The Team House - Apache Pilot Turned FBI Agent Turned Tom Clancy Author | Don Bentley | Ep. 209

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Don Bentley is the New York Times Bestselling author of the Matt Drake thriller series including Hostile Intent, The Outside Man, and Without Sanction as well as one forthcoming title. Don also writes in the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan, Jr. universe with Zero Hour, Target Acquired, and one forthcoming title. Don spent a decade as an Army Apache helicopter pilot during which time he was stationed in South Korea, Germany, and Texas. While deployed to Afghanistan as a Troop Commander in support of Operation Enduring Freedom VI, Don was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and the Air Medal with “V” device for valor. Following his time in the military Don worked as an FBI Special Agent and was a member of the Dallas Office Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team. After leaving the FBI, Don worked for companies that developed technology for the U.S. Special Operations Community. He holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Ohio State University, and an M.F.A in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. Grab Don's books here:⬇️ https://donbentleybooks.com/ Today's Sponsors: Hello Fresh ⬇️ https://www.HELLOFRESH.com/teamhouse16 Get 16 free meals plus shipping by hitting the link! https://www.HELLOFRESH.com/teamhouse16 SLNT (Silent) ⬇️ https://SLNT.com/?rfsn=7107485.9bde8d SLNT® sleeves, bags, cases and wallets are all exquisitely designed to ensure your devices become invisible, untrackable and silent. Get 10% off your order by using this link or using the promo code "teamhouse" at checkout! https://SLNT.com/?rfsn=7107485.9bde8d To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #apache #fbi #tomclancyBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Good evening. This is the Team House, episode 209. I got that right. Nailed it. Evening. You're so formal. Nailed it. I'm Jack, here with Dave. And our guest on tonight's show is Don Bentley. He's a retired Apache pilot, FBI special agent. And now he's a thriller author. And we're really excited to talk to him.

Dave, I'm going to give you real quick. Thanks to HelloFresh for supporting our show tonight. Go to HelloFresh.com slash Teamhouse 16. Team House 16 and use code Teamhouse 16 for 16 free meals plus shipping. So Don, thanks for joining us tonight, man. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. I was saying as you were introducing me, you were telling me all the amazing guests you had before. So I appreciate you lowering that bar to let me on tonight.

There's no bar. as I've said this show half of it consists of Dave and I drinking more than we should. So the standards are not like that, that high. But if we did have high standards, you would still be a welcome guest on the show. I was going, I thought you were going, we would still have to lower them for you. No, no, no. That's all right. I appreciate it.

I'm sure there are many more credible podcasts that you can get yourself on. Maybe Michael Morel is available. You know, you want to be on like one of those real national security podcasts as opposed to whatever we have going on here. But no, thank you, man. And so the first question we pretty much ask all of our guests is for their origin story. Kind of like how you grew up, what your upbringing was like and sort of like how that kind of propelled you towards military service. Yeah, so origin story again, I feel like lends more credence to this. than I should have. It exudes this sense of foresight that I actually knew what I was going to do

and go in the military. And so my origin story kind of begins my junior year of high school when I was pretty sure that continued schooling was not for me. And the Army recruiter walked in that day. And man, did he have a brochure? And the front of it said airborne rangers. And those guys look like they were having a good time. And so I took it home to my dad. And I said, I want to do that and he said not on your life while you're 17 years old but when you turn 18 if you want to do that i'll take you down to the recruiters office myself and so fortunately or maybe unfortunately i still think i would have made a good a good airborne ranger is i got an army rOTC scholarship to the ohio state university and went there and then was lucky enough to get branched aviation and then fly

Apache helicopters. And it is hard to have a bad day when you get to fly Apache helicopters. There's one on the shelf behind me. Most Apache helicopters actually have four rotors. That one's been through some moves, so it's only got two. That is not normal, but it does have an amazing set of fun toys that they let you play with, like a 30 millimeter cannon that hangs underneath of it and follows your eye whenever you look. And so I got to do that for 10 years, including toured Afghanistan from 2005 to 2006 as air cavalry troop commander. So I always knew I wanted to serve. I was the first one in my family to serve voluntarily.

My dad was drafted for Vietnam and my grandfather for World War II. And my son is actually against everything I could do, is leaving tomorrow for the second half of Marine Officer Candidate School. So it's kind of cool to see that continue. and that legacy continue in the family, even if he apparently was not smart enough to go in the army and he's going in the Marines instead. I mean, that's like an incredible family history, like generations of guys. And I mean, even though your grandfather and father were maybe drafted against their will,

I mean, growing up around that must have been sort of like planted the seed in your mind, if nothing else. Yeah, absolutely. And I think for most of us, I'm in my late 40s. And by late, I mean 49. I don't know if you can get any later in your 40s than that. And so, you know, I grew up during the Cold War. You know, I remember Ronald Reagan.

I remember the evil empire. And there was very much a sense of there was a side that was right and a side that was wrong. And you were going to serve your nation to be part of that. And I just from, like I said, from an early age, wanted to serve and also knew that my dad had originally thought he wanted to go be an Air Force pilot. He was a pilot and a flight instructor kind of on the side. And his eyes got worse, his senior year in college. And so he didn't go through with it. And I knew that if I couldn't get aviation in the Army, there were a lot of fun things. They still let you do in the Army. I couldn't imagine what you would do in the Air Force if you didn't

fly planes. And so that kind of steered me more towards the Army and kind of the career I had. But yeah, absolutely. I think most of the folks that grew up in my generation had that sense that there really was a struggle between good and evil. I remember when the Berlin Wall came down. I remember seeing the former Soviet bloc countries be liberated. And I think, I think certainly there's a case to be made that the subsequent generation, maybe my son's generation doesn't feel that same way. But I also say you can make the case, you know, less than one quarter of one percent of the American population served in Afghanistan, Iraq. Most of those people served multiple times, and they all did it voluntarily. You know, I came in in 1997 before

there was September 11th, before we knew we were going to war. Everybody since then raised their right hand and knew they were going combat and still did it anyway. And so to me, that still says something about the kids that are replacing us today. Yeah, I was actually, I was interviewing, so we were talking earlier about our friend Rod, who I do another podcast with him for Stars and Stripes. And for that, I was interviewing Dan Green this week. And he wrote a whole book about veterans, you know, kind of really addressing our generation of veterans.

And I mean, he points out, of course, that, you know, the incredible thing is like a lot of these guys deployed 10 times, 15 times. And to think that they did that voluntarily, you know, They weren't drafted. They didn't have to go. Yeah. Yeah, you, we actually connected through Alan Mack, who did the 160th pilot, who did a he did a signing with me in Columbus.

And that guy over a 10-year period deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq 17 times. And so 17 deployments. Now, that's a little crazy. They're the 160th. They do that kind of thing. But my best friend is a guy named Kelsey Smith. We were troop commanders together in Afghanistan. And I got out at the 10-year mark he stayed in and recently really tired as a full bird colonel.

But he deployed six times. And that's six years of his kid's life that he spent in combat theaters. And that's it's crazy. On one hand, you know, I think the folks that served post-9-11 are the new greatest generation. But on the other hand, I think unless you know a veteran or you serve personally, it's really hard to have a concept of what that level of sacrifice is. to be gone from your family for years at a time multiple times. Yeah.

It's funny because one of the things that, you know, like, I mean, I think you're Gen X. And I think that, you know, a lot of people from Gen X and whatever, you know, a lot of people kind of shit on millennials and whatnot, you know, oh, millennials, millennials, but millennials carried the bulk of that war. Yep. And so regardless of what you think of, you know, any, I think that people who are, older always going to look at the younger generation go ah slackers but yep but those those kids i say

kids but but those young people over there did not slack 100% 100% and they did it and that's what i said like i'm the anomaly i only deployed once um 2005 to 2006 most of those kids did it multiple times across multiple combat theaters and they volunteered every time that that just you know if you just think about that, you know, volunteering to go into combat multiple times. It's just incredible. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, I mean, you certainly have an understanding between your dad, grandfather, and now you have a son in it. So, I mean, you're, you're, you are the anomaly in the sense that you're very connected to that military and, and the war as it transpired that, you're right. It's hard for a lot of Americans to kind of feel that connection.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's certainly different. you're a father and you look at it. I mean, I, the, so my latest book is called Forgotten War and it takes place, it's fiction, but it takes place during our 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I wrote it in part because as a veteran of Afghanistan, watching it crumble just wrecks something inside of me. But before that, you know, as as somebody who had served there, who had, most of us has served there have lost friends or acquaintances or we certainly watched you know blood and treasure disappear into that country for 20 years and so my son was born shortly after september 11th and as a father thinking that my son would have to go back there a generation later to to do what you know what what

what in the world were we still doing there but at the same time that sense of we deserve the better ending than that like we who served maybe didn't want it to go on forever for another 20 years and have our children there, but by God, we didn't want it to end that way. And that's what, that's what kind of, I'm a writer. And so I process things through writing. And so Forgotten War is very much fiction, but the, a lot of it is based on actual events and the conversations between veterans and the characters that are depicted. There were very much the conversations I had, because I don't know about you all, but the, the question that I kept getting in texts and emails and calls from, from fellow vets were, was it worth it? Was, was any of

it worth it was what we did worth it and i didn't know the answer to that and so i tried to figure that out as part of writing that book well and don it's okay if you don't have an answer because i think like all of us like have to figure out how to process that and place that part of our lives but i mean you said like you process things through writing i mean did you come to any sort of thought conclusions or thoughts about how how the conflict ended not about how it ended i think i think for me personally the best I could come up with is that in the year that I was there, we made things better. Little girls could go to school. It was you could, you didn't have to get stoned for not having a beard, the length it was supposed to be.

Right. Like things like that, in that period of time, it was better for them. Was it still worth it? Was the sacrifice still worth it? I don't know the answer to that. Yeah. You just put your finger on it right there, I think. In the, in the microcosm of it, you can see all.

all those good things that were accomplished. But when you zoom out, there's a bigger question that I think we're all still trying to wrap our heads around, right? But let's back up a little bit in your personal history. I'd like to hear about, you know, going into the Army, Army Aviation and like how you got, well, branched into aviation is pretty cool. But then was the Apache your first choice? How did you end up on that airframe?

Can you tell us a little bit about that process? Yeah. So it used to be, when I went to flight school, your first day, you had like two weeks of, I can't even remember what it was called, but it was like welcome to the Army before you started flight school. And so the second or third day, the instructor said, I want you to bring your spouse to class this day because it's kind of welcome to the Army for them to. And so when they showed up, the instructor said to us that were service members, she said,

I'm going to give your spouse a test. and the results of that test will determine what aircraft you fly. And I was like, oh, this might be a little bit, a little bit sketchy. And so the captain, she gave my wife the test. And the questions were something like, is your spouse extremely detail-oriented? You know, they probably are going to fly Blackhawks. Do they always follow the rules? They're going to fly Chinooks.

And then down at the bottom was something of, have you ever walked in the house and found part of it on fire, they're going to fly Apaches. And my wife had actually walked into the house before and found just a little bit of it on fire. And so there's certainly a sense of the airframe attracts the person. And then like with most Army courses, there's an order of merit list over the nine or 10 months that you're in, Officer Basic course. And then there's also the needs of the army, which trumps anything. Like they let you fill out choices.

so you have, you can pretend like you actually have a chance of getting what you want, but the needs of the Army drive all. And so I was very fortunate that I desperately wanted Apaches. I scored pretty good and the Army needed Apache pilots at that time. And so it meshed up really good. And so once you get your wings and you graduate from OBC, then you go what's called to the transition. And the Apache then, I'm sure it still is now,

is the longest transition course because it's, the most difficult one to fly and you're employing a weapon system and you have to you have to do something I'll talk about in the middle minute but in a and we all dog on each other's airframes and so you can I'll try and tell you when I'm telling the truth and what I'm just making fun of Black Hawk pilots but the Black Hawk transition was six weeks like I think they they came in got some cupcakes said here's the airplane you took it around the traffic pattern and then you went home and the Apache um was quite a bit long And part of that is because you have to learn to fly using the system.

So prior to 9-11, we really didn't even fly with goggles that much. We did after 9-11 because the entire mission set of Apache's changed, and the guys on the ground, as you all know, used goggles. And so you wanted one pilot to be able to see what they were seeing. But the Apache is made to be flown with the forward-looking infrared. And so the way you do that is there's a little something called the HDU. called the HDU, this monocle that goes over your right eye, and wherever your head moves, there's a sensor that moves in correspondence with your head.

And so you use your right eye to see outside the helicopter through that sensor, and you use your left eye to see inside the helicopter with instruments. And so the way they teach you to do that, it's called Flying the Bag. And incidentally, the Navy got Top Gun, and we got this god-awful movie called Firebirds with Nicholas I remember it. Actually, yes, yes. That's the movie that shall not be named. But it actually depicts flying the bag pretty accurately in there.

And so they sit you in the back seat and they take garbage bags and tape them all over the window. So you can't see outside. And then your instructor pilot sits in the front seat to keep you from killing yourself. And so you're flying using that thing. So what would happen, though, inevitably, is you're flying in the traffic. pattern and you're coming into land and you're concentrating and you're pouring down sweat and you're trying to make yourself use the system and there would be a pin prick hole in one of the bags and as you land up for final the sun would stream through that hole and your left eye would take over and you're like

oh gosh i can't see anymore and so you're trying to force yourself to do that and so it's really hard i actually had to get extra hours in the bag and uh because i've i failed my first bag check ride and had to go back and get more hours because it's extremely difficult to train yourself to do it, but once you get to the point where you can do it, it becomes a lifesaver in combat because you can look through the floor of the helicopter. Because when you turn your head down, what you're actually using is the sensor on the nose of the helicopter. So you have a much better view. And it works amazingly to pass targets and stuff back and forth between the front and backseater and such. But it is a tough aircraft to manage. And it's a big airplane too.

And it's got multiple, multiple weapons systems. So it's hard to learn how to fly, but once you master it, it's hell on wheels and combat. Can you tell us a little bit about the Apache itself? It is a two-person system, right? Two-pilot system. Or can you tell us how it functions and what each person does and everything? Yeah, absolutely. So I started out flying Alpha Model Apaches, which was the first version.

And it was very much kind of like an analog helicopter. And so because of that, the two seats were very different, the controls in the two seats. the front seater and the backseater. And so both crew members are pilots, but typically what would happen is the junior, the less experienced non-pilot and command would sit in the front seat, and the pilot and command would sit in the back seat. And so the difference between the two stations

is that other than the pilot and command had a whole lot more room and he or she could stretch out and have a cup of coffee and stuff. And the front seat, you're kind of like this because they had this awesome piece of 1970, technology that jutted out of the dashboard and would try and kill you in a crash sequence is that the backseater could start the engines and the front cedar was the only thing there's a sensor bucket on the front of the helicopter that's called the tads the target acquisition and designation system and it's a forward infrared looking sensor it also has daytime tv and a direct view optic and it also has

the laser that you would use to designate targets with and so in traditional my first assignment out of flight school, it was 1999, was in Korea. And so that was very much still the old Russian-Soviet model where the armored hordes would come

pouring out of North Korea. And the Apache's job, much as it had been designed to do, was to kill tanks and to shoot up armored vehicles. And so you would do that from a hover five or six kilometers away, and you would engage with the Hellfire

missile that's specifically designed to kill tanks or you could use rockets or for lighter-skinned vehicles and such you could use the 30 millimeter and so you could divide those systems up between the pilot and the co-pilot now what happened after 9-11 is that number one the first helicopters from the 101st that went to support the guys during anaconda figured out that they didn't have power to hover number one and they they figure that out literally in the middle of the of the mission. Number two, you can ID the old Fleer, again, was 1970s technology. And so you could ID a boxy tank or a BMP or a BTR or something, but trying to find an individual guy with an AK-47 or an RPG was much, much harder. And so you had to be able to look, use your eyeball

more than you did the sensor. And you had to learn how to do diving fire, which was something the Apache wasn't imagined to do. And in fact, the Apache's pylons actually articulate like this so that it can sit at a hover and change to the trajectory that it launches rockets. So you can imagine, you know, the old Cold War, there was the fold of gap in Germany where Russian tanks were going to pour through. And the Apache was designed to kill those. And so literally overnight, they had to figure out how do you do diving fire? How do you shoot over the shoulder of infantrymen? How do you do? Because none of that was what Apaches were originally designed for. And so those folks literally had to do it. There's some really chilling tape of Operation Anaconda where the Apaches are, they're more senior pilots

are over the radio telling the more junior, this is how you do diving fire. Here's how you need to change your tactics, techniques, and procedures on the fly. And then they actually ended up landing and switching out crews and stuff to even the load. And so we had the advantage going to Afghanistan of knowing what it was going to be like of being able to do gunnery set up to mimic that and so it was I went in 2005 and so whatever four years later we'd already begun to adapt our tactics and stuff but the Apache itself the long bow is like a digital airplane and so each aircraft has its own IP address you can do data bursts between it the front and the backseat are much more similar and so oftentimes people will be dual seated

where they can fly from either one. I still, if I thought it was going to be a mission where we were going to get shot at, where it was an active, where it was a combat mission as opposed to just flying around Bogram doing some stuff, I would still fly from the back seat because the front seater,

I was the pilot in command. The front seater is the only one who could use that sensor, and I would still want he or she to be able to do that. And if you're, normally if you're getting shot at, the pilot and command is flying. And so my rationale is, if I'm sitting in the front seat

and I'm flying, then nobody's using that sensor. And so I still flew from the back a lot. But we had to, when we went into Afghanistan, we were the first longbows in Afghanistan. And the reason why that's significant is because it was the same engines, but the helicopter was about four or five thousand pounds heavier. And so what that meant is we didn't even have power during the summertime to hover in ground effect. And so you would literally, it's funny, when you went through flight school,

most of your instructor pilots were old Vietnam guys and they would tell you, you know, there I was in Vietnam and I had to choose between do I get more gas or more bullets because I don't have enough power for both and you're like, whatever, man. And then there I was in Afghanistan trying to decide should I get more gas or bullets. And so you would have to bounce along the ground to try and get through what's called effective transitional lift. So about 20 knots where the rotor system cleans up before you hit that HESCO barrier at the other end of the fog.

Wow. You'd have your front cedar. He or she would have their thumb on the store's jettison button because if you blew off the rocket pods, you'd have an extra two or three percent torque. And if you were going to go in, you could either cushion yourself or maybe clear that Hesco barrier. And so it was, uh, it was pretty squirrely to fly in the summertime for sure. This sounds like, uh, Clay Hupmocker told us the prank he used to play or they,

the pilots used to play sometimes of having the Rangers get out and push the helicopter like oh we need a jump start and they'd be rocking the whole thing back and forth and then hit hit the on button you're like okay guys we're good but it's kind of i mean what you're describing is like yeah man you needed like a ranger platoon to like push the apache like get you a good a good running start off the runway yeah yeah and especially in uh when you'd fly into in the summertime like bomb in i think that was about 9000 feet or something like that and so you could you'd fly the schnooks follow the schnox if you're doing escort mission and they all had power to spare and more than once I'd been led into a dead-end box canyon by a Chinook and you'd

turn the corner and he'd be like oh shoot and he'd just pop over it and I'd be like oh my gosh you're doing little circles trying to you've got little pedals down there yeah like exactly exactly pedal faster that's so that's wild man I didn't I didn't know you guys had that problem I always assumed the Apache like really had some ass on it to to get altitude and it's also interesting too because it seemed like it seems as though even though the electronics for the long bow like improved that it wasn't really that that the knowledge gained for the war the fact that afghanistan it was harder to get lift but you guys went up and wait with the same power it's like that doesn't sound like a lesson learned to me no and they so and they to their to the

army's credit they went back and re-engined the entire fleet within a year or two i believe after we did it. But so coming in, when you talk about combat power, so back then there was only one kind of hellfire. It was the hellfire designed to do armor piercing and hit the tank. So they hadn't come up with all the awesome, you know, different fragmentation warheads and stuff like that. And so because we were so power limited, before we even went to Afghanistan, we pulled all the radars off the helicopters. We pulled all the hellfire and hellfire racks off. We took as many of the black boxes that we didn't need off. And so to your point, there were certainly some benefits to the aircraft that we were sacrificing because we were power limited. Now, it's still

an amazing bird. And there are things like you could, you could between the two seats, you could do things where you could do a target hand. So if I'm looking at something in the back seat and I want you to see it, I can slave your sight to it and you'll get little queuing dots in your heads up display that'll tell you which direction to look. and then you'll get a little crosshairs. Well, you can do the same thing in the longbow model. One of the, as you all know, one of the most difficult or one of the most critical things to do when you're doing close combat attacks is to accurately know where the bad guys are and where the good guys are, right? And so what you'd had to do before is look for visual recognition symbols or something like that.

With the longbow, you could program in their grid and you would get a symbol in your heads up display that would show you as you. looked, here's where they are to try and, you know, verify that or here's where the bad guys are. So it was still a incredibly amazing killing machine, but we were a bit hamstrung for sure during our tour of duty. We have to do our ad real quick. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. I have a question about the close air support aspect of it.

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Yeah, absolutely. So go to hellofresh.com slash T-Mouse16 and use code T-Mouse16 for 16 free meals plus shipping. And I also want to give a shout out to Silent. other sponsor for tonight's podcast. Silent makes these Faraday bags in different sizes. Some of them you put a cell phone in, some of them bigger for a tablet, some of them for a laptop. Some of them are like waterproof. You can wear as a backpack or whatever day bag that you want to carry.

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So that's SLNT.com and the promo code is Teamhouse to get 10% off your water. And everybody should have a Faraday bag. I mean, you should put your computer, even your phone in it when you're in public spaces and you're not using it. Everything has vulnerabilities. Your iOS, your Apple, your Android, everything has vulnerabilities. Protect yourself. Get a silent Faraday bag. So the question is, the Apache was a tank killer.

The Apache and, you know, in the post-Cold War world, post-cold War world, you guys were there to knock out the big stuff. Yeah. How, like, what did you guys have to change when you're training with the aircraft you've talked about a little bit in order to do close air support? Was that something you had trained with, trained for when you initially, like, did your training on the aircraft? Was it an idea that was there? No, for the most part, no. And so that's a great question.

So back then, I don't think they do this anymore, but Apache squadrons or Apache units were, divided into squadrons, a cavalry squadron or an attack battalion. And so my first assignment out of flight school was in Korea. It was in a cavalry squadron, a scout platoon leader. And so this kind of stuff that you practice on was memorizing the order of March and understanding what your target is because the Apaches had a unique doctrinal mission in that you would go cross the flat or the forward line of troops. And your targets were the reinforcements, the second ever,

echelon forces, and you had to know, what does that look like? Is this part of the advanced guard main body? Is it because you had a very specific target set, but to your points, it was vehicles. What you were designed to do was kill tanks and the supporting vehicles. That's different for units like the 101st. So because the 101st, the Apaches there supported air assault missions in a traditional air assault mission, the Apaches are going to guard the Blackhawks or the Chinooks as they come in, they're going to clear the landing zone, and then once the guys are on the ground, they're going to provide supportive fires to the guys on the ground and transition roles. And so if you came from the 101st or that background, you probably had a little bit more

idea, but most of us didn't. Most of us hadn't come from that. And so to our leadership's credit, as once we realized we were going to Afghanistan and we got the lessons learned from the 101st, We set up gunneries that allowed us, number one, we always flew heavy. We always flew, you know, tried to fly power limited to mimic the conditions we knew we were going to face in Afghanistan. And then you started doing more diving fire and moving fire and stuff to, again, represent what it would be like to not be able to hover. but I think I don't remember ever doing live fires with guys on the ground until Afghanistan. And so it was a, you know, when you go to combat, obviously a lot of things changed for you. But I remember it being a significant pucker factor the first time you do a bump and you're about to shoot rockets and you see good guys and bad guys in your windshield at the same time and know that's for real.

And so what we did was that. And we had the other thing that's good about aviation is you typically have folks that move in and out from like the 160th or some of the other Aviation Special Mission units that bring a different level of expertise that can that and those guys and girls do that for customers all the time. That's their primary mission. And so there were some some tactics techniques and procedures that we already had that we could adapt and we call them close combat attacks and that CCAs and that might have been a hundred and first thing too. But what we're But what we would do is every time a new special operations entity came into theater, we would take them across the river in Bogram and shoot with them. And that both gave us confidence shooting over the shoulders of guys and gave them confidence in Apaches because it's very much different.

If you're an Air Force combat controller and you're talking to an F-15 or something that's going several hundred knots and can't, you know, doesn't have the same situation. awareness can't slow down. You have to be a lot more skilled at that job than the average person is to call in an Apache because we're so much slower. We have better situational awareness. We are Army folks. And so honestly, a lot of the learning that we did from them is like, hey, I know that you got taught to do it this way in JTAC school. For us, if you just tell us where you are and where the bad guys are and then let us go to work and we can adjust fire off

that, it worked really, really well. And so you would, you would, you know, whether it was a U.S. entity, whether it was, you know, British or anybody else, we would shoot for anybody. And that's what started to get us more proficient and then, frankly, them more confident calling us in. Because where I was, or during my rotation in Afghanistan, typically in the Army, you have the 160th who supports special operations customers. And they did, from a lift perspective, but when I was in Afghanistan where we were, it was much too high for their little birds to be able to fly, and all their daps were with other customers in Iraq. And so we as Apaches as general aviation got bumped into a lot.

There was a SEAL team there at Bogram that we supported. There would be other customers where you're working with folks that in general aviation are typically not your customer set. And so there was a lot of learning that kind of went on on both sides of that. that and it was like I said we turned across the river in in bogram there we shot there every day all the time and would shoot for customers so they could get used to it and we could get better at it but it was certainly a skill we had to learn so while you guys were like driving like an uparmored SUV compared to their like little you know meadas or Ferrari or not meadas Ferraris or whatever

um you guys also though had this suite of like targeting like you you were able to target much differently than they were right yeah it's yes and no and so the Taliban is really smart and um would figure out that in the daytime it was really hard for us to see them and so they would a lot of the time you know they'd shoot out us or do whatever and then grab hold of a tree or they and so it was it was really really hard if you didn't have guys on the ground specifically marking a target for you, right? And that's the other thing is that, you know, personally, I feel like a lot of Afghanistan I spent my tour trying to get guys to shoot at me so I would know they were bad guys, right? Because you would pop up over a hill and there's five dudes with AK-47s.

And you're like, are they shepherds? Are they Taliban? Are they, you know, they would say, well, everybody has an AK-47, but if they have an RPG, they're probably a bad guy. And you're like, is that an RPG? And so literally, we would, we had taken, there's this bucket at the back of the Apache that can either hold chaff or flares. And we would take flares in it, turn it upside down. And that was, again, probably more for our confidence than it was going to save our life.

Because we fly at such a low altitude. If somebody's shooting a man pad at you, it's by you before you even realize it's there or not. But we would often, like, fly over them and drop flares to see if they, they're going to shoot at us or not, but then decide if we could shoot at them. And so in the daytime, you really didn't use the sensor as much. What you would use it more for is nighttime because it's dark and the temperature differential would oftentimes work better and allow you to see bad guys better. And the other thing like what we were talking about before, the TTPs that we went to is the

front seater would often fly goggles as your flying system. And so because that frequency, you can see the ground guys lasers under goggles, but you can under the system. Right. And so the front seat or a lot of times would see where they're designating. He would shoot or she would shoot with 30 millimeter. And I'd watch where those shells would hit and then roll in and put rockets on top of that. And so you did it more there, but I would say subsequent generations of longbows, they got much bigger, better tad pictures.

And you can actually see the way engagements turned, where in later tours of duty in Afghanistan, they were basically like modified reapers, right? Because they could loiter up there. They had the optics to be able to see targets. They had hellfire missiles that were designed to produce shrapnel's and take out guys on the ground. And so again, the tactics changed for us because we're doing a lot of the overshoulder stuff and it's really hard to find them. We didn't use the sensor as much, especially in the daytime. I see. That makes sense. Yeah. Did you ever have an incident where somebody did try to wing an RPG or a man pad at you? Yeah, RPGs, for sure.

The man pads was always the, it was, so the, the biggest fear in Afghanistan is that we had given, you know, the Mujahideen, all these Stinger missiles. And so every time you went for a mission, there was some briefing of some warlord, some guy in the Hakkani network, somebody had a Stinger. Now the Afghans, I think, called everything Stingers, you know, whether it was actual Stinger or an S. and sometimes an RPG. I don't know it.

I know I got RPG shot at me. I don't think I ever had man pad shot at me, but that's a little bit of a bone of contention because when you, because if the man pad threat had been active in Afghanistan, it would have had to change significantly the way the war was fought there, right? Because so much moved by helicopter from Fobb.

And so you can actually look, if you look at the extortion shootdown, you look at some of the others, there are folks who, or there's a theory, I'm not saying that it's credible, that, you know, potentially that was not a man pat, or excuse me, an RPG, that it was a man pad, and then that was suppressed because they didn't want to have to change. Because if you look at Iraq, there was a period of time because the man pad threat was much more active, where Chinooks couldn't fly during the daytime at all. You know, they would only let them go at night, and because they had to adjust their tactics

because of the man-pad threat. And so in Afghanistan, I don't think it was as prevalent. They had also retrofitted the Chinooks and Blackhawks with a new system that had, through Doppler, it could detect a super, either a super fast-moving object, or there was another sensor that could detect supposedly the flash of it launching, and it would automatically kick out flares. Now, what I'll tell you is that the Afghan kids figured that out, and they could with a mirror flash that sensor to get flares kicking out.

And so the first, you know, quote unquote, combat mission I did, I was just escorting somebody. And I'm watching in the black hawk in front of me kicks out flares. And I look and I see what our flashes. And I think we're getting shot at. And I turned to roll over on it. And I'm in the process of selecting the rockets when my front cedar yells at and like, they're kids, they're kids.

And it was literally a bunch of kids flashing mirrors. but it looked like, you know, I hadn't been in combat before. I saw Flair shooting out, and I thought we were getting shot at it. And you're like, oh, my gosh. And that was just another day in Afghanistan. Yeah. Now, just for the viewers and listeners who might not get the different changes, a band pad is a man-portable air defense system, which is they hone in on the aircraft, right?

Where an RPG is just a shoulder-fired rocket of some sort that doesn't have any kind of targeting device. It's still a big threat to you guys, but it's not the same type of threat. Yeah. So if you're moving, if you're flying, if there's a bad guy here with an RPG and you're flying perpendicular to him at say 100 knots or something. For him to hit you, he had with an RPG, he's got to be able to lead you by a couple hundred meters and, you know, depending on the distances. It's really, really hard. Now, if you're flying towards him or away from him, especially towards him, that angle works much better. and if you're stationary, then it's much, much easier. And so we didn't lose any Apaches to ground fire.

We lost two Apaches to the environmental conditions where the pilots over flew it. But there were several Chinooks that were shot down in Afghanistan during my tour duty, including the 160th Chinook that was part of Operation Red Wings. And those were all brought down by RPGs. But most of the time, they were either brought down because the Chinook was hovering or because it was that Chinook was flying straight out and he had a really good, a much easier shot. And so it's still, they're still dangerous. Obviously, as you all know, that was the big wake-up call in Somalia during Black Hawk down, right?

Those were just RPGs. And up until then, the traditional thinking was you don't have to worry about them because they're unguided. And obviously that's not the case. Right. Now, is the Apache fairly, is it fairly armored? What kind of fire can you guys sustain? Not giving away classified information, but like are small arms fire a big threat to you guys?

So it's so not as much from the standpoint. You got to put the caveat on there because obviously any any lucky shot or anything can. There was a guy in the squatter next to me that had this gnarly scar on. his neck and he had during the Iraq, the second Iraq war where we tried to do the deep attack again and the Iraqis had gotten smart and turned off all the lights and then

turned them back on and started and I believe it was an AK-47 round that caught him just grace of God didn't kill him but caught him straight across the throat but for the most part the Apache is pretty heavily armored. The fuel cell is actually armor in itself in that it's a self-sealing tank

and jet fuel is really really hard to ignite and so that fuel blivet that you're sitting on will actually, it's self-sealing, and as rounds go through that, the fuel itself slows down, the progression of the rounds. And then there's Kevlar kind of wingtips and Kevlar seats and stuff like that. The helicopters, there's some incredible pictures, again, of that first deep attack in Iraq, where Apaches came home with holes in the blades and stuff like that. And so it's a pretty rugged airplane, and there are a lot of redundant systems and such in there.

It's not bulletproof. There was a friend of mine had guys under his command killed later by Dyshka that as they were flying by just hit the transmission right and took them out. And I had some folks I knew who were killed in Iraq with surface air missiles, man pads and stuff. So it's certainly not invulnerable, but it's a pretty good helicopter. Yeah. Do you want to talk about, because I think it's that, like you're somewhat involved or on the periphery of it, of the Operation Red Wings when that bird went down. Yeah. So in Afghanistan, there were basically three different types of missions for Apache pilots.

And so the first is ring route security. And as we were talking before, pretty much everything in Afghanistan or much of everything moved by helicopter. And so when the Blackhawks or Chinooks would transport people or equipment, you'd always have. Apaches with them that were escorting. I mean, that that mission was usually long and fairly boring for the most part because again the Taliban are pretty smart. They're not going to pick a fight with an Apache or a Black Hawk that has an Apache. And so it's long hours of flying and not really doing much. On the other extreme, you would have the direct action missions where you're, you know, a customer on the ground is going to go hit a compound. And so you're going to

to provide covering as they're flying in. You're going to escort them. You're going to clear the landing zone. And then you're going to transition to providing over the shoulder support for the folks on the ground as they're kicking indoors and doing what they do. And so that was those types of missions were usually planned weeks in advance. You do a lot of rehearsals. Most of them, I think almost all of the ones I was slotted on were canceled. It wasn't uncommon to, you know, you'd get through, you'd do the rehearsal.

something would change, the guy would be there, and you wouldn't do it. And so those were the opposite, usually very short in duration, but had a tendency to be very exciting. And then the middle of those, which was red wings for me, are the QRF or the quick reactionary force missions. And so the way that that worked is that you would do a shift usually from four in the morning, I think it was, till four in the afternoon or the reverse of that if you were on the night shift. And you would come in in the morning, you'd run the bird up. You'd get the brief from at the talk, the Tactical Operations Center for the day.

And they would tell you if there were any scheduled missions and those missions were usually, you know, some VIP escorts or things like that. Or maybe if there had been, if there was an ongoing fight, you'd say, hey, there's a tick, a troops in contact right now. You might get release authority for that. So be ready for it. And then you would go about your day with a walkie-talkie. and if the walkie-talkie went off, you had 30 minutes to be airborne. And so most of the time, like I said, those were either Medevac escorts or a VIP escort, but every now and then it would be a tick.

And it was part of our squadron was in Salerno, and those folks did a whole lot more on QRF than we did because we were the Bogram QRF. So to get release authority for the Apaches was hard because the powers that be were always weighing. if we let the Apaches go and something bad happens, what do we do, right? Where the folks in Salerno were much didn't have the flagpole there with them, were co-located with the customer, it was much easier for them to get release authority. And so for me on June 28, 2005, I knew that Red Wings was an operation that was getting planned. It was not one that I was slotted to be on.

And it was originally a conventional mission that the Marines were going to do, and for a bunch of different reasons, they ended up pulling in the seals who then that night, so June 27th, the four-man seal team was inserted. And so when I came on duty that morning, I remember the battle captain or whatever saying, hey, there was a seal team that was inserted last night. We've lost comms with them. There might be something going on today. Just kind of be ready.

And that wasn't all that much different from a lot of briefs during the day, right? not usually that intense where we've lost contact, but there were a lot of kind of just be ready, something might go on. And so a couple hours later, my radio went off. And the way it worked is that my front-seater, I flew with quite a bit, you kind of your battle crewed with another pilot a lot of the times. And he would run for the talk and get the update.

And I would jump in the back and get the engines run up and the bird ready to go. And so he came running back and jumped in the front seat and said, And it's the SEAL team. They're in contact. And we basically had a call sign, a radio frequency, and a last known grid. And that was about it. And so I took off with my wingman, who was my EXO, was in the front seat, and then the maintenance test pilot.

And we flew from Bogran down to Jolabad because there was, there were a pair of Blackhawks in Jolabad that had the Marine Infantry Battalion QRF loaded up. And so we were going to link up with them and then go to, literally just the last known grid that we had and see if we could raise these seals. And so as I was coming into land at Jalalabad, I remember seeing Chinook taken off. And I knew it was a 160th Chinook because it had that big old fuel boom on it. And they're the only ones that have those, the refueling probe. And so, you know, I remember thinking, I wonder where he's going.

And then I did the air mission brief, got ready. We took off towards that last known location. And so at the time, the Apaches, we didn't have SATCOM. And so there was no way to talk back to our higher headquarters and everything. It was literally just go there, see if you can raise the seals, and then start doing what Apaches are supposed to do. And so as we're flying to this, it's really, really high in the mountains. And weather's starting to come down a little bit. There's an A10 that's overhead that's trying to provide a little bit, a situational awareness that we don't have.

because we're so underpowered that it's taken a lot to be able to get to the altitude where that little grid coordinate was. And as I'm flying, traditionally what you would do, like I said, the black talks would stay in front of you until you'd hit what's called the release point, which was, I don't know, like maybe eight or nine kilometers, maybe more than that, away from the landing zone. you would pass them at that point. The Apaches would go to the landing zone first, do an LZ reconnaissance, and then call it either cherry or ice. Say the landing zers cold. You can come in. The landing zone's hot, and you're going to continue to work it. And so as I was trying to pass them, I had to call the Blackhawks and say, you've got to slow down because you're leaving me.

I'm so power limited. I can't maintain the airspeed. You got to slow down. And so as we did that, I saw two Chinooks come in and join the flight ahead of us. And I can't remember, like I said, it was a long time ago. And so I can't remember if we could talk to them directly or we had to talk to them through the A10 because the 160th operated with slightly different fills than we did. And so for your users, the fill is the portion that makes the radio secure the the crypto. Crypto, thank you.

And so you reload it every day. And so if you're not on the same crypto as the person, even if you're on the same frequency, you can't talk to them or it was close enough that it was kind of intermittent. And so I saw them and we either got from the A10s or got from them that they were the 160th Chinooks and they had the rest of that SEAL team as their quick reactionary force in there. And so I remember calling to either the Chinook or the A10 and saying, hey, you got to tell that Chinook to wait for me to clear the landing zone because I'm so power limited. I'm barely edging past the Black Hawk right now. And I remember the Chinook responding back saying, you know, negative, we're going to the LZ. You can clear it once you get here. And then the next thing I remember is the A10, either the A10 or one of the Blackhawks that was ahead of me

because I was trying to pass the Black Hawk at that time saying the MH is down, the MH is down, the MH is down. And so what had happened is the Chinook had come to a hover. The seals were about to fast rope and a Taliban hit him with the RPG. Chinook kind of tried to fly away and then ended up going down and tumbling down the side of the mountain. But from my perspective, the way it worked, I was just passing the Blackhawks as it happened. So they turned away from the landing zone, which turned them into my flight of two helicopters. And it was just grace of God that we didn't have a midair. It was kind of the starburst of helicopters flying everywhere.

And to make things a little more interesting, as the Chinook went into the ground, the A-10 turned and started firing white phosphorus rockets on either side of it. And when I talked to him later, saw the deep reef. In his mind, what he was trying to do is keep people off the crash site. But from my perspective, all as I could see was stuff burning everywhere and blowing up everywhere. And so for the first couple minutes, I couldn't. I had turned down one blind draw. My wingman had turned down another, and I couldn't even find him.

And so it took a while for us to link back together. And then when we turned inbound, all that I could see was everything on fire everywhere. And I remember arguing with the A10, I'm like, this can't be the crash site. Like there were at the wrong spot. And so he literally had to talk us onto the crash site where he was saying start turn, stop turn, start turn until we flew over. And there wasn't anything there that looked like a helicopter anymore. Just look like sheets of fire between what he had shot up, what the what the Chinook did.

And so we just did a whole bunch of low passes over and over again because we, and there were, at one point I had my, my wingman was an incredibly brave guy and would fly super low over the crash site. And I would fly above him with the thought processes. If he can draw fire, I can at least see where it's going and try and shoot back at it because we were definitely afraid of hitting an American, that the four seals were somewhere around there, there, that we would accidentally cause fracture side. And every time we got shot at,

during one of the points, it was so high that, like I told you before, if you're going 110 knots or 120 knots, it's really hard to hit a helicopter. We were barely doing 50 or 40 as we're coming to the top of this ridge line. And my front cedar yelled out, you know, we're taking fire. It's an RPG. and he had the gun slave to his eye. And so we turned to shoot. But what happens is the gun will only turn so far. And then it's limited so you don't accidentally hit the helicopter. And so we couldn't shoot.

And then when I came back around, we still couldn't figure out where it was coming from. And so it was awful. It was, you know, I'd spent my entire career training for that moment to come. You know, if there is a mission for the cavalry, it's that one. Your job is to come over to Hill to save the good guys. And we not only did we not save the good guys, but until the extortion shoot down years later, the most seals and the history of the seals were killed on that day. And it happened in my watch and I couldn't stop it. And so you, you know, not to trivialize it, but for somebody who isn't in the military, the closest analogy I could think of is that if you're a professional football player and you spend your intent,

entire career trying to get to the Super Bowl and you get to that moment and then you walk on the field and the first play of the game, you fumble and that's it. That's it. And that's what it felt like because when we, we flew over that crash site over and over again, trying to draw fire, trying to find survivors until we ran out of gas and had to leave. And the only thing I could think of is, is if anybody's still alive, they're watching us leave us on that mountain right now and there's nothing that we can do about it. And it was, it was awful. And it took me, and it took me, a long time to come to terms with that because it wasn't it wasn't how it wasn't how it was supposed to happen right right it wasn't the way that you trained for it to happen and it was and i couldn't stop it

and so yeah that that is that is my version of the the lone survivor story you uh you see yourself as everyone else does out there is somebody who can put their hands on the situation and take action and i mean that must be such a a feeling of like powerlessness at that moment yep It was, and when I met Marcus LaTrell once briefly, I met and got to be better friends with Mike Murphy, who was awarded, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. And I met his mom and dad and his brother. And his dad, his whole family is great. But his dad was a Vietnam era infantry platoon leader, Purple Heart guy. And so he knew what the deal was.

Like he knew, and they, he ended up inviting my wife and I to come. to the christening for the the the Michael Murphy ship when it was done but it was you know when I read Marcus and so I met Marcus once but never really talked to him or whatever and when I read his book in the part where he talks about watching the Apaches fly away it just gutted me and I was like that was exactly what I was afraid of like that dude sat on the mountain and watched us leave him and and and you know and and we couldn't stop it you know and we couldn't and so it was It was bad. It was a bad day. Did you guys have fuel up and they sent you back out there looking for people? I mean, what was the next? No, that's the worst part is that you came. So one of the first things you learn as a young cavalry officer is the fundamentals of reconnaissance.

And the fundamentals of the cavalry, the first one is to gain and maintain contact with the enemy, right? And so we were the only ones who knew what that crash site looked like. the A10 that was overhead had to break station and come back. So a new guy was on. We went back to Sadabad to refuel with the intention of going back there. And that was the first time we could talk with our higher headquarters because Asadabad had Satcom and they came back and said, no, you guys can't go back in. And you're like, what are you talking about?

Like, what are you, we're the only ones. And then like the weather's too bad. You can't go back in the mountains. And the weather was coming down. It was starting to cloud over. And we were kind of dodging clouds. we were trying to find that guy, but then that made it even worse. It's like, not only did I not stop it, not only did I not fire a single shot and anger,

but now you're telling me I got to go home. And that was how it ended for me. It was awful. Don, out of curiosity, because, you know, we talked about the Apache's initial mission. And we talked about the early challenges in Afghanistan, particularly because of the elevation and the helicopters lift and power capabilities. like were there up like in a car if you want more horsepower like there are all kinds of things you can do or you can drop a new engine in it like were there options that could have made the Apache more effective that either the Army or the Defense Department or defense industry that they didn't take that you feel they should have I mean sort of re-engineing the the fleet I don't I don't think so okay and the reason The reason why that's the case and the reason why your power limited is that the engine, what happens is that when you pull the collective up, you're increasing the amount of bite that the rotor blades take out of the air, which then corresponds to a need to increase power.

And the way that you get that power is that more fuel is dumped into the engine and it works harder. Well, the counterpart to that is there's something called the digital engine control unit that you don't have any control over, and its job is to keep the engine from burning up. And so the way it keeps the engine from burning up is it limits the amount of fuel that dumps into it. So what happens is you would ask for more power. The DECU wouldn't provide it because the engine will burn up. And so then the rotor blades would start to spool down because you're putting more of a load of. on the rotor blades than what you have power to. And so you have to limit the power to be able to do that.

And so in the Army's defense, I don't, we were the first ones there. And it was, and you kind of, you can look at the charts and understand what the performance theoretically is going to be and we knew it was going to be hard. I don't think we realized we were going to be that power limited. And it's kind of, it's this trifecta things that has to happen. You have to be heavy. You have to be high and you have to be hot. And so in Afghanistan, you're always high, you're always sort of heavy, but you didn't really notice it until the summertime when it got really hot.

And so it was kind of that that series of things that came together. So it wasn't a matter of just like sending experts to bore out the cylinders or do whatever. Like they would have to completely redesign it. It's, I mean, it's interesting that we've interviewed quite a few people who are involved in the, and in Red Wings. and every time you learn a little bit more. Yeah. Like your perspective was just a new thing. We've talked to 160th guys.

We've talked to some of the Rangers who roped in. Chris Miller with the CTPTs on the ground. We spoke to recently. Like every little, I mean, it really comes, you realize how complex, how complex it was and how many people were involved. And even like your story, your perspective lends new insight, at least to me personally, about how all that happened. Yeah.

It's wild. It's just wild to think about it. Now, was the Apache re-engineered or do you see that, do you feel like there's going to be, and I don't keep up with like the defense industry and technology, is there a success for the Apache on the horizon or is the Apache just redesigned to be better or how does that work? Yeah, so a little bit of both. So they re-engined the fleet and had a more powerful engine. that took away a lot of the power constraints.

They also, like I said, have a new tads that is much, much better that allows you to track multiple targets and then you can see much better. So the other thing we had to do because the technology was so old is that during the day, but it's more easy to see at night, you have this phenomenon called thermal crossover. And so what that means is that at night, things. cool at different rates. And so the way that thermal works is that the sensor is seeing the delta T or the difference in temperature between two different objects, right? So unless it's at absolute zero, everything has some amount of heat and the sensor can determine those. Well, overnight, after the

sun sets and things begin to cool, what you have is thermal crossover, which means that grass, if you look at the chart and say, here's what grass looks like and here's what concrete looks like, at some point they're going to cross and grass and concrete is going to look the same and you're not going to be able to tell the difference. And so what you could do with the older sensors is tune them and you're adjusting kind of like the gain and level as conditions are changed. But the Apache one was, again, was never meant for what we were using for. It was bent to be able to look at a tank from six kilometers away. And so when you were flying at night, you would often have to choose to adjust the site of do, want to see the helicopter I'm following or do I want to see the terrain and and so you had to

choose one of those two and so oftentimes what you'd have to do is dial it so that you could see the helicopter you're flying in formation with blacked out but you can't see the terrain and so you're dependent on that helicopter to to not crash because you're going to go into the ground if if they do because you're adjusting it just so you can fly formation and so since then with the advent of the new TADs and the new hellfires and such, it's much more effective. And they've now come out with the third generation of the Apache that's called the Echo Model or the Guardian. And so that one actually you can do from the front seat, you can actually fly some UAS systems. You can pass data differently. I think the engines have been upgraded again. And so it is for the foreseeable future, the Apache is still

going to be the gunship of choice, I think, and it's, and it's a great platform. But again, it went through a, like, like the American soldier did, too, right? Went through a dramatic shift post 9-11 of, you know, my friends that stayed in, the old crusty guys, when we were lieutenants, we learned what we were just talking about. Here is the Soviet threat. Here's what that looks like. And then for 20 years, the kids that came after us did nothing more than put two Apaches in the sky at the time and shoot over the heads for green berets and stuff. And so now they got to go back to that. And we learn how do you do a peer on peer or a near peer fight?

How to, and so you see the training centers, NTC and stuff having to reteach here. We know we're no longer just shooting over the shoulders. We're no longer just doing this counterinsurgency thing that we've done for the last 20 years. We got to learn how to fight China now, right? Or Russia or both at the same time. And so that is reflected. of the Apache as well is, hey, now we have to go back to learn how to kill tanks. Because the original doctrine, correct me if I'm wrong, was for Apaches to fly as a squadron

in a pure conflict, right? Yeah, that's right. So what makes the Army aviation different from the other branches, by branch, I mean the Marine Corps, the Air Force and stuff, is that aviation is its own separate branch in the Army. And so from an Army perspective for doctrine, they treated Apaches as if they were flying tanks. And so that's why you would learn how to do a movement to contact, how to do ozone reconnaissance, how to do all of those things, because you were a maneuver branch. Now, that changed, the Marines, for instance, their aviation is not its own branch. Like a cobra exists to do nothing

but provide support for Marines on the ground, right? That change for Army aviation out of necessity during Afghanistan and Iraq, but now it's going back to what it was originally intended to do. So after this deployment to Afghanistan, you get back, what was sort of like the transitional process of you leaving the military? I mean, was this already sort of like a decision you made or how did that come about? Yeah, I knew I wanted to stay in long enough to be a trooper, a company commander. The way it works for aviation is that you fly when you're a platoon leader and then you do a staff job and you don't fly. You fly when you're a trooper company commander. and then you got this six long year period where you're a major, where you're just doing staff work,

and maybe you're a battalion commander or squadron commander at the end and you fly again. And I had no desire to spend six years as a staff person on the whim that maybe someday I'd get to be a commander again. And so from my perspective, I'd done what I wanted to do. And so I got out right at the 10-year mark. When I came back from Afghanistan, I was stationed in Germany at the time. And so I went to most of us, like I said, in 2005, there was still the majority of the military didn't have combat experience yet. And so since we did, they took a lot of us who were troop commanders and sent us to the European version of NTC, which was Hoenfels. And so I went there.

My buddies were OCs. I got the sweet job of being the aviation planner because I knew I was going to get out and didn't want to take another aircraft transition and get another. add so on top of that. And so I did that for the last year and then got out. And my wife and I are high school sweetheart. Our family'd still live where we'd grown up. And so I got a great job in a great company, bought what was going to be our forever home, came out. And then it kind of hit me that I wasn't in the military anymore.

That would, I think a lot of folks who are veterans, what they don't, whether you've been to combat or not, what you don't understand when you're in the military is how much of who you are is defined by what you do and that what you do is noble, that it matters, that you're a part of something else. And when you leave that, trying to find it in the civilian world can be very, very difficult. And when you add the second part of that, that if you've gone through some trauma, if you've had a bad day, you have inadvertently cut yourself off from anyone who understands that and you've left them in the service or you've left them somewhere else. So not only are you trying to figure out like a sense of purpose and your identity and who you are,

but then you have all this stuff that you haven't tried to deal with yet that now you have to and you're trying to deal with it on your own. And it was a bad couple of years for me for that. And so that's another thing I tell veterans all the time is you don't understand what you bring to another veteran just because you served. And so if you, like what I equated to is if you got diagnosed with stage four cancer tomorrow, your wife might tell you you'll be fine. Your pastor might tell you he'll be fine. But who you really want to talk to is somebody else who's had stage four cancer, right? And so as a veteran, you know, for me, it took a long time to get past the survivor's guilt to get past what else I should have done to get past replaying that moment in time over and over again.

And so a friend of mine that I ended up working with for a while. I was a guy named Nate Self, and so he was the Ranger QRF leader for during Tocker Gar and Roberts Ridge. He was the Ranger QRF leader whose helicopter was shot down. A couple of his guys were killed, and he secured the top of that mountain, said, okay, and I've gotten rid of the Taliban, send another helicopter before these guys die. and, you know, somebody probably a thousand miles away said, no, you got to wait until it's dark. And so he had to watch those guys die and there was nothing he could do to stop it. And so he wrote a book about it called Two Wars about that and then the PTSD stuff.

And it was, you know, I finally talked to him about it and told him what I was dealing with. And he looked at me and he said, it wasn't your fault. And that wasn't anything anybody hadn't told me before, but it meant something coming from him because he had been there. and he had done it. And so that's what I tell folks all the time is, number one, be prepared that you will need something besides probably your day job to regain that sense of purpose, and whether it's in church,

whether it's a charitable thing, whether it's something that you're going to have to give yourself to that feels as noble as that thing you did before or else you're just going to keep searching for that. And number two, stay connected with those fellow veterans. Like my front cedar, every June 28th, we text each other or we call or we do something. But for years, both of us were struggling with the same thing and neither of us reached out to the other person, right?

Because you left all that behind because it wasn't part of your life because you didn't need that. And that's what I try to get people to understand. Like there's power in you, just your experience in being a veteran by lending that to another veteran. Donna, I'll tell you, and I say this not to like celebrate trauma or make it sounds like it's romantic because it's not. But I'll tell you, like, I don't trust people who have never had a bad day. Like that person, that person who was like an all-star athlete, a honor grad in every class, straight A's. Every time the teacher asked a question, their hands up, they know the answer. Like, I feel like people like that, like you don't know who you really.

are until you had a bad day. You've had to look in the mirror and confront that, you know? And I think those are character building experiences. Yeah. Yeah. It's also challenging, I think, with veterans. You know, like, there's all this talk about

they try to be tough, but really I think it's that most, for a lot of veterans, they know somebody who's had it worse. Yes. And so it's not about them being macho, you know, it's not about them like being in denial is just I know somebody who's had it worse yeah why why should

I complain when all these other guys are out here how can I you know I mean I I still have both my legs I know guys who don't so why should I complain um you know um you know I never had to hold anybody in my arms while they were dying why should I complain and so so I think that sometimes like you say we just need to find those people that we have commonality with who go hey look it's not your fault or it's okay that it's okay that you feel this way like you're not taking anything away from anybody else by you having needs too yeah no i agree with that a thousand percent i remember um like i said it was kind of that three year period and and uh to fast forward to that after that i went in the fbi for a while and then after that um

I worked for until I got to the point where I was writing full time, I worked for a series of companies that made technology for the special operations community, the intelligence community. And for me, that was a way to still find purpose because the people I cared about, I was giving them something that was going to save their lives. Like I have a great friend of mine who works for Procter & Gamble and he sells diapers. And I have three kids. Like I needed a lot of diapers, but from a sense of purpose and. makes you get up in the morning. I needed to do something that was different than selling diapers. And I found it by staying connected to the people I cared about and who ultimately, you know, became characters in my book. But the second part that you're talking about, there were many times during that three-year period where my wife's like, you need to talk to somebody. Like you're not what you're doing. And I had such tremendous guilt in that, number one, I got away Scott free and all of these people died. And number two,

most of those seals I'd only met some of them once or twice I didn't know them and I felt like I shouldn't know them like it should mean something more to me like it's at some point when you're in that you know dark and twisted place you're like I almost wish I had this horrific scar that I had to carry around right because then it would mean something and I'd have to atone for that every day that I'm still here and they're not right and it's and it and but every time she'd say that I'd say I'm still alive like you're not a witness. why do I need to talk to somebody you know what I mean like you can't even look at me and realize I've gone through any of that I'm fine and it's I think it's a hundred percent what you said

because you you do and that's part of the selfless service thing right like you're when you look around and see you know your brothers or sisters hurting what your inclination is to pick up their slack I'm going to carry their right for I'm going to do and so like I don't need that help save that help for somebody else you know I think that's 100% right yeah I So was that sort of why you made the jump into the FBI? It was like, I'm not a soldier anymore. I don't know who I am. I don't have that sense of purpose.

Yes, absolutely. I worked for a great company. But I remember at one point, it terrified me that someday, so I'd spent 10 years in the Army doing something I was intensely proud of. You know, in a year and a half before that, I was chasing bad guys across Afghanistan. And now I'm just a dude sitting in a cubicle. Right. And one day, I will spend.

more time, I will have spent more time sitting in a cubicle than I was an Apache pilot. And then who would I even be? I'd just be another schmuck sitting in a cubicle. Right. And it was just, you know, that terrified me. It terrified me that, you know, I was sitting in this row of cubicles and five rows over. I graduated from high school with that guy's daughter. And so I'm like, in 20 years, I could move from this one. And it wasn't the company like it was me. Like, I just needed something that was, that was, I felt like was more important. than that. And so the FBI at the time was heavily recruiting folks from the military and people that had combat experience. And so I went from that back to a job where I was a human agent and was

on the SWAT team and was doing. And so then you have this sense of purpose again. Then you're like, okay, what I'm doing matters. What I'm doing is noble, what I'm doing. And so you're finding a way to scratch that itch. And for me, the FBI wasn't the choice, but or exactly. the right choice but then once I got out and number one I was working for the customers I cared about and number two the majority of my co-workers were like me they were people who had been in the military that had that experience and for me that was the sweet spot and that's how it is when I'm a writer is that I get the books I write about are the people I know who could be my character is a guy named Matt Drake who was a former ranger and is a current case officer for

the defense intelligence agency and I had I had a interviewer asked me once she's like are you Matt Drake and I said you know I am absolutely not Matt Drake but I have stood in the room with men who could be and so when you when you know people like that and you get to tell their stories that's incredibly satisfying to me you know for without sanction the reason why he's a ranger and the reason why there are so many seal jokes in my book is because two of my best friends were at Tarkar one Brandon Kates was Nate's sister platoon later Greg Glass was the sawgunner in his platoon.

And so, you know, you look at the eyes, you look at life through their eyes, and you, one of my other great friends that serves as my subject matter expert that I wrote with, he was in Delta Force for most of his career, retired as a sergeant major. And his first gig in Delta Force was Gothic Serpent, was Black Hawk down. And he told me, you know, I knew about the Ranger Creed. I wasn't a Ranger, but I certainly knew the, you know, the paragraphs of the Ranger Creed and stuff. But to hear him explain it, he said, you know, in that moment, after the Blackhawks were shot down, he said, we knew those, the crew members inside were dead. And we're still on the crash sites, recovering those guys as were under fire, even though

we know they're dead. And for a civilian or somebody from me that's not part of that community, you'd say, why would you do that? Why would you risk the living for the dead? Well, the reason they did that is because they swore a blood oath to each other, it said, never will I leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy? And that's how it played out. I'm like, by God, I got to tell that story. And so that's part of what drives. That's why my character is, you know, a former ranger. And that's why without sanction deals with my character trying to figure out he had an asset meet go wrong in Syria, whereas asset was killed. And his

family was killed and it's him dealing with the same things that I did but I can tell his story because I know men who could be and I'm like if I if I'm blessed enough to have friends like that and I can write a book that maybe people want to read then by God I'm going to tell their stories super cool that's amazing so um yeah again just to backtrack a little bit before we get to your to your writing career I want to talk about that too but what uh what were you doing when you were in the FBI when you were a special agent yeah so when you leave Quantico, you're tracked one of five career paths, and it can be intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, cyber, or criminal. And so I left Quantico, tracked as a counterintelligence agency

agent. But when I got to Dallas, I was moved onto what's called the FIG or the Field Intelligence Group. And so I was basically a human agent. And so my job was to run and recruit what in law enforcement we call sources, what in the intelligence community call assets. And so it's kind of the equivalent of being a case officer, but you're doing it domestically. And so when you, um, running and recruiting a source or an asset is sometimes a different skill set than being a good case officer and building, or excuse me, a good case agent where you're investigating and creating a case, you're building a thing. And oftentimes either those two skills don't coincide or if I'm a case agent, I have this really big case. I know I need a source in there somewhere, but I don't have the bandwidth to be able

to recruit them. And so if you were on the fig, you could either recruit sources to answer national intelligence questions or you, as you started to get a reputation, if you were good at it, other agents would come to you and say, hey, I'm working this case. It's a counterterrorism case. I need somebody on the inside. Here are the people I know. Could you recruit the source for me and run them? And so it was a blast. Like I went from sitting in a cubicle to feel like I was in one of my spy novels. And it was a very, it was a very fun thing to do. It was prior to 9-11, the FBI was predominantly focused on criminal investigations.

And so they ran their sources, much like a traditional cop would be like, hey, I'm going to roll you up. You did this thing. Now you're either going to work for me or go to jail, right? Which works good with criminals. It doesn't work so good when you're trying to find somebody who maybe hasn't done anything wrong but has access to information. And so the FBI really had to take a step back and have people, other folks, other agencies from the intelligence community come in and say, this is how you do what's called rapport-based recruiting, which means I need you to work for me. And so here is how, you know, CIA case officers do it.

And so you had to get, and so the FBI had to kind of relearn that. And I was lucky enough to be in the post-9-11 things where you did get to learn it. Very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because normally you think of FBI as like or law enforcement in general, like their sources are snitches, right? Like you say, they've already committed a crime and you're rolling them.

Yeah. But to actually recruit sources is a very interesting direction for them to go. Yeah. Absolutely. And if you're in it's, and to be fair, you know, there are still, there were still criminal things that were much more focused than that. But if you're working intelligence or counterintelligence or counterterrorism or you're working foreign intelligence stuff, you're doing some of the same things that a CIA case officer would do overseas, but you're doing it here domestically with a different set of people. And so it was, you know, the training and stuff is fantastic. It would focus much more on the psychological aspects of it is you would bring in, you know, you would practice, doing pitches. A lot of times you would go to different training and they would have role

players and stuff so you could do it. And so it was, I mean, it was a lot of fun. And it was much more, like I said, kind of focused on how do you do this without holding something over their head and saying, you're going to work for me or else you're going to go to jail thing. So I got to do that. And then I got to be a part of the, so the FBI offices, the large ones, all have their own SWAT teams. And so if you're in a really big one like Washington, field office maybe or New York or something. They have their own SWAT team and that's their full-time job. For the smaller offices, like I was in Dallas, you have a SWAT team and there's

the senior team leader. It's his or her full-time job, but the rest of the agents, it's an additional duty. And so it's a ton of fun. You're doing high-risk warrants or things, you know, a whole bunch of different stuff. And so those two things together were a ton of fun. Did you work any like cases that have been prosecuted now that you're allowed to talk about? No, and so the, what I was doing as a, as an, as a human person for the most part, a lot of it didn't have, let's figure out how to say this. A lot of it.

And state that leads to an arrest. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So, and that's unusual that the FBI is still at its, and it's one of the reasons why. their mindset is still very different from the CIA because, you know, when I do author events, two of my friends are former. So David McCluskey wrote a fantastic book called Damascus Station.

He was a he's a CIA officer. And then Taylor Moore, his first book is called Downrange. He was a CIA officer. And he said, you know, when we introduce ourselves, they say, look, a CIA is officer. Our job is to steal secrets. That's what we do. Our job is to lie to do whatever we need to in order to steal secrets. an FBI agent's job, even though I was a little bit of an anomaly, is still at the end of the day, everything you're doing, you're thinking could end up at court at some time, right? You're building a case. And so the last thing you want, or as you're doing things, you're always thinking, what is, how is this going to play out if a defense attorney is cross-examining you and saying, you know, and that's one of the reasons why the FBI, the CIA, it's very easy for them to pay their assets. The FBI is very hard because the

first question any defense attorney is always going to ask is, were you paid for this testimony, right? Right. Where if the CIA never wants anything to end up in court and their job is just to steal secrets, right? So it's, there's overlap because they're both in the intelligence community, but it's very different organizations,

very different missions. Yeah. I mean, how, how hard was that for the FBI to, like, adapt to the case offs or like, you know,

the training at the farm? Yeah. just because you really do have to follow the laws within the United States, especially when dealing with U.S. citizens. Yeah, and it's different, and there are different. So obviously the CIA case officers work overseas, the FBI. For the most part, what works, KONIS, there are FBI positions that are called legal acts that work overseas that are kind of advisors and stuff like that.

And so it is very different because here in the states, you know, the Constitution protects American citizens. And so there are there things that the CIA, the folks that they work overseas are, you know, for the most part, probably not American citizens, don't, aren't protected by the Constitution and things. And so it was a change in mindset. And I don't want, like I said, I don't want to give the impression that the, you know, the FBI morphed into the CIA or an organization like that. They certainly didn't. But they had to adjust, um, certainly the way in which they worked potentially like

counterterrorism takes or counterintelligence things when it could be as opposed to saying hey here's a case that we're going to try and wrap up in X amount of times to feel this is hey this is maybe as a source is just

and I can't remember the name right like domain intelligence and stuff right I'm going to just figure this thing out which is much more what the CIA would do overseas potentially that the FBI is not now doing because I need to understand more about this community or I need it. And so it is, it's very, very different. But as the, as an FBI agent, you are unequivocally, you know, swearing your allegiance to the

constitution that you're, that you're working in the United States, that you're working for the most part with, you know, even if you're investigating violations and stuff like that, they're American citizens that have rights that are completely different than somebody overseas. that the CIA is working. Right. Yeah. I mean, we've talked about the same thing

with the hostage rescue team in the sense of, they may have trained with like Delta and Dev Group and things like that, but their law enforcement officers, they cannot, that's right.

They can't use the same. You need a warrant. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely right. And that's the reason why that the Delta force is not.

So if you look at some other nations that don't have protections against possible. comitatis, their version of Delta Force can also be their national response like hostage rescue team. We can't do that in the United States, right? Delta Force can't respond to a hostage situation somewhere, which is why the HRT was created because of Pasi comitatis, because of the divisions, the clear division between law enforcement and military in the United States. Was the FBI still trying to, obviously the Constitution is clear and what the laws are clear,

But was the FBI like trying to figure out how to adapt this This this this this type of strategy the intelligence the overall intelligence angle with like I think yeah it going from like investigating criminal networks like the mafia Yeah, the idea is like you're going to do an investigation and slap handcuffs on somebody to what it sounds like they had you doing which is like Yeah sort of long term intelligence surveillance sort of thing. watching some recruitment. Yeah. Are they up to no good? Are they plotting?

Like spotting assessing recruiting, right? Yeah, it was, and again, I can't, you know, I wasn't part of the FBI prior to 9-11. And so I can't tell you exactly how it went down and what they did. But it was, you know, if you, a great book is called The Looming Tower, which goes through kind of the, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism from the Muslim Brotherhood all the way through 9-11. And so you can see the FBI plays a large role in that book. And so you can see, you know, this is what, in fact, one of the, and his name escapes me right now. But one of the FBI special agents that beat his fist on the desk and said, Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda, actually got out of the FBI and then was killed during the 9-11 bombings because he was working security for one of the, you know, the firms in the trade towers or something like that. And so that's kind of part of the theme of looming tower.

But you can see how the FBI somewhat had to adjust what they did from a TTP's perspective, but then also had to, I don't know whether there were the same five focus areas where you had agents who were tracked specifically counterterrorism or in that, you know, each one. Right now, like every single FBI office has all of those specialties, has agents working counterterrorism, counterintelligence. And that is, I think, a large part driven by 9-11 and kind of the aftershocks from that for sure. So, I mean, it sounds like you were doing some really interesting stuff in the FBI, but I mean, ultimately you decided you didn't really want to spend a whole career there either. Yeah. So that's the, I was only in the FBI for a couple years. And the, um, so I was having a great time as a human agent. And then after, I don't know how.

long year and a half or something I got called into the so the way the FBI office works is there's the SAC who is the special agent in charge and then they're called what's called ASACs or assistant special agents in charge who are kind of his or her right hand men that that manage a portfolio so you have you may have an ASAC that manages criminal an ASAC that manages counterintelligence and so my ASAC called me in once and said hey or had called me in at that point and said hey you're doing a great job and there is and I can't remember the acronym is but one of the things that they measure is is your work being distributed beyond the FBI like is it going to the greater intelligence community and if it does you hit stats kind of points for that and the office looks good and it does

so one of the difference between a CIA case officer and an FBI special agent is a case officer when they're running a asset they write their own cables and they choose to disseminate them right So with an FBI agent, what happens is you come back and you write the source report and then an intelligence analyst will go over that and say, did it, is it actually releasable? You know, did you answer the question? So there's always some back and forth between the agent and the analyst trying to do that. But I had been fortunate enough to have several of mine be released and it looked good for the for the office and stuff like that. And so he calls me in and he's like, you're doing a great job, but new agents aren't supposed to be on this squad. I was older.

I went in the FBI when I was 36, and so you're usually, or not usually, you have to be 37 or younger because mandatory retirement is 57 and you have to have 20 years in. And so most of my peers were in their mid-20s or maybe late 20s. And so some of it, because I was older and some of the other things, I went to this squad, they don't typically send new agents to. And he said, you know, you've done a great job at this human squad, but you're a new agent. you need to go to an investigative squad because you haven't done that yet. And I said, okay, great, I'm track counterintelligence. Am I going to the counterintelligence squad? And he's like, nope, you're going to the public corruption squad.

And so I went from like going out and meeting people and doing things that should be in Tom Clancy movies to sitting in a cubicle again. And here's like your 30,000 emails about these public officials that you're not. The director of the public waterworks is up to no good. Yes, exactly. And I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't want to minimize the work they did. There's, it's one of the things, um, that sets the FBI apart from a lot or sets America apart and the FBI apart from a lot of other things is that we're supposed to, uh, investigate public corruption, right?

We're supposed to weed that out. That's part of the job. But it was not what I came in the FBI for. And so I was not super happy doing that was. felt like I was sitting in a cubicle, wearing a suit again, not doing what I'd come there to do and was kind of having a little bit of a come-to-Jesus moment where I felt like I was back at that other company once again sitting in a cubicle. And providentially, that guy I mentioned before, Nate's self, had formed this company with a bunch of other veterans that were doing work for

Socom and folks like that. And he reached out to me. We'd stayed friends and said, hey, why don't you come do this with us? And so I did. I don't know if I'd stayed on that squad, maybe I'd still be an agent. If I hadn't heard from Nate, maybe I still be. But I think, you know, when I look back at my life, there are a lot of things that I think are providence. Where you look back and you say, hey, this is where I think I can see God's fingerprints. Or I can see things that because I made choices that were a little differently, it worked out for me. And so I wouldn't, I certainly wouldn't have been able to back then say, hey, you're going to go to the FBI for this amount of time.

go to this other thing, but I certainly wouldn't be able to write the books I'd written right now, were it not for that career path that I followed, for sure. Out of curiosity, you said that when you went to the FBI, like, there was this push to hire veterans. Yeah. When you were in the FBI, was there any sort of, like, did the veterans mesh well with the FBI culture at large? Or was, because the FBI, like, they are a lot of very smart people.

A lot of advanced degrees. Was there at all any kind of like cultural sort of friction? I wouldn't say so. Like if you looked at my FBI Academy class, there was what stereotypically what you would think of. There was a fair amount of accountants and lawyers and stuff. But there were also a bunch of us who were veterans. There were folks there who had been school teachers before. There were folks there.

And so it is, I found the culture and stuff to be very reflective of the military from the sense of purpose and things. And so I think it's a, I think it's a good fit for veterans. I think I had a lot of my friends that ended up going into the FBI after they got out of the service. And so I wouldn't, I wouldn't say so. I think it was a pretty good one. And what the FBI was looking for was both for veterans and then HRT was looking to establish kind of a pipeline of folks who had. you know, special operations experience or whatever that could then come and assess potentially for HART. And then H.R.T has its own FBI Air Force, if you will, kind of their version of the 160th.

That is FBI special agents. And so that's what they were looking for for me originally is to, hey, come do your time as an FBI agent and then come assess for our FBI Air Force. But once I had spent time in Quantico and then moved to Texas and I'm like I am never going back to D.C. again. And so much to the chagrin of my recruiter, I did not come back and assess for the FBI's aviation assets. So you went to this new company and worked there. And did you have to move? What was, what was life like for you when that happened? No. So, oh yeah, I did. So I was, I was an FBI agent in Dallas. And then that company was a little one in its tiny town called Salado, Texas. It's like midway between, I guess more than midway, closer to like Waco, like just south of Waco and the Temple thing.

And so we moved to Round Rock where we've been for like the last 12 years, which is, you know, about 15 miles, something like that north of Austin. So, yeah, been there ever since. And what did you, like, what did you think going from the FBI where initially you had purpose and then going to the public corruption, you didn't, and then you go into a completely civilian in debt, well, it's not completely because you're serving the former clients in a way. I'm serving the former client and all of my coworkers were veterans, all of them. And so the majority of them came from the special operations community. Some were from the intelligence community.

we had a CIA paramilitary officer that was on staff. And so it was a culture that was very, very familiar to me. And the customers were it's one thing to work at a defense contractor where you're making a widget that goes in an Abrams tank or something, right? And we need widgets that go in Abrams tanks. And you want them to function correctly. It's completely different. One of the products we work on was called the M-TAS,

which was this 120 millimeter mortar self-laying mortar system that could fire 360 degrees that was developed for special operations community in response to the tragedy that was, oh man, what was the cop in, cop Keating in Afghanistan, right? And so it's much more our folks would help companies who wanted to develop that technology. we would be the voice of the customer for them. And then we would take it and do the training for the end users. And a lot of times we would deploy with it to Iraq or Afghanistan or something and train folks. And so the sense of purpose was much, much greater because you're giving them something that's going to save their lives.

And oftentimes my coworkers, I didn't, would go to Iraq or Afghanistan with them and train them. And so you know if you do your job right, there's a very linear connection. to the end user that you're going to help allow them to do their jobs, right? And so that was a tremendous amount of satisfaction for me for sure. And it's gone all the way to my last company before I worked, before I got to write full time. We make uniforms and hide sites and stuff that mask both your visual and your thermal signature.

And so it's like, again, like I'm giving our warfighter something that are going to, it's going to bring them home. And you get to go. That's where I get, you know, the majority of my stories and stuff that I use in here is you go to a team room, you listen to their problems, you give them something to use. And then you listen to them talk, right? And you can, and the stuff that you hear again, it goes back to, you know, I'm not Matt Drake, but I know men who could be him.

And that was very rewarding. So talk to us a little bit about that, about, you know, where did writing come in? When did you start writing? When did you have this idea of like maybe I want to be an author? Because it sounds like there was a process leading into becoming a professional. Yeah. So I always grew up and growing up, I knew I wanted to tell stories. Like even as a kid, you know, I'm a kid of the 80s.

And so I remember watching this masterpiece of cinema called the A team like every Tuesday night. And the problem with the A team is by about the third episode, you knew exactly what was going to happen by the numbers. you're like this is when BA is going to weld something to something and put on armor plating and stuff. And I remember, you know, loving that stuff, but then thinking at the time, wouldn't it have been cool if they would have done this or wouldn't it have been neat if the story had gone a different way? And so even then, I knew that I was a storyteller, but I didn't have the tools yet to be able to tell the stories I wanted to. And so my kind of fast forward to my senior year of high school, I had an incredible English teacher who took me aside at one point.

And she said, you could actually be a writer. Like, you have what it takes to do this. And so I listened to her and went to college and majored in electrical engineering as all good writers do. And so at the time, though, I was still working. I probably started working on my first book in high school and really didn't know how to do it. And so after right before September 11th, I decided this is it. I'm going to get serious about writing. And so I took some classes that brought the tools in my toolkit up more.

up to par with the stories that I wanted to be able to tell using those tools. And so I wrote, you know, fast forward. I wrote three books over the course of 17 years that nobody cared about before I wrote my fourth book without sanction that sold in a two book deal that then led for me to be able to write for Tom Clancy, that it's now led for me to be able to take over Mitch Rapp next year, the Vince Flynn books. And so all of that to say, I was, I was always writing in on the spare time when I was in Afghanistan and we get done with a mission and everybody else would go back and play Xbox,

I'd write. I'd work on my book because I knew there were stories that I wanted to tell. So tell us about Drake. I mean, your first protagonist, your first book, you mentioned that, you know, he's very much a character inspired by the people that you were around. Yeah. Yeah. So I know, so after my first three books didn't sell, I had kind of a come to Jesus moment.

know, like, what, what am I not doing right? Like, what is it about my books that, that aren't there? And so I had, you know, and I heard an editor say, is now my editor say that when you write genre fiction, commercial fiction, what you have to do is something that's the same but different. So Brad Taylor is a good friend of mine. He was a troop and squadron commander in Delta force. He writes the Pike Logan series, incredible books. Like Brad's books and my books should be shelved in the same area because we both write military fiction or espionage fiction, but I'm never going to write a better Brad Taylor book than Brad does. And so what I have to do is figure out what am I going to do that's the same but different. So with my first book,

I did three things. So the first thing I did was one of the guys who's been a huge influence on my writing is Nelson DeMille. And in fact, he was kind enough to blurb forgotten war for me. Nelson was a Vietnam era, a platoon leader, decorated guy from Vietnam, and he's written a lot of books, but one of his, my favorite ones, he has a protagonist called John Corey that is this

sarcastic, like New York police detective, and I remember reading his first book, and he was so funny, I remember telling my wife, like, I would read about that guy filling his car full of gas, because he's so funny and it's so fun to be with. But when I looked at this genre,

there wasn't much of that. But the people I knew who could be Matt, most often they had kind of a gallows humor because that's what you use to deal with the incredible, crazy situation that you find yourself in. And so I told my wife, I was like, well, I think I could write that. And she's like, you're not that funny. And I'm like, I know, but you know, give me enough time to work on the jokes, I think I could be. And so that was the first thing I did. The second thing I did is when I looked in the genre, there were a lot of special forces guys running around there were a lot of assassins there were a lot of it but I didn't see a lot of people who were actually case officers and who did what I did in the

FBI but did it for another government organization and I didn't see anybody who was a case officer for the DIA and DIA is a really interesting organization because it has a very similar mission set to CIA but a different reporting structure and so there's all this built in conflict where they're constantly fighting turf wars and stuff and I said well that's another the thing I could do. And the third thing is kind of going back to that story I told about my friend that was the Delta Force guy and what it actually means, like what the men who could be my character, how do they see the world? How do they, how do they look at life? What's important to him? You know, what used to crack me up is my two friends from the Ranger Regiment would still recite

the Ranger Creed to themselves 15 years after they got out of the regiment when things were really tough or when they were trying and I'm like what are you doing and but then when you understand why that means so much to them and how it governed their life I thought man there's something that I could write there there's there's kind of a window I could open if you're not lucky enough to know somebody like that well man I do and maybe I could give you a window into that person and then the final thing I did I have a friend of mine Nick Petrie who writes a great series called the drifter And he said, you know, in a really good book, what's happening is an author is trying to answer a question for themselves in the pages. And for me, without sanction, was the first one where I was willing to wrestle with the things that kept me up at night.

You know, what do you do when you train for something your entire life and it goes sideways and you've got to pick up the pieces? You know, what do you do when, you know, the thing you devoted yourself to, you know, all the stuff we talk. talked about. And so I made my character deal with that. And so I think all of that came together kind of turned the switch. And that's like I said, that's what you see in without sanction. Like it's the fourth, or excuse me, in, in Forgotten War that just came out. It's the fourth book in that series, but it takes place during the fall in Afghanistan because I couldn't figure out what I was going to do during the fall of Afghanistan. And all of the veterans that I was talking to at that time, like I said, all had some version of the question of was it

worth and the in the crazy thing is all of that sits on Afghanistan so if you knock that stone out then I was listening to people who had served in Iraq say well was that worth it was the what you know it's like all that house of cards was now trembling and I didn't have the answer to that and so I thought you know if I'm brave enough my job as a writer is to tell a story that keeps you turning pages long after you want to period you know it's not to preach at you it's not to do anything else but readers resonate with veracity when they look into a book and say, man, I never served in Afghanistan or Iraq, but I've had something go wrong. I've got scars. I've got a bad day. Like, I resonate with the veracity of that book. And the, and the only way I think

that happens is if you as the writer are brave enough to put those things in there. I was about to say, Don, I mean, it takes some balls actually to tackle that subject, particularly in genre fiction, where the expectation is as a protagonist that's six foot three with green eyes, former Navy seal, but you're willing to deal with some of those opaque. questions that don't necessarily have an answer. But that also makes your book very topical and very meaningful. Yeah. And that's real life, right? And it's real life that you, that you don't know the answer to that. That you're trying to figure that out. And that's, and I think, you know, I think in some ways you do two things. You read to escape and to have a really good story,

but you also, like, I love the Avengers. My kids love it, whatever. But you don't, you don't watch the Avengers and say, that could be me, right? You understand that that reality is something different than what yours is. But man, if you write a great book, you don't have to be a green bray or a ranger, but you can say, man, I get it. Like, I get it for, you know, I get it watching something that you've dedicated 20 years of your life to and lost friends crumble. Like, I get that.

And I get that, you know, that how do you, How do you find purpose after that? How do you do? And so that's what I try and do is kind of walk along. The other thing I do is that my protagonist is married and he loves his wife. And that seems like a small thing. But the people I know who did this time and time again usually had this grounding back at home that was their wife, that was their family. And a lot of times there were books in this genre or it was much like it's more like James Bond or it's the person unattached.

And I was like, you know, the people I know that could be him aren't like that. They have this thing that grounds them that makes them human. And so I tried to kind of thread that needle where, again, my job is to tell you a great story, hands down. But I'm also going to try and bring the things that I've seen to it to make it maybe more real. And maybe you recognize some of yourself in it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the James Bond shooting bad guys and womanizing is actually the easy part, right?

That's the easy thing. Yeah. The difficult is managing a real relationship. being an adult and everything else that goes along with it. Yeah, I remember, I can't remember who it was, but one of the, one of the folks that talks a lot, and he was either a seal or a green beret or ranger, some, one of those guys was talking about how when he had come home and, you know, the week before he's in Afghanistan, hitting a compound, and now he's standing in the grocery aisle and he's got to choose between

breakfast cereals and he can't like that decision is locking him up right like is it this breakfast seal of right and he's like how in the world am i having this rush of emotions over which breakfast seal to chew you know what i mean but that's real life yeah yeah i i i used to have a habit when i'd come back from deployments of like going to hooters and not like for the women the wings and also because it was so open that you know there aren't like the tables you can hear everybody right yeah And I would listen to the conversations people were having and go, oh, that's what people, that's what stresses them out or that's what they're worried about. Because it's so easy to, you know, for Afghanistan and Iraq, it was so easy for it just to become like the real world. Yeah.

And all that mattered. And then you would come home and listen to people and like, like, why are you bitching? You know, like, you don't have any problems. but you have to accept it, you know, they are problems. They're their problems. Yeah. Yeah. No, 100% the guy was talking about before Brandon Cates, that was Nate's sister

platoon leader, when he got out of the military, he took a job in supply chain. And he said, you know, it was a hard thing to walk because people would get upset if he didn't ship enough widgets, right? And the workers underneath of him are stressed out. And he's like, look, I'm not trying to minimize this, but nobody's going to die today. Like if we miss our thing, and I'm not trying to say it's not important, but I'm trying to also provide some context to you that nobody on this floor is going to die today if things go wrong. Right. And maybe that was more for his benefit than his workers, but it's certainly something that you have to reconcile that's hard to do when before the stakes are there, that if you screw up, potentially people are going to die.

And now you're making widgets or you're choosing a breakfast cereal or you're in Hooters listening to conversations to try and figure out what normal people worry about. Right. Right. And it goes back sort of. Sorry, Jack. It sort of goes back to what you're talking about of like when you left. and you know and finding that purpose is that yeah it's kind of tough when the decisions that you're making or the challenge you're facing don't result in death it's time it can be tough to give importance to anything else yeah yeah yeah and i would i would say it a little differently that when so when i worked at that company that great company i was supporting a sales team and i came like a month before quarter close and everybody's working like crazy to make a sales number and we make it and everybody high fives and the next day they start working on the

next number right as like that's it like that that's it and they're like yeah that's what we do yeah and it was still and i'm not trying to to minimize that or you do anything but it's just it's so different from what you thought was important or what how you were drawing satisfaction or what a good day or a bad day meant for you it it feels like culture shock right right It's not to say that actual, like, goals in the normal world aren't important. It's just a perspective. And it's tough to shift that perspective. Yeah.

Yeah. So you get without sanction comes out. I mean, you get to publish some of these novels. I mean, you've made it as a professional author, which is amazing. And then you get the call from the Joggernaut, Tom Clancy, the Tom Clancy franchise. I mean, what was that like? Like, now you, you've really. Yeah, it was crazy. So I'm lucky enough. I just finished edits on my fourth Clancy book, and it's my eighth book overall. It's called Weapons Grade, and it comes out in September. And so I'm lucky enough to have worked with the same editor for all eight of those books. And the reason why is there are a lot of Tom's in this story. So my editor is a guy named Tom Colgan. And when Clancy was still alive, he was Clancy's editor. And so after Clancy's, he was. After Clancy's,

he passed away, the estate kind of came back to the publisher and said, hey, we want this to be able to live on. Can you find a writer to keep working in this universe? And so Tom Colgan has always been the guy who's selected the next writer. There's actually two writers that work in the Clancy universe at any one time. The other guy's name is Mark Cameron. He's a fantastic guy. He was a former U.S. Marshall and Manhunter and stuff. He's a great guy too. But, but, but So Tom Colgan would pick those people. And so when I turned in the second book in my series, it's called The Outside Man. And there's a little caveat there that Tom, my editors told me that lots of folks have one book in them because you have your entire life to write that book.

You have your entire life to get it right. But then once you go to your second book and the clock's ticking and you've got to do it in a year and you have inside your head the reactions that other people had, a lot of folks can't make that, can't bring. that and write the second book and so when I turned in my second book we had what's called the editorial call where he goes through and says hey here's what I think you need to make better and at the end of it in a very kind of Columbo-esque moment he's like oh and by the way would you want to write in the Clancy universe too and I remember hearing that what did he just say and and there was and you know my jaw kind of hit the floor and I was super flattered but when I got off the phone and I told my wife I'm like here's what he said and I think I'm

going to tell him no. And she's like, what are you talking about? And I was like, look, I still have a day job. It isn't for writing, especially as novelist, the work is usually there before the money is, meaning you've got the opportunity, but you haven't proven yourself yet to be able to get the kind of advances that you would need to live off of them. And I was like, I can't do this. And she's like, of course you can. Like, this is the thing you've all. And she's like, family meeting. And so the kids came in and we talked about it and kind of came up with this plan that I would try and do. do it for this amount of time. And if it was successful and it could transition into me writing full time, I would.

But it was a huge honor, but it was also super, super intimidating because every, there's always, every time a new Clancy book of mine comes out, there's always one fine gentleman on social media who will make sure to point out to me that Clancy actually didn't write the book. He is dead. And he didn't. And I'm like, yes, you are, you are correct. He is dead. He didn't write it.

But, you know, the way I. The way I look at it is, you know, George Lucas, you know, created this incredible universe and then invited other people to come in and writing that. And so what my editor told me that has helped me quite a bit, he's like, look, I don't want you to write like Tom Clancy. You can't. He's like, I just want you to do what you do for your books in his universe. And so, and then the other thing he told me is that he said, my gift as an editor is to find

the right writer and you're the right writer. So you don't have to worry about that. You just need to concentrate on telling the story. And it was a very big confidence booster. But at the same time, I have a friend of mine who's also a veteran. He was an infantryman, Josh Hood, who writes in the Jason Bourne universe. He's a great guy. And he always says getting the call to write in one of these is kind of like your dad finally tossing you to the keys to his classic Stingray Corvette, right?

Like you want to drive that thing as fast as it'll go, but you want to bring it back without any new dents in the fender. And so that's the other part I think about is don't let me be the guy that crashes the Clancy franchise. And so that's kind of the walk you do when you get the call and if you're lucky enough to write in one of these estates. And you mentioned that you're fixing to take over the Mitch Ratt franchise next, which was Vince Flynn's espionage novels. We spoke before the show. Years ago, I had interviewed Kyle Mills, who had that job. Kyle's a great guy. Yeah, he's a super, super fun guy to interview.

So, I mean, how's that where are you guys like high-fiving? Yeah, so he, it's funny. Vince Flynn is my all-time favorite writer. And like probably everybody who loved that series, I was very nervous when Kyle took it over because I didn't know, you know, could he do it? And I think he just did such. a fantastic job that they were, I didn't know Kyle, but I had friends who knew his editor. And so Jack Carr, like I know Jack Carr, Jack Carr also has Emily Bessler as an editor. And so every now and then,

I would just send her notes when I thought Kyle had so completely captured how Vince Flynn would have written a section of it. I'm like, just as a fan, I love what he did here. And she was very nice, and we would email back and forth sometimes. And so as I was coming to the point where I had my series, I'd done some work in the Clancy books. I was thinking about, you know, what did I want to do next or what? Because every so often, you know, you have to negotiate another deal and figure out what you're working on.

I thought, you know, if there's one series in the world that I would love to write, it would be the Vince Flynn. But, you know, Kyle's doing a great job with it. And as far as I know, I'd only met Kyle. once. I didn't really know him then. I don't know that he has any plans of quitting. And so I said something to my agent and he said, well, that's an agent's job to ask questions like that. I'll talk to him. And it just so happened, like I said, I look back on my life and kind of see God's fingerprints over and over again, kind of a providence that Kyle had decided he's done it for 10 years.

He didn't want to do it anymore. They were looking for somebody else to fill his role. And so I had to audition for it and they read books and my books. And we talked. about it and kind of talked about the idea and then it worked out that i got to take over for kyle which is it's a little different from the clancy just from the standpoint of there have been you know probably half a dozen writers who wrote in the clancy universe before me we were talking about mark grainy before he's a fantastic writer he was one of the first there's only been one who wrote vince flynn books and so when i took over the clancy thing other than you know fans that were mine or knew my work nobody really cared from the state of the

standpoint of, and that's kind of a testament, I think, to my editor because he'd established the track record of bringing in the right writers. And so it really wasn't a ripple for the fans. When it was announced that I was talking over, taking over for Kyle, the publicist texted me, and he's like, it's trending on Twitter right now. And I'm like, we all, like, I've pinnacle. This is not going to get any bigger. But it was funny because the messages I got from the fans were very polite, but they were all along the lines of, this is our favorite book series. Welcome, but do not screw this up. That's kind of where I am right now.

Aren't fandoms fun? You never have to wonder what they're thinking. That's the beautiful part, because they will tell you. And it's funny, the amount of emails or notes I get that start with, you're probably not going to see this because your people are going to, I'm like, let me break it down to you. don't have them. Right. Right. And the dog. And that's it. There might be a family meeting after this, but yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. That's amazing. So do you have, I know you, you, you said you had another book written that's in the shoot to come out. Um, I want to hear about that book, but I also want to hear, I mean, is there anything you can tease out about the future of Mitch Rapp and what you have in store? The only thing I can tell you is I talked to Emily Bessler this week and pitched her my idea and she said, I love it. Go for it.

So that's all I can tell you. All right. And I say that not as kind of a snooty thing is that writers generally fall into two camps. And so there are the people who know the story before they write it. They outline it all and they understand it. And then there are people who write more organically. And so I don't, when I start a book, I don't know. how the story is going to end. I don't know what's happened. I have kind of a very,

right, right. Kind of a spark of an idea. And what I found is if I try and tell people about it or explain it or do anything, it really kind of saps, it's like it's like when you're out in the woods and starting a fire and you got that tiny little bit of kindling and you have to guard it until the fire's big enough to be able to sustain itself. And that's kind of like what my ideas are when they start. So I've got one and I've got the kernel that I'm going to start working on, but I'm not ready to talk about it yet. Right. So because it's got a writing process, you don't really outline or anything.

Do you just start writing and see where it goes? Yeah. So I normally know kind of that in what's called the inciting incident. So what's the thing that's going to change it all and start the story? But I don't know. And I think you were, you were going to ask this as, as you all were talking over each other. But like a good example of this is my, because my editor and I have eight books worth together when, So I actually have 30 books coming out this year.

So Forgotten War was the fourth book in the Matt Drake series that just came out. My third Clancy book is called Flashpoint. That actually comes out on Tuesday. And then Weapons Grade comes out in September. And so Flashpoint is a big book. Like it takes place in the South China Sea. It's got kind of a China making a run at Taiwan and all these big geopolitical things happening. And so when I sat down to write what would eventually become.

weapons grade my editor said what do you want to do and i said i think i just want to write my son goes to texas a and m and so i'm constantly driving east along this stretch of road and seeing all these small towns and every one of these small towns has a dairy queen a pizza hut and a brand new bank and i'm like how can this town of 5 000 people afford this brand new bank and so i was telling him i was like i think i want to write about like almost like a jack reacherish this small town thing that happens. And he's like, yeah, sure, write that. And so four months later in the book, I had to turn in a book every five months. So four months, you know, a month before I'm turning the book in, my editor comes back and he's like, okay, based on your small town story, here's the cover I

designed for you. Here's some ideas for titles. And I was like, yeah, so about that. And I'm like, now the book is about Iran developing a clandestine and Richmond site. And, you know, that's like, That's exactly what I was going to say, Don, that the story changes so much from. Exactly. Exactly. When I wrote my first Clancy book that was called Target Acquired, you have to write kind of a synopsis for the Clancy estate to be able to look at it and say, here's what it is. And so I told him, I was like, look, I'll write this thing for you. And he's like, I know, I know, just write it.

You know, they can look at it and they'll have some idea. So I wrote this four page synopsis, sent it to him. So a year later, the UK does their own version of the book cover. It's different from the U.S. And he said, hey, they need to look at something to understand what the book's going to be about. I know it changed from your synopsis, but can you look at those four pages and just tell me how much of them are still good? And I'll send them that much. And I'm like, yeah.

And so I looked at it and I said, about the first three sentences are good. The rest of it has nothing to do with the book I wrote. And so he's, like I said, you end up building up that trust with your editor. where he gets more comfortable. And frankly, you as a writer have to get more comfortable with that process because there's a lot of terror early on where you're like,

this sucks. There's nothing interesting about it. This is going to be the book that tanks the Clancy franchise. And then usually it kind of comes together by the end. That's fantastic. And then like you obviously have a large network of people that you can reach out to when you're looking for, not just what,

you know how a weapon loads because it's interesting that a lot of authors, a lot of writers, not just book authors, but you know, film writers, TV writers don't understand the first thing about a lot of this stuff and they don't reach out to anybody. They just write it.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you get a lot of, like do you bounce some of your ideas, not just the TTP stuff and you know, but do you bounce some of that stuff off people in terms other than that.

Yeah. And so, you know, people come up to me all the time and say, hey, I didn't serve in the military. I didn't, whatever, you know, can I write these books? I say, yeah, absolutely you can because Tom Clancy, they like to call him an insurance salesman with a library card. Like, that is literally what he was. Vince Flynn was a bartender before he was a writer. Brad Thor was a travel writer. But all of them did the research and stuff to do it. And so, you know, I started writing more of what I knew.

because like I said, you know, I'd done work that was kind of like Matt's for a different agency, but I had some idea. And then I had, you know, friends and coworkers and stuff. But as it goes, as you go deeper and you take, you know, kind of those original ideas and they're gone and you look new stuff for a book, I spend a lot of time that friend that I mentioned before that spent the majority of his career in Delta Force, he helped me with a very pragmatic thing and without sanction. I wanted to do a really cool, hey-ho scene, and so he talked me through what it would be,

and forgotten more, one of the major plot things was from him. And I said, hey, this is what I want to happen. I want something that's gone wrong during a hit, and it led to this, and like he walked me through all of that. And so I think part of that is, honestly, as a writer, getting to the point where you realize,

You don't have to have all the ideas and you're actually, I tell people sometimes I think you're better suited not having that background because then you're more likely to do what I did and ask him. I'm like, hey, so I have this idea kind of about this and then he took me in a direction I would have never gone and it did incredible things for the book. You don't really find out what happened on that. So the forgotten war starts in a bar as all good books do in Austin. Matt Drake's best friend is a former Delta operator who was horribly disfigured when they were on a mission together. And as they're sitting in the bar talking, and he has since been detailed over to DIA, his radio call sign is Frodo. And so Matt and Frodo are together in all of the books. And when the book starts, there are two Army CID officers who come into the bar and they're arresting Frodo for a murder that allegedly took place 10 years or early. or during their first tour together in Afghanistan. And Matt was like, I know what was there because I was with Frodo, but he figures out that Frodo was inside the compound while Matt was at,

and they were supporting an ODA team that were two guys short. And all the other Green Berets on that ODA team who were in the building with Frodo have been mysteriously dying in the last two weeks or something as Afghanistan is crumbling. And so the only way that Matt can find out the truth of what happened in that room is to go to Afghanistan and find their terp who is with them because he's the only one. And so it starts with this mystery that takes place during Afghanistan as it's crumbling. And so you see back and forth between what happened in that compound 10 years ago and what they're doing in Afghanistan to try and find this guy. But like what actually happened in that compound, how it would play that? All of that was my friend as I had talked him through.

it. And so it's very much, I think you get, and frankly, I have him, but then there are other people, the Clancy name opens a lot of doors too. And so for weapons grade, I was super fascinated about hypersonics. And we were talking before the thing. I'm like, I want to talk to an SR-71 pilot. And so I actually got to spend two hours with an SR-71 pilot and a lot of that went into the book. Yeah. So it's, it's super fun. But you got to, you got to have that, um, intellectual curiosity and then you got to be willing to know what you know and don't know and be willing to go ask for help for the stuff that you don't know that's what makes it i mean correct me if i'm wrong but that's what makes it exciting for you as an author yeah absolutely absolutely

because it was you know there is still that small town aspect of the book of weapons grade it is some of it a lot of it does take place in a small um texas town but i knew i was like there's something i'm missing there's something else and all the time i was google stuff on hypersonics and the new hypersonics missile and there's this really neat startup company called Hermius that is in Georgia where they're trying to make a Mach 5 airliner and one of the ways that they're paying for it is the Air Force is paid for them to try and make this hypersonic drone and I was like that's really cool and in the and so a lot of times where the book comes together is by that right there's this thing that you can't get out of your

craw that has to come into the book and add life to it for sure. Sure. Our friend Alex Hollings told us about her. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Alex, I follow it. I love his stuff. Yeah, he's awesome. He's little things all the time. Yeah. Yeah. He's incredible. So tell us about that you have two books on the way out already before the Mitch Wrapped stuff gets underway. Um, what, one of the release dates? Where can people go to find your work? Yeah. So you can, everything for me, you can find on my website. And it's just don't. Bentley Books.com, so B-E-N-T-L-E-N-T-L-E-Y, or if you're a social media kind of person, I'm on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and it's just at Bentley, Don B-E-N-T-L-E-Y. And so you can go there to find out. You can go there in order to buy the books, or you can buy the books anywhere. Books are sold.

So Forgotten War just came out about a month ago, and that's the fourth book in my Matt Drake series. All my books can be read as a standalone. My three kids I'm sending to college would love it if you started it without sanction and came through, but you don't need to. You can start with Forgotten War. My third Clancy book that is called Flashpoint comes out on Tuesday. And then my fourth Clancy book that's called Weapons Grade comes out in September.

And for folks that read, I use, first of all, I hate coming up with names for characters. Secondly, I have so many friends that I like to pay homage to them and name characters after them but because i'm a twisted man and i'm the author and i can do what i can do what i will typically do is change their branch affiliation when they put them in the in the book so for instance brandon kates who is a ranger platoon leader proud man in real life is a navy seal in my tom clancy book which he absolutely hates and uh one of the green berets is actually an evy seal in real life which he hates but you know what i'm the author and i get to do that stuff so so So basically what you're saying is that you enjoy torching your friends by making them Navy SEALs and books.

I do. I do. And there was at one point I knew I'd gone too far when another friend of mine who's a writer, I won't name him, said, man, I don't know if I would have even put that Navy SEAL joke in there. I'm like, come on, man. It's funny. He's like, you might have gone too far. So I did. Did it have to do with, did it have to do with a compound in Afghanistan?

Sorry. I'm actually in a couple MacBowlin novels. Nice. As Jack Murphy, a slightly different spelling on my last name. And I'm a fairly eclectic weirdo appropriately in the novels that Chuck Rogers wrote. So that's my claim to fame. That's all I got. Sorry, man.

That's awesome. Any questions? Oh yeah, we do. We have a few questions. And while I get to these, I'm just curious, do you, you know, writing your books, your series and then obviously there are your books, but writing the books in your world, compared to like the Tom Clancy, do you try to make, do you have to do an artistic or a stylistic shift or do you just write the way you write for both of them? Yeah, that's a great question. So it's a little bit easier. This is some writer inside baseball, but I write, the Matt Drake books in first person, which is just fancy way of saying that Matt tells you this story. It's I. Jack Ryan Jr. is in third person. And so it makes it a little easier to separate my head because there's such different voices and they're different.

Now, having said that, when I was still figuring out my first Tom Clancy book was called Target Acquired. And my editor is the editor for both books. And so he kind of pulled me in at different points in Target acquired. And he said, no, this is Matt Drake talking. It's not Jack Ryan Jr. You need to dial this back. But one of my good friends is a fantastic writer too, was a golden glove boxer.

And he boxed in Penn State. And he told me once that the purpose of a referee in a boxing match is that the referee's job is to worry about your opponent so you don't have to. And so your job is just to fight as hard as you can. And you don't have to worry about hurting the other guy because the referee is going to stop it before that happens. and I feel like a really good editor does the same thing for your writing. And so I think about that, but I don't worry about it too much because I know my editor's going to be the guardrails for me.

And if I've gone too far, he'll pull me back during the editing process. That's fantastic. So, Jackson, thank you very much. What was your experience like with HRT? Did you consider trying out at all? We talked about that. Also, how often do FBI SWAT SWAT? say is go to selection.

So for H.R.T. I did not consider trying out. And their selection process is brutal. Like I had a number of classmates that did it that didn't make it through. One of my classmates was a force recon Marine. He didn't make it through selection. And so they are some bad hombres. And I know that you get you were mentioned before. They've done especially while the war on terror was still going on. They would do L&O stuff back and forth with some of the other military soft units. And so they, I have no illusions that I would make it through HRT selection. For the individual SWAT teams in the offices, what happens is the, the team is allowed a certain

man roster, like say it's 30 people. I don't know what it is. And so every so often, they'll have tryouts based on agents that move to another office or SWAT's a young man's job, right? Like all of that kind of stuff. And agents will rotate off the team. And so every so often, then the team, senior team leader will say, okay, we're going to have tryouts.

We've got room for three new SWAT folks. And so they'll hold tryouts and you'll compete against everybody else that wants to try out and they'll go through. And it is by no means equivalent to the HRT selection. It is nothing, nothing as brutal as what they go through. but you go through a tryout process and then you do it. And so I was fortunate enough when I tried out. They had a couple of extra slots and I made it.

But there isn't any like rules or regulations that say you're going to have trials. It's all based on the manning of the team. Sorry. Let's see here. Okay. Jim Schneeberger, thank you very much for the general donation. And Louis Vasquez, thank you. You talked about people reciting the Ranger Creed.

What is your internal phrase that you say when you were in a hard spot? That's a good question. What I will say, like my experience is that it, so I think it was back in Vietnam is where they first coined the phrase like Uda Loop, where you're, when you have something, that happens that that you're not expecting, you go through this series that's the Orient, the whatever, decide action, whatever that is. And so the way that the military helps you get over that traumatic thing more quickly is through training. And so you train, you do battle drills, you do.

And so for me, as an Apache pilot, what you would practice all the time, both in the aircraft and then in the simulator and stuff, is that when you're getting shot at, one of the opposite crew member says taking fire and you hear that and you execute the battle drill for it. And so when everything went sideways and the helicopter was shot down and everything was going wrong, it took me a while to figure out what is actually, because you can't, when it goes so completely wrong, it's not shock, but it's like you have to get past that what is happening is so completely outside the norm. And it takes you a minute to do that. And what happened with me, as crazy as it sounds, was getting shot at helped because my front seater made that call,

we're taking fire, and it just triggers that muscle memory. And it helps you get past that, and then you transition from being scared to knowing what to do, and maybe you're still scared, to then it's like, how dare they shoot at me? Like, how dare they do it? And by God, we're going to rain hell and bring stone down on them and stuff. And so I don't, you know, I don't have a Ranger Creed, and I won't say that I have something repeat like that but i will say you know it's it's it's a little bit of a cliche but not but that the more you sweat and training the less you bleed in combat and that was very much

my experience that the harder you make come or training than the easier it becomes to kind of make that transition to combat especially when things aren't going your way so don that's it for the questions unless we have on a patreon d uh don i i have i have a question you mentioned the a team and I've admitted on the show before that the A team definitely influenced me into going into special operations. Were you influenced by Airwolf? Was that your jam?

It was my jam. It was absolutely my jam. And I'm going to tell you that my kids got on Netflix and started watching the A team and we're digging it. And I was like, let me show you this show called Airwolf. And it did not age well.

I might have to tell you that like, he spends a lot of time on the port. playing the cello and there's like shots of hawks flying over and stuff and I'm like this is not what I remember it being but Airwolf absolutely influenced me to be a helicopter pilot well show him some Knight Rider and see what happens there oh my god that was next on the list I'm like I've got this show called Knight Rider you'll love it yeah well Don thank thank you so much for spending you know your Friday evening with us man and I mean this is an incredible interview like so many different experiences and you kept it super real man um you know thank you yeah absolutely guys this has been

fantastic thank you so much for having me yeah and i hope people will go check out the books i mean that your one protagonist is a former ranger i feel morally obligated to support the endeavor um absolutely absolutely uh yeah everybody definitely check out don bentley's books like all of them and Yeah. I will pick them up. I know you're breaking my balls that I hadn't read any of them. And usually, I mean,

it might have been a little bit. Usually, usually we make a pretty concerted effort to read at least one of the books before we interview the author. And this was an exception. But your name is on my radar, man. It's on the radar.

And I will, I will be picking up something as I go through, you know, an airport or wherever I am. And I'm sorry, I'm going to say, I'll tell you on the air, the same thing I told you off the air.

If you don't like the book, it makes a great beer coaster. And if your wife is like mine and has Polish pottery, you can stack that up on the book. And it just, it displays the pottery magnificently. So there you go. Yeah, Don, you definitely raise the bar of our show. Yeah. So we appreciate it. For sure.

Thanks for having me. Next Friday, we're going to have a journalist Ed Dorok on the show. He's written about extortion 17. Marines in Afghanistan, a number of other awesome books. A great, great reporter. So we'll have him here Friday. Don, again, thank you so much.

Guys, check out his books. We'll have a link down the description to it. And until then, you know, I'll see you guys next Friday. Make sure you buy Don's books. Do it. If you don't, the terrorists win. Or the Navy SEALs do. I don't know.

I'm not sure which is worse. I'm all in just for the, just for those gigs. Just, just, just for the jabs. I'm all in. Just kidding. Love you guys. All right. Take care of everybody.

Thanks, everybody. Yeah.