the prongs went.

It was like a green prong, yellow prong. There were two different yellows. And there was a red prong. It was an orange. My team split into actually a bunch of, like, this is, you know, kind of classic UW stuff, where you got two or three guys with hundreds of indige. and then we spread out on my team across two different prongs. So it was me and my team sergeant's little crews on what was called the yellow prong,

which was like the main effort of the attack that was supposed to go in and secure the Sargat chemical facility, which was, by the way, the whole point of Operation Viking Hammer was to. It was possible that we were the ones who were going to find the WMD al-Qaeda connection in Iraq. Like that was the thought at that time. Spoiler alert. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's kind of a sad, you know, hindsight analysis. It's kind of sad on the whole thing in that regard.

So, yeah, me and my team sergeant and our two, you know, I had two guys with me, and one of the guys with me went to Delta later. And my team sergeant, we were the yellow prong. And then my warrant officer and two other dudes were on the, green prong, which was really the covering fire team for our prong, they were on this high ground ridge alongside us as we went up this valley. And if you've ever seen pictures from Task Force Viking of a guy firing a Barrett 50 cow, that was a guy on my team named Chris, who, you know, made some amazing shots with that thing on this thing. So anyway, that's how

my team broke down. That's how the whole attack kicked off. You know, and we had like, phase lines and all kinds of stuff established with the Kurds and with the leadership on the SF side on it. So I think there were five or six ODAs in total. The number of Kurds was hard to really pin down, but the number has been between like 7 and 10,000. And the numbers of Ansar Islam have ranged from anywhere from 400 to 1,000 that were there. Most of them got away before we attacked them. I think they escaped into Iran. It was one of the reasons, too,

the Kurds were upset that were waiting so long. All the guys who were not just going to die, you know, probably left before we even attacked them. But anyway, yeah, where was I? So that's kind of how we're structured. We roll up into this enormous mass of Kurdish,

Tashmerga. You know, they love us. They dance around. they got their beads and stuff. And like, so what kind of kicked the whole thing off was, um, these Ansar guys come out and they're like standing on the ridge, you know,

you know, kind of, not in a, not in a perfect line, but there was, they were scattered along this front ridge. Just looking at us, you know,

and this was probably, I don't know, 1,500 meters. Which, again, if you're on flat, almost desert like terrain and you're looking up onto a ridge, up 1,500 meters isn't that far.

So it's kind of this like, in the book I describe it as like a braveheart scenario where it's like we're standing there looking at them. They're standing there looking at us and somebody's just waiting for the signal of like, when are we going to do this? And that ended up being some old dude, curd, jumping up on top of that ZSU 23-2 bolted to the back of a flatbed pickup and starts firing off around. at these guys on the front ridge. And that's when, like, the whole mob of Kerr just kind of started oozing towards the mountains.

And, like, at that point, it kind of just self-organizingly split into the prongs. And everybody just started to kind of flow. It kind of reminded me of, you know how you do room clearing or you got, like, your move to the points of domination and all that kind of stuff? imagine that but at a massive miles by miles square area with thousands of people that's kind of how the Kurds roll they're like locusts

you know they just go they don't have much of a plan they kind of just it's almost like they're I think I describe it in the book as like swarm intelligence you know like Starling swarm yeah they're like that in combat like they

the big blob goes over here and they take some fire and then some people dispatched to take care of that but they keep moving and we are our challenge was to stay on the front line of that you know that was really our job was to know where the front

we called it the front line trace and this is one of the challenges I think in just UW in general is like you got thousands of indigenous fighters they don't have great comms they don't have great movement tactics they just kind of move out how do you keep track of where they are,

especially if you're going to integrate air power, which was one of our things, because you've got to be careful. So our struggle was to like stay on this concept of the frontline trace, be able to report where that is, and then integrate some air power, whatever we had. We also had a mortar section set up with the Kurds and our B team. The 18 Bravo's on the B team ran almost like a fire support center.

along with the Kurds. So I had like a radio comms with those guys to call mortars. So anyway, like that's how it was. It was pretty amazing. We actually didn't have that much air support. We had kind of ad hoc if any

air came on station, we might get it. But we didn't necessarily have birds circling as a dedicated platform. Not that I know of anyway. I don't believe there was. So anyway, As we, you know, we're storming the mountains, basically.

Fire fights everywhere. The green prong goes up the hill, and they're immediately taking fire. And my team starts going right up the valley. It's called the Sargat Valley. And, no, not too far up. We start taking fire from two different directions, from, you know, probably like PKMs, primarily away from different positions. And that's when we had the first call,

my team sergeant called in an airstrike on those guys. So it was the Gatlin guns or whatever you want to call them from an F-18. And that was one of the most insane things I've ever been, you know. You know, in training. Sometimes you do stuff with like jets and helicopters.

It's nothing like when that thing is flying like frigging literally 100, 200 feet over you. So this thing came like screaming from behind us and just opened up with these, you know, I guess it's 30 millimeters on an F, on an F-18. I think it's 30s. It might be 20s. I don't know. But the whole, like, I think they made two passes to take out these kind of positions

that were set up. They were kind of triangulating fire on us. And the Kurds thought that there were mines in the, anywhere but the road. So we're like hunkered down on the road, taking fire. like some Kurds got wounded right then but once these birds came by and just decimated these couple positions the Kurds were literally like cheering and dancing on this dirt road and it was like the motivation went through the roof man and we just we were literally running you know like war cry type stuff like towards this one village called gulp which we kind of easily kind of went through

you know and then from that point on it was just you know hitting resistance kind of in in layers uh along this valley uh like one time we got so what we would do is we'd go on foot we'd fight somewhere we'd be in a firefight and then but curds would like squeeze through and get way out ahead of us and that couldn't happen like that was bad we needed to get up there to know where they were so we would then like jump in pickup trucks and try to drive up so we could then jump off again and link up with the front line. So we kind of like constant fight to get up to the front. And we stayed in the front pretty well.

But there was one time where we took some fire and we like pulled the Mark 19 off the truck and we were like whaling positions out on this one hill. And we threw it back in the truck. We had a 240. So what we had were like these little high-lux trucks. They were kind of like the rear logistics of the front line. So we had like spare ammo, 50-Cal, Mark 19 on tripods in those things. And we did like crew drills a couple of times to set those up and use them, put them back in the truck, keep going up.

So it was a really like unconventional type battle. I mean, when you think UW, like I think it was pretty. Yeah. I don't know. I think of it as pretty classic, man. It was some rag bag stuff with just weird stuff all over the place. But anyway, we ended up, the big event was going into the village of Sargat where the chemical facility was. That was where the real super intense like battle took place where we were, you know,

it was like hours and hours of slinging lead, you know, trying to bust through this village. When I say village, by the way, there's no civilians in there. So this is a all bad guy village. You know, think like, I don't know, I don't know. There were no civilians there. This is all Islamic extremists, kind of like an ISIS area or something you might equate to it. They had like a schoolhouse with like books for teaching radical Islam and all kinds of stuff like that. It was a serious, it was a pretty serious place.

So anyway, the big event was fighting three. Sargat. And they were, there was heavy machine guns set up along the backside of Sargat. Sargat's actually also a really weird geology kind of going on. In the book, I describe it as like some monster, I think, in the first edition, where it's almost, you know, it's almost like some mythical. I tried to give it like a mythical feel because I couldn't figure out any other way to convey that kind of gravity that I felt.

I don't know if that worked, but you know how it is, artistic stuff with writing. Sometimes you think it works. Sometimes it doesn't, actually. So anyway, we end up fighting through Sargat for hours. You know, the highlight of it for me was when my team took a 50-Cal up to the top of this one specific hill. Because we were getting kind of beat down. They had one of these. You ever see those 14.5 millimeter machine guns that are like brutal, you know, chainsaws.

And like one of those was firing down from the backside of Sargat. We were pinned down my little crew for like a couple hours. You know, I was frigging, I'll be honest. Like, and I wrote it in the book very humbly. Like I didn't know what to do. I was frigging. I was kind of just at some point waiting to die. I didn't, couldn't move anywhere.

I was actually my captain who kind of came bouncing over through the friggin' hail of bullets and told us like there's hope here, like there's a place up to your right where you can actually go. And I was like, it kind of snapped me out of my thing and like we finally moved. But it was intense, man, like bullets flying, mortars dropping, RPG sizzling, heavy machine guns, you know, beaming. down, you know, and anyway, what we ended up getting through that when my captain came and saw me, there was this moment where he dropped his map when he came over to see me. And they ran away. And then he ran back to get it.

And this is like, he's running through a hail of bullets. And I was like, you know what? I guess you could say, like, I'm like, if he can run through this shit, I guess we can too. So we ended up bolting over to where he was with his with he was actually there with the CIA ground branch lead guy. And Baffle Talibani was there with him. So I don't know if you guys know Baffle Talibani, I think, was a serious player in the ISIS Kurdish battles later, you know, not too long ago. And he's the son of Jalal Talibani, who is, you know, Jalal al-Talabani, who is, you know, Joel Talibani.

So anyway, this is Baffle, who has a beautiful English accent, perfect English speaker. So anyway, we run over and link up with those guys. And that's when it was decided that we need to get some kind of heavy weapon in place above this village of our own that we can, you know, we can speak the language of heavy machine gun back at these guys. So my team got kind of the tasking for that. And we ran, you know, we ran through a friggin' hail of bullets. And I'm not like, it's hard to exaggerate it to get to where the trucks were. So we could get the 50 cow out of the back of the truck and then run it up this hill.

So we ran, I don't know, probably three or 400 meters across this frigging open, almost open area. Just getting, it was also scary too because there was lines of curds in depth firing too. So you had to be careful of them just as much as the enemy. So there was tracers going both ways. And we're, you know, so we're like waving at the Kurds and making sure like, hey, guy, because you know how it is when you're firing at somebody, somebody can come out of your flank and you don't, you know, you might not see them. So anyway, we made it over there to these trucks. And it was me, the comms guy, Blake and Ken Gilmore, who we called him Hap, Happy Gilmore.

who we grabbed this 50 cow. So the comms guy was just a freaking huge guy. You know, he put this 50 on his like shoulder. You know, a 50 cow weighs like 80 pounds or something. I don't remember. Then, you know, the medic grabbed the tripod. I grabbed like two ammo cans, slung my weapon. And then, of course, like five, ten curds show up and just start grabbing ammo cans.

And we all just sprint up this hill. It was actually kind of nice at some point because behind that hill we were covered to some degree. So we were in a rush to get to the top of this hill. We got to the top and placed this 50 kind of by crawling and price. There was a nice little divot up there. So we had a little bit of cover by laying flat down under that thing. So we set up the 50 on the tripod and started scanning for like, where's this freaking, where are these heavy machine guns? And we identified there were some like concrete, almost like houses or pillboxes or whatever you want to call.

I don't think they're, they're probably houses. But, you know, Middle Eastern concrete houses where one of those was. So anyway, my commo guy, you know, he frigging, we dialed him in onto that building and just we frigging disintegrated it. And, you know, us up there, I think, you guys know, at a 50, sounds like it ain't no joke it's like it speaks its own you know it's got its own language so when we're up there firing that thing uh there were actually curds right down below us and right down below us was the chemical facility and i remember seeing it from like satellite imagery you know like from the intel piece and i'm like wow that's the chemical facility right there right below us

it was it had been hit by tomahawks but you could still tell um that it was at the fence around it so. Anyway, Kurds got, I remember it's just seeing Kurds getting shot like mowed down a couple of them as they were trying to come in from that side. But I don't, you know, I don't know how it is

sometimes with like battles where the tides just kind of turn. Not sure why. Maybe it was that machine gun. Maybe it was just coincidental by the time we got up there started firing some other units had broken through something.

but that moment, whether it was because of us or not, was a pivotal kind of moment where we flooded through Sargat. It was kind of like, I kind of related to like an ant farm, you know, hundreds of Kurds just pouring through this little village, you know, with a lot of firing. It was like a total, you know, when you think of war, you know, like machine guns and explosions and freaking people screaming, I mean, that was, that was it.

It was pretty serious. I mean, I'm sure people have. seen worse. But for me, it was the battle of my career. I will tell you that. Anyway, we got through that. And then, you know, this is weird UW stuff. Like, we come down

the hill off of this and the Kurds are like, oh, yeah, hold on a second. And they bring us like a platter of food. So it's lunchtime. The Americans have to eat. So they bring us like, you know, rolled up little meats and stuff on this platter.

We were like, is this actually happening? We just, you know, we just got done crawling up a 50 in a position and firing and breaking through this thing. And now we're casually having lunch behind a berm next to the Sargott chemical facility. So, like, it was just surreal and funny at the time. So, yeah, that was the main event. But we kept going. But go ahead. You know, I'm probably talking too much.

Yeah. So you got up to the, you're limited of advance. and unfortunately, I recall you writing about seeing some of these guys escape into the Iranian mountains. Yeah. But I was wondering if you could talk to us about the Sargat, you know, alleged chemical weapons facility and kind of what happened there is you guys reconciled around that objective. Yep. Yeah. So, you know, we went from what I last described, our little lunch with the Kurds.

We continued clearing the area all the way up through another village. way up the hill. It was called Daramar. We actually got another serious brawl up there where we had we had to call in airstrikes. Almost had a friendly fire incident with the green prong guys. That was a big deal.

No joke. And then we came back down into Sargat for the night. It was basically the main objective was over. We had cleared almost to the Iranian border. You could actually see an Iranian checkpoint from

our furthest advanced point. That's how close we were. And then we pulled back into Sargat and basically stayed the night in the Sargat, in the village of Sargat. So we were in some house and actually had like a library in there and stuff. And meanwhile, and the Kurds started collecting all kinds of documents and intel and all that kind of stuff.

And then the real interesting stuff happened the next morning when, remember, this whole, this whole operation was geared towards this Sargak chemical facility. So in the morning, this sensitive site exploitation team arrives. And I don't even know who they were. No clue. I don't know if they were even Army. I don't know.

I don't recall who they were. But they're wearing like spacesuit kind of stuff, like these chemical suits. And we're of course, you know, a bunch of SF dues. We're like, what the hell? Like how come why weren't we wearing those if we're like, you know, fighting through this thing. You know, what's the deal? We were just laughing about it.

Like, you know, we're all basically poisoned with something at this point. But anyway, they came in to do this sensitive site exploitation. And this is what, you know, an epic thing to me happened in my medic. So they're trying to prove or disprove whether, what kind of chemical weapons were taking place, you know, was this like WMD? probably is where they're figuring out. Part of that was, oh yeah, and you got to remember this. We killed supposedly like 300 of these guys. That was the rough estimate by the Kurds.

And like I think I describe it in my book as almost like a zombie apocalypse kind of movie, where there's literally a dead mutilated body every 15 or 20 feet for like a friggin square kilometer in this. box of Sargot. And like, um, so, you know, I didn't know this at the time,

but apparently like hair samples are one of the ways to know whether someone has been chemical engineering stuff. So my, you know, my, my medic and I, um, Bobby got,

you know, the lucky, we pulled the unlucky straw of, you guys are going to go collect hair samples from the dead. Um, so, we got a digital camera and plastic bags and a pair of scissors and our job was to walk around all day and cut hair off of these dead frigging enemy you know dudes and like man you talk about like gore i describe a few of these in like ridiculous detail yeah grisly detail in the book yeah and i'll tell you i did that because you know, those, I don't want to sound like a whiner, man, that stuff really struck, stuck to me.

Like, even though those were bad guys who would literally chop our head off with a butter knife, if they could, there's something about just afterwards seeing the friggin mutilation on that kind of scale that, man, both of us were, I think, traumatized, like immediately. Because you're like grabbing dead people, you know, who's like, their face is burned off. your eyes are you know burnt they're blown in half you know just unbelievable gore you know and we're cutting hair off these guys so you're grabbing them you're touching them you're you know cutting hair uh man i'll tell you like i would have never imagined it would like i don't know i got to mess with me as bad as it did and stuck with me for for many years still but still does um

But anyway, man, like there's a few, just, you know, they give you a taste of the book. Like one that really stood out to me was apparently like a group of these guys had been hit with like a 106. So we had a lot of 106 for clueless rifles mounted on Land Rover's. And there's incinerary rounds for those if you've ever. Incinerary rounds like a friggin fireball basically on a one of when the round hits. So there's one group of like five. dudes on SARS-Lam guys who had just been... My only logic is they must have been hit with an incinerary round

because they, like, all burnt almost together like a blob, almost like melted, you know, melted wax figure kind of thing. And, you know, in order for that to happen, they have to die really fast, or they would have spread out or something. So I imagine, like, an incinerary round, like, melted them together. And they're like burnt so bad that their intestines like come out.

And like, and we're, you know, waiting into this and cutting hair off these guys. Like, man, it was friggin. It was horrible, man. I mean, I don't even know. I don't, I don't really, to be honest, like even talking about it. But I've been told that my descriptions of it in the book are pretty harrowing. So, yeah, they are. If you do read it, it's pretty intense. And I intentionally, went into insane detail to try to give people a feeling of what that's like to do something like that. So yeah, that was it.

And that was kind of the end of Viking Hammer, really. Oh, actually, there's one more day. And to your last question, Jack, like, after, so we fought through this objective, you know, kick ass, everybody's cool. I transitioned to this, like, cutting hair from the dead thing. And I'm like, man, I freaking just had my head spinning. And then the day after that, day three of Viking Hammer, basically, by the way, there was still little pockets of fighting going on during the haircutting day. The third day, like, we were, like, rocketing and mortaring these guys as they're, like, post-holing through the snow over into Iran. There's still snow caps on those mountains.

And like a lot of us were like, man, so we didn't kill them all. You know, like how many of these guys like escaped? You know, and what kind of guy escapes? Is it, you know, and you start to wonder, especially now, like I wonder. Back then I didn't wonder as much. Probably good that I didn't. But like the guys we killed there, were they really of any significance? I have to ask myself.

Like, what did they really do? And then, you know, I write about a lot of this stuff in the book where I kind of think out loud about, you know, I talk about this concept of marginally successful tactical operations that are strategically insignificant as like a term. And I always wondered if that was one of them. I'm like, does it, was it worse to disperse the ones who want to continue the full? fight just to kill the ones who wanted to die? Or what would have happened if we didn't take that approach? Maybe we should have taken a more subtle approach.

Then what would have happened? Right. Because you also have to look at like AAI Ansar Islam. And then like, then AQI came around. And then like who were the other guy? Al-Suna. Whatever. And then, you know, eventually you get to ISIS.

And I always wondered, you know, I literally don't know. I wonder how Viking Hammer and the mass dispersion of these three groups. And then the decimation of the Iraqi military. I wonder how all that contributed to those other groups like rising out of the ashes of this stuff. So like I've always kind of, you know, intellectualized the possibility of that mission being, although really interesting and brutal and like SF guy awesome like strategically what was it what about the chemical weapons facility did that was that ever verified what was the conclusion

yeah if you i actually never saw a real conclusion other than what i have found on the internet now which i think they did find a couple different toxins in there i don't don't even remember. But I don't think there was nerve agent or anything like that in there. I forget what they were. It was like man, I can't, I can't think of them. Oh, racin was one of them. You know, stuff like that. There was another

one too. I can't remember what a potassium chloride or something. I don't remember. They did find traces of stuff. Maybe, you know, who knows? I never heard, I never knew through military channels what they actually found. never heard in my in my time so all i know is what's on the internet so viking hammer is pretty much complete you were in iraq a little bit longer uh targeting saddam's military for airstrikes

uh as i recall yep that's right that's where we went and then heading back home and when you got back to the united states and you had like massive psychological fallout from what i read in your book from the things that you had done in in Iraq. Yeah, I did, man. Like, it probably culminated about, I don't know, like a year afterwards. One of the things I always had an issue with was the just relentless death that we, you know, that we did to the Iraqi military, man. We were, we just slaughtered them with airstrikes. You know, I always, like, wondered, because we had reports of, like,

you know, like the, you know, officers, like, shooting their own guys and, like, forcing them to be there in their foxholes. There were reports like that. And meanwhile, we're just frigging them with airstrikes. You know, there's a couple things I write about in there that are really harrowing stuff. You know, like, you know, people just getting friggin incinerated. Just, it's unbelievable. You know, so I think I left there. what was weird about it is, you know,

as a, you know, a lot of people probably think of it. Like, why, I don't know why you, you know, a Green Beret is supposed to be able to deal with this shit. Like, aren't you trained to, like, be a badass?

I'm like, put up with this shit. And like, I don't know. I was surprised how it made me feel. And like, I actually, you know,

I like a lot of guys that felt like a frigging weekling for a while about it. I'm like, why does this friggin bother me? It's not supposed to. So I had a lot of gifts. around the frigging of Iraqis when really they were posing almost no threat whatsoever. And we were also wondering, like, who's going to be the Iraqi security forces after the war if we decimate the entire military until they all just desert? Like, why does this even make any strategic sense to completely decimate the military when they're not even fighting anymore?

at some point anyway. So there was that thought and there was a guilt around that and then just the frigging gore of the and the intensity of the Viking hammer battle. You know, where it's just I kept, you know, so just tense thinking about that all the time. I think it's probably like anxiety maybe. I don't know.

I thought it was really interesting in your book how you spent, what, like 15 years or whatever, long had been in your military career, like wanting to get into the big fight, then you did, and you get home and have this moment where you realize, like, actually, this isn't really what I want. That's right. It dawned on me. I was like, man, I've been training for this.

I tried to get every patch and tab you can get in the Army, you know. And it dawned on me, like, and it was for this shit. Like, that's kind of what through my mind. like it's friggin death, destruction, chaos, and in some cases, total nonsense. You know, like, and I'm like, it was just, I don't know, it didn't resonate with me. Let's put it that way. When I got back, I was ready to do something else. Let's put it that way.

And I kind of resented it a little bit. Like, if you, you know, when you read the book, some people have actually told me that they didn't like this angle of the book of where I was kind of very, almost negative about it. you probably read that. I thought it was great though because it's a perspective that you usually don't hear because these books tend to follow a sort of format, a sort of hero's journey, you know, Joseph Campbell type story. Yours is different and I think it's more honest in a lot of ways about seeing that and then having the self-reflection to be like, no, that's not actually what I want to do with the rest of my life now. And you were strong enough to pivot into a another direction. Yeah, that's right. I got lucky, really, too. But, yeah, that's actually, I mean, one of the reasons I chose to write the book

was to bring that perspective. Because I know there's more people like that than me. Like, they come out of it, and they're like, man, I don't kind of wish I hadn't done that. Or at least some aspect of it. Right, right. I'm not, I don't think that completely, but I'm just saying.

But yeah, and then what, so what happened next? I could get back from Iraq. I'm kind of a mess almost immediately. I mean, it's funny. You go from like a war zone into your, I think I described in my book, I'm like, one day I'm in Iraq, literally like 36 hours later, I'm in my, I'm in my living room. Yeah. My ears are still ringing. You know, I'm like, I'm still frigging amped up about like a threat.

And it wasn't, when I say I, I'm talking about, you know, thousands of guys have gone through this, you know, where. it's like you're still on like hyper alert state. You know, you're just of a heightened alert. You know, what is it? Hyper vigilance, I think is the term people use.

And like, you're in that mode. Like, people are talking to you. Your ears are still ringing from frigging from frigging and stuff. And, and,

and, and, and, and, you know, what you're going to eat for dinner. It's like, dude,

I, I can't think about dinner. I don't care. You know, so you don't even know you're safe yet. So it's hard to describe it. You know, I tried. I actually wrote and rewrote those sections, like probably 100 times each,

trying to actually convey. First, trying to figure out what I even completely thought about it myself, and then try to convey it. But anyway, what happened next was kind of a, blessing where what I did was I undid my declination of continued service statement. I don't remember why. I think I don't remember why I chose to do that.

And then what, oh, actually I might have done it because it turned my PCS orders back on to go be an instructor. Because honestly, I wanted out of the team. I'd been on a team life for seven years about. and after Iraq, I was ready to do something else. I was freaking burnt. And I'll tell you, I was the kind of guy who gave it like 150%. You know, I'm not trying to brag, but I was a friggin, I would say most people would agree.

I was one of those guys that was, I was hardcore, you know. And I'll tell you, I was burnt after Iraq. I was ready to go to SWIC. So anyway, I undid my, you know, my declination statement. And then I immediately came on orders to go to Fort Bragg. And it was with like three weeks notice from when we got back, when I got back from Iraq. So I'll tell you, like I was back and then going through out processing within like a week or two of being back. And then my wife and I are driving across the country from, you know, Fort Carson to Fort Bragg.

And that's where like the whole thing turns, it takes a super weird turn. And, you know, I'm grateful for this turn. Was I, back in that day, this was still, you know, roughly the middle of 2003. This is when the 18 Fox course was coming online. So it was, you know, for those who don't know SF, you used to have like the ANOC O&I course, but they changed that to the SF Intel course that was specifically for 18 Foxes. And I ended up being brought into that cadre because my old team sergeant from Kosovo was the NCOIC of this new thing called the 18 Pox course. And the aspiration of this new course was to be really high tech.

And I think it probably still is. I actually don't know. But, you know, so like geospatial analytics, link analysis, data mining. That's what we were going to do. No one even knew what that really meant. We had an awesome warrant officer, though, that was really driving it. And he was the driving force behind that. So anyway, I got pulled into that thing just because I knew the guy in charge of it.

And it sounded good to me because it was something totally different than I didn't want to do, frankly, honestly, I was done with like, I would have been happy at that point. I never heard a gunshot again, to be totally like honest. I was at that level when I got back from Iraq. People can call me a pussy. That's fine. I'm like, I got pulled into the 18 Fox course, and that was like the life-changing event. Like, I got assigned the geospatial analytics stuff.

And I'm like, I don't even know what that means. Like, GIS, geographic information systems, was what I was going to teach. So I know people have used like Falcon B. probably. And then there was one called ArcVue. So I used to teach ArcVue at the 18 Box course. But like I had to learn what that was and then like build a curriculum for that. So I ended up going to like college. I went up going to these GIS courses.

They were like civilians were in and stuff and learning what this is. Long story short, like while I was there, I started like writing code. like programming. So I was like geospatial data. I could carve up data with code a little bit. And that was, to me, that was my new thing. I'm like, this is frigging amazing. And you got to remember, too,

this is like the dawn of the big data analytics stuff in the technology space. So I kind of like accidentally fell into this world of this, you know, where the tech technology in general is at this like hockey stick moment in history. I just happen to jump on that

just by pure frigging chance. But I really ran with it. Partially too, because my wife helped me like, she's like, hey, you know, this is actually something that you can do to get a job someday. Like, you know, and, you know, she's, you know, she's, you know,

she's got a master's degree and stuff. So she knew the. deal of like what you need to do to succeed in the real world. So I ran with with this hardcore, man. Like I was as hardcore about tech as I was about being a green beret, you know, five years earlier. And like, man, I just went, I went nuts with it, taught myself out of code. But that won me a new assignment to SOCOM. And that's where it really kind of took off. There was this thing of SOCOM called the Special Operations Joint Interagents. collaboration center, which then turned into the interagency task force, which is kind of the beginning

of these things called like Giadifs and all that kind of stuff, at least I think it was. And because of my kind of history at the Fox course and I could write code and I was like a big data processing guy and geospatial analytics and stuff, I kind of, you know, you could say finagled my way into this. I was like a tech lead in this Sojixi program at Socom and our whole mission was to like big data

analytics on massive amounts of like interagency reporting. So like we had you know like dozens of terabytes of reports you know and like doing analytics on that stuff. Writing code like I learned multiple

programming languages. So here I am like I'm an E7 and and E8 sitting behind a computer writing code at US Socom with a bunch of like contractor computer scientists and analytics people. It was frigging weird. So I went from, you know, Operation Viking Hammer and Iraq to hardcore tech guy. And what's funny in hindsight, I spent, if you calculate the years, I was like almost eight years of my last eight years in the army.

I was like a technologist. You know, I was a hardcore. That's awesome. Yeah. And right at the right time, too. Yeah. And right at that moment in history of tech outside of the military, just everywhere. Yeah.

I just caught this wave in this little place where I honestly just got lucky, man. Like, in my mind, it was pure luck that I encountered that. And like, yeah. And I mean, it ended up being insanely fruitful, man. man, like I got out. I immediately had a great job. I worked for Booz Allen as like a lead associate. You know, obviously pay being twice as much or more as an EA was.

Right. And then I dove into that whole world. I've been doing it for, you know, over 10 years now since I retired. And it's frigging, man. And this is part of my book, too. Like, Jack, you probably picked up on. I'm like, at one point I almost resented. all the military stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Because I could have been doing this tech stuff the whole time was kind of my hindsight analysis. By the way, I've come to grow a little bit more positive on that. Yeah, you did seem like really when I, say, I guess I read the first edition of your book and you sound like really like down on the initial parts of your career in special forces. You felt like you were a dumbass the entire time.

Yeah, I mean, I wasn't, well, I think what it was is that the tech stuff showed me like my potential intellectually. I'm like, I can solve these computer scientist problems. Like, I never thought about that at all in my entire life. And then when I did it, like later on, I'm like, man, what could I have been doing this whole time? You know, instead of like, you know, and then when you put that in the context of what did we

really accomplished in Iraq anyway. You know, I just maybe, I just questioned it all. You know, I'm one of those guys who frigging digs into stuff. So, Mark, I, I'd like to challenge that just with the thought that being like from a military background and being it from the military when you're young and having those ideas, had you gone into tech earlier, had you gone another way and ended up in tech, you would be one of those guys that you meet a bar that goes, yeah, I was thinking.

about doing that. I was thinking about going for us, I was thinking about going Ranger. And I didn't, and regards to what your experiences are now, had you never gone that path, I can pretty much guarantee you that you always would look back and regretted it. And what or could I have done it?

You know, you know. Yeah, there's another thing too, man. Like, I agree. Like, by the way, in subsequent editions of that book, I actually toned down some of that negativity because I actually changed my thinking. Because I wrote that in like 2015, I think.

In subsequent additions, I actually have toned down that discontent kind of thing. And to your point, like, here's how I think about it now, is the character-building aspect of it, too, was invaluable, man. Like, right now, I am like, I'm a pretty, you know, senior, at least you'd call it upper-middle manager. because to get to that level of stuff, you have to have that human factor piece as well. You can't just be some super nerd who can't even operate on a team of programmers because you can't even talk to somebody.

So I do, I agree with you. And I actually, like that thinking was missing, I think in the first edition. But it has been super valuable in my tech career to have the background as a Green Beret. Because I'm like one of those guys where I can rally up people from like across the company that are in their little tribal areas. Right.

And I'm not afraid to like just walk in there and make rapport. Kick in their door. Like I'm like I'm kind of known for that, man. And those type of leadership, those things turn into really important leadership qualities. Yeah. When you start, you know, you back up from literally coding a program.

to where you're leading like 20 or 30 or 50 programmers, and you've got those programmers nested in a 5,000 person organization where there's competing stuff, corporate, you know, corporate competition type space. Like the Green Beret stuff is friggin awesome for that. So I've definitely changed my mentality over the years to that. But at the, you know, at the time of when I was really, coming into tech and the kind of bad taste in my mouth of Iraq, I did have a super negative.

I also went to college. Like I took a lot of courses in philosophy. Yeah. And that's part of my whole thing too. Like I was almost over intellectualizing some of the stuff. Like I write about some of that stuff in there too where I really crack open like these weird philosophical debates about the stuff. So I kind of overthought it probably too.

And something I would still raw, too. You know, I mean, there was a lot of emotion behind it driving. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Something I would just offer to people, maybe young people out there or really whoever. I say this through my own lens as well, but it's okay to be more than one thing, right? You can be a tough guy, green beret, and you can also go to college and get an MBA or get your Ph.D. You know, and also have a Ranger tab, right?

Like it's okay to mix and match these things. And I, again, I'm biased, but I would say that can actually help you in your life and your career. Yeah. Yeah, that's one thing. I would agree. Like part of my whole thing that, you know, I guess you could say I've been pretty successful, like post-retirement. Of like, to your point, like, don't, your identity can't be completely hooked to being a green beret, like, as a person. Because that's going to go away.

Like, you're going to get old. Right. And like, it's, you're not going to be. one. So you got to have another dimension to yourself. I think that drives a lot of guys crazy. They don't know who they are anymore. Like when they don't have a green beret on their head anymore, they don't know how to beat. They don't even know who they are. And I'll tell you, like, falling into technology, going to college at the same time, you know, coming out of retirement into the tech industry,

it's a it's a it's good to be multi-dimensional to your peer point it's like a load balancing thing like you've got backup plans you know when when you when you get out you know let's uh hit up some user questions here from the audience um one guy isick is asking about uh there's a story you tell in your book where uh i think it was you and a seal officer you meet a terrorist in bosnia And he's asking, do you know whatever happened to that guy? I don't know what happened to him. And I can't say his name because it didn't get approved. But, yeah, what happened there was in this little village in Western Bosnia,

we're eating lunch at some little chivapi joint. And this dude walks in who we thought was an NGO, but he wasn't. He was alone. And we kind of dialed him in. And this guy was, I think he was a bad dude. He was probably like the Mujahideen for the Muslim side in the Bosnian War. There was a small amount of them that came in and,

you know, fought alongside that enclave. But anyway, this guy was probably one of those. And he had been involved supposedly in the Beirut bombing. Wow. This guy. Wow.

So like, man, when we, like the CO and I, when we found that out after the guy left and we never saw him again. But we were like, we're going to kill this. Like, if we see him again, it's game over for this guy. But we never saw him again to answer the question. But, yeah, that's a good indicator of like the chaos of Bosnia, by the way.

Ian asks, as the only guy I know that actually used one in combat, what did Mark think of the M21? I love the M21. I carry it primarily in Iraq, especially on like some of those Viking Hammer. you know, the fire fights were not close range. Like, you know, a 308. You didn't really need full auto anyway. You know, you're shooting at 100 plus meters firefights.

So I liked it. It was a little bulky to carry around in a vehicle. That was the only thing about it. Yeah. But for what we were doing, to me, that made a lot more sense than carrying an M4. And I had a PBS 10 on it, too. Yeah, I would, I mean, even back when I was in during the peacetime military,

I always thought that having an M14 as a secondary weapon system would be awesome. I have your round that, you know, a better, not a better gun, but, you know, a different purpose gun. The only weird thing about it that I didn't like was the safety on it. The safety's weird. You got to, like, push forward on the inside of the trigger guard. It's not as fast. But, again, we weren't planning on having, like, we're not doing CQB, you know, in the mountains of Kurdistan. But it was better to me to be a long-range shooter because other guys at M-4s alongside me.

Isaac says, was it awkward hanging with Spetsnazar competitive? Like, were you all watching each other waiting for the other to turn, having 100-yard stare-offs with each other? Yeah, we did actually have some stuff like that. I wrote in there about this one time, like the Russians, I think it's a Russian thing. They have this thing called the Banya, which is probably their word for a sauna or something. something. I don't know. But they make these saunas insanely hot. But basically, they had like a gut check with us about who could withstand the hottest sauna and the most amount of vodka.

And like running in and out of this sun, butt naked. So butt naked Russians and Americans drinking vodka with Russian hats, fuzzy hats on, of course, in the sauna. And like, then we would run outside and jump in this tank of water. And it would, like, give you a a heart attack. Yeah. So there was that kind of stuff where we were obviously trying to, you know, hurt each other. But while we were out on patrols and stuff, there was a little micro competitions, too, of like, who can walk the fastest up the hill when we walk up the hill, you know?

You know, it's just, you know how it is. It's even like that on a team, you know, where everybody competes with each other. We were like a team, basically, at some point. Were any of your guys ever approached for recruitment? to like to be sources yeah for russians not that i know of no it wouldn't surprise me if my captain did though since he was a fluent russian speaker i don't know there was we had an amazing relationship with the russians like you guys if you read the book you'll see it it was i think it had a lot to do with my captain's language ability believe it or not because they didn't speak english

like very much at all. But he could go in there and just roll Russian. You know, so he was paling around with their leadership like he was one of them. It was amazing. John says, great interview, cheers guys. Alejandro says, dude, bro points

for getting to do a legit UW mission. I still remember stories from Greybeards when I was a cherry about Viking Hammer. Interesting stories about the ugly baby infill. He goes on, say stories I heard was they took a lot of groundfire, not sure if they were pulling our legs, but supposedly the bottom of an MC130s

clipped the top of a sand dune. Wow. Yeah, I never heard that. I believe it. It was crazy. Isaac asks, what's going to happen to the Kurds now? Like, that's kind of a tough question for any of us to answer. And a very broad question, too.

Yeah, because it's like which Kurds, too. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, they can't even. get their own stuff together, let alone, like, deal with any, deal with Turkey, Iraq or any, you know. He's also asking if you know what happened to the Kurds you worked with. I actually don't know. I don't know if the P-UK even exists as a, as a Kurdish entity. They do.

I don't. I don't keep, I don't keep tabs. I mean, I kept a little bit of tabs on, like, the ISIS stuff the Kurds were doing, and I saw a baffle on there, and I was kind of cool to see him talking about it again. And like I know the one thing I get hung up on usually is trying to teach people the difference between the PKK and the other Kurds. Yes. And, you know, the varying perception of who's bad across that spectrum of Kurds. So, yeah, we had PKK around our areas, too, by the way.

Like, there were areas up in the northern part of our sector, my sector, during AFO where there were PKK, like, position. on the hillside. And the P UK was like, don't go there. That's the PKK up there. And it was up near this big lake called DuCon, I think. But anyway, they were spread out.

And once we rolled south with the Kurds to fight the Iraqis, there were all kinds of different flavors of them showing up. We actually did like a bombing mission one time. I think it was with the PKK guys. And we didn't even know it until we were done.

and they told us that casually they were communist Kurds, not P-U-K. And we're like, what? You know, I didn't, we didn't know that. So it's confusing as hell over there, or at least it was. You know, I don't know. Anyway, long, long answer. Pap is asking, did you use Dutch V40 mini grenades? Not that I'm aware.

I never threw a grenade once, so I doubt it. I've never heard of that. I don't track that kind of stuff, honestly. I don't re-dced ammo. I had a couple of them. Yeah, I've had some. Well, plastic ones. Yeah.

They're convenient, but there are many grenades, so you're not. Are those the ones that are triangular shaped? No, those are, if you're talking about the big ones, those are the thermobarics, the large kind of pyramidic, where they're conical at the top. The minis are just small around. Yeah. All I ever had was a. normal fragonade.

I don't know. I never used one. You might be talking about the PDM, the pursuit deterrent mind. PDM. That's what I'm talking about. Okay. Yeah, those are the ones that shoot the wires out of the different. I never had anything.

Those things are actually kind of cool. Yeah, they are. Alejandro says, thank you for coming and sharing both your story and part of the original's history. Cheers, mate. And where are we? Oh, Isaac wants to know if you worked with Ed Snowden at Booz Allen. No, I didn't.

I think he was there at the same time I was, but he was not anything like I was doing. Carl says, Mark, based off your experiences in the Balkans with the Russians, what do you think 10th group members should focus on today in light of the Ukraine crisis? Wow. Well, so it's definitely not my era

to think about the great powers kind of stuff. Like, but UW is pretty straightforward. You know, you're always going to have like resistance forces of some kind, even if they're like surrogates or some other host nation military. So I don't know, maybe FID. I don't know.

I mean, I don't claim to be an expert in that kind of stuff, by the way. I mean, but to me, the classics probably come to end to play. Yeah. I mean, when there was near pure great power with a Soviet Union,

you had like dead aid, that K, you know, like SF had that stuff you know planned out and in place yeah yeah maybe that's the

angle is more of that like you know Jedberg type operation where you know we need to get a lot better at our language capabilities which I always try to tell everybody like if you're an SF dude

and you don't take your language seriously then maybe you're not a real SF guy like that is so important for the stuff I did anyway. It's amazing. Like my German was pretty good. I always scored like a two plus three or a three three. Like my German, in the old scale of the DLP. So like my captain was really good at it too. He's the same kind of scores. I'm like, we were able to talk to people directly. And some Kurds spoke German because they did like migrant work. So there were actually quite a few Kurds who we would be able to speak to and kind of use as our interpreter directly. It was awesome. And then observing my captain working with the Russians is another huge one. Like, it's amazing what that actually means.

And something else I wanted to make sure we brought up was that you're also a guitar player and you recorded an EP that's, like, heavily inspired by your military experiences. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so that's funny. I try, again, try to be multidimensional, you know, Jack's theme here. Like, one of mine is I'm a musician for like my whole life. I've been playing the guitar since I remember being alive. You know, I probably eight years old or something is when I started.

I play flamenco, like traditional flamenco. I like the real deal with your fingernails and strumming, you know, like hardcore traditional flamenco. And also metal, which is what I played my whole life. So, you know, one of those bucket list things to me, it was always to like put together a an album like I've always written music and did it you know

for those like just to give you a point of reference I'm kind of like a Joe Satriani style or maybe the more hardcore shredders like Inveh Moussin so like you got to know knowing my age you know I graduated high school in 91

like my years of you know when I was a kid growing up I grew up with the 80s shred scene of guitar playing. Like in my day where I grew up, if you didn't play the guitar, you were just, you were asleep. Like, you got to play the guitar. You know, hair bands and frigging was what it, you know, Van Halen, Inveh, Satriani,

Metallica coming into play. So I kind of, like, I feel like I'm like an Ingvee meets Metallica. Actually, one of my favorite metal. influences with Pantera Dimebag Darrell who was their guitar. The guy's like the greatest guitar metal rhythm guy like ever.

So I like to think I combine like the shredding of the late 80s with kind of that groove metal style. But like the EP I made is called Firefight. That's the name of the EP. And some of the songs

they're instrumental songs because I don't I'm not going to sing. Well, you guys don't, nobody wants me to sing. So I'm not going to sing. But I've got like sound effects of like machine guns and some of the songs build up with intensity that, you know, I'm trying to convey some notion of if you're, if you're thinking about combat or firefight or something, that this stuff resonates. I wrote one song. It's called Ode to the G-Wat, the Global War on Terror.

I got like snippets of George Bush. making statements about it and then Obama in the end. It's a really heavy, chuggy groove metal kind of tune. But the other ones are just kind of traditional classic shreddy stuff like Joe Satriani style, a little heavier edge on it. But yeah, I mean, that's one of those things, you know. So I just posted, I just posted links for both the Spotify and the Apple Music in our live chat. But you guys can, yeah, you guys can find it in their firefight under Mark's name, Mark Giaconia.

Geoconia, yeah, that's right. Oh, there's one other one I wrote. One song is called Nec Aspera Tarent, which was the motto of the first infantry unit I was in called the Wolfhounds. And Nec Osseratirat Tarrant means no fear on earth. And it's kind of a cool tune. It's pretty shreddy, satriani-like, but medley. tune. And then throw up the new book cover, too.

Oh, yeah. Because I'm holding the first edition. Mark has the new one here. This is the new one. That's a real picture of me from Iraq. During AFO, actually, because I'm wearing a civilian clothes top in there. And people can go get it

on Amazon? Yeah, Amazon. Cool, yeah. I highly recommend you guys pick it up. I really enjoyed the book. and I don't know what is the feedback been like Mark on the on the book?

Good mostly I mean I got a few people who didn't like some of that negativity stuff and like if you read there's 160 Amazon reviews on there so it does pretty decent awesome yeah

a lot of it's some of it's thanks to you Jack on this first one of these you did with me really got the word out and yeah pretty good I mean I think I'm almost like four and a half stars averaged or whatever they do it

So a lot of people like it. I get a ton of feedback through LinkedIn, too. By the way, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll, you know, I answer tons of people's just questions on there all the time. And I get a ton of feedback. I get everything from like, dude, you got it all wrong. You know, everything you did was awesome. Or some people actually mad about some of the stuff I wrote in there where they think I'm just whatever,

trying to be an uppity asshole or something. But most people like it. And they like it for the reason you said, Jack, where it's not your average, it's not your typical playbook for a memoir. It digs into stuff and I question some of it. And I did it on purpose and make people think about it. You know, like don't just think that everything you did is maybe was all that effective. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but maybe you should think about it. Yeah.

That's all I was doing is trying to encourage people to actually, like, explicate your experience and think about what it means. Like, and some people don't like that, you know, they don't like. Go figure. It's kind of anti-intellectualism is what I got a little bit of. But at the same time, like, you know, I have revised the book. It's third edition right now where I did tone down some of that because I changed my own mind about some of it.

And some of it was because of, you know, some of the stuff we talked about today. Some of it is meaningful, regardless of whether you thought the strategic significance wasn't there. Like, for instance, the reason catastrophe was, like, pulling out of Afghanistan or whatever, you know, people feeling like, you know, at the end of the world, you know, what they did was worthless or whatever people are thinking about it. Like, you know, personally, I wasn't surprised how it went down, like, when we pulled out at all. And then, like, just think of your experiences and how they grew you as a person, you know, because you couldn't control the situation anyway. Like, that's kind of, anyway, so all part of just actually thinking about stuff, you know, which a lot of people hate doing these days. Yeah. So anyway, I'm probably, you know, rambley now.

Oh, it's awesome. No, it's good. I think that a lot of that comes down to, you know, everybody has a unique experience. I mean, two people could be in the same foxhole, go through the exact same battle and come out on the other side, feeling completely different about it. Yeah. And everybody, everybody's opinion and everybody's feelings are absolutely valid in the way that some people, like probably, probably some of the guys. on your team weren't bothered all by any of that. Totally.

And some of the guys were. And it doesn't make anybody right or wrong. And I think that as veterans, one of the things we need to do is come together on these things and just respect how, you know, everybody else's experience. Yeah, I totally agree. And like part of my whole, you know, reason for writing a book at all was like, first, I just wanted to write one.

But part of it was to help me figure out what do I think about what I think about what I did. Right. Right. You know, it was almost, you know, cathartic in that way where I'm like, I'm confused about how I feel about some of the stuff I did and we did, whatever. Right. I'm going to write about it.

And I'm going to, part of my goal of writing about it is to really pull it apart. It's almost like if you've ever done like behavioral cognitive therapy type stuff, like it's one of those. Like, ask yourself why you think something is bad or good. Right. And make yourself explain. it to yourself. So like, you know, and that's, that was part of the reason I wrote the book is to help myself

figured out, but also to provide a perspective that I didn't see in any other book, which was tell the actual genuine truth about what you're thinking about what you did instead of this, this templated, you know, like Billy Badass thing where I just, that's not who I am. Like, I'm not going to be like that no matter what, but like, I wanted to. I wanted to write a book that gave people a different perspective. Right, right. And again, like that's your truth.

It doesn't necessarily mean that the people who write the Billy Badass books are lying or presenting a front. Maybe they just don't. They just, those things didn't bother them or whatever. You know, like. Yeah, I know guys like that. Yeah. And it's one of those things where, again, I feel like everybody's story deserves to be told or everybody deserves has the right to tell their story. and nobody's story it's true for them right i mean it's the truth for them and we know we're

really happy yeah them being genuine yeah you know is what it really amounts to right yeah and honest with yourself you know and that's kind of what i was trying to do yeah absolutely you guys check out one green beret uh definitely pick it up um and uh next friday we're going to have Andrew Milburn, or I'm sorry, it's actually going to be Saturday. We move the show from Friday to Saturday. So we're at a new time for next week's episode. We'll be here live Saturday, 8 p.m. with Andrew Milburn coming back on the show. Oh, and you're going to be here Saturday? Or neither? No, he's going to be here Saturday, the 29. Awesome. Awesome. One thing about your book, I want to tell everybody, it is on Kindle and Limited. So if you have Kindle, if you have Amazon Prime,

you can read it for free. Download it, read it for free. Download it. Read it for free. Mark still gets paid for it. So check that out for sure. And please like and share and subscribe to the channel and all that good stuff. Give us a review on iTunes or whatever. Spread the word around about us. Down in the description, there's a link to our Patreon if you want to get access to the bonus segments we do and support the channel and help us grow.

Manscape. And Manscaped? Yeah, check out Manscape.com for your male grooming needs and use Team 20 to get 20% off and free shipping. And thank you for everyone for joining us tonight. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Mark. We really appreciate your time.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Awesome. Absolutely. All right, so we will see you guys on Saturday. Saturday. Take care, everyone.