The Team House - An Inside look at an ODA (A-team) in Special Forces | Justin Juarez | Ep. 304

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseJustin served in 5th Special forces group and was deployed multiple times to Iraq, after he got out of the military he started KRG (Kinetic Research Group).https://kineticresearchgroup.com/—————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFabric Gerber Life Insurance ⬇️https://meetfabric.com/teamhouse Mando⬇️Use the code "TEAMHOUSE" FOR $5 OFF!https://shopmando.com____________________________________Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️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/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#specialforcesBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House channel and podcast if you'd like to and we really appreciate that so go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house special operations covert ox espionage the team house with your host jack murphy and david park hey welcome to episode 304 of the team house i'm jack here with dave and

And on tonight's show is Justin Juarez. Justin served in Fifth Special Forces Group, deployed to Iraq, also served in 19th Special Forces Group. And then he went into the private sector and started a company called KRG. And today is working for J-Glt Aircraft, working on some pretty interesting projects there. We're excited to talk to you tonight, Justin. Thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, fellas. I'm excited to be here.

I've been listening to you guys for quite a while now. Thank you. That's cool. So we've got a quick ad read to do before we jump into the interview here. So we want to give a shout out to our sponsor tonight. Ghost bed. So I'm a very hot sleeper. I wake up in the middle of night sweating.

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ghostbed.com slash house and use code house excuse me at checkout. Again, that's ghostbed.com slash house with code house at checkout and save a whopping 50% off site wide. Save on your air conditioning bills and get a ghost bed. All right, Justin, let's jump into it, man. Tell us a little bit about your origin story about how you grew up and what your path was that took you towards the Army. Sure, yeah. So I grew up in a small town of Wyoming, came from, you know, poor family,

pretty much peasants basically on both sides. My mom's side is white, my dad's side is Mexican. And like I said, basically peasants all the way back. but I was fortunate that my parents realized the importance of, well, first of all, they wanted a better life for me. And I should probably clarify, when I say poor, we weren't dirt poor like you see in some places, like the kind of poor I saw in like the South, for example, when I joined the Army,

went over to the Carolinas and stuff. But anyways, so my first. parents realized that the way to improve your life was through education. And so that was a, that was a value in the family early on. And that kind of led to me being, as far as I know, the first one in my family to go to college or go to like a four-year college. Being from Wyoming is, you know, has a lot of advantages. There's not very many people there and it's a it's a fun place you can do a lot outdoor kind of activities fishing and shooting and stuff like that so I grew up doing a lot of shooting just you know birds and

prairie dogs and stuff like that and target shooting and fishing and stuff like that and you know really really got a feel for you know sort of being outdoors and but also just kind of the West and and that sort of lifestyle that kind of still goes on out here today. So, you know, I stayed, I stayed in Wyoming through college. I ended up going to University of Wyoming. And when I was a kid, I wanted to be a World War II fighter pilot, which, of course, is not something you can be. But I used to watch all the shows.

and, you know, we used to read all the books about World War II and stuff like that. And, and, but I was, I was pretty, I had pretty poor vision, you know, all through life. I had real thick glasses and then contacts later on, you know, as I got older. Fortunately, the Army got me LASIC once I was graduated of Q-course. So, so anyways, when I was like maybe preteen, the idea was maybe get me into the Air Force Academy. And because, you know, we couldn't, no one in my family could afford to pay for college for me. And I, you know, it wasn't any way I can do it. So it was either some kind of a scholarship, academic or athletic or something like that.

And really, I wasn't athletic enough for scholarship. I was a pretty good tennis player, but not, you know, not collegiate level, I don't think. So between the vision and, well, that was really it is vision. And, you know, honestly, I didn't really try too hard during high school, I would say. I was smart enough. I was kind of, I kind of think of it as I was cursed with being smart enough to not have to really work that hard in high school. to get through, which is, it sounds like a kind of a good thing in a way, but it's actually not because as you learn in life, the key to success is not to be smart. It's actually to be resilient

and to keep pushing through when you have, when you come up against challenges, you know, academically or whatever have you. So anyways, they ended up going to University of Wyoming and My dad had pushed for me to, you know, go into the medical field. He saw that as a way of, you know, attaining a good income, status, social status, all the kind of stuff that you think is great when, you know, you come from an immigrant family or come from a poor family, whatever it may be. but I think I really just never had the passion for that. Nevertheless, I ended up getting a pre-med degree from the University of Wyoming,

and I was all set to go to med school. I'd take my MCATs. I had already started applying. It was kind of midway through the application process, and then September 11th, you know, the attacks. and those happened in my senior year. It would have been obviously 2001, but I graduated.

I waited until I graduated in 2002, and I signed up like a delayed entry or something like that. I can't remember when exactly I signed up, but I left maybe a few weeks after I graduated. I left for basic training. And this is, if I recall correctly, so after 9-11 happened, Don Rumsfeld decided we needed more special forces,

and that brought about the 18 X-ray program. Was that how you enlisted through that program? That's exactly right. Yeah. I had looked, so probably you guys heard this story, but I saw the movie Block Hawk Down, and that got me thinking. It just sort of opened my eyes to some of the things

that were available, you know, and obviously it portrays the Rangers and deltos, these super cool guys, right? And it's like, oh, man, that's really neat. But the other thing that that movie did was showed me that, you know, sometimes there's stuff going on that, you know, you don't know about. And not that, I don't know how exactly how to do that. describe this, but there's people that are doing things on behalf of the country that people don't know about.

And I don't know. That, I don't know how to really describe it, but it kind of, it kind of spoke to me a little bit. Like it was something you wanted to be a part of. Well, it was something that I didn't want to not be a part of, I think. You know, because I didn't want to be sitting idly by, I guess, is just kind of where I'm going with that, you know. So anyways, forgive me here.

I'm just getting over a cold. I was up in Vermont. Oh, that's okay. A cold last week. But so between watching this movie and then the attacks of September 11th, you know, it was actually my brother and I, we just got together one day and we sort simultaneously started talking about, hey, and think about joining. And we'd both been doing the research on it.

SF and and, uh, and Rangers, really that was the two kind of routes we were looking at. And somehow we had learned about the X-ray program, which yeah, had just, just come about. And it turns out we were, we, he left in like April, oh two and I left in June O2. We were in some of the first two classes. Wow. Wow. Wow. So we were, uh, we were very fortunate. it. Because, you know, we all heard horror stories of, you know, trying to get, going to the regular army and then get into SF or Rangers.

And our, in our basic class, it was half X-rays and half rip contract guys. And none of the rip contract guys made it because they were all infantry. And Rangers didn't need infantry at that point. So we were fortunate that we chose the way we did. And a lot of the guys that I was with in Basic were had come out of college. There were some super good dudes. And most of us made it as x-rays. What was that like going through the X-ray program and like the, I don't know if Sopsy had been stood up yet.

What was it like as a very young guy or a young-ish guy? You had college under your belt, but still. new to the Army and going through all of this stuff for the first time? It was pretty wild, I got to say, you know, a lot of discomfort, you know, is kind of how I guess you could say. But we ended up, we were, we did have SOPSE, so we did, you know, infantry airborne school. And then we got to SOPSE. And up until then I hadn't been super impressed with the Army. I got to say, and I'm not trying to, hopefully I'm not sounding like arrogant or anything, but

there's a lot of silly stuff that they had us doing. You guys know how basic is. It's a lot of of ridiculous stuff. And it's like, really, this is the Army. And then airborne school is supposed to be tough and you sort of run around like at a walking pace. And so we got to SOPSY and then we saw what stuff was really about. And we, yeah, we had a SOPSE instructor. He's pretty, He was pretty famous at the time. His name is Rolf Jensen. He was this German guy from 10th group. And he was a scuba guy who had,

I don't know how he got to Sopsy. I heard he did something wrong, you know, in group. Got sent over there. You know how it is. Nobody wants to be there. So anyways, Jensen was brutal to us. I mean, he just worked us, you know, I worked us over night day.

I mean, pool, pool PT, just everything. just low crawling through the sand pit, you know, pouring water. And it's all just all the stuff everybody goes through, you know. But at that time, it's like, wow, this is pretty intense stuff. And I don't know if more guys quit in soapsie than the rest of the course. I'd say there's a chance there was more guys that quit there than quit later on. Because it was pretty brutal. And when it came time for selection, selection was not as intense as what soapsie was.

With the exception of it, the weather was a lot worse, which made it pretty miserably for us. So you think the soapsie course as brutal as it was? It did a pretty good job of preparing you guys for that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we were land-nav and all the time. And, you know, there was a lot of gut checks in there. And I remember, you know, I kind of think of my path in life, the success that I've had is it's, it's dependent almost as much on the things that I didn't do. Some very key, key sort of crossroad points where I didn't take an action.

And it's as dependent on those things as the positive actions that I did take. like, for example, joining as an x-ray. But the first one of those was in Sopsy, and I remember we were land-naving in the rain, and there was a guy in Sopsy with us. I didn't think much of them. He was kind of small, kind of just not that impressive of a guy, I thought, and I was going through there,

and I hadn't really got to hang a land-nav yet, so I was kind of half lost and walking through the woods with whatever it was, 60-odd pounds on my back, just miserable. And I was kind of just wanting to quit, you know. Of course, I don't know if you guys had this, but they always had the threat of sending us to Korea or the deuce, the 82nd. So that was a pretty good motivator to keep us from quitting. But anyway, so I'm thinking, ah, maybe this. deuce ain't that bad and then in pops into my head pops this this guy who's in sopsy with us you know

and and uh he's like you know sf just isn't for everybody that's what he's saying to me in in my head and uh so i was like fuck you i'm i'm not quitting and uh and so i pushed on and so that was that was sort of one of those sort of key like uh cross-huh road points in my life. Then I pushed on and I, you know, made it through SOPSY and made it through selection and the course and all that stuff. But kind of a strange kind of occurrence there because I never really had something like that happening again. And so you go on to the Q course. You were in 18 Charlie?

I was, yeah. I was afraid I was going to get assigned a Delta to be a Delta. Because you're a medical background. Yeah. Yeah, but I wasn't like a EMT or anything like that. You know, a pre-med degree is basically just science, you know, physics and biology and math. But I don't think they knew about it even. And I wanted to get deployed as quickly as possible.

So I wanted to be, I didn't want to be an echo. And Charlie's sound good sounded great, you know, construction and explosives. That sounds pretty awesome. So, yeah, I got assigned a Charlie. and it was very fortunate for that. And then you get assigned to fifth special forces group, Fort Campbell, Kentucky. What was it like hitting the ground there? We're still sort of early on into the war on terror.

What is it like 2004? Yeah, late 2004, yep. It was a pretty intimidating environment, actually, because, you know, the fifth group guys were the ones that, that went in to Afghanistan, you know, and they were, they were the ones that were taking the fight to the enemy, uh, doing the bulk of the work up until then, you know, I know other groups had been coming online, but a lot of it had been fifth group. And, uh, so there were guys there who were pretty, you know, salty, pretty crusty guys, you know, combat experienced. And, uh, so it was intimidating, partially,

because also because fifth group had such a reputation. I mean, it was like, it was sort of like going to Ranger Regiment, you know. And I'm not, you know, I'm not saying it's like that. I've never been to Ranger Regiment. But just the idea in my head, it was like, fifth group wasn't the relaxed, you know, long hair, everything, you know, a cool guy, kind of gentleman school kind of kind of environment. And it was like, it was the hard asses and we do everything the hardest way possible and that kind of stuff. So it was intimidating.

And, you know, I had some advice from a guy who was in J-Socke. I was riding dirt bikes with him. And he told me, you know, if you get a chance, volunteer for like the hardest things that you can. you know, so the heart of school, scuba school, stuff like that, you know. And because you always want to, you want to get to the higher levels of group and, and the army. And when I got to group, the, I believe there's a company sergeant major. Might have been battalion sergeant major. He's like, well, I don't think about where I should send you.

We got a slot open on the scuba team and a couple of other teams. and I'm like, and I hated from Sopsy, I hated the swimming, I hated the pool, hated all that stuff. And so I didn't go to the dive team. And looking back, that was probably a mistake, although, you know, I don't regret it's a ton, really. But, yeah. I hear you. Well, we, yeah, some guys are real into that kind of.

stuff. It's one thing if you're just doing it, if you go to dive school, just to challenge yourself. But I still have zero interest in swimming or, you know, water or anything like that, scuba diving, that kind of stuff. So anyways, I ended up. I was just going to ask you what team you did end up on. Yeah, so I went to 551, which is, you know, I would have went to triple nickel, I think, is the is one which was a pretty notable team at that time and even 551 had done some some pretty good work in Afghanistan in the early days and been written up in the like the soft journal or something like that I can't remember but like I said when I got there um or you know mentioned earlier when I got to the team I was the I was the senior Charlie right off the bat

and most of the guys didn't have much experience at that time. it's interesting that you say that they didn't have a lot of experience so you know guys were doing their hard time and then kind of getting out because the rotations were so rough yeah they weren't and i don't know if that's if the contracting world was pulling the guys you know with that lure of the money um i don't think they had introduced the uh what they called the devil's money at that time it was a 150k bonus to stay in once he hit 18 or whatever um i don't know if they They had that, but the contracting world, there was a big, that was a big draw. And I don't know if they were doing that or not.

Or we were just so tired of being in Afghanistan and whatnot. Because those guys were, they weren't living like we lived when I deployed. We lived in Saddam's mother-in-law's palace in Baghdad. You know, we weren't living hard like those guys were. And so I don't blame them, you know, for getting out. And it's not like they just got the group in 2001. You know, those guys have been there. Right.

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So, Justin, tell us a little bit, you know, you don't have to like name names or get into personal details that you don't want to, but I'm interested if you could talk about your ODA about 551, like, what were this cast of characters like and start walking us through like getting prepped up for deployment in 2005? Sure, yeah. So, you know, most of guys had had been there just one rotation. And they had, I think, a year max group for a lot of guys. Like I said, I was a senior Charlie.

So I was all here. I'm all amped up because I'm going to take over, you know, take over all the Charlie duties. And I'm going to build us a castle and, you know, just go crazy with Charlie stuff. And a lot of us were like that. Well, you know, we had, I think, two other x-ray. on the team at the time. So we're a pretty young team. But we did have our team sergeant,

our first team chart at the time, he was a Silver Star winner. And so he was like, you know, he was like amazing in my eyes. Like he could do no wrong. And he was kind of a wild guy. I remember in our, you know, you, do your, you know, your pre-mission prep and all that stuff. And then you brief the company

commander on what's your mission's going to be. What's, you know, just the whole, that whole commander briefing before you deploy. And I remember the, he was saying some wild stuff. I don't remember what all, but the company commander was a super sharp guy. He ended up going up to the Pentagon. And he's like, okay, so what kind of, you? What kind of numerical superiority are you guys looking for when you engage the enemy in combat? And my team sergeant said 30 to 1. And the company commander says, you want 30 guys for every shithead. And now he says no.

He says if there's 30 of them for every one of us, we're going in. and so I think I think that kind of played into some events to follow it and you know it ended up that the guys had they had sort of misstep on the previous deployment and they didn't really do anything super wrong but they they had done some gray area stuff trying to help out, trying to write a wrong, a mistake that one of the guys had made. I won't get into it too much,

but they were, they were trying to do the right thing, but they just went about it the wrong way. And, you know, it wasn't any kind of war crime, stuff like that. It was all financial-related stuff. Is this the story about the team that had the kitty and they kept putting money into the kitty

and then taking it out? There wasn't a kitty. Oh, okay. I've heard the story get distorted a lot of times. Yeah, yeah, that could be the case too. Yeah, there wasn't a kitty, but they got creative and with some financial stuff, basically. But anyways, we had a warrant who wasn't well liked, and we had been through a series of warrants. we had a guy who came out of seventh group who was wearing a silver star that he didn't earn in one of the battalion formations.

So we went through like three warrants. Yeah, it was brutal. We finally get this warrant and we think he's going to be good. He was a stud, a physical stud, but he just was such an asshole. And nobody liked him. And I think he was getting booted off the team. I think he was getting voted off the island. basically. And he went to the Jag or whoever and said, hey, this team did this, you know.

Anyways, he told them all the stuff, all the secrets, you know. Like I said, nothing was that bad, but in my eyes, I wasn't worried about anything. But anyways, they, right before we deployed, they dispersed the team, you know, disbanded the team. and everyone went different places and I ended up deploying straight into siege of Sotaph and the Lod like high level command you know and I was a I forget what they call it but the battalion rep up there and I'm an E5 and surrounded by you know colonels Colonel was running the whole show and the whole country at that time and briefing him every day and and everyone else that's doing the job is a

is generally an e8 I think because it's all guys who are combat weary and need a little downtime or something like that anyways I spent the first I had maybe half of my first deployment at see just soda doing admin stuff and I was absolutely miserable obviously as any team guy would be up there. I did meet Vince Mackle up there. A hell of a good dude and a lot of good dudes up there, you know. But that was the first time I got exposed to sort of a toxic political, sort of just that sort of a leadership,

that sort of top high-level leadership environment, you know. Just the kind of stuff that you hear about and just dread about that goes on at the top levels of command. And I saw all that stuff firsthand. And there's a lot of dudes that cared, especially Colonel McDonald, really cared a lot about the guys. But the overall attitude and kind of how I describe it is,

or I think of it, is like they all felt like they could just win the war if they could get these goddamn pesky team guys out of the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was really, really kind of tainted my view of things. And on top of that, I was really pissed off about the team getting disbanded because the team sergeant got prosecuted and the team leader got prosecuted both.

Holy shit. And yeah, so two guys that I looked up to were just prosecuted for what I consider total bullshit and not just one of those things where you're like, hey, the leadership should have said, hey, you had the right intention, you were dumb about it, you know, move on kind of thing. But, yeah, so I kind of got, I kind of got that glimpse of that view of officers stabbing each other in the back and shit talking and stuff like that. And I saw how the ground truth gets twisted 10 degrees or 25 degrees at every step until at the top of the chain, it's 180 degrees.

and they have absolutely no idea what's going on. Right. Or it's, their idea is 180 degrees out, I guess is more accurate. So, but there was good things to it too, of course, but,

but yeah, that was just a miserable time. Unfortunately, I was, they brought back the team together and then finally sent me down, back to the team house, which was in Baghdad,

just south of Green Zone there. Oh, that's interesting. they reconstituted your team like halfway through the deployment? Yeah, and they pulled most of the guys back. Wow. The enlisted guys. Interesting. And so I take it they found you guys a new team sergeant, new team leader.

Yeah, I think we didn't have a team leader, but we had a team sergeant. He was a hell of a good guy, but he was a real weak team leader. Probably one of the nicest guys who'll ever meet, but he should never have been a team leader. team sergeant, sorry. And I don't know if he wanted to be a team sergeant, but he was, he was miserable. I could tell. And things just devolved, you know, because you can't, you just can't have a weak team sergeant. Yeah, yeah.

You know, I think of an SF team as a pack of wolves, you know. It's a bunch of people with big egos and who think they're badasses, who think that they know how to do it best. And you need a strong leader who can basically wrangle all these guys and basically channel all that energy. Jim Morris, who was a team leader in Vietnam, he described once in one of his books that being a team leader on an ODA is basically being the manager of 12 pre-Madonnas.

There's quite a bit of truth to that. But there is that what comes with that, there is also a lot of capability, too. oh yeah i mean the guys were when you know everyone's everyone is studs by that point right and you know when you think of like the guys being in shape the guys were all you know you had guys who were like real studs on the team compared to everybody else but then when you take a team guy and you take him out to the civilian world it's like the the slowest out-of-shaped team guy is as you know destroys the civilian you know world as far as fitness and stuff like that goes

and then you have all the capabilities obviously that you know on top of that but not to disparage civilians I'm just saying that's the that's the standard of SF is that even if you're the slowest guy you better be a damn gun runner and you know if you're the weakest you better be still strong and you know you got to be able to rock really well and carry a lot of weight even if you're a small guy um so yeah there's there's a lot of there's a lot of uh strong personalities basically uh hopefully not too much of the prima donnas like some other branches have but um but yeah you need a strong leader and we didn't have one and so it was it was a it was not a a pretty time on that deployment. We didn't, I don't think we were super productive. We, you know, the guys

wanted to go out and be, but, you know, we just weren't. And, you know, we did what we could. Yeah, I mean, you kind of started off on your back foot there, too, with a team being disbanded and then reconstituted halfway through. And as you said, you're, you know, no team leader position there. Yeah, you guys kind of got, you know, that's pretty tough. for anybody to kind of go through. But, I mean, it sounds like there were guys on the team trying to get you out the door, get you out doing things. Oh, yeah, we were, we had some very aggressive guys.

I mean, we, and I was aggressive, you know. I wanted to go out and take my sniper rifle and go out into the city. If I would have been able to, I would have just walked out the gate of our compound and just went out and set up a sniper. position started shooting guys, you know. But they, you know, we didn't have, essentially we were like a brand new team at that

point and I was a brand new guy to group. No one's going to let us do that kind of stuff, you know. So I was planning all kinds of crazy stuff being a Charlie and I was super into explosives and whatnot in unconventional warfare. I was rigging up schemes to, you know, install, you know, remote data. detonated bombs in places to take out key leaders and stuff like that. I mean, I was, I was pretty gung-ho, you know. So we were trying to, I take it that.

That con-op did not get approved. I take it. No. You know, that was kind of the day before con-ops were really, that first deployment was before con-ops had really taken hold as much as they would later on. Yeah, yeah. And I probably didn't see the Kana process anyways. Maybe they were.

I just didn't know about it, you know. But, but yeah. So we ended up kind of, you know, doing what we could and whatnot. And we definitely did some ASO work and stuff like that. And, you know, drove around in low-vis with, you know, in Haji bands and stuff. Was this around Balad still? No, this would have been in Baghdad. Okay.

Yeah, so I was at the same, we ended up, the team was at the same house for, for both deployments that I was at. Okay. Okay. Which was just south of the Tigris River, just south of the green zone there. So it's a pretty, it was a really cool compound. I had an amazing range set up there. I had a thousand yard, maybe, maybe it's 900 meter, something like that range going. Just really cool setup.

We had a big flat range for the training the jundies and stuff. yeah so i was glad to get out of blonde for sure so it sounds like you know you guys weren't as you know productive as you had wanted to be or maybe some of the other guys on the team wanted to be that deployment um well walk us through redeploying back home and now you're kind of getting ready to go right back out the door again right you know like you said to the same place yeah essentially so as soon as we got back um i had uh there'd been a position that opened on the um They're third battalion, let's say Charlie Company, third battalion. They're making an OPE company.

Yeah. And so I was like, oh, that sounds interesting, you know. So I was going to go do that. And then I don't know, I just decided not to for some reason, you know. But they ended up sending me the Fox course, which is really where I hit my stride in group. Keep you one second. Yeah. I just want to, I'm going to, I'm going to vaguely allude to this.

So the OPE company, operational preparation of the environment, is doing like some more unconventional intelligence stuff. And that company, as I recall, they were all going to be like long hair teams and all this kind of stuff. I don't know how much of that actually happened. And then why don't you tell folks about the 18 Fox course and what an 18 Fox is for people out there who don't know. Oh, yeah.

I love to. So 18 Fox is the Intel, the Intel Sergeant. And essentially, what that is, is it's not, it's like, it's almost like an all-source Intel analyst. Basically, you're the guy on the team who's responsible for developing intelligence to target and developing targets. for the team to go prosecute. So, you know, you're doing everything from reading intel reports

that are coming from the agency, from other teams, regular Army, and obviously anything your own team is producing. And you're in a lot of ways an analyst. You put that information together. You start developing a target packet. And it's a really interesting. job, you know, and part of it is, you know, you're planning out that, you know, you do a lot of terrain, not a lot, but doing the terrain models, like real detailed terrain models so,

so that the team can see which building you're hitting, how you're going to, how you're going to park the home v, is how you're going to flow through the buildings, that kind of stuff. it's really a really dynamic kind of thing and there's a lot to it the course itself was like three months long maybe maybe more i can't remember but it's at brag there and they go over a lot of stuff that's you know you learn photography uh you learn um like mapping software so you can do you can do a lot of interesting things with with mapping software as far as uh you know figuring out points of observation and and, you know, infill points and stuff like that. And so you learn that kind of stuff. You're learning how to pull intelligence off of the, you know, from the agency and

everywhere, like I was saying, but also from just open source stuff and how to how to do that, how to interact with like the sawdays. And then it goes down to prosecuting the target and then and then the aftermath doing the SSE and, you know, how do you exploit the information and the stuff that you're picking up off the objective and that kind of thing. So really a really dynamic kind of, it's kind of a high, you end up being pretty highly trained, I guess, after that is what I would say. It's probably one of the longest courses in SF, I would think, apart from the Q course. about as long as as probably the level three course, I would guess. But you get a little bit of that too, but go ahead.

I was just going to say, and then afterwards, you went back to 551 to be the intelligence sergeant on that team. Yeah, and I was still only, I don't know if I was even in E6 by that time. And that's typically an E7 slot. It's a senior guy, it's a lot. But they, you know, they sent me because I had an aptitude for learning and that kind of thing. You know, I had a degree and whatnot. But, and probably no one else wanted to do it either because there's, you know, paperwork involved and that kind of stuff.

So I went back to 551 and, man, we didn't have much of a train-up and much time to get ready before we deployed again. but we got a new team sergeant who was a stud and he was from the SIF. He was from A1-5. The name's Robert Pittman. He was later killed working as a contractor or he was working for, I believe, AWG, although I'm not sure on that one.

Okay. After he retired in Afghanistan. But Pitt was a, he was a hell of the leader and he was one of the first, one of the first and one of the few, actual good leaders that I saw in the Army. And I still don't, I couldn't tell you how to be a good leader. I'm not a good, I'm not a leader myself, but I certainly can see it when I saw it, you know, I could identify it.

What did you identify in Pittman that, you know, struck you as like, yeah, this guy's on it? part of it was you know he knew what he was doing so he was tactically proficient he was a hard ass and so he didn't

he didn't he didn't let the guys slack and he didn't you know sort of back down or kind of let guys influence him too much or like ah do we really need to train today that kind of thing you know it was

he had the discipline and you know and but but he also what not only was tactfully proficient he was a stud with PT you know so um he kind of he kind of had the skill set combined with um the only thing i can really think of a of a trade of a good leader is like self-assuredness self-confidence you know and and uh just being sure that you're right when you're making a decision and that's a that's a difficult thing I think and and he had that you know he was he wasn't he wasn't arrogant he you know he was he was he was just confident that he knew the way forward and that you needed to keep pushing forward it's just like when you go in a house you know you don't stop in the doorway you push

you push through and and you make decisions on the fly and you just trust your training and your instincts. It's a bit of a cliche, but I mean, I once heard someone say that a leader is someone who takes the team somewhere that they couldn't go without them, right? And it sounds like he was that type of team sergeant that kind of filled that void that was left by some of the previous leaders. Absolutely. When I, when I ETS, you know, you do your interview for your final NCOER, I think it is, or whatever. And I told him, I said, you know, this team was one of the weakest teams in group. And with the same personnel, effectively, we had to change of leadership.

And now we were one of the best teams in group. And so, you know, that is the kind of difference. Amazing how that works, yeah. So tell us about that deployment going overseas with him. Uh, well, uh, we, we were sent up to Taji at first, actually, which was a pretty nasty place. A lot of stuff going on up there, about IEDs and whatnot. We are pretty hungry to get in the action. So, uh, he rode me pretty hard to always have targets on deck.

He wanted, I forget how many, like 10 targets, like 10 target folders ready to go at any one time. And so it took me a while to kind of. find my footing because I was pretty intimidated by Pitt and I don't I have a difficult relationship with authority in general and so it was difficult being around Pitt at first you know and and and I don't think he really trusted me and really thought that much of me at first because um well I I will say I want a little bit of credit because I got the Honor graduate of the Fox course which to me

I expected that of myself because I was pretty academically advanced before I joined the Army. And so everything you learn in the Army is really not difficult when you compare it to like college level calculus and physics and stuff like that.

Yeah. And so I expected my, I expected to do well. But, but apparently that turned out to be a big thing back at the company. And I hadn't even told them about it. They heard about it now secondhand. So I earned some credit that way. But, but I also had one of my first big missteps with him in that first just a couple weeks of Taji. And we went out on a mission and we were going to go cap.

this guy and I hadn't developed a target packet the previous team had he was some shithead who was who was out there and and and this guy had this is going to sound silly but the guy had air conditioning at his house and if you know about Iraq no one has air conditioning especially like in the country but this guy has air conditioning and you could see on the imagery all these air conditioning ducts all over his house and stuff. Well, you know, you don't just get that by being a general good person Iraqi. And I don't remember what all else had on them, but I remember that specifically. And so we, our first mission, I think it was one of our first missions. It was going to be kind of a test of the team.

We did a foot movement on foot from the, from Taji, from the base out to this guy's place. and it ended up being, I don't know what it was, five miles or something. I can't remember. It was just a grueling, grueling ordeal that we put ourselves through. But, you know, I want to make sure that I mentioned this because I want to also show people that I make lots of mistakes. So anyways, during one of our movements, we're walking down. We were actually moving on a road at this point. And I had my PBS 15s.

You know, they're real heavy. That's a dual night vision one. They're real heavy. I had taken them off because my neck was getting tired. I put them in my pouch. I hadn't put them in there properly in the little pouch they sit in. And they fell out. And, yeah.

So a half a mile down the road, I discovered that I didn't have my nods anymore. And boy, I tell you what, that's a kind of feeling I don't want it to ever have again. It's just that feeling of Jesus, how could I be so stupid? How could I, you know, just do that? Because it's a big deal. People maybe don't know. It's a big deal when you lose night vision on a back on Fort Bragg. or anywhere in a training mission.

But when you're in country like that, and, you know, that's a pretty damn big deal. Anyways, I was able to run back and find him, and a guy went with me, and we found them. Thank God, I don't know what happened to me if we hadn't found them. I don't know if I got a court martial or what. I probably would have been kicked out of group.

anyway so that was that was something that that pit you know i i sort of lost credit after my gaining some credit with him uh but he was he was a hell of a leader and and eventually i found you know they moved us back to bad dad and and i got in my groove as a fox and i worked in the morning tonight doing intel i i'm not joking from the from the moment i woke up to the to the moment i went to bet i was reading reports and and i basically i don't know what i don't know how what what clicked what switch flipped in my brain but i had never i never really considered myself that hard of a worker i would say i don't think i had shown that kind of tendency towards that that direction but um something flipped and and i just just poured everything into into finding shitheads and and and that's

Then we started rolling, basically, just hitting targets all the time. And, you know, as I mentioned before, we turned into a DA team. And we kept pretty busy. So lay it on us as you, like, get into this sort of like rhythm of in this sort of continuum of targeting, that you're developing the intelligence, you're going out on targets, developing more intelligence. Yeah, it's a pretty cool thing when a team's really cool thing when a team's running well. You know, we didn't, we weren't developing a lot of our own intel.

We didn't have any, any, uh, really ASO qualified guys. But we're being in Baghdad, we had intel coming in from everywhere. Cool. So, so we were going on hits, you know, all the time as often as possible, basically. And I was doing this, my damnedest to keep that target deck full and, and I'm just ready to go at any time. You know, we're not going out every night or anything, but, but a lot more frequently than the other teams.

And, you know, we never really got in any, in any, you know, like big prolonged firefights or battles or anything like that. We were just, and in some ways, sometimes I look back in it, I'm like, ah, I wish I could have, you know, said that I was in this battle. Like, you guys remember when that religious cult came and attacked one of the other days? Yeah, yeah. We've talked about that on here once or twice. Yeah.

So I think if I remember right, I was in country when that was going on. But I can't say for sure. But I bet I remember hearing about it, you know. And I was like, man, those guys are really getting in it. I was kind of jealous of that. But we were doing, we were doing it in a different way because we're going in super fast. in the middle of the night and we're blowing doors and we're snatching guys and and getting out of there and so it was it was a little bit different kind of a of warfare I guess for us

than it was for some of those guys but it was still you know you know I had a lot of times a lot of missions where I was pretty sure I was going to die you know we got hit we took an IED like everybody else has done. And again, I thought I was going to die on that. But I wasn't even injured. A couple, couple teammates were about, or one teammate and a couple Terps or one of our Terps. But, you know, we were doing as much as we could to try to do our part to, you know, clear

the battle space of guys who are doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing. and by that time things were starting to shift now you're starting to see the con ops oh your con ops not doesn't have the right font right you know we started that's that started to creep in right kind of over that deployment and it was started to shift towards

you couldn't so you couldn't put our mission is to go kill this guy an ex-guy, whatever, killer capture. You couldn't put that anymore. It was capture or detain, which is like the same thing, right? But the mission started to shift as the deployment were on from a war to essentially a police action. And the emphasis started to become on, hey, are you gathering evidence that this person is a bad guy? you know what kind of case can we make against them in court that kind of thing that really started to put a sour taste in my mouth and a lot of guys too you know so once we uh we took an iED i forget when it was

but towards the end of the deployment and and after that i think that they worried that we were going to go back and sort of do retaliation against this area because we went over to the it was just south of solder city and i can't remember what it's called now but i looked it up on the map one time we were doing a just kind of a presence patrol there i don't we need i don't even know why we were doing it really but he took an iED and and uh you know um let's second here anyways i won't go into the details, but I was pretty upset about it, and I was determined to find out who did it. And, you know, as the Fox, I felt that was my responsibility. But they kind of pulled us offline, and the command did.

And they let another team go in and prosecute the target. Ran out of my bourbon there. So they brought in another team. Was that because your guys were injured or they were just like, I think you had mentioned that they were afraid you guys were going to go on like a revenge spree if they've set you loose? They didn't tell us. They didn't say that exactly, but that's my perception of it is they thought that we would go in and start killing people.

And, you know, in the heat of the moment, I had said that I wanted to go back there and kill everybody. And, you know, obviously we're not going to do that. Right. but there's there's a certain amount of moral injury that I imagine happens when your team suffers a loss and you want to I don't want to say get revenge but you want to get the justice for that and they're like you guys sit this out we're bringing somebody else to do it

yeah it didn't say well with us but what are you going to do you know and I The guys, we were, we exercised professional discipline the entire trip. I did myself and the guys did. And we were not a team who was like a bloodthirsty team. And especially with Pitt as our leader, you know. We were very professional. We were very effective, an efficient team, that kind of thing.

but you didn't see from us. There wasn't a bunch of people shot who didn't need shot. There wasn't, there wasn't, you know, just shooting even for just a hell of it. And really that brings me kind of the next point in the crossroads in my life that was really impactful. I guess I didn't really realize at the time, but when I, but now is it as, you know, more of an adult, I look back on that. And I think that was a pretty big deal. One day on our second deployment there, we started taking heavy, heavy rocket fire.

And so we're our compound situated right by the oil refinery in Baghdad. And we would take, the compound would take rockets because everybody do, we were there. They thought we were an agency team or something like that there. the bad guys did. So we'd take rockets and mortars and stuff like that. And the oil refinery would take rockets and mortars. And I don't know if they got it because we were there or we got it because they were there or what. But regardless, one of these days, we start taking incoming, pretty heavy and clothes.

And so we're looking around and trying to see what's going on. And it's, this is, these are rockets for sure, not just, not just mortars, big, big explosions, rocking the whole area, the whole house, you know. And, and somebody yells out, hey, we got a spotter on the roof. And, you know, you guys know that somebody on a roof with a cell phone during a, during a rocket attack, typically means, that's a spotter. Right. Yeah, and they're calling, and they're, and they're directing fire onto you.

So I get I get grabbed the mark 13 which I which was my sniper rifle and I always had set up and I had my whole range range cards and you know had the whole area laid out right and so we see this guy he's across the river. I want to say he was only 300 meters something like that and and and the captain gets up on the spotter and he says and you know we and we of course IDM and draw down on them, you know, and I got my dope dialed, which I think might have been point blank at that point. But the team started comes over with radio, says, take the shot. And I'm on the Mark 13, and I'm not ready to shoot this guy standing there with the cell phone on the top, and he's looking at us, you know. Of course he is, because there's like explosions going on. You know, he's trying to see what's going on. Well, something kind of just clicks in my head.

I was like, man, that's a lot of, that's a lot of rockets. Because it was like at that point, it was like four or five maybe that had come in. I'm like, man, something's not quite right. And so I didn't shoot him. And I put around into like the ground, you know, kind of away from him. And he went away. And it turns out that it was a dang, the artillery unit from that big army base that was down in southwest Baghdad there. they're putting 155s into a into a palm grove just on the other side of the oil refinery

because they're just doing terrain denial there and they never told us and we thought they're yeah we thought they're walking rockets onto our compound onto our house you know um so anyways kind of a long story but as i think about it now like it's hair racing yeah yeah and and if i'd have shot that guy uh you know, how would my life have taken, you know, a different turn? Yeah. Because in hindsight, he obviously wasn't doing anything wrong, but probably not anyways, you know. Some of those guys, a lot of them are doing something wrong, but, you know, he wasn't.

And so anyways, I look at that. I kind of consider, as I said, my life has been sort of the direction has taken has been almost as much stuff I didn't do as stuff I did do. Right. And that was one of them. Iraq, I mean, both Iraq and Afghanistan, there were a lot of very hard decisions being made all the time by, you know, not just guys with a couple trips under the belt like yourself, but by, you know, some 18-year-old PV2 sitting in a, you know, on the gun, on a Humvee that, you know, you're rolling down the road and you see somebody on a cell phone. And it's like, is this guy, is like, is he going to detonate something? Like, if I don't shoot him, are my friend's going to die because I don't? If I do shoot him and he's just an idiot who's standing by a convoy with a cell phone. You know, and like those are decisions that people had to make all the time.

And they never knew if they were right or wrong until after the fact. And sometimes they didn't even know that. Yeah, exactly. And how many how many of those guys have carried that kind of stuff? you know yeah big time who did take the shot and and you know how many how many people has that affected yeah or who didn't take the shot and they got blown up it's like was that the guy was that the guy that killed my friends that i could have shot and didn't yeah yeah that's a lot of uh it's a lot to put on you know a 20 20 something you know it is it's a lot of that's a lot of

a lot of stuff there. Yeah. But, uh, so anyways, uh, as, as that,

as that deployment, ended, that's, that's when they sort of brought on line, you know, the con op restrictions are becoming worse and worse. And then they, they brought out,

they came out with this, hey, hey, don't, don't target jam, which is Jaisa Mahdi for, you know, you know,

people who don't know. That's the, uh, jishamati is, is the, uh, Soder Moktada Sotr's crew

Yeah Moktado Soters guys But they're the not the Sunnis of the Shia That's the Shia militia And You know Really by the time Of our second deployment The guys are

The Iraqis are fighting each other As much or more as they're fighting us I mean Those guys are doing unspeakable things to each other And People maybe don't realize that but the kind of stuff that we're finding out about and whatnot, I mean, just subhuman behavior on a lot of the part of those guys there.

And that's why I call them shitheads, you know. I got to say, one, just as an aside, I'm always jealous of the World War II guys who get together with the German, you know, guys at some reunion when they're 60 years old and they're bullshit in about their day you know on their their buddies and whatnot and hear about that kind of stuff and I'm like that's never going to happen for us because of because of the kind of behavior that those that they were doing the kind of things they were doing to each other that's just not we're just never going to have that and I'm kind of kind of jealous of those guys, the more or more two guys for that.

And maybe the Vietnam guys, I don't really know as much. But anyways, I would tell the guys when we got on target, we'd snatch up who we were looking for or whatever. And I would tell everybody else, hey, if you stop killing each other, the Americans will leave. We'll get out of here. Because by that time, we always want to go home, you know. why not.

And you guys know how it is. A lot of the Iraqis didn't want us to leave. They wanted us there because they knew there was some stability with us there. And they knew what was going to happen with the Iraqi army when they would take over when we left. So, you know, what are you going to do, right? But that was kind of the state of affairs. This is basically what I'm trying to say is, you know, these guys are killing each other. and then they tell us, stop targeting the largest terrorist organization in the city.

And so that was kind of the sunset of our tour, and then we came home just shortly after that. Yeah. And at that point, what's going through your head as you went to 19th group at that point? Were you thinking about going to school? I mean, what was kind of like going through your mind during that time period? Well, so I got out because of sort of that bitterness of that original what happened to the team and being up there at C.J. Siodiff and seeing that kind of stuff. And then just a general Jackassery that goes on in the Army.

And also I just considered that the war was over. I was like, yeah, it's not a war anymore. It's either somewhat of an anti-insurgency or counterinsurgency. and somewhat of a police action and you know that's when they had the surge going on and the regular army. They were using the army as nation building at that point basically, which

is the wrong thing to do. But so I got off active duty. I joined 19th group because my buddy had said that his dad had been in the Guard SF and had a really cool experience and I wasn't ready to sort of put that all behind me and you know

for the longest time. I wished I was deployed again. I mean, even back when I was in Colorado and whatnot, all they wanted to do was be deployed again. It sounds crazy. But that's, you know, that's how it was, you know. And there was a certain, I tell people that there's a very interesting purity of purpose there where you don't worry about the power bill. you don't worry about how you're going to feed yourself so much.

You don't worry about much other than the mission. Doing the mission, keeping yourself alive, trying to take bad guys off the battlefield and trying to keep your teammates alive and help out as many people as you can. You don't have that back in the States, and that's part of the, that's part of the lure. of being deployed and then part of it is just there's just something about it like you guys know there's something about about combat and the deployment that you can't you can't explain to anybody else who hasn't done it it's just it's just something but 19th group was I was served in there with some very impressive people some guys that I think very highly of

The overall experience I wasn't impressed with. It's like, can you name me one part-time NFL quarterback? That's kind of how I look at it, right? It's being Special Forces is it's something that is like a full-time. You're dedicated to that task kind of thing. And being in the Colorado Guard was a little bit. bit different too. The Texas guys had an amazing experience. That was a hell of a unit down there. They're well funded. They're well regarded by the state. And, you know, they keep them at that time.

This is all nearly 20 years ago now. But I had definitely had some good experiences and met a lot of good people in the guard. And I didn't play with the guard. I ended up training. training up people who are going to selection. So I was like a sopsy instructor is kind of how I ended up. It's interesting. Like the guys I've spoken to like, it seems with the guard like they either love it or they hate it. Like it really goes in either direction. Yeah.

A lot of guys have had amazing experiences in the guard. My buddy, Matt Pacino, went into the guard in like Massachusetts or something. Fortunately, he was killed in Afghanistan. But he, you know, he was a, he was a hell. of a dude. He was a guard, you know, fifth group to guard. And he, and I think he really enjoyed his, his time in there while he was there. The guys that I was with, everybody on active duty left immediately, left that unit immediately. Everybody I can think of anyways. It was just, I don't know. I don't, I'm trying to, I don't want to say anything too negative. So, but it,

It wasn't my favorite experience for sure. So what was the next thing for you? I guess you decided to leave the guard at that point, and what was it like going into the private sector? You know, it's so I had, obviously the guards part-time. So when I, my last little bit in the Army, I had designed a rifle. And when I got,

off active duty, I bought a lathe and a milling machine with my, you know, combat pay, saved up combat pay. And I learned how to use those things. And I made this rifle. This is 2007. By a chance occurrence, I ran into some guys from Magpull. They're at the shooting match. And I ended up getting a meeting with them and showing them this.

rifle I made and I had also made the stock for Remington 700 and uh that caught their eye and so they hired me and this was in you know late 2007 and so I went straight from not straight I mean I had a summer basically where I was just kind of chilling and working on this rifle but then I went I went into working for magoo after that and right into the firearms industry and and then doing the guard thing on the side, obviously, one week in the month deal. But that was very incredible. No one knew who Magpo was back then. That was like just as the PMAG was, I mean, not even really gaining steam,

just kind of starting to pick up. And I worked on the Masada, which was one of the most anticipated rifles at the time. And so Magpull went from, was in the process of going from like this, no name nothing company to yeah they made good stuff but but now they're doing this masada rifle which became the bushmaster acr and uh they're doing all these cool things they got the p mag which everyone is you know has a million of now um and so i was really on the ground not quite the ground floor but you know pretty early on in that process uh of the sort of the growth and the really exciting products coming out of magpool

That's pretty cool. I mean, it's pretty cool that you designed and built your own rifle in your free time. Yeah, I've always been kind of mechanically minded, so it was, it was, I don't know, I guess that's just me, you know. When I was younger, I had made maybe some things that could be used as suppressors, you know, in case the ATF is listening. you know so i used to be in all that kind of stuff you know i was one of those guys one of the charlies who went home and started making stuff in my kitchen um you know even though they told us to be really careful about that kind of stuff exposes you know that's what i'm talking about uh so i always just been that that kind of guy but uh you know i was very um uh i was very fortunate to that they

took a chance of me and I was getting ready to go become a sniper for a contractor, like, I don't know, Triple Canopy or somebody. And then Magpull offered me that position. And I was him and in Hawn, and my brother told me, hey, you were, you were born to do this. And so that's what I, so I took the Magpul position, even though it didn't pay much. Because as an SF guy, you can make a lot of money, contract in those days. So that was a life-changing experience for me.

with some amazing industrial designers there. Surprisingly, not a lot of those guys had any kind of real firearms expertise as far as like the handling, the usage side, the end user side, you know what I mean? So I was one of the guys that they leaned on for that. And then gradually I learned SolidWorks. I learned the SolidWorks, which is the 3D design software. And then I became part of the design team. and I worked on a lot of the different products that they put out

and then worked on mainly the 308 version of the Masada rifle, which still has not entered commercial production, but is coming from our company. So it's been in progress, like nearly 20 years now. but I was very very lucky and that set me up to then transition to our own company with my brother and my business partner who was a fifth group guy with me way back even into the course John Lucas so before I finally got out of the guard I I went to selection you know Delta selection and I had to give it a shot and and you know that's kind of one of the

high points or interesting points to me in my life and I didn't I didn't really I don't know that I was really dedicated or that I really wanted to be there that bad but I knew that I had to give it a shot because I was getting out of the guard so it was like my last chance you know I knew I wasn't going to going back to active duty. And so I tried that out and I basically self-selected and I quit and, you know, went back to my civilian life at that point. So that was kind of the decision point for you. Like I'm out of the Army here.

Yeah, I knew I was getting out of the guard. But, you know, I had heard that everyone, everyone, Everyone in SF owes it to themselves to go to selection to see how this is, this is the saying. I'm not trying to disparage anybody, but see how a truly professional organization is run. And I did, and I was impressed. And, you know, I got myself an amazing shape. But in the end, I, you know, I think. I just got wrapped up in my own head and I quit.

And I've always been a pretty high, like sort of higher level anxiety kind of guy. And just kind of, I just thought, ah, these guys, you know, I'm not what they're looking for. And also, I didn't really, I thought all he did was CQB and I really wasn't in love with that idea, you know, after doing it for a while. So, yeah, that's kind of the gist of that. but it was it really just I'm not proud of quitting but it also just wasn't my path yeah sure it was a decision point for you like there there there's there's there's there's there's no dishonor there's no shame and like realizing that something isn't for you or that you have other priorities yeah well they you know they people used to say that in s f selection

And it was like, the answer to that was, well, this is not what group is like, you know, how could you quit during SF selection? Yeah. That's not, this is not what groups like, which is the right, you know. Right. And I, and I did never, I never did find out what, what Delta's like. Now, I've heard stuff from the guys who will come on your show and stuff that you've interviewed. I'm like, man, that would have been really cool. Yeah.

You know, it isn't just a bunch of knuckle draggers. you know, doing CQB. They got a lot of cool stuff going on. Yeah. You know, a lot of interesting things. So I kind of, I kind of was bummed about that a little bit, but at the same time, you know, my, my path was set. Like, you know, my brother was right. I think I was born to be a designer, you know, and for that, in that time, it was firearms.

And it still is. So, and I still, I still design. the products for KRG. Tell us about that about going from Magpull to starting your own company with your friends, KRG. Yeah, so we, I was going to go, I was going to leave Magpul and then I was going to go contract in order to build up some money to then strike out on my own. But my brother had already been contracting for, oh man, he did like four years or something.

At that point, he wasn't. he wasn't that far into it. But he had saved up some money and said, hey, what if I just put in this money and you get started right away? And John had this idea for this product, which is our boat lift. It's a little bolt mob that you put on the Remington 700

for people who can't do any kind of permanent modifications to their rifles, their sniper rifles. And so we all basically just formed this company and my brother funded it. And then I lived off of my, you know, savings from combat pay and this, you know, working at Magpull and stuff like that. And so for, we started in my garage and, and at the first, at first I did everything.

You know, I machined parts and design stuff and whatnot. And then once our little bolt lift thing started selling, my mom started working for free for us and I was working for free, you know. And it was just one of those deals where we just kind of gradually. picked up steam just over the years, you know. Monster garage. What's that? Monster garage. Yeah, it was from the R&D to the building to the shipping.

That's awesome. Yeah, and, you know, we've had a lot of luck along the way, too. And a lot of things have gone our way. We, you know, a lot of things haven't gone our way, too. But we were lucky to be getting into. to this industry right at the time when all the boats were rising, right? Because there was a lot of GWAT spending. There's a lot of interest in firearms.

And then you had, you know, without getting too much in a politics, you had Obama become president. And there was a lot of anti-gun talks. So people were spending crazy money on firearms, all everything. So, yeah, we just, you know, I worked my ass off. Everyone worked their ass off. My brother was still contracting and pulling in money. I was spending my savings down.

And then so then I ended up using my GI bill to go back to college. And I studied philosophy, going for a philosophy degree. And then I was getting money because you get a stipend as part of the GI bill. That was paying for my housing and stuff. And then I went to contracting with Blackburn, like I had mentioned earlier. And that kept us going. going, you know, and, and I, you know, I lived like a college kid, uh, and didn't take, didn't take money. I mean, it was years, you know, ramen noodles and, and not, not spending

money on stuff. And, uh, and, you know, I've, I've been, I feel like I've been rewarded. Life is, I feel like life has rewarded me, uh, for, um, for hard work. And then some of the, some of the, some of the hard choices I made when I raised my hand and, you know, said, yeah, I'll be, I'll do it. And that leads you into, you're now working with J.Golt Aircraft, another one of your companies. And so you're not a totally unrelated, but I mean, from firearms to aircraft, it's a pretty big jump. Yeah, it really is. So, you know, again, very fortunate that we were able to grow the company.

And in, I want to say, 2017, I was able to start taking lessons to become. I'm a pilot. I learned to fly. And then sort of that childhood love of airplanes was kind of rekindled, you know. And I'd seen this replica spitfire when I was in college. And I was like, man, that'd be so cool because I figured I'd never be able to afford a real spitfire, which they sell for around $4 million now. I still can't afford one.

but I wanted to get this replica and I talked to these guys and anyways it turned out that we were thought about just going down there and buying them out this whole company that makes these little planes anyways the company was it wasn't the deal didn't happen it just didn't come together but we thought man we could we could just make our own which was a really neat a really neat thought and one of the dumbest things we ever thought about, all wrapped up in one, you know. So by that, you know, a few years later, this maybe, I don't know, four or five years ago,

I'm kind of getting burned out from just working morning tonight on the firearm side. And, you know, I didn't have social life and that kind of stuff. I was, you know, I was very fortunate. it in 2015 I met my now my wife and that's most that's been one of those other like really defining points in my life so that's been a big deal but other than that you know and she's been amazing and and sort of I've sort of become a little more balanced but before that it was just I mean work and and and and and and uh work and and and uh

and exercise. That was my day, you know. So I needed to step away, and I kind of started stepping back from running the whole company, the KRG, which is kinetic research group. And the kinetic comes from, obviously, you know, kinetic energy, but also kinetic strikes. So I started to push more into the aircraft.

So I had, we said, hey, we could just build our own, design and build our own aircraft. this replica. And so that's what I've been working on. And I started with, you know, all these books you see behind me, that's virtually every aircraft design book that's ever been written. And so just started going through those books and learning and, you know, are you building a Spitfire in your garage now? Is that what you're telling me? well we've upgraded the garage we have a hangar now so yeah that's that's essentially what's going on yeah so we're we're several years into it and a boatload of money for sure yeah but it's it's a hell

of a it's a hell of an experience it's uh it's an incredible learning experience and um you know I tell you it's I think everybody should you know life's short you know life's short and I think it's, personally, I think it's too short to do one thing. And but also, and some people, that's not, that, you know, they don't feel that way. That's okay. But I think it's also, you need to always be challenging yourself and you need to keep your, you need to keep your brain functioning by learning new things. And just taking one of these big risks is kind of one of those things, you know,

like, you know, you could do it, whatever you wanted, you know, you could take up, you know, the piano or something or try to learn a new language or something like that. But I think that's very important in life. Yeah, but you went pretty big there, Justin. You didn't just like, yeah, let me learn Spanish on Duolinga or something like that. You're a self-taught firearms designer and aircraft manufacturer. That's a big leap, man. I'm jealous.

You've got the type of brain that can do that. That's amazing. Well, thank you. That's quite a compliment. but I feel like I feel like I'm probably I may have maybe a little more intellectual capability than average, but I'm not a genius and I don't think that any of this stuff is beyond most people. Yeah, you're putting the work into it, yeah. Yeah, it's the resilience.

I mean, I've got some of these books where I looked in an equation and I was like, man, and I've had college calculus. And I'm like, man, I don't understand this. And it's taken me days of thinking about it and working through a problem a bunch of times. And then just having that tenacity, really. And I never really had that before. And I think that probably came from the Army. From the SF, you know.

Yeah. But that's anybody could do this. Now, not everybody could do a carbon fiber spiff fire and put that into production. Probably not. Because of the just of the cost but anybody could design a small aircraft

if that's what they wanted to do. And that's this is what I see as my life's passion and mission at this point. So it's like Victor Frankel said, you know, whoever has the

why can endure anyhow. And I just pictured that I know, but you know you guys everyone knows victor frank or whatever or they look it up but um essentially if you have a purpose you can overcome mountainous obstacles to to achieve uh your end goal so anybody could do it if they want and so i want that i want people to think about that and like you know i'm just this i'm you know i came from a poor family no one had had any education You know, my parents were teenagers, essentially, when I was born, you know, pretty humble beginnings.

And I don't have any special gifts, you know. I don't have anything like Russell Crow in that one movie, Beautiful Mind, you know. It's just a little bit of smarts and the desire and just that willingness. to be uncomfortable and feel like you're an idiot kind of. Like I don't get this but I got to push through it. And that kind of leads me to one thing that I

want to convey to people is that like a lot of people now talk about how the American dream is dead this and that and the other thing you hear that and it's what they what they're trying to say is that you know oh this new generation is never going to

own a house and have two kids and you know, that's what the American dream is, whatever. That's not the American dream. I'm living the American dream and, you know, you look at me. I'm not that remarkable of a guy, you know. Nothing's really standing out about me as you look at me. But yet I've been able to shape my life in the way and to the potential that I feel like I'm capable. And that's what the American dream is.

it's to shape your life to the direction and to the extent that you want to and to reach your fullest potential. It's the pursuit of happiness, right? You're really living that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And part of the dream is that in America you can do that because you don't have like a caste system holding you down where, you know, where I can. could never be an aircraft designer because, you know, my parents weren't royalty or, you know, didn't, weren't landowners or stuff, something like that, you know. So the American dream is really, it never was about, uh, being wealthy. It wasn't about having a Bugatti or Lambeau's. You know,

it wasn't, none of that kind of stuff. It wasn't about having kids. It wasn't about it on a house. It was just about sort of this freedom and, you know, sort of this base, level quality of opportunity and and as you said this freedom for people to pursue pursue happiness that's a bit of a misnomer happiness ensues from living living the right way is how i view it um it's not something that you chase after the happiness uh having happiness is like money uh or wealth happiness ensues from doing the right things and life as a living a good person living a good life and wealth ensues from doing the right things in relation to the market right which which is finance people refer to as the market the market is

everything from the from the butcher shop to to you know the sock exchange the market is all the stuff that money is sort of involved in but you do the right things in either of those arenas and you're going to, the happiness is going to ensue and the wealth is going to ensue. I was going to ask you, because you know, you say, like you, I love how you casually tossed off Victor Frankl like everybody knows it, but unfortunately I don't think everybody does.

And if you haven't read his book, man, search for meaning, it's a short book, it's an easy read and everybody, everybody should read it. What are some other authors or some other people with these ideas that have inspired you or guided you along this way? Oh, boy, that's a good question. Victor Frankel is definitely very influential. A guy named Mihai, Chiksen Mihai, who wrote a book called Flow. I essentially just am constantly rereading and re-listening to it.

I have been on book and audiobook to him. Those are two big ones. But then also, so shifting back a bit, you know, I mentioned we're poor. My family's idea of success or my dad's idea of success was having Ferraris and that kind of thing, having money to be able to, you know, do what you want, but also to kind of have the fun stuff in life, right? but um so i never i never learned it i never learned about money because it was always a there was always an attempt to reach those things without being able to afford them it's basically poor people behavior continues that continues to this day right is buying buying toys on credit essentially so in when i was in the cue course there was a

guy who one day came in and said, hey, I just made $4,000 in the stock market. And he had been an investor. He had learned about investing and all this kind of stuff. And I thought, oh, my gosh. And here I was. I had two cars, a sports car, and I had a four-wheel drive van. And I, you know, I had debt on maybe both of them. I can't remember. And I had a dirt bike and all these toys, right? And zero money to my name. And so, that was one of the things I might have maybe been thinking about a little bit before, but I was like, man,

I made all this money and I have nothing to show for it, and I'm in debt. And this guy just made $4,000, something like that, in the market. And so that kind of kicked me into gear learning about money. And I think everybody should learn about money. And circling back now, one of the books that was very influential for me

was actually rich, dad, poor dad. And the dude's kind of gone off the rails, it seems like maybe now. I don't really follow him too much. But Robert Kiyosaki, that book, I wouldn't push anybody to get any of the other ones. But that book, it's served to frame my mindset about how money works and how you build wealth. So you got Victor Frankel and then Chicks and Mihai on sort of this personal development side. and then you have rich dad, poor dad, and a host of others. I mean, I've read so many books about money, but those are some very influential ones as far as that,

because like it or not, finances are a big part of life, and it's a big part of having a happy life is having your finances in order. Yeah. So I hope those are some good recommendations for people. Another one on the finance side is called The Richest Man in Babylon. And, you know, that's an old book. Old. It's a, yeah, it's a fictional, you know, tale, but it's the lessons are invaluable.

And essentially, it's even on this list of topics I'd come up, or I had wrote down to mention, really what he wants people. to do is invest 10% of their income right off the top, invest it. You know, put that money away and make that, and don't put it in the savings account. Don't put it in the bank. Invest it so that it makes money for you. You know, compounding is the, what they call it, the eighth wonder of the world or whatever the other next wonder is. Compounding interest is, and even Einstein said that, compounding is, is, and even Einstein said that, compounding

is such a powerful force that you need to get it started. And saving money is just not enough to try to build wealth. So, you know, I would ask that anybody listening to this, take 10%. And before you do anything else, even if you're 25 and you think that you got lots of time, you don't really, you know, take 10% and put it in an index fund. That's what I do. I'm not giving investing advice. What I do is I put it in an index fund. I don't buy Bitcoin.

Don't do silly shit like that or speculative type stuff. Don't try to get rich quick. Take your 10% and put it in an index fund, a low-cost index fund. I use Vanguard. I put it into VOO, which is Vanguard's S&P 500 index fund, and let that stuff compound. But that book is very influential. So that's richest man in Babylon. Justin, I really appreciate this interview, man,

and you're sharing your story and all of your insights. And I think it has been a unique perspective, not just on the military, but on life too. Before we let you go tonight, I mean, are there any final things? You'd kind of, and I really like the way you interwove some of these lessons learned into your story. Are there any we failed to hit during this interview that you'd really like to tease out there?

I think about the only I mean I have a bunch of stuff I mean I can I could go on and on but you know I've I'm 46 now and I've I've failed a lot and I've learned a lot of lessons so I feel like I have a lot of things to share a lot of things I want to convey to people I have a whole article I wrote not an article but I started laying out sort of these principles of wealth and and not that I'm a super wealthy guy but just from stuff I've learned from from actual, you know, life experience. But one thing that that I would like to for sure add in to people, add into this interview is that I think, I think that as a society, we have a lack of an appreciation for the importance of exercise. And that's in all ages. But especially as, you know, you're past, you get past 25 or whatever. I look at it as exercise is to the adult mind and body what reading is to like a child's mind,

right? Reading does something to your mind when you're a kid. It isn't just the pleasure of reading and learning facts. It's the actual deciphering the symbols on the paper and, you know, maintaining the information you're taking in. The whole process, it's very important, I think. see as developing the young mind and exercise is sort of that for your body and your mind as an adult and and if you can you know anybody is listening to this you know get a little strength

training and and some some cardio work in and try to once a week run or whatever walk up a steep hill with weight to the point where you are breathing very hard where you're out of breath. You feel like you're out of breath and just get that exercise. It's done, I feel like it's done essentially a miracle for me because, you know, when I got out of the army, I was, I had a difficult transition to civilian life. You know, one sec here. Nice to have this. You know, I lost a lot of buddies, a lot of guys from group in the war.

When I got out, I was pretty, I guess you'd say resentful of civilians. And it's hard to explain, so forgive me. It's totally fine. Yeah, it's, it's, I think even in like the Hakaguri, the samurai writes about this, about, you know, the samurai coming back and, like, resenting the civilians around them. Like, these people are fat, they're lazy, what's wrong with them?

They don't have real problems. They don't understand what's going on. Right, right. You know, they bitch you about nothing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then also that coupled with, they don't know, you know,

the kind of sacrifice is going on. Right. Yeah. There's a lot of judgment with very little information. Yeah, and not that they could know, you know, necessarily, because there isn't, I mean, you can make shows about, you know, what's going on. Like Restrepo, for example, was a very good one. But there's still, you know, it's not, I don't know, it's just a terrible situation all around, basically. But so I was pretty resentful for, you know, a lot of that stuff that, all this stuff we're talking about right here.

And so I was pretty, you know, kind of angry. And I've, I've had a, I've had a, like a condition, which is perfectionism since I was pretty young, which it sounds like something you put on your resume to strengthen it. If I'm ever in one of your aircraft, I'm going to be happy about that, though. Yeah, yeah. it can go too far sometimes. Right. And that's, you know, that kind of, it's, people think it's kind of a good thing to be a perfectionist, but it gets to the point where it basically starts destroying your life.

Yeah, yeah. And so it just takes away any possibility of being happy. Yeah. Because it's, you know, you're constantly undermining yourself. Perfections and aspiration, not a realistic, possibility. I'm very, I'm very curious though because you know, you have a successful firearms company and you were also doing, you know, this other company with aircraft. And one of the problems or one of the challenges with perfectionism is this whole paralysis by analysis

and people never even get started on projects because they never feel like they know enough or the situation isn't perfect. How did you manage to overcome that? You know, honestly, I don't, sometimes I don't know. Part of it was, like on the aircraft side, I had to go through every single one of the books to basically have that satisfaction in my head that I got to that point of knowledge.

And then on top of that is I brought in other engineers to go through my work. And so, you know, to make sure that I know what I'm doing. And, you know, they were, I don't know everything. So they're helping out too. They're doing stuff on their own. But I honestly, I don't know. I think, I think it's, again, as the SF stuff, it's just, you just push forward.

Yeah. You know, you just have to do it. You have to make mission. Yeah. And on the KRG side, it's the same way. I've designed some rifles and some stocks. that are, you know, incredible as far as their function and design. And, I mean, that sounds like I'm bragging, but, I mean, just the amount of thought and detail is what I mean

that's went into them. And the function is beyond what's available out there and stuff like that. And I had a rifle. I designed it was planned to sort of be the equivalent of like a fine English shotgun. I mean, you guys have heard of like purdy shotguns probably and stuff like that. $200,000 shotguns. Well, I, you know, I've worked on stuff that's been to, was intended to be to that level.

And that hasn't seen the light of day, partially because it's not, that's not a good business decision. But, yeah, some, it has handicapped me in some ways for sure. But, but I think, again, the military, the SF stuff, the SF side says, hey, this has to be done, you know, You just do it. And also I can kind of rest assured that I feel like I pretty much outwork anybody in the industry. Yeah, gave 100%.

So not to delve back into a sensitive subject, but you had mentioned that when you got out, you had that resentment for civilians. How did you overcome that? Like, what, how did you get past that? Or did you? I would say I would say still haven't entirely I'm not a

I never was a people person I was never a leader I was never interested in being a leader you know I used to I used to be one of those people who would say I fucking hate people you know that's the truth you know it's a harsh thing to say

but part of its time you know I think I think I ended up with and I don't know how this ever affected me but I think I ended up with some probably a little bit of TBI stuff because we used to blow doors from literally the other side of the door jam yeah I mean six inches yeah you know it is how it's how we would blow doors there was no stand back that kind of stuff it was I would have a uniform covered in parts of

duct tape, the little adhesive of duct tape, you know, could be all over me, that kind of thing. And we didn't know back then that that was a dumb idea, you know. And so I think there might have been some of that because we blew a lot of doors, blowing walls, blowing, you know, everything, a lot of demo. So I think that kind of factored in and then that kind of healed over time, I think, It's part of it. Part of it was, you know, meeting my, you know, my current, she's my fiancé, car, my wife, but meeting her and having this amazing relationship, that's really helped, too.

You know, it's just, I don't know, I can't say exactly what the mechanism is, but that's been a big help. I feel like, you know, my life took a big turn. and she's been such a positive influence. She's a very positive person, so she's been such a positive influence in my life. And, you know, I want to tie in something here that I wanted to mention to people, too, is, you know, for people out there

who maybe haven't found their partner yet or who are looking for a better partner or they feel like you're in a bad relationship, is, you know, take a look in the mirror and realize that you only deserve the kind of partner that you are to the other person. And that took me a long time to come to that realization, I would say. And, you know, people have a tendency to think, ah, this person is not good enough for me without thinking, hey, are you even that, you know, pleasant to be around?

and for a lot of my life, I don't think I was that pleasant to be around. So, you know, I didn't meet my, you know, my spouse until I was like 37-ish, something like that. And I, if we'd have met before that, she would have been able to stand to be around me. So I want people to, you know, just kind of think about that as like, turn that, turn that magnifying glass back on yourself and say, hey, what, what kind of person am I to be around? What kind of love do I put out there? What kind of affection do I put out there into the world? And give what you want to receive, essentially.

Justin, where can people find you with KRG, with J.Galt aircraft? Where can people go and check this stuff out? Well, for the firearm side, you know, we make the long-range chassis and stuff. That's our long-range precision is our bread and butter. That's our focus, basically, on the firearm side. And the company is called Kinetic Research Group and the website's kineticresearch group. Or you can just search for KRG or KRG chassis. I'm not super involved in day-to-day thing.

So on that side, I'm not really the person to get a hold of. Excuse me. On the aircraft side, we have a little YouTube channel that we started that has like one video that I put up a year ago. That's J-Gald Aircraft on YouTube. And we really haven't been talking about things because we don't want to have a lot of hype and then not deliver. So we're waiting until we get the aircraft in the air before we're really start pushing things. because we're trying to sell these things, you know, but we also, aircraft industries had a long history of people promising,

taking deposits, and then, you know, paper there. I think the most important, oh, I was just going to say, I think the most important question is when can Jack and I come shoot some of your systems? We'd love to have you guys down, definitely. We could go do some flying, do some shooting. Cool. Yeah. We got some good ranges here, so I'm in Boise area.

Yeah, we'd love to have you guys. So anytime you, if you make it out west, I know you guys are pretty far east there, but anytime you guys are coming out this way, we'd love to have you. John and I are in the Boise area. The rest of the company is up north outside of Corderly, northern Idaho, dang near up to Canada. But we're here, and we got lots of toys, our stuff. We got other stuff, you know.

and like I said, all kinds of, we can have all kinds of fun. Definitely. We'll hit you up when it gets warm. It's cold right now, Boisey, isn't it? Oh, yeah. Well, it just turned. It's been really nice, and then it's turning now. But yeah, come in the spring or the falls here are amazing.

Summer's brutal. It's like Tucson here in the summer. But come down for sure. And anybody who's interested on the aircraft side can look at the YouTube or they can even, email me at Justin at Jigalt Aircraft. We'll put some links down in the description for people to go check out. Yeah, and if, you know, just be patient with, because I, you know, I get a lot of emails and I really try to spend my time actually doing work, like working on the plane.

So, and then, you know, on the K or G design side too. So just be patient if I, you know, if I'm slow and getting back. And I also have some wares to sell that I want to tell people about. My book, We Defy the Lost Chapters of Special Forces History, is coming out December 9th. It's up for pre-order on Amazon now. It goes through Detachment A, the undercover guys in Berlin, Detachment K in Korea, Blue Light, the First Counterterrorism Unit, Green Light, The Backpack Newk Guys, and the Commander's in Extremist Force.

So I'm excited about the book. Please go check it out if you guys have a moment. Thank you. We have two viewer questions. I don't know if we have anything on Patreon D. Nothing. All right. First one, thank you, Bjorn. You know, you had mentioned selection and whatnot.

But the question is, ever work with A15 and how do they compare to CAG? And I don't know if you have an actual comparison for that. I don't. John was with A1.5 for a lot of years. I don't know how many, but he was over on the, sniper troop there. He'd be the one to answer that question. Maybe we can get him on with you guys. Yeah. He has a lot more time than I do. Um, and he's got some cool stories. I don't know if, you know, he's not, he's, we're SF guys, right? We're a little shy. And it's only recently I

would even, you know, want to be out there in public with a bit and whatnot. So, um, he, he might have some more of that stuff. Sorry, I don't, I can't really tell how he won five compares. We always thought of those guys as a bunch of pre-Madonnas, you know, when I was on just a regular team. And we were doing direct action stuff. And we, you know, our team sergeant came from A-1-5, so we felt like we were just as good as them. And how they compared to Delta, I have no idea. But the stuff I hear about Delta is pretty next level. So, you know.

And then, M. Corbyn, thank you very much. why was the VAT F4U Coursera the best fighter from World War II? Well, this sounds like a Corsair fan there. That was actually my favorite plane for the longest time. It was featured in that, an old show called Baba Blacksheet. Yeah, Pappy. Pappy Boyington. Yeah, he was a Corder Lane guy.

So he's a kind of local hero out there. You used to love that show. That's probably one of the reasons I got so interested in it. And of course, the Corsair. was an incredibly powerful engine with an incredibly large, efficient propeller, and quite an armament. And when you really look at what they were doing back then, fighter performance is largest, most powerful engine you can find, smallest airframe with the lowest drag that can tolerate, you know, the landing conditions and stuff like that, because you still need to have some kind of low speed performance,

especially land on a carrier. And then your armament. And so, of course, there was a hell of a fighter. And then, I mean, there's a lot of nuance to it, too, the size of the ailerons and, you know, whatnot. But I don't know that I would say it's the best fighter. If you ask the Brits, the Spitfire is the best fighter, and they will not hear a word otherwise.

You ask it American, it's the Mustang, generally speaking. Most people say it's a Mustang over the Corsair. So I can't say one is better than the other. The Corsair was certainly amazing, and I'd love to have one. I would love to fly one, that's for sure. Yeah, that's it. And next Friday we're going to have David McCloskey, the author of the new spy novel, The Seventh Four.

we'll have him on the show. So that's coming up next week. Justin, again, thank you for joining us tonight, spending some of your time with us and sharing some of your life experiences with us. It's been a pleasure, fellows. I really appreciate you inviting me on. Like I said, I listen to a lot of your shows,

and I hope you guys just have an enormous success going forward. And if I can do anything to help that out, I'm happy to do it. Yeah, thank you, Justin. I really appreciate it, man. So we'll see it. see all of you guys next friday take care out there have a nice weekend