The Team House - Army Special Missions Unit Medic | Uriah Popp | Ep. 299

Episode Date: September 21, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseCommand Sergeant Major Uriah S. Popp is a native of Jasper, Indiana, and entered the United States Army as a 91B, Medical Specialist, in 1996.CSM Popp has served in numerous leadership positions including Civil Affairs Team- Alpha Team Medic and Team Sergeant, Senior Special Operation Forces (SOF) Medic, Senior Medical Operations Sergeant, Medical Operations and Intelligence NCOIC, SMU Team Sergeant, Command Sergeant Major USA MEDDAC Alaska, and is currently the Command Sergeant Major for Womack Army Medical Center.Find Uriah here ⬇️https://68medicalsolutions.com—————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/house____________________________________Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#smuBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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

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No, no, thank you. So, you know, we like to start this story off with your story, your origin story. How did you grow up and what led you into the military? Oh, so that's a, it's going way back. So I was born in a small town in Jasper, Indiana. It's right next to French Lake Indiana. If anybody knows, it's Larry Bird. Okay.

So Larry Bird's from French Lake. Jasper's a little small town right beside of that. Grew up in a trailer next to my grandmother's house until that burned down. My mom and dad ended up splitting up, and my mom moved to Florida and went to beauty school where she met my current father. and they got married and then my dad joined the army shortly after I think around in 1982 and so so he joined had some had some had some other siblings so I got got some brothers went to high school in Fort Knox so I kind of grew up around the military

so long way to say I grew up around the military that's really all I knew so my father was in. His father was in. And so I really didn't know anything else. I grew up in the DOD school system. So a lot of folks may not know what that is, but the government actually has high schools on military installations. And so I went to Fort Knox High School. And then we moved to Hawaii my senior year. So my dad was a drill starting on Fort Knox. Then he became a warrant officer. and then went to the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, and I graduated high school, and then after high school I wanted to do something,

so I enlisted in the Army. So that's the Reader's Digest version of how I went from just basically a kid growing up around the military, and then that was the thing that seemed like it was the right thing to do or the thing everybody was doing. Well, I'm sure that your dad had, oh, maybe he didn't, But did he have like strong opinions about what you should do in the army, like what the best jobs would be or anything like that?

Not really, actually. Probably like most, I'll say, well, I don't want to generalize, but I'll speak for myself because I got three sons who have all served. They didn't want me to go in the military. They actually wanted me to go to school. And I didn't want to go to school. I wanted to get out of the house. You know, I think my generation, it was all about not staying at home.

It was about getting out of the house as soon as possible, and the military was the way to go. My dad actually swore me in, so that was pretty cool. He was a warrant officer. He actually swore me in. They had just moved to Germany from Oklahoma as he was finishing a warn officer school. And I had to fly to Germany. I did the MEPs process in Oklahoma. um, flew to Germany, he swore me in and I, uh, I enlisted to be a, I think at the time it was called

a 91 Bravo. It wasn't a healthcare specialist. Um, I think it was, wasn't a combat medic. I think it was like a medical specialist. That's what it was. It was a medical specialist. I think everything was called a specialist at the time. Yeah. So it was a medical specialist. So a field medic. And, um, I think he actually wanted to be a field medic, but ended up being a field artilleryman. so they didn't have any issues with it and I had selected at the time used to be able to pick station of choice and I had just got to Hawaii and finished high school

and Hawaii was pretty cool so I signed up for Station of Choice that's the option I picked and I went back to Hawaii so what year was this that you enlisted? So I enlisted in 96. In 96 and what was it about being a medic or medicine that it appealed to you? I wish I had a good story.

It was the best choice of what was offered, right? You know, you got used to when you go to MEPs, they'd give you that printout, and there was like four or five jobs on it and like petroleum supply specialists. A lot of things that really didn't really sound great. Yeah. So it sounded pretty good,

and it allowed me to get stationed. of choice so I so I picked that and I'm actually glad I did I fell in love with you know medicine and I'm doing that still to this day so yeah so you go out to be a medic at a 25th ID no so I initially started out at Tripler okay so I got yeah I got double lucky right I got Hawaii and then ended up in a hospital and for anybody who served pre-G-WAT right not everybody was excited about going to a field unit yeah because you were going to do field stuff. And going to the field was not a cool place to be.

Maybe it is now, but back then it kind of wasn't. Yeah. So I went to a hospital, end up being an ER medic, and got to learn a lot. I had some great mentors there who I'd later go back and serve with. So I did that. But I did get a chance to go to the 25th, like halfway through my tour there

because it's an overseas tour. So I volunteered for an exchange program and then went to become a light infantry medic. So I switched units, went up to the 25th, did 25th things, go to Air Assault School there. And I got to be a field medic and get to learn what digging in a fighting position is and digging a straddle trench. Yeah. And the red clay dirt with an e-tool. Yeah. Wasn't really cool.

But it was a good experience. I imagine that pre-GY. I worked at Balboa for a very short period of time in the ER there. And I think that, you know, pre-GY, it was a pretty cool place for a medic because you've got to do a lot of things that, you know, that somebody that was like an EMTP and probably even an EMTP in some cases wouldn't get an opportunity to do. If you had doctors that were really into teaching, you know, they'd teach you how to throw sutures. They'd teach you like tons of stuff. Oh, 100%. I can distinctly remember.

So when I transitioned, I had exactly that. I had a doc who taught us like things like, you know, shoulder reductions when you put a shoulder out. That'll come into play. Doing, yeah, just doing like in G tubes. You know, I got to do CPR. You know, I got to do CPR and people who were in. cardiac arrest. I got to sew people up, got to learn how to suture. So you're exactly right. When I transitioned up to the 25th, we had a guy, they're doing like squad exavals and,

you know, out in the field out at East Range. And one of the guys had threw his shoulders out. And like I got to be the, got to be the hero. So I like, I had learned sheet maneuvers on how to like kind of strap them down and, and reduce the shoulder. And, you know, put it back in place and the guy got to ride all the way back from East Range with his shoulder in socket versus out, which would have been painful as hell, right through a bumpy humby all the way back. I've been a long ride. And so, so yeah, I learned a lot of, I got to cut my teeth there in the ER and I kind of attributed a lot of that initial learning and just the passion for being like a good medic. Yeah, that's really cool. I would also say that there's probably

no experience like a military ER on payday Fridays. Oh yeah, especially in Hawaii. And Marines. So you got Marine-based, Connie Hoy. So I actually used to do the, I volunteered in the ER to do the midnight. It was a swing shift. So I got to have, I think it was like Sunday, Mondays,

and Tuesdays off. So I worked, I think. think seven at night till seven in the morning on those days. So it was all the action. Yeah. Like, and then Hawaii has a pretty large homeless population. And so you get to kind of, I don't want to put this in the, it's not a negative at all. You actually get to work, take care of a lot of homeless vets. Yeah. And so I actually appreciated talking to them. It's kind of sad. You know, you'd get these routine homeless vets in, and you kind of get to know them. Yeah.

Right? On one instance, it's frustrating because you're like, oh, Mr. Such and Such is here again, you know. But then on the other instance, you're like, how did this guy, I can always remember, I mean, to this day, it's like amazing I can remember this, you know, almost, you know, 20, 25 years ago. But it's like, how did this guy who was at 0405 in the Navy is now homeless down? downtown Waikki. And I always wondered that like where in life, where, what happened in their life that this is now where they're at. Right. And so, you know, it's just give them haircuts, give them bass, you know. Yeah. I wasn't too proud to do that. Treat their, 100%. Their gangreness, diabetic. Give them their banana bags, right? Because most of them were,

you know, they were alcoholic. So you'd kind of give them a banana bag and get them rehydrated and do the best you could with them for the couple hours you had with them. And, and, you know, hindsight, they were probably doing it just to that social dynamic. It's like, it was probably good for them. Yeah. But they did that, even though it was frustrating for us, it was probably good for them. And it's probably good for us that we did that for them. Yeah.

And we got to see, you know, that what potential life can be like, you know. Yeah. For sure. So, so you do. your hospital time, you do a swap, you go to the infantry. And what was that like for you? During a peacetime military? So it was exactly that. Some things were fun, right? Like road marches and things like that. Just pre, I don't know if a lot of folks nowadays can relate to a garrison military. Right. You know, I just, you know, talking with Dee about that a little bit earlier. earlier, just like, a garrison military wasn't necessarily a fun thing to experience if you were

looking for excitement. I think that's a little bit of where we're at a little bit with some of our forces today. But yeah, it was just going to the field. Very routine. As a medic, you're in an infantry unit. You're laying out all your medical chest and you're inventorying and you're usually doing that at the end of the day because you're sitting around in the barracks. People playing video games waiting for the platoon sergeant to tell you,

what are you going to do today, right? Right. And then they wait after the first sergeant formation to come in and say, we need this done. Right. And I don't know if people still go through that today, but it was frustrating. Yeah. You got all these guys sitting around the aid station like, all right, what are we going to do?

Yeah. Hopefully the platoon sergeant tells us what we're going to do pretty soon. And that's usually like, it was just task, right? You're just taking care of stuff. vehicle maintenance like motorpool Monday yeah yeah you know all that kind of stuff and what was what was like T triple C like at that point in time and what kind of training were you guys getting from like your doctors at the clinic and stuff like that it was non-existent right yeah so back then it was um oh man what was the um i think it was like ATLS ATLS protocols so two large bore IVs yeah

Combat life saver thing. That was a combat. It was like two leaders of fluids and some pseudofed, Motrin, some ACE wraps, all hospital-grade equipment packed in a little trifold bag. And so, yeah, there wasn't, you did get mentorship. Actually, the PAs at that time were still embedded in the age station. It's no longer like that now. The Army medical system has changed it. I think throughout the services they've actually done.

change that dynamic. Like, AIDS station medicine isn't a thing anymore. I think they're trying to go back to it. I'm a little bit dated. They may have gone back to it. So your PA actually mentored your medics, but the practices of what

was learned from the lessons and I think Mogadishu and some of those times haven't, they weren't doctrinalized. Right, right. So those committees hadn't came together. So you were still learning just old fluid recesses protocols. It was still field dressing, pressure dressing, then a stick tourniquet because there was no

such thing as a cat tourniquet. It was a dow rod, a Gatorade bottle top, and a cravat was your tourniquet that you made and kept in your aid bag. So, but there still was mentorship. So every, I think it was like when the PA had to do their time at the TMC, you would maybe get selected. You know, like I think there's around 30 to 40 medics that are broken down between evacuation treatment squad and then your line medics. And the PA would pick you and bring you over to the clinic and you would do sick call. The folks who referred to the TMC from sick call, you'd go over there and get to see patients and do vitals and do some minor procedures, toenails, hemorrhoids, you know, all of those

type of minor procedures. So your soap notes were on point, right? 100%. Yes, 100%. So after your time, with the 25th, what was next for you? So, yeah, so my tour was up getting close to the end. It was time of my reenlist. You know, I had my first three years.

And so went to the retention in CO. And there wasn't a lot of stuff that was offered. And I wanted to try something else. So they had different ASIs, additional skill identifiers, medics could get. And so a surgical tech. So I actually liked doing the minor procedure stuff. So I went and did an ASI to be a surgical tech, a head-and-neck surgical tech. Very unsexy job.

There's only like at the time, I think there was 90 of them in the whole inventory. I went to school to do that. Went back to Fort Sam, graduated from that, and then got stationed at Fort Lewis. and so was stationed at Fort Lewis as a head and neck surgical tech. And that was kind of like the beginning, I would say, of my soft exposure. So I was working there. At the hospital there? Yeah, so I was actually at Old Madigan, not the new Madigan.

And, you know, the Rangers would rotate through. and some of the first group rise and 160th medics would rotate through. And so it was like, oh, this is, you know, this is pretty cool. You know, these guys are, you know, they're doing field medical stuff. And, you know, they would, you know, talk about it and talk about their job a little bit. And it was, you kind of just, you know, rumor mill. Yeah, yeah. Hey, there's cool guys doing cool things.

Yeah. You know, and so as a young, I think at the time I'd maybe turned, you know i was in my early really early 20s maybe 21 or something like that and so um so yeah and the and i wasn't really liking that job to be quite honest um and so um i didn't stay at fort louis very long um and at the time my dad had gotten orders to go to third id and so um i think I think I either did an extension or a short reenlistment for that school. And so I, I think I either 4187 or something and got to go to third ID or I got to go to win because I was still a surgical tech. And that is, actually, let me rewind. G. Y, um, 9-11 happened. It happened while you were

at Madigan. That's what happened. Okay. So 9-11 happened while I was at Madigan. And I was actually in PhDLS class. I distinctly remember it. Everybody remembers that. Pre-hospital trauma life support. Yes, so I was at a little training education facility and we're all in a room and that's what happened. I think I had a couple rangers in the class, a couple ranger medics in the class with me.

And we were going through our PhDLS because I think there was like three courses you had to maintain to maintain your 91 Bravo MOS qualification. And so they put on the TV like probably every unit did in the Army or in the service, you know, or like everybody in the world, you know what I mean?

The United States had their TV on. And we were watching it live and I was like, wow, I remember the Rangers instantly had to go back. They left class. And we, man, you just sparked this memory, I forgot about it. We end up doing gate guard detail.

They put it, what was it, like the ThreatCon Delta or whatever? I think all posts went to like ThreatCon Delta. We got issued, you know, I think it was like one magazine with, it may have had been, you may have gotten 30 rounds, I don't know. And everybody was on gate guard duty. We were doing gate guard duty rotations. And so, yeah, so that's 9-11. I want to be part of that.

So, and I think everybody did. And so my dad had just gotten orders to third ID. Every, they, I was in, I wasn't really a critical MOS, you know, and it wasn't, it's not even a deployable MOS. Right. They've gotten rid of a lot of the non-deployable. The ASI. The ASI. Yeah.

The non-deployable AIS. I was wondering if that locked you in. It did. So, yeah, so that's actually how I went to the Special Operations Medic Program. So I was in this non-deployable MOS. I'll just fast forward it for the sake of time. I get to Third ID. My dad, I think he was the division targeting officer, third ID at the time.

He was on the initial push into Iraq. And I wanted to go. So I went to my CSM at the office. because they were pulling people out of the hospital to fill, so all the, you know, soldiers were on profile or something and couldn't go in the line units, they would one for one of them. Yeah. So they would take medics out of the hospital, fill the line, and then, you know, people were going over. So this is around the 2003 time frame?

Yeah, so this is, you know, fast forward a little bit. So, yeah, around 2000, yeah, whenever they push, he was actually there a little bit earlier. I think he was doing something in Kuwait or something, and then maybe they knew they were already going to push them over. And so I went to my CSM, and I was like, hey, I want to deploy, and he was like, no, go back to your clinic. Right. And so, you know, I was like, well, this sucks.

And so, I mean, it was crazy. I can remember like a full rotation. of medics got pulled out of the hospital had came back and you know they're telling their stories of war right this is like this is the free you know I grew up and I joined

the garrison military or at least for the most part some folks were still doing things but for the large part people weren't really doing much so I called no I put a 160 a packet in and at the

time I was I think a pretty good soldier. I promoted really fast. I made E5 in Hawaii in two years. I had already went to the board and won like Soldier the Year, stuff like that, or NCO of the year. And so I made E6 really fast.

So I got promoted really fast. And so I put a 160th packet in. And I remember they had they had some pretty season medics because they were just getting back from the initial stuff in Afghanistan and they were like

you're an E6 my E4s will I'll never forget the phone call and because they actually gave me the courtesy of a phone call and they're like you got a great packet and you know high PT and all that stuff but my our E4s will run circles around you

we need people who grow up Yeah. And the unit. Yeah. And so I called Branch up and I was like, hey, I need to do whatever I need to do so I can, like, deploy and be a part of this. And they're like, well, we got this new thing. Have you heard of Civil Affairs? And at the time, of course, I'd never heard of Civil Affairs.

And so I was like, okay, what is that? And they're like, well, you'll have to go to a special operations medic course to do it. And I was like, okay, that sounds awesome. Yeah, I was kind of wanting to do that anyways. And so they're like, okay, well, we'll put you on orders and send you to sock them. And I was like, perfect. And so because I had one like NCO of the year, I got, like, what I asked to go to airborne school because they were like, you know, you're kind of representing the command,

and they give you, like, hey, what can, what do you want to do? Yeah, a little bit of fun. A little benefit. Yeah. So I, you know, got to go to, I had been to airborne school and, like, the basic, like, cool guy badge stuff for, like, the conventional military. Right. And so, um, so I went to Sockham.

So I went to Sockham as an E6. And then, um, you know, did a full, um, you know, the full, you know, the full, it back then it was still a six month course. Right now, I believe it's nine unless it's changed. and then additionally if you went through the Civil Affairs program was another three months of like their qualification course and so made that through no issues you know um because like like you said you know my time as an ER medic I was a I felt that was a pretty good medic and I didn't really you know didn't have a lot of like issues and made it made it through the program and then I got to the unit um at um at um um at um at um

at Bragg, so at the time it was only one battalion. It was the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion. It had all been guard up into that point, right? No. So yes and no. So 95% of the force was, I believe, reserve. Okay. I believe reserve.

There was one active battalion. Oh, there was. Ninety-six. It was on Bragg. It was right by the G.B. Club. Okay. Right behind there, there's one building. and there was, what was there, Alpha through Foxtrot Company.

And every company had a geographic area of responsibility. So when I got there, I got Echo Company. So Echo Company was kind of unique. Echo Company was the SMU support company. So they were the ones who supported J-Soc Taskings. and the Rangers. And so when I, in process, you know, everybody meets the CSM at the time. And so I went at, and we, you know, we like everybody.

And so that was 2004. We thought we were going to miss the war, right? Everybody thought they were going to miss the war. And so the CSM was like, hey, I have a spot. I need a medic and echo company. and so me and my good friend of mine, but you guys got to deploy like in four days. Can you be ready?

And we're like, of course we can. Absolutely. Let me get my affairs in order and done. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so, that was pretty interesting. So now I've told you my back on, right? So real quick, because you go through the sock,

and for people who might not know, that's the trauma portion for special operations. I think even SF, that's their trauma portion. They go off and do the rest of their veterinary and hospital and stuff like that. But for civil affairs, you guys have a mission that's very similar, I think, to the SF, right? So to the SF mission, because you guys do need to know how to test water and do things more, you know, outside of trauma. So was there additional medical training for you guys for like that portion of it being like a medical support on top of the trauma stuff? Yes. So I would say that we compliment, right? So we are kind of like a support element that brings a capability to an ODA. And so the training, we go back through their dental block.

Okay. So we went through their dental block, their veterinary block, and then we had our own that was our own blocks that were field sand heavy. So it was all about water treatment. You had to go through food inspection. You go learn how to like kill an animal and prep it and then inspect food and then a lot of field sand and then water purification. So it's yeah, it's taught. At the time it was actually taught by a Sierra, a 68 Sierra, which is a a preventive med specialist and so it was it was all once you did those blocks we're learning how to work with animals and basically pulling people's teeth and things like that the dental blocks then you got the field sand blocks and so yeah so those are some of the things that you can kind of complement and help a team out with right a lot of the rapport building right so for people who might not be aware of it can you tell us what civil affairs is why why at Sunder Socom or, you know, what's their mission? Oh, boy. So caveat, if I'm doing a disservice, just know it's my recollection of it. So what we did is I would say what we best did,

because my first mission was actually a regional mission with an ODA, so I was attached to a seventh group, I believe was seventh group's first rotation into Afghanistan, I believe. And so what we do is kind of maintain freedom of maneuver and maneuver and expand the maneuver area through. At that point, it was, I think, a lot of, like, counterinsurgency stuff, right? It's like the civil affairs folks work with, like, so let's just like counterinsurgency, right? You've got your pro people, 10%, your hardliners, under 10%, and then I guess to make this simple, 80%, in the middle. Right. So what our job was to kind of work with the ODA to kind of gain rapport with that 80% in the middle and push those towards the pro side. And so really that's what you do. And there's a lot of

so things you bring to the table, humanitarian assistance, med caps, vets caps, just partner, you know, it's like nation building stuff, kind of the other regional aspect of it. But really you're just, they're small teams. People may not know that. So they're a cat A team is what I was on. Is a four-man team that used to have. It's not like this anymore. It's important distinction, I guess, my generation of being on a civil affairs team.

So you had a medic, an engineer, a weapons guy who was 11 Bravo, and then you had an officer. And so my tenure there is when basically SF needed all the SF guys. back because that battalion was all SF guys and they were pushing them back out to the team so they were usually your older kind of long-in-the-tooth guys very experienced guys or just maybe they were hurt or something so they would they would end up in the in the civil affairs battalion so they needed to go back so they basically took a bunch of Rangers from Ranger Battalion so Echo Company had a lot of Rangers from Ranger Battalion where they were typically your team Sardin and then you had a lot of 82nd engineers and then medics that they were they were generating

medics through the course because I think we were like I think I was in the second class or third class of medics that are being recruited to basically push the deltas back out to the teams there's very few deltas left in the battalion and then we were back filming them so I don't know if I got to the answer your question, but in a roundabout way there. So what I'm taking away from it is that civil affairs is, you know, we talk about special forces being hearts in mind, but civil affairs is really kind of the backbone of that hearts and mind. It's a lot of the civilian engagement. And in the counterinsurgency strategy, it's the idea to win over the population. 100%. And help create that sort of area of denial,

not necessarily through force, but through goodwill building. Exactly. And so I think where we count come in and I can remember at the time they were talking about the phases of military operations so going from phase three combat operations to phase four which is I think sport and stability so that's kind of that transition from combat operations to support and stability it's kind of the nation rebuilding establishing government governments and things like that so you're exactly right so that's kind of honestly we thought that's what we were phasing we were going into phase I can remember that as People, because I don't think you get a combat patch, you know, a shoulder sleeve insignia.

If you're in phase four of operations, I think you have to be in phase three. Interesting. And I can remember people were freaking worried about that. That was like a, that was a thing. I believe it. I understand, and I understand why. And it's, it's funny because I can remember the seven, I can remember. So we were attached to a, I think it was seven, two, three.

I could be wrong. But a lot of those guys, so they were getting there, you know, those guys were, their army guys, they were all Boy Scouts at the end of the day, right, collecting, like, badges and Flair. And they were worried about it. And, like, I can remember, like, the guys who didn't get a CIB yet, they were like, like, we need to, like, get into something so we can get our CIP. So somebody needs to shoot at us, yeah. Yeah. Let's just drive down this road and see what happens. Yeah.

It's, like, moving to contact. Yeah, yeah. Let's keep going out there. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, and if you remember Afghanistan at that time, you know, like, you know, I did a lot of time, well, I guess a lot of time is relative, but I did, I think, five tours, four or five tours there. At that time in 2004, it's a high-lux pickup truck, two dudes, and four Afghans, and you're driving for three hours. You know, that's unheard of, I think, later on. But it was relatively a, I would call it permissive to semi-permissive environment.

And so a lot of people, they've never seen you before. And, you know, you're there. So as a civil affairs, guys, you've got goodies to hang out, coats, backpacks, engineer kids, school supplies, soccer balls. Yeah. You know, it is. And you're going out with the ODA, too, because they're, you know, They're trying to maintain their freedom of maneuver, right?

Well, yeah. Yeah, there's a... No, I get it, though. But, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's one of those things where if you don't use it, you lose it, right? If you're not getting out there and actively patrolling and showing presence, then encroachment happens and things like that. And if, and, like, again, like, back in that,

we were still handing out the green matches with the picture of Osama bin Laden on it, like asking everybody if they knew. where Osama bin Laden was like probably everybody else. Right, right. And so it's that period of time where they're like, no, we don't know who that dude is, but can we have some jackets? So I have to ask you to this because it's kind of funny to me. You know, like you say, a lot of civil affairs used to be made up of long in the tooth,

you know, SF guys who had a lot of experience, you know, working with indigenous cultures, doing foreign internal defense, things like that. And then they need those guys back, understandable. And so they backfill them with Rangers in 82nd who probably aren't known for their civilian engagement, you know, strategies. How did that all work out? So I think it, I think because we didn't have a lot of seasoned fighters, like our people were seasoned combat veterans. Maybe that's a better way to say it's seasoned veterans. It was new to all of us.

And I actually didn't go to the qualification course till between my first and second appointment. So I didn't get school trained. I'd been through the MOS portion of it, but then you had to go through like the SWIC portion of it. The schoolhouse portion. And so I think you understood that you were trying to like make these people your friend at the end of the day. and so some of it comes, I would say a bit naturally, you know. And at that time period, they weren't really aggressive towards us. Right.

You can still get on Chicken Street or whatever and buy rugs or buy. Yeah, exactly. So it was just, I think, a different time. And so I think that at least I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, it didn't seem to be an issue. It didn't seem, it didn't seem to be an issue. And I never, I didn't think, you know, say, because we had, like, my team sergeant was a,

I think he was a first battalion ranger, and he had already deployed with the, with the battalions to Afghanistan. And I didn't experience guys who were just overly aggressive, wanting to, like, not do their task. Right, right. and try to like get it on. Yeah.

And so, you know, it just seemed to, I guess, you know, we're discovery learning. It's like learning a new job. It's kind of fun when you're doing that, though, because you also, like there's not an overbearance of leadership at that point in time. You're kind of creating your own missions, you know, that nobody is sitting there with their thumb on you. So really, whatever you guys come up with, like, that's your off. Yeah, it is.

And, you know, like, I've had con-op parties, and I remember the pain of con-ops and getting improved. But you're exactly right. Then it was just like, hey, where are we going to go tomorrow? Yeah. Okay. And we would go somewhere almost every day. Yeah.

And just drive, you know, go to the next place, go to the next place. So, yeah, it was really just like where, what we've seen of value being nested with their plans and their objectives, the ODA's plans, and just. trying to support them the best we could. And to kind of just really develop the area, because I think that's the other component. At this point in time, since this is all fairly new, and not just, you know, like civil affairs, civil affairs had been there, but did the ODA know how to best implement you guys, or were you both learning together?

I think we were learning together, to be quite honest. I think that we was a little bit more natural from us than the SIOP guys. So they had a SIOP team attached as well. So they kind of had the full package. So you had a, I think they had their intel team attached to them. They had a SIOP team and they had a civil affairs team. And we were all at Camp Tice. So in De Raulud, you know, down by Kandahar.

and so I think with them they didn't really know how to implement them. You know, they were handing out their flyers and things like that at the time. Leaflet drops, right? But for us, it was a little bit more natural. I was a medic. There was only one medic. They had split up. I think half of that ODA went up to Cobra.

And so I instantly gravitated. So I was a fairly senior and both grade and experience as a medic, at least, you know, because again, the ER time helped me. So instantly had a great senior 18 Delta who took me under his wing, and we just did a lot of, you know, a lot of tailgate medicine, right? And then we ran Camp Sick Hall, right, where folks can bring people in from all over, and you get to see, I mean, you get to see everything. So that trip, I probably, next to Iraq and next to the surge,

I practiced the most medicine I mean We did a whole blood Transfusion You know one of the cooks From the cook We you know Elden carded him

And we had an Afghan Come in with From a A garden tool fight So he had took a pickax To the chest And so he needed He needed blood

We weren't getting flights for him Yeah That was the things They didn't end At that period of time They didn't even these guys. You had to set them. So gunshots, I got to do, you know, full repairs and put in drains, just things that are unheard of. Yeah. I mean, you're talking like surgeon, physician level stuff.

Yeah. So, you know, just a lot of mentorship burns, right? You remember all the burn kids? We ran a burn clinic. So we got to learn about, you know, ketamine use. That was the big thing. That's one of the biggest things. He had wrote some papers, just a phenomenal 18 Delta who just really made the best of the time and experience and honing his skills. Yeah. And then taking me under my wing and or under his wing and just, we ran a great clinic there and just really, we got to see a lot of things and experience a lot of things. I did my first field amputation. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah.

I wanted to do another one. It's probably good thing I didn't because I remember the ODA commander. So this guy came in. I don't know. I think he got bit by a dog or something, but you could tell his leg was septic and I needed it to go. Yeah. And I wanted to take his leg off. And the ODA commander was like, you're right.

I know. He's like, if he dies here, that's a problem for me. So no. So we ended up to do that. But another time a kid got his hand. cut in a fan belt working on engine like so it's like a partial so like an volition type of or no it had taken it had taken like it was just a mess it was a mangled mess it kind of ripped everything away oh wow so there's nothing you could do

but basically complete it and just work through the joint space and then just kind of undermine the tissue and pull it wrap it around yeah and then kind of closed it and then I called up the the the team you where the PA and doc were and basically taught him how to do wet to dries and put him on a broad brand. I think I forget what we gave him like shots of Rosefin or something. And so just really got to do some really great things. And then I got to learn some lessons. I remember this one time.

This old lady came in with her. ear in her hand and a dog had bitten her ear off and so me the great like suture person I thought I could sew that back on and so I get like it was beautiful too like I had approximated all the edges perfectly and lined everything up and like so did and then the you know the Jeremy came in and he's like hey man what are you doing I'm like I'm sewing his lady's ear on he's like what and I had like the ear canal like I had like you know both exteriorly and interior he's like dude there's no blood supply to that what are you doing and so I was like oh shit um okay he's like okay do this he's like take that back off and just take what left the skin and just close it up

the best you can and then let me take a look at it when you've done so I did that but you know so I got to like um make some mistakes I guess you could say so because because Because of like the cartilage and whatnot, like there's just no way to... Yeah, not at my skill level. Yeah, right, right. And then not the post care, right? So that's the other thing. That's like a plastic surgeon level type of thing.

Yeah, I think it's way beyond something I should have been doing. But, you know, that's all they had. And even the guy whose hand, he didn't, man, he came back like, he was supposed to come in daily for dressing changes is what we told. And we taught him how to do it, like if he needed to. and he was supposed to come back and he did and he came back infected and I think we had to put him on some more antibiotics too but um yeah it was just a great that um trip was just a great um a great trip that i hone my skills as being a field like a forward medic and getting to like do some extra stuff do you have any any funny stories from like the tailgate medicine because i i feel like Oh, yeah.

When you would, the, like, the village, like, I don't know the right terminology. I don't remember it anymore, but basically they had sort of witch doctors in a way. But it wasn't witch doctorate, but like some of their home remedies were pretty bizarre. Yeah, I mean, kind of the, a lot of STDs treating, oddly enough. you know you'd eventually tease it out it's like it's burning when i pee yeah um and so you know then it's like you already had the pill packs like made up for him okay here here's your pill pack um and then i remember my my team leader um he he was like taking a liking to it and like we were running out of vitamins so everybody wanted i think it was like vitaminas i think that

i don't know if that translates to what it was but they would have asked for V2. They wanted vitamins. And so we would run out of vitamins because like we would just give them out. There's, I mean, these were hundreds of people coming in. They would be a line. Like in the morning, there was a line ready to see us. And some of it was people just want something. And understandably. And so my team leader wanted to get involved. So we like would make skittle bags for the people who wanted vitamins. Because we didn't have any. and we wanted to give them something you know you didn't want to just turn them away right get away you know you don't you don't have any nothing for you so but yeah I

tell you one of the the the funniest story that I have that's kind of connected to tailgate medicine it's like you're going out to these villages and so I always kept a cargo pocket full of candy to give to the kids and we were getting ready to load up and so I had reached in my cargo pocket and there's all these kids like they're just all doing them you do things with them you'd be like listen at the board I got you didn't

put your hands up put your hands down like practicing the language and stuff and so I reached in the pocket they seen what was in my hand so there's all these kids there and all some of these kids are holding kids

babies right because that was the other weird thing you see like five year olds carrying a baby they're like that's not normal so I throw the candy up in the air right so what happens they drop the kids they start dropping babies

there's all these babies falling in the rocks and I'm like oh man what did I just do you're a horrible human being I'm just kidding I'm just kidding no it fit yeah so um oh man so that yeah that was

uh that was uh I yeah that was pretty funny well it was it was not funny yeah it was like it was like yeah people are laughing yeah what are you doing it's funny it was on another babies like yeah they weren't yeah yeah yeah we don't think um so how long was that first deployment for you so um the first trip i want to say it was an eight i think it was an eight or nine month uh trip where the regional uh rotations but i can came in, I think a month late, they needed to fill out the rest of the teams and we had graduated. That's why they needed medics in that company because they were already on over there.

And so I think the first one was, I think I end up doing six or seven months. Okay. And so you come back and then you go through the Civil Affairs qualification course or the Yeah, so then I, yeah, so came back, went through the qualification course and I think I went through Sear. I think my team starting was like, hey, you need to go through Sear. So I went through Sear C. And what was the Civil Affairs portion of that like? Because you'd already been through the medical portion. So what was this like hearts and minds piece? It was a lot of for the, I forget what they're called. It's a different mission set. So that's more of the like the tactical stuff. It's more of like the higher level where you're okay. So like an embassy team.

Okay. So later I did an embassy team trip. So it's much more working with governance and things like that, learning what a Bravo team does, you know, what a Cat B does and things like that. Or, man, I forget what the name of the teams they're called. But essentially it's working directly with the embassy and learning how to engage with a functioning infrastructure. So if they have governance involved, here's how you integrate.

here's the capability you provide. And so it was much more at the strategic operational level, not really at the tactical level. Yeah, interesting. So do you know if that ever changed at all, where they made it, where they created more of a tactical, or at least added like the tactical curriculum to that? I don't know, but that's kind of,

It would be, I don't know where it's at today, to be quite honest. So it became its MOS. So that's, we'll get to that port of story, but basically I had to leave civil affairs because they were becoming their own MOS and you had a choice. Convert to a civil affairs MOS or leave that organization. So would that, would have, that have been like an 18 Delta in a way, that it would have been a civil affairs MOS with like a medical, Yep. So yeah, you're exactly right. So essentially just like it's an ASI. So it's a 30, I believe was a 38 Bravo Civil Affairs Sergeant, I think they were called. And then you got, I think it was a whiskey two. So we're whiskey ones, or we were, which is a Sockham, a special operations combat medic. And then the active component, because they created other battalions, they were growing it because of the need of. in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They created their own MOS, and then they, I think, the only thing specialized on the team, so that was the difference, is they still needed a medic, and the medic became a whiskey to and got to go to Sokham. Okay. And then the other ones were kind of generalist. Okay.

And so I think that was the worry, though. It's like, okay, you had these guys who had hard skills, right? You had these combat engineers or 11 bravos who, you know, Victor identifiers and things like that. But now you got a, a mechanic or a whatever, a S-1,

you know, you have a human resources person going through this program. I have to believe they would, for just the sake of being competent in an asset, they would have had to have figured out some program to get them tactical

training. Yeah. I do, but there's obviously, you know, there's no, there's, there's, I don't know how they could replace the, uh, both the institutional knowledge and the operational of experience of 11 Bravo. Right. Right. Um, you know, when you have an E7 with 15 years as a, a guy in, and Ranger Battalion or even the 82nd for that matter, there's just basic principles of security that they know and when you're talking about small unit tactics right and i think that's where it got a little bit dangerous and so they had to they've had to have mitigated that yeah liability yeah no and it makes sense too because you know even though civil affairs isn't like a d a force if you're out in the back country somewhere doing something in a semi-permissive environment

at any point in time, that four-man element, four-person element, may, you know, may need to react contact, you know, and be good at it, be good enough to, you know, to, at least even if they're with an A-team to not slow the team down or, you know, take care of their own. Yeah, and I think, again, like, so I transitioned before that started, but I think that probably, you know, you asked me earlier about, did they know how to utilize you? I think it was maybe easier for them because there's some credibility that comes with the background of,

okay, I have the average time and service of, you know, 10, say 8 to 10 years or 12 years of being, you know, in battalion. Right. Being at least through a Sockham program or at least a 80-second in-year-old. engineer. Right. So they have those skills, some hard skills, if you will, and to like, okay, now, what did you do for that when you just graduated the course? Right, right. So I think it may have been easier than for us to kind of, to integrate with them. It makes sense. I mean, if you have a guy show up and he's wearing the civil affairs or, you know,

the, you know, so comp hatch or whatever, but he's got a scroll as a combat, that patch and it's like, okay, like, or even with the 82nd, you know, if he's got a, you know, a combat action badge, um, with an 80 second, like you, you look at them a little bit differently than just somebody who may have only come up through that, through that pipeline. Yeah. And it's, again, not to take anything away from it with it. And I'm sure there's, you know, they've worked through that. I, I would have to believe that they would have to figure that out. Yeah. To mitigate the experience they lost. from taking people.

Because you got again, it initially, like you said, started with people long in the tooth, 18 series guys, and some of those guys that were on our teams, you know, some of these guys, they were, I know they were well over 20 years. They had 20 years of service as 18, whatever, Charlie or whatever. And so now I got a 10 year in service,

whatever the engineer, MOS, used to be 12 Bravo or whatever. Yeah, 12 Bravo. So, okay, but the guy knows engineering. He knows demo. He knows this stuff. Okay, now I have someone who's went through, used to be a whatever, and went through a five-week or whatever the MOS, I don't know, maybe it's a year, whatever it is.

Right. So I think that it may have degraded, but it was the requirement. You have to grow, right? The Army had to grow to be able to meet the demands and the requirements of two theaters of operations. And the support requirements because, like, we thought we were transitioning out of those places. When you think in 2008, 9, 10, I mean, they were talking about pulling out of those places and those time frames. Yeah. And so, you know, there was a lot of, you know, in the surge, right?

The surge happened in Iraq, and so it really kind of bloomed up the requirement. But, yeah, so I'm sure they figured that out. So you do your first trip. You go and you do the Civil Fires Training and now another trip to Afghanistan? Yep. So I did, so, yeah, so I did the first trip on a regional. then that was my second trip I was attached to, I think it was

275 initially and then 375. Okay. And so we were, they used to be directly attached to the Ranger Regiment, but then it kind of, they peeled them away like the early days of some of the first teams that were in,

they were, I think, directly attached. We were still attached, but now it was more you know it's take on versus i i forget like so were there two separate chains of command then if you guys weren't directly attached no so that's the weird thing about seeing being a civil affairs guys and kind of the identity of you right you're like you live always being attached to somebody right so you're not with your company especially on those on the tactical teams that we're doing the

SMU support, your four-man team is directly attaching to whatever the Rangers, the Seals, or whatever J-Soc wants to put you. And so you are, no, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you, they have a tactical control of you.

So, you know, the different between yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they can move you and do whatever they want to you. They just can't assign you somewhere else. I see. I see. I see. So, So how was that then? Had the Rangers already been working with Civil Affairs, did they know how to best utilize you guys?

Yeah, they, yeah, and I'll describe what that was like. So working with them, you're pretty much, or I'll say my experience, my experience was not a lot of stuff on target. You did all of the cleanup. my job was to go in and make things right so that was it's actually pretty it was actually pretty dangerous at times yeah quite honest because they had just hit a compound whatever how many ever people died tore everything up broken everything so my job was to go in with two other guys you know maybe maybe another humby you know so two trucks

that we knew that was a good target, and then try to make it right. And you basically had a backpack pool of money and handed out cash. Paying for the doors, paying for, yeah. CERT money, doing salacia payments. So that's what I spent my second tour doing is doing what's called damage mitigation.

And so you're basically, and then TSE work. So that's the other component. It's, you know, leave behinds, retrieving lead behinds. Yeah. So you basically either are getting that stuff and say, hey, you know, I understand that, you know, an operation happened. If you could, you know, you basically get with the village elder. And what was weird about maybe it's other place in the world, Afghanistan, money can make a death right.

Yeah. That was always really odd to me. and and it was a it was 1500 bucks yeah the equivalent of 1500 bucks was the authorized payment and i know i did damage mitigation for some very large targets one of the biggest ones was i think mandated by like i think i saff at the time because i think i saff had moved in by the time 2005 i believe they had taken over i think candahar and so it was like 54 deaths. So it's like basically a tough box full of money. You're taking a tough box full of cash out there and giving it to this guy. And sometimes they won't take cash because they know that somebody's

going to come and take that cash. So then we're doing animals. You basically buy livestock and you give them to them. And so and that was the case of my second deployment. And on the second second one, the medic who needed to, no, I returned back. So yeah, so I finished that one out. It was mainly working for the regiment, mainly doing damage mitigation, you know, doing salacia payments, and working with TSE folks, I think the Jaya talker, I forget what it's called. There's just a little section here in the compound. Yeah. And so that's a whole other really cool thing. It's probably not appropriate to talk about. You know, it's interesting that you bring up sort of the damage and mitigation and how,

like, there is an assigned value to life out there. And it's a little bit different, I think, if, you know, if people were to hit a target and innocent people were killed, which I don't know that I really saw that. I'm trying to think. But if it's a legit target, like, people understand it's a legit target, and there's, there's a way to, I don't say pacify the village. There's a way to, like you say, make it right. I remember we went on target one time and it was a legitimate target, but there was a very old guy on the target. And while we were, you know, doing the questioning and the bit and stuff like that,

he had a heart attack. And, you know, our medic tried to resuscitate him, couldn't resuscitate him. and called it and somebody came up with money and they're like hey we're really sorry about this and the family was like he wasn't taking his medication he's been having pain like it was just yeah so um on that i think it was that trip so so a lot of it was from air from cast okay so it was kids like these i mean babies oh so they have a full list okay so it's everything from I'm in kids, people. So you're not just talking about DA stuff. Not just direct.

Anytime close air support came in or a JDM got dropped. Right. Whatever. Right. I see. And so, yeah, those would be because the international Red Cross gets involved. Yeah. And so some of the big ones, you had an international Red Cross rep.

You had, I mean, these are big deals to clean this mess up. I did have one of those incidents. So they for some reason had the guy was shot, so I'll just tell you the story and then I'll tell you what we discovered. Guy was shot. For some reason, they took him on the bird. Maybe they were working on him.

And he would end up dying and he was in a refrigeration unit on Kandahar. All right. So we got a mission and our job was fly down to Kandahar, get this body, figure out somebody who can drive this body with you, go coordinate with some unit. It's not like this is set up for you. You have to arrange all this. And get this body back out to the village. Within like three days, right?

No, 24 hours. 24 hours, okay. Within the culture needs to be buried within 24 hours. So one, we were trying to figure it out. So I'm like, hey, I want to see this body. And we end up being, it was like, it could be a military age male, but you could tell it was, you know, just by pubic hair and things like that, you can be like, okay, this kid's maybe 12 to 13 years old. You know, and they're smaller folks. Yeah.

Anyways. So it's like, okay, we need to figure this out. So we coordinated the logistics and found a unit to drive us out there. And I think it ended up being like the princess's infantry. It was like the Canadian had owned the space where we needed to go. So it was like we coordinated. Get this body out there. And it's kind of a sad story.

The kid was actually mentally, I think, he retarded her so you know and um he was running at the guy and they had told him stop you know put your hands up and stop and with all the chaos going on he just kept running at him and they shot him yeah and you know so we you know through translator stop talk to the village elder and his family and explained to him you know what happened you know they perceived him as a threat and we want to make this right you know what can we do to help your family and so you know end up paying them out and and and it's again that's the weird thing it's like there's there's no there's no vengeance afterwards it is done yeah like we have now made it right and that that was what's really odd because

as a father you know it's like it'd be really hard to make that right yeah with me but for some reason culturally it was um we had done due diligence to mitigate the situation and make it right. And, you know, it's one of those, the dirty sides of war that happened. I feel that a lot of that had to do with Post-Tun Wally, you know, with, you know, the fact that, you know, a lot of these tribes and a lot of these families, they were like the Hatfields and the Coys. And there had to be a way to stop the cycle of violence between them. And so the blood price was, it was a really, it was very real thing for them in order to, you know, you know, to knock that off.

And, you know, it's just, it's a very interesting part of that culture. Yeah. Yeah. So how was that for you on that trip that you weren't really practicing medicine as much? Obviously, it was very strenuous and probably interesting job. But were you missing the medicine at all? I think most medics downrange gravitate in their downtime to, because you know you need to help out, right? Yeah.

So especially the smaller base, the smaller the base you're on, there's an unsaid expectation that that's where you are. You're there, you introduce yourself, you tell them, and you kind of keep your skills up and you help them out. So you go into like their clinic and do or whatever and do whatever you could do? Yeah, anything from just routine sit call to an ID happens, and so you're kind of called. And then you're kind of updated on their alert masts as you introduce yourself. Yeah. They know who you are. So when something happens then.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, for the most part, because let me try to think, I think at that time we were, with the Rangers, we were on in Kaus, on the little compound right there on Kausst. in the tents before they got the Alaskans. So I think they transitioned to the Alaskans, but before it was like GP mediums, the green tents, and then they got the nice Alaskans with the air conditioners.

So, yeah, that trip was there. And so I want to say that we weren't doing anything, no, because they had a Charlie Med, that's right. So Kaus had a Charlie Med, which is essentially a, It's like a mash, I guess, if you will. So they have as much capability. So you go over there and introduce your test self,

but for the most part, they have enough. Yeah. Is that like a field surgical team, FST or whatever? Yeah, it's like a bat plus. Yeah, okay. So they have x-ray capability. They have everything. Okay.

Okay. So how long was that trip? So those were short rotations. So we were on the same rotational cycle as the battalion. So I believe they were, I want to say, 90 to 120 days, I believe at the time frame. So it was three to four month rotations.

So I did a couple of those throughout the 2005, I did two to three rotations. And then I was there. I think I went back for just a really short period of time and then had to go back again because again civil affairs was still pretty small and we had basically four teams that's all jaysock had to support all of their missions in iraq and that's it for c a team so we were always on a cycle yeah and so um i think we had to go in early and it was four um red wings okay so it had just happened

and I think they were needing to fast rope back in. So this is, um, they had already happened and I think they were, it's at the time period where they,

I think they were doing a lot of the remains recovery stuff. And, um, long story short, our tasking was to do a lot of the money stuff. Uh-huh. With, um,

the, the guy who was basically protected. I guess Marcus. Uh-huh. And the team leader, he was an older SF guy, and he just wasn't fit and just couldn't. It was just an older dude.

It was a brutal environment. Yeah. Yeah. And so they had spun us up to come in early, so we came in early. We didn't end up going to the site, but we just finished up the backside. to buy all the animals. I think that was the end of we ended up giving a bunch of like animals.

If I remember, didn't want my recollection. I don't know what really happened. My recollection is we bought animals and had them had them delivered. Interesting. So what was, if you guys didn't go in, like you would spun up early to go support that. you didn't actually go in. What was the rest of that trip like for you? So the rest of that trip, at that time,

we got spun up for that, but we were no longer attached to the regiment. Now we were attached with the seals, but they put us in the J3IO. Okay. And so that's the information operation. So you're part of the three shop, working, doing more of the, with the TSE folks.

And so we would, we did the same thing, but this time for the assault force. At that time, it was the guys from the beach rotating in and out. And so we did the same type of payments, damage mitigation for them. And so, um. So were you out of Kabul at that point in time? Nope. Now we were at, we were at, so we were at the compound on Bogram. A Bogram.

That's what I meant, Bogram. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I said Cobble, but yeah, Bogram. Yeah. Okay.

So, so then how, because how would you guys work the payments out of Bogram? Because that task force went everywhere in country. So there are a lot of places you guys aren't going to drive to. Ring flights. Okay. Ring flights? Yeah, it's kind of like you hitched a ride on anything. It was like reflecting back on it, it was like we had to figure it out.

It wasn't like it was a range force. So if we needed to go and it was in the ODAs battle space, then we would go over to Camp Vance, go to Sea Gisota, tell them we need to get over here. Then we would catch a flight to Kandahar, and Kandahar get on a ring flight. or if there was a convoy going out, it's like you're a hitchhiker with an objective to do. So it's really kind of crazy. That is wild. So for those of you,

you guys can probably get it through context, but ring flights were basically just the patterned flights from base to base a lot of times supplies or personnel pick up and drop off. But they were scheduled flights. It would be like hopping on a rail line. and trying to get to one city and then hitchhiking to another city to get to where you need to go to. It is, and sometimes they would already have another tasking for you.

Like, hey, this just happened over here. We need you guys to hurry up and get back. And we're like, okay, we got to find a ride. Like, we have no assets to do that. Yeah. So it wasn't like we had vehicles. Right. Like, we're just a team in a tent.

Yeah. And it's like you're on a page or just like, okay, this just happened, we need you to go do this. So it was, yeah, it was kind of odd. To me also in a way, though, it seems kind of fun. It's like, it's like being a hobo on a train, right? It's like the open air. It's fun until it's not fun.

And I'll tell you when it's not fun. So we got with the Royal Princess Infantry, so it was, It was a... Down in Kandahar? It was down in Kandahar. With the Tim Horton's? Oh, no, no.

No, it wasn't in Kandahar. It was some... I don't know what they're called. It was smaller than a cop. Oh, okay. It was like basically like you're out there and... Just these little tents. Well, they're not little tents.

I can't even describe them. But we end up getting stuck there for a week. So it's, you know, just living out of a small ruck. But it was like we were, it was hot as shit. And they kept us outside. And so we were like laying on these hot rocks on cardboard. I got pictures of it. It's crazy.

So to get padding, we like broke down some MRE boxes. So it was just, we were just sleeping there, just trying to find anything to get us back to Kandahar so we could get on a C-130 to get back up to Bogram. And so, yeah, there were some times that were just like. it was like being a hobo you're there like who are you guys and what are you here for and we're like well we we we just finished you know taking care of a tasking but now we got to get back so you guys got anything going back and it'd be like yeah we got um you know we have some you know some strike you know whatever vehicle we got a you know we got a police you know some mps going back

so you just hey can we hit your ride and they're like let me see if we got room in the back the vehicle. And yeah, it's, it was pretty wild. But until you've experienced the polar opposite, which like full command and control of, which I, you know, like being embedded in the 80 second during the surge, much different. So yeah, it was kind of fun, but then again at times it was kind of shitty because you're like, we don't have any support here. Like we're just trying to figure it out. But I guess that's the, I mean, that's the job. So that's what the teams did.

So it is, I think they get a lot of a flack right for being a civil affairs team. But in the reality, it's like you are kind of just like three or four people kind of hanging it out there, hitching rides all over. Yeah. A country and war just trying to do these odd jobs. So anything, if anything interesting happens. I mean, that you want to cover on that trip, feel free. If not, we can fast forward. Not a whole lot.

I did get to discover a... So we had a payment for the Seals. So it was out in Farah. I don't know if you know where Farah. It's like right by the Iranian border. Yeah. I believe. Yeah.

So there was an ODA there, and I won't say what group they're from. And so we showed up. And so I'll describe them, though, because it's funny. And maybe you can, like, relate to it. And maybe some folks can relate to it. So they had a hit, right? They ended up, I think it was one of those stories where, like, the daughter picked. It was, like, some prominent person, and I think the Agriculture Department or something,

a government official, we'll just leave it at that, end up hitting the house, daughter picks up a weapon, shoot the daughter. And so we need to fly out to kind of make this right. So we fly out and our link up is with the ODA out there. And so we do the, you know, Mr. Toad's wild ride from Bogram to Kandahar, to the ring flights. And we end up in space camp way out here in the middle of nowhere.

and we get there and like these it's like mad max these there's like an they've gone native they went native so these dudes had made and welded choppers so they took these like 100 I don't know 100 cc

like um they're not even like Honda's they're like pieces of crap motorcycles and so they got them all raked out and they're these dudes in like little shorts no shirt yoked out of their mind on these like choppers riding around we're like what in the fuck is going on here and they're pissed they're like you just caused us a catastrophic loss of

rapport it's going to take us whatever to you they're pissed right yeah but at the same time we're like look at we're like looking at half of these guys and we're like what the fuck are you guys doing out here yeah like colonel kurt's back there like yeah I know I mean the Swedish gym like the Swedish gym with like a guy like making your proteins I'll never forget like we go into the gym and it's like it's exquisite right it's not your like jailhouse gym with like cinder blocks like your typical one yeah it's like really nice yeah like there's like an afghan in there like making like protein smoothies for everybody and like guys riding these like sons of anarchy yeah um yeah it was

that that that must have been challenging though for them and and for other battle space owners especially conventional that you know sometimes task force or or other units you know any DA units would make a mess and and generally that that mess was deserved right I maybe occasionally it wasn't but generally it was it was it It was deserved, and if they start receiving fire and they start calling in casts, you know, things happen. But for the battle space owner, who doesn't really have any control over that, and who does not, who does see it as a catastrophic loss of rapport, when maybe they didn't really actually have rapport, they just didn't really actually have rapport, they just, just the problems weren't right there in their face or whatever. But they did have to go in and clean that up a lot of times.

Yeah. And you're exactly right. And on that same trip, different place back to Kaus, I believe the 82nd owned at the time. And so another part of our job was detainee release. So, you know, you had the T. the TSF, I think it's called, temporary screen facility, holding facility, whatever it is, THF, TSF. Our job was to go release these guys.

Now, some of these guys were still on people's list and they didn't know that these guys were already there. Right. So they were either releasing them back to go recruit and do tasks. Right. And so I'll never forget, like, they had just did something, they had done an op in this area.

We had gotten given a bunch of pitchers and were told what to brief this commander. So you're going in, I think it's, I think it was a BCT commander. So, you know, you're briefing this commander. Here I am, I think it's, you know, E7 going in there briefing in 06.

Yeah. a total bullshit story with pictures and everything to go with it and here's what just happened in your space and here's what's going on

and so that was kind of I think sometimes we're the left hand didn't talk to the right maybe it's by design and an intentional and I think it was

and I think there's certain things that people need to know and they don't need to know and apparently that battle space owner did not need to know that we were going to, you know, not only did we make a mess, but now we just release somebody. And at times I had issue with this, but there's nothing you can do about it.

When you think about conventional soldiers out there, you know, as someone who later became a senior leader, there's people who are going out there risking their lives because they have a target deck and they're young troops who are executing missions to find a guy that they don't realize well that guy's already been found and he's back out there and he's back out there for a different reason but these guys could be going out there just doing their job and hit an ID right and you know and I'm sure they did and I'm sure people did lose their lives yeah but so You know, those are some of the other dynamics of that job that were a little bit different, you know, if you will.

But it's, you know. Yeah. I mean, would it be because they thought that they'd flipped the guy or because they, he wasn't, even though he may have been an IED facilitator, he what, they had his, like, they had his number. And they were waiting for him to unwittingly lead them to, a fatter target. I think that's what it 100% was all the time. Yeah.

It was, for the most part, it's just, hey, they'd already got him, and you do this task force, and then you get to go free. It's almost like cops, right? Yeah. It's like, okay, we got you on a small, we'll flip you. You go catch us a bigger fish, and we'll make this good. But generally, I don't know. I have mixed feelings about that, because especially for the IED,

Those guys were so difficult to prosecute. Not as targets, but as criminals, because they generally weren't going to pick up weapons during fights. They knew that there probably wasn't, you know, a lot on them. And, you know, units would roll those guys up two and three times, put them into the, you know, the American system, the Afghani system, or the Iraqi system. system and then those guys can be back out on the street and no time flat back doing business and

they're not the ones out there digging the holes and putting the iEDs in that's some farmer who's getting paid you know 20 bucks 50 bucks yeah it was very challenging environment for sure yeah yeah um so how long roughly was that deployment then um so i think at that time those were those were, I want to say, 120s. Okay. I think those were just four months. Yeah.

But you guys weren't on their rotation, because they are on, like, you know, red, green, yellow, whatever cycles are on, they're on, but you guys, a small, you know, you guys have to match every... Sometimes we would, sometimes we wouldn't.

Sometimes, I think once we switched from directly supporting direct attachment to the to like the units that made up the task force to directly being a task force asset, then it was much more fluid. Okay. You just, you know, you had a two-day rip. Yeah. And then, you know, you just, everybody goes up, meets in Bogram, do a high five.

They go, you stay, and you instantly are back on. So I believe we were on 120 days cycles at the time. Okay. but yeah it was interesting you know the other interesting dynamic of that is being being in the in the iosel you also got to see because i believe at the time you know so redwing happened and um i i'll i remember this one time we got pulled into the into the the talk and it was basically that we were writing the narrative about another aircraft getting shot down um And it was like, okay, well, it had gotten shot down, but we're like, at the time I think there was like, well, we're not going to give them credit.

We don't want them to get credit for shooting one down. So it had mechanical failure. And that was my first really experience with. Those two things with the, there's another narrative. And the narrative can evolve based upon the needs of the bigger picture or organization or objectives and not. really based upon ground truth. Right. I think a lot of people get upset with that.

And you hear a lot of stories where it's like, well, why didn't they tell the truth? Or they expect people like myself or like yourself who are there. It's on the onus becomes on you to correct the narrative. And you see this all the time. And that's tough, right? Because it's like, well, you know, we're service member following orders and we're doing what I're told. and we didn't come up with the narrative. For some reason, it was needed to be that way.

I don't know why. And I think another part of that, too, is I don't think that, I'm not saying always, but I don't think generally it's with the impetus to mislead Americans. It's that there is a full-blown propaganda war going on with the Taliban. And, you know, they're out there saying, we're using human shields.

They're out there, you know, saying these things. And you can't give them these victories of shooting down an aircraft. And vice versa, I think, when some of our folks, something happens. So I think you're spot on. And I experienced that. We talked about it a little bit earlier. I experienced that myself in a later deployment. So I agree with you that it seems nefarious and ill intention and ill will behind.

it. The reality is there's a strategic we're not playing checkers here, we're playing chess. Right. And so it's a bigger narrative that ties into a soldier's death, I was told one time, a soldier's death is a tactical

loss. A civilian innocent civilian death can be a strategic loss. Right. And so sometimes they need to adjust the narrative to gain or achieve the objective or perception of what's going on. Yeah.

No, it's in Afghanistan by probably maybe 2007 or eight, I'm not sure, like they were very good at, and I'm not saying there were no. civilian casualties in Afghanistan because there were. But they were very good at saying that teams had gone out and just killed all these kids and everybody on target. And I'm not talking about cast. I'm talking about bullets to the head, execution style.

And international Red Cross, they would shut the battle space down. They had the power to go to our government and whomever else to basically shut the battle space down. while they conducted an investigation. Yep. And, you know, and that was, so in Kandahar, you might take all this ground and push, you know, the Taliban out, you know, but then the Taliban say, hey, execution on this target. And battle space would get shut down. International War Cross go out, do their investigation, and the Taliban would all move back in. you know so there was very much a propaganda war going on at all times being in uh in the j3 io

were you ever privy to any sort of theoretical good idea ferry stuff that just having been out there on the ground you knew was not going to fly um not that i can um not that i can think of there's a lot of like interesting technical things that they employ again that and I'm sure you're probably aware and some of those you question those like you're going to do what and put that and they're not going to find that but um but yeah so I mean other than things like that no none that um no i always really about i i always just questioned from the optic of um luckily like that incident uh that that um that 47 went when that one got shot and no one died on it but that's what you always that's what people seem to gravitate towards is where kind of the conspiracy

theory kind of jumps in is and i think that's the that's the that's the that's the that That's the danger of it, right? Because when people don't have clarity and there's, like, ambiguity exists, they come up with their own narrative. And sometimes their own narrative is much worse than reality. Right, right. But intentionally, they don't get clarity. Yeah.

And so I think that's, you know, it's a double-edged sword. It is. And to be fair, the military. has, you know, whether it's a sexual assault under a command or, like, the military does have this history of covering up its mistakes. So it's very hard sometimes to tell when it's a cover up and when it's, when it is like legit sort of I-O operations. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how long were you on this rotation of these task force?

So I did a few of Afghanistan and then the next, and then the surge happened. So I did that pretty much consistently and then 2007 is when every got, is when

the mass flux of troops went to Baghdad. Okay. For the surge. And so I think that was spring. Okay. Spring of seven. And did you say that you were with the 82nd at that point? So at that time we all got pulled off of our regional mission. I guess it was a higher

precedence. And so we let me think about this. We had additionally, the civil affairs had additionally split. So they didn't get a bunch of new people, but they basically cut the battalions in half. And so the 96 became the 96 and 97th. And then the 96 and 97th became the 96th, 7th, and 98. And so I had moved to the 97th.

We had become, but same building, we just, like, you're now the 97. So I was no longer part of that group. I think that tasking then became where it used to be a company-centric four teams that did it. I think they end up rotating it around the battalion. And so the surge happened. We all got pulled in. And I can remember, like, every team from every company was going to Iraq. So for the most part, there was a couple guys on regional trips in Africa.

But for the most part, and maybe some down in South America, but for the most part, folks were going to Iraq to be part of the surge. And how was that for you after, you know, working with task force, working with Rangers, Sealed Team 6, and now you're going to the 82nd? That was horrible. And it was horrible because I think, well, one, that time in Iraq was horrible. I think it was horrible for a lot of people. It was the heights of the casualties. If I think that, again, like, I don't know exact numbers, but I think we were about tracking about 100 deaths.

service members a month at the time period of the height and so um i was assigned to solder city so i um solder city and i lived at the police station there so we were embedded with the police at these little joint security djs district joint security station i believe they were called and um i heard solder city was that nice that time of year yeah i'm just kidding no that was not a um yeah that was a dangerous place. Yeah. And so interestingly enough, my dad was also in theater at the same time. Was he still with 3 ID or where was he? He was still at 3D at the time. No, I think he was. I could be wrong. He was either with 3rd ID or with 1st ID because one of the units, I think it was 3rd ID. But so he was at, I don't know what main base he was at, but I was, we were working, our headquarters element was in Taji.

And then we lived at the police station. And that was all casualties again. So that was being a medic every day, all day. And that was a lot of my frustration with, I think, some of the leadership of the 80s. second is they would rotate through so they would come through and rotate do the command visits to the outstation and and you know everybody's like it's one thing in training to live like shit right yeah it's a whole other thing to live like shit when you're in the shit yeah and um so you know like things like running water just you know toll it's overflowing with shit that in porta potty that were full of mortar holes you know if you're going to die sweating on a port of john you know if you're going to die sweating on a port of john you You know what I mean? And so, you know, like, so that was, and then there was, you know, everybody's eating the canned. It was like this weird canned food they had that you like poked it.

And it had. So you were eating like shit. You weren't eating quality. You were eating, but not quality food. Yeah, yeah. And then the freedom maneuver, I think, was two streets. You could patrol two streets and you were almost 100% going to get. at least hit one

IAD. And at the time they had released because of the again like the strategic loss of civilians the the there was a rule that

no vehicle could drive faster than five miles an hour. So you think about this. You know city structure lobbying grenades into your vehicles so we put like welded tops on all the humvees and then And at that point, you had the big rhino mount for, I guess, it was like a glow plug or some kind of plug inside of it, I think.

I don't know. You talk about like the drop arm. So you had a jammer for remote detonating, and then you had this drop arm thing that I forget what it did. But essentially, like, you had this weird, like, hodgepodge of vehicle with welded glass all over. So people were, like, welding and up arming their own stuff. Because at the time, I mean, it was horrific, like, deep buried minds where they would flip Bradley fighting vehicles. I mean, it was, you know, there's a lot of bad stories. And so from that time of just, you know, those vehicles would flip over and you'd watch soldiers burn to death. Like, you would see them trying to get their arms out of hatches and it'd be engulfed in flames.

and, you know, those really, it messed me up personally. And a lot of medics just never, like probably people, I shouldn't just put that to medics, but I know some of our medics, they didn't do well after that. Yeah. We had some that during the surge took its toll on folks. It certainly took its toll on me, and I think I changed as a person after that trip.

Yeah. We can talk about that stuff a little later, but um and so yeah so that was my job was to be a medic um the medic who was with the with that unit his platoon sergeant got shot um in the head putting up they were doing their hescos putting their heskos up in the beginning so the medic became the platoon sergeant and so we had a little four detachment he was in believe it or not in e5 um and So I was like, and so my team, we were all these sevens. I was like, hey, man, just do your job.

If there's anything medical, just I'll take care of it. Don't worry about it. So we set up a little hasty, you know, one litter in a ceiling container at this little police station. And that's where we live for seven months. And it was injuries every day. And it's really what kind of, to hone me into like you know some of the device stuff that I'm doing today it's just some of

these injuries from the EFPs that was when the EFPs got started and EFPs would go and take people's legs off they would I mean they would just go right through guys torsos um I'll never forget I had one go through basically I don't know how this ended up happening but a piece of it went through under his plate, under his skin, but not through his thorax, but basically a big hole in one shoulder and a big hole out the other. And just, I can remember trying to put pressure. At the time, they had quick clot sponges. Yeah, yeah. There were these, man, I had these sponges and I kept them like in all of, I must have stuffed those sponges in somebody every day. Yeah. So all my pockets, because you're just walking around and you're on its little,

police station so it's not like you're wearing full kit all the time you know sometimes you're just wearing your uniform maybe your your your your vest but my pockets were never not full because we this police station also had a radio tower yeah so you're in a flat land with a radio tower in a city that you can see this tower from anywhere in the city right so now you have an azmith now what do you need distance. Right. So it was like just, I mean, you probably remember that time. It was just mortar city all day. So you really, you're not fighting. Yeah. You're just taking casualties and getting blown up. So it's really a psychological, it's probably what they're experiencing, I could guess, with some of the drone stuff now. Oh yeah. That's what I, that's what I equated to in

my mind. I'm like, that sucked and you're in constant fear because you're not going to know when you die. you're just going to blow up or maybe get mangled and, you know, it's just like this stuff's coming in and so. It's very, it's very frustrating to hear this because, you know, they also did this in Afghanistan where they would put a small number of soldiers out at some cop in the middle of nowhere with no support and basically allow, you know the the Taliban to just come in and you know they'd put them in low ground they wouldn't give them a solid tactical position you know and

and they would just allow the Taliban to kick the shit out of these guys day after day after day and in my I would love to know who decided that U.S. soldiers needed to be at this police station what was the point of putting them there you know because there's no area denial going on, right? You're not, you're not, you're not creating a cordon. You're not, all,

they're just sticking these guys in a meat grinder with no ability to defend themselves. And then putting additional restrictions on them, like the five mile an hour speed, you know, speed limit. Like these, these are people, honestly, that need to be called to carpet and an answer for their sins. Yeah. So it's funny you mention that. So it was, if you remember, where we were, again, not to get, it doesn't matter the politic aspect of it, but I think the nation wanted us out. And so we had specifically an embedded reporter with my four-man team. In Iraq. In Saudi City, okay. So in Sauter City, so why we were doing this, so in this like two streets in Jameer, I think

it was called, that we could drive to, we were doing these small projects. So we were putting in lights. So, like, I think they were like solar lights or something like that because I forget what it was. Lights, you're doing your basic, like, handout stuff and schools, like trying to, like, refurbish rehab these schools. So that was our job. Like, so it was in it, in, I don't want to get off the story, but I think, and here's one of my frustrating parts about being a civil affair soldier is success, measured on how much money and projects you spent, not your effect. And so you think about, you know, and that's one of the things that, you know, like the I.O.

side of it affects-based operations. But if you read every award, it was like established so many of this and spent X amount of dollars. And so it was like you did these, I don't want to say frivolous projects and risk people's lives to essentially like do some sort of a rebuilding that I don't really think it rebuilt anything. And so, you know, yeah, it was really frustrating, but that's essentially what we did was a lot of that. It's just driving around, get blown up, take fire, treat people. I think half the people in that small element, you know, they all ended up with Purple Hearts. They were just, it was just like you were going to catch something.

the likelihood of a piece of frag not flying at you and getting it was just everything was just riddled um i i still got a whole lot of pictures it's just everything was riddled every build every everything was just holes everywhere um and so uh so yeah that was the surge and that was a pretty unpleasant time um so um yeah i wouldn't wish that on anybody no yeah yeah sutter city and you know and moktado of Sutter. Like, he was, he was a piece of work, you know, because he'd get his, the Jechal Mardi, you know, they had openly hostile, you know, openly aggressive, U.S. elements would go in and just start kicking ass, you know, doing hits, you know, whatever. And then at the point in time that we, you know, that the U.S. would gain some ground in there. You know, he was, you know,

would pull out the, I'm a cleric, I'm a holy man, let's, you know, let's work. And, and, and, and this would be the story that would play is, you know, he's a holy man. He's, you know, he's a mullah. And, and, and so U.S. forces would have to stop directing hits on J.S. Madi while they rebuilt, re-armed, and then they would go at it again. And we, we played this game with him forever. And, and to, to throw, to, to, to, To throw an ounce of U.S. money into Sotter City is ridiculous. Yeah. And I think more importantly, it's the blood that was put there.

Because, you know, like, every soft is sexy, right? Yeah. But really that's where I gained. I learned an important lesson there that no one's service is greater than anybody else's. Absolutely. Yeah. And when you look at these kids, I can, these kids at that point of time we're doing, some of them were getting extended to 18 months.

Yeah. So I was blessed to experience that only for seven or eight months. Yeah. 18 months to deal with that. And the casualties that they were taking were half of their squads were no longer alive. Yeah. at, you know, 20 years old, 18 years old, 19 years old. You know, that's the travesty of it, I think.

And, you know, we've talked about that on this show before, too. People love the soft mission. People love the direct action. The direction is great for commanders. It briefs well. How many bodies did you stack? Look, we're winning the war. You know, we just killed.

20 insurgents. But both in Iraq and in Afghanistan, these conventional guys, they don't get any credit at all for what they went through. And they, the software was very Gucci.

It was dangerous. I'm not, I'm not taking anything away from it. It was dangerous. They, you know, they had the lion's share of kills and whatnot. But they also got to plan it. They had the assets. They had, you know, the resources. They weren't out there doing, you know,

recon by, you know, enemy fire. But both in Afghanistan and Iraq, these conventional forces were stuck out there. Some of them mixing it up every single day. You know, they weren't flying back, you know, to Bogum. They weren't, you know, going back to Jalalabad, you know, to play Halo to unwind and prepping for the next stop. They were in it every single day and for long periods of time.

like you say like 12 to 18 months and they get no credit at all everybody is so focused on soft because that's what they make movies about that's you know and yeah these these these kids these guys these these women they they deserve a hell of a lot more credit than they get yeah yeah they do hopefully hopefully i'll remember at the end um once i got really senior i suppose spoke up at a conference that I, well, no, tell us. So, yeah, so I'll fast forward really quick and then we'll go back. So it was the right towards the end of my career,

you know, I was a brigade CSM, but previous, a lot of soft experience, you know, once I had, you know, I had 23 years in service. And as much as I, a physician stood up from one of the elements within J-Soc. And basically it was about prolonged field care. And he basically was saying how prolonged field care was a soft problem and conventional people

and he did not worry about it. And so I stood up because at the time I had already worked with some prolonged field care stuff for the conventional army. It was a tasking given to me based on my background and some stuff that was going on with Korea and fight tonight, where we thought we were going to fight in Korea.

And I was in that area. And so I stood up and I said, so what you're telling me, sir, is that, so I have two sons that are serving, one in an SMU and one son and 425 in airborne infantry in Alaska. So the training that their medics get and their life,

their survivability statistics should be directly relational to their unit of assignment and not their injury pattern. So we should invest only in soft training and teaching and preparedness for prolonged care. And so it really just struck a chord with me and I wanted to just rake him over the coals. And I think it even actually made them rethink. Maybe not the group. And maybe I didn't have a bigger play in that. But it definitely made me reflect upon because I was back now working for the conventional military of the importance of, hey, those are the dudes staying out there for 18 months.

They don't, they get the least training. They're least equipped and they have the least assets. But now you don't want to focus on them and dedicate some training to you. You're saying it's too sexy of training for them to get it. I'm like, and so they don't need to know how to ensure survivability of those forces. Should they encounter, you know, prolonged field care? And so, but yeah, so. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's a huge soapbox for me. It's like, hey, you know, invest in all these guys because that's our charge. Take care of American sons and daughters. And so as a leader, you need to ensure that that's your responsibility is a commander. like the man training, equipping of your soldiers. But yeah, so rewind back to the surge.

So surge is done. And so, you know, the majority of us, you know, made it back. And at the time, that's when I essentially got an invitation to do something else. And I was seeking things to do.

do because that's the time that I had mentioned that civil affairs was converting. It was no longer going to be an organization where people could just go to regardless of their, or because of they had an MOS that fit the team dynamics, which is basically kind of modeled, kind of like the ODA, like I said, the engineer weapons. Medic team leader, now you had to be MOS and they basically gave us all the opportunity, change your MOS or find another job. And so at the time,

I actually enjoyed the tactical medical stuff, and I wanted to go to the unit at Bragg. That's where I wanted to go. But they had periods of time where they're senior, I think the senior medical folks there, they either wanted

18 series guys and they wouldn't take the Sockham guys. And so it really was who's in charge of the med troop or squadron or whatever it is. And so at the time, they were like, hey, we're not taking, you know, we're only taking 18s. And so, okay. And so a friend of mine had went to another organization, a special access program, I'll just call it that, in the national capital region, just keep it kind of area generic.

and had said, hey, man, I've talked to them about you. I think that you've got the experience, and you would do well here, and would you like to apply. And so, and I was seeking things out, and I said, yeah. Had you been aware of that program? I known about the people because there was onesies and twosies that worked with the task force. but you didn't know

kind of what these weird animals were. You know, they're kind of like these strange birds, right? You're like, what's that strange bird? Yeah. Oh, it's something really cool. And so, but no, I mean, honestly, like, because of my, by that time I'd have developed a strong sense of passion for a medic to being a medic, and that was actually a really important thing about that organization

is they didn't want people who wanted to be. something else. Right. If you're going there to be a medic, that's what you're going to be, and you're going to be the best medic. And so, so, so, basically you either you get asked to go there or someone knows and recommend you. That's the process. And so funny story is I actually filled out another packet, and I thought that I was getting packets in. And you don't really know where these packets are going because I'll tell the dirty secret. The dirty secret is there's a lot of places you can go. Yeah.

It isn't just one place. So there's a lot of places up in the national capital region. So I had fully applied and been like hired. And then I talked to my buddy who was at the place that I wanted to go. And he's like, because I think I had applied to, I had filled out the packets for both. but again the names on the packets they're just like names they don't really correlate and um he's like uh dude we you didn't go through the price like you so i called the other guy because you get a point of contact and i was like um yeah i don't want the job i'm actually trying to go somewhere else

yeah and he's like okay i understand and then so long story short is i um so i filled out the packet i got um offered to go up an interview and I went through my interview process and I'll talk a little bit about that later because my CSM at the time which I did know was also a former unit member but he would he never told me that and he's like I need you to do one more deployment before you go so I had went basically I got you know if you you get the job or not but I told them hey I committed to another deployment and so so after that I had to do one more deployment and that was to I had now switched companies to the 90 or the 97th had split and also became the 96 and seventh said split and become the 98th 98th was Latin America so then I got a tasking to

go down and do the part of finding the hostages in Colombia. So ramping all up and going through language immersion. And so got back from Iraq, immediately started language immersion after I went through, you know, my screening process. And then headed off to Columbia. And what was that? What was the search still ongoing at that point in time? It was.

So we actually got them back. I was actually at the location the day before. Wow. Yeah. So when we first got there, so we got there, I think they got them back in June or July of 08, if I remember right. And so Operation Jock, I think it's called, pronounced Jock, J-A-QU-E, whatever

I don't recall. So essentially, yeah, that was our job, was attached to embassy mission, seventh group, so I was working with seventh group at the time, out of the embassy there. And so we were flying around with the, so Operation Willing Spirit, and so it was about

going and finding the, where these hostages, this plane that had crashed in the middle of the jungle, five years earlier. So these guys have been hostages now for five years. getting moved all over, you know, triple canopy jungle. And so I can go right into it. Yeah, please. Yeah.

So, yeah, so, you know, I finished language immersion, you know, just came off Iraq. And honestly, you know, like I said, Iraq kind of changed me, I think, as a person. And so, you know, I, you know, I struggled a little bit on this deployment, but that's when I first started like angry outbursts and things like that. Just somebody, if you, you know, you're used to have an escalation of one to ten.

Now it's just zero to 60 like that. Yeah, it's just 10, you know. And so, so yeah, we get there and without focusing too much on that, we instantly start going out and basically, you're doing these civil affairs type activities so it is a more of the traditional i guess i think doctrinal mission of going out and working with their government and supporting them and then using resources you know the monies that are afforded to go out and do um larger scale medcaps not like essentially like tailgate medicine afghanistan these are where we actually bring in 10 host

doctors and dentist. Wow. Load these airplanes up with these huge suites of medical equipment, and you fly out to these remote places, you know, all over the jungle, and you set up and you start seeing people. And, you know, and then other folks can kind of come in and ask questions and do what they do. Right. So it's kind of a, I don't know if you want to say, cover for status action kind of thing.

Yeah. You're just, you're facilitating. Maybe that's a better way. You're facilitating people to do their job. And I mean, done right, I feel like medcaps and PRTs and the PRTs, but medcaps are almost always, if they're done right, like there's always an element of that intelligence gathering piece to the medcap, right? That there should, that there's always somebody there,

and especially on the female side, because a lot of times, like, a lot of times the women will talk about the things that are pissing them And things that are pissed them off are generally the things the guys don't want to talk about. Yeah, or, yeah, well, you know, that was a huge, you're exactly right. And that's probably more so in Afghanistan than even Iraq. Afghanistan, I've never talked to a woman. Yeah. Never.

Yeah. Iraq, yes. Because they have like the ones that don't kind of wear the full Burka type, the traditional. They have a much more Western mentality. Western, exactly. Kind of more westernized. It's more socially acceptable for them to kind of associate with males. And so could work with females there.

And then in Latin America was no real deal. But yeah, 100%. The utility in Afghanistan, I didn't get to experience those, I think the female engagement teams or whatever they're called. And then we didn't get females in CA, my very very. last trip we had our, I think, once some of our first females. Is that because it was still considered

special ops and so... I think it was the MOSs. So if you looked at it. Oh, right. No female medics that went through. I actually had the first female medic in my Sockham class. She was Air Force. First female go through Socum, I think.

That's a whole other crazy story. That was integration gone awry. that's a funny story so I should tell that but we're too far past it but at any rate so yeah so we're kind of lost my track of so you're in Latin America you're doing the med caps so we're doing large med caps yes so the big big large med caps and so we're really just asking questions like any FARC around has anybody heard rumor of them moving because that's what they would do They would move these guys for five years everywhere.

And so we, I think it was San Jose Guavier, the Guavier River area. We were there. Now, we didn't know the op was going to happen, but we were there the day before setting it up and doing planning to do it. And so we met with the local government. We told them, here's what we'd like to do. would like to do health screenings. Yeah. Because a lot of the stuff that we were doing, because like, well, why do you want to do that?

Well, you know, you didn't just come out and say that. A lot of it was because of the State Department stuff that they were doing with the spraying. Right. For the, I guess, the eradication of the crops and stuff. Yeah. Or the mosquitoes and stuff. Oh, oh, oh, the drug. The counter drug stuff.

Okay. It's all counter drug. Okay. Through the con, I believe it's called. as their organization through their counter-narcotical folks. So that's a whole other different mission that we also did once we got the hostages back. We continued doing that. So, yeah, so we were there planning it to set it up and you're just like, hey, we want to do this.

We want to see, you know, we see the folks, make sure everything's okay and planning it. And then I think our team leader got a call and it's like, hey, you guys need to get out of there. now you need to leave and we're like we're in the middle of courting this no and they're like no you don't understand you need to go so we're like okay um all right so we you know we packed up we um we we uh we told them we we had finished everything because at that time we didn't have to hitch a ride we basically would go to the counter narcotics police they would get one of their um their what are they the MI17 okay their helicopters and fly you out.

So they facilitated our travel and we said, hey, you know, we're finished. We need to go back. And they took us back back to Bogota to the embassy. And then the next day, it was either the day or the day after, then that operation took place. And I believe that was one of like the most successful, like, you know, no shots fired. got a lot of controversy over them using imposing as a Red Cross element so it kind of violated I think some international law

but nonetheless no shots fired they got the folks back they were able to be repatriated and then did you did you meet them did you greet them did not they flew back they facilitated their their movement was pretty much facilitated and kind of escorted. And there wasn't a reason. Like they didn't need to. Yeah.

I didn't know if you had medically screened them when they came out or not. No, no, nothing. Nope. No real direct contact. The, I think Cleveland was the South, the Sox South commander at the time. He flew in, briefed everybody and thanked everybody. You know, because this was, they've been looking for. these guys for years and so it was a big deal I think I still got the Fayetteville

Observer paper yeah from that and and so yeah so that was the bit but that was actually the very beginning or towards the I think two months into our rotation and so after that you know that didn't get to see them they they got they went back and we continued on mainly working with the State Department stuff and just kind of just you know we would go out sit these things up and they would have a State Department rep who would kind of screen

these folks and make sure the stuff they're spraying them all over this stuff isn't like causing cancers or causing birth defects I think it was really birth defects honestly yeah that they were not causing health ailments with with the population right right with from saying

you know it's interesting because as I think about it like I when I think about med I've always thought about intelligence gathering. But it's possible, and maybe you know this, and maybe it wasn't even a thing. But I imagine, you know, with the FARC moving around as much as they did, medcaps are also potentially part of a shaping operation, right?

Yeah. That if you throw a medcap into a region, then the FARC's going to move away from that region. So you can almost, in a way, if you have a general area, you can almost channel them or at least, you know, influence their movement. Yeah, I think you can. And what's interesting, you bring that up because we're not the only people who go and build wells. Like in the beginning of Afghanistan, there was a lot of well building.

Right. Because people needed water. Right. And you would find, I want to say, I want to say, like, Taliban built wells too. Interesting. Yeah. So they would do their own kind of like humanitarian assistance. Yeah.

Like there was some weird stuff where you would be like, well, who built this one? And they're like, oh. So I think just like we recognize kind of these centers of gravity for being pro, they did the same thing. And they kind of rewarded. So it's kind of like the stick or the carrot, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, if you're friends with us, then we'll take care of. If you're not friends, then we're going to come and shwack people.

Yeah, yeah. And maybe we do the same thing. Yeah. Well, I'd like to think we don't, but, you know. Well, I guess I mean that shwack the people that need shwai. Right, right. If you're doing, if you're putting bombs in place. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think you're right too. And I think they see that. And I think that's what gives us the upper hand is that we don't do that. Yeah. I think you're exactly right. I mean, the upper hand in terms of, the upper hand in terms of them not being hostile towards us,

but there is, there is a brutal efficiency with sort of the mafia. style play nice or will come in it's fear yeah you can exactly it's you know it's it's influencing through just direct fear so yeah

I don't think that we you know I in my experience you know which isn't every experience but my experience we've never we haven't played yeah there may have been some folks who do that but it's not because they're

I well I wouldn't think direct it and it's certainly not at large scale. And it's certainly not within your, I would say, majority of your soft elements and definitely not your conventional military. It kind of goes against doctrine, you know, a lot of just doctrine and policy. Yeah, I mean, you know, you might get some rogue, you know,

commander out there who has a, you know, a small element that has influenced over that might pull that kind of stuff. But it's not, it's not within our ROEs. it's not within our TTPs. It's not within our doctrine to do something like that. And I think that's actually important to know and think about. The military isn't, it's an organization, it's an entity. It has a value system attached to it, but it's not a person.

Right. And so there may be people doing those things, but it may not reflect the policies and regulators and common procedures of the larger entity or how it expects its people to behave. Right, right. There's bad apples in everybody. And bad apples and people who go off the rails.

Look, if you have some young lieutenant with a platoon, maybe a platoon plus out in some cop, right? and they keep on getting hit or they keep on hitting IEDs and if he's there for 18 months at some point after he puts his third, fourth, fifth dude guy on a bird

at some point does a switch flip for him and he goes into like the local village and he says hey look my guys get hit again I'm there's going to be hell to pay yeah like I don't know who's doing it. You guys know who's doing it. My guys get like that's not the way that's not the way to do business but I can see and empathize with somebody who who goes who goes there.

I can't I've I've actually thought a lot about this but I think it's short-sided and I'm not I don't disagree and the reason I say that is so because I think about this. a lot. Because I think about what we asked, like, why was there blue on green or whatever? I was like, well, I can tell you if you came to the states

and you were in my neighborhood and you were doing questionable things and I didn't like, you might have that problem for me too. Right, right. And so, and then if you think about, you know, later some of the stuff where you're overseeing indigenous

forces, yeah. And especially in their areas where they came from, their neighbors, friends, brothers. Now, you don't always know what your neighbors are doing. So that's the problem I have. It's like I live in a neighborhood, right? There are 75 houses. I don't know what the hell half the people are doing in their houses.

I don't know if they're doing criminal acts. I don't know if they're who they're talking to. I don't know what they're doing. Now, maybe there's the rumor mill in some places, but I was like, for a large part, people can be doing bad stuff in a close proximity to you. Yeah. And you truly not know anything about it. Yeah. Right?

No, I agree. Like, your next door neighbor could be a child molester, a rapist, and beating his wife. Right. And you not know anything about it. You may have subtle signs. Like, hey, something's weird with this family. but so so from that aspect of it I'm like you know I can see where the natural instinct would be to 100% do that yeah but I think if you wouldn't think it through yeah and actually like okay is it plausible and logical

that they may not know anything about this yeah and if you go with just the stick and you know I'm going to beat you or kill people until you tell me. Yeah. And they don't, what are you going to get? Yeah. You're going to get bad information. Yeah. And I think that's why maybe some of those approaches are not the best approaches.

I don't disagree with you. You know, and like I wouldn't condone, you know, like I said, a young lieutenant or captain doing that. I can just imagine their level of frustration and their sense, you know, the inability to do anything, the sense of powerless. and the desire to do something to protect their people, even if that something is toxic and and not well thought out. Yeah. But again, and I guess I'm also open-minded enough to also think that you can manage things in your area by being a good steward and actually, hey, hey, we're going to talk about

this and whosoever's doing this needs to get out of here because you're putting my family at risk because you're doing these things right right so I think you know I can see both sides I guess I can see them resorting to that because they feel like they're tied they don't know what else to do as a leader they feel a responsibility to show that they're doing due diligence to the people who are getting affected and so I could see where they would they would feel like I have no other choice but to go in with the stick because people are continuing getting injured. I need to stop this. I can't control it.

Right. And so it's a helplessness. Yeah. I think so too. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I mean that it's like it's a breaking point, I think. And I don't think this happened a lot.

I haven't heard of it happening a lot. But I can imagine the frustration at some of those smaller cops with not having assets, not having support, you know, not having, you know, not being able to go out into the village and conduct, you know, a med cap or, you know, build a well because it's just you and your line guys, you know. So, yeah. Anyway, I'm sorry, I derailed that. No, no, you're good.

But so the operation is accessed. You stay down there for a while longer. So, yep, we stayed to the end of the tour. So once I completed. I hurried up, came back. I had, you know, I just, my basically, I think I had to hurry and sell my house. I had to get it ready to sell because I'd been on Bragg now for a good number of years. No, I rented it.

I had to rehab it to rent and then hurry up and just pack up and move and then move to the D.C. area. And so, so, yeah, so then that's my time is done for now at Fort Bragg. end up going back. But, um, so now I, um, I left and then, um, you know, I ended up there. And then I, I, I kind of got what, uh, a lot of people, you know, you really don't know. Yeah. You don't know. And, um, D.C.'s a, um, a big place that hold the national capital region, I should say.

And, um, and, um, and so, you know, like most people, I'm like, hey, man, we're, like, you know, I have a point of contact. And I'm like, hey, um, um, um, um, um, I'm. where should I live? That's where it starts out. And they're like, hey, you should probably, you know, look at this area. Right. So I got given up a geographic area that I needed to kind of find a residence to.

Because if you're in the D.C. area and if you ever live there, 15 miles can take you. I was just, you know, I was talking to D about that. I was like, I was like, after I got out of the service, I got offered to go back because I wanted to work. can do policy, write policy for the Undersecretary Health Affairs is what I wanted to do, because I had learned that I could shape things through policy. And I'd been taught and mentored by actually somebody who was the unit, the med Sarn major. And so, but anyways, if you ever been up there, like, it's critical where you pick to live because your life can be hell

for however long you're there and so luckily I picked a good place because I'm living on the Beltway for those that live around there it's probably like this it's like four miles will take you an hour to go four miles

I honestly think that traffic in that area is much worse than traffic in New York traffic here can it can get messy but I feel like there it's always messy yeah that

Traffic there can be brutal. Yeah, if you don't, like if I needed to go to our headquarters, which was much more central, if you did not leave that building by 3.30 and you had to go over the bridge in Alexandria then, you weren't getting home until 7 o'clock at night. And so it was, and I was like, man, some days, three hours each way in traffic. It's like six hours of my life every day in traffic, which, yeah. So, yeah, so I get there, and like most people, I'm like, okay, what do you do, day one? Like, what's day one? That's what most people want to know. What's day one look like?

Well, day one looks like, meet me in a parking lot. Meet me at, you know, the KFC over here. Yeah. And you get escorted, you know, get through the, into the building. And then, you know, it's a whole different environment, you know. And it's like, you know, if you, folks who worked around skiffs before, you get very used to just like leaving your phones. Well, if you're in a typical soft element, you know, your electronics and your watches aren't a big deal.

But, you know, it's like, hey, if you have anything electronics, you know, so that was all new to me. You know, I dealt with it, you know, going into certain places just with working for J-Soc overseas and things like that, but never for my everyday work. Yeah. And so, you know, so that was kind of new. And so, yeah, so I get there. And surprisingly, the organization I was a part of, I was end up being on the on the, the manning role.

So there's a lot of medics who've been there over time. So I was a medic. So that's one important distinction. So I was, if, yeah, that's what I was. I was hired to be a direct support medic. So just to break down the difference, or when you're saying this, that it would be like, it'd be sort of like being a Ranger Battalion, that you have your line platoons who are, who are the main effort, or not necessarily the main effort,

but they're the technical experts in what they do, and then you're there as direct support to those. Yes, so that's 100% right. So, yeah, so let me, I'll rewind a bit and then we'll pick back up. So going through the screening process, they make it very clear that that's what you want to do. Right. And they ask you that.

And, you know, and I kind of asked, like, well, what else can I do? Well, no, no, I didn't. I didn't ask that because I didn't. I had no desire. That's an important thing. And actually, later on, I was part of building their enhanced selection program for medics. I ran the very first one as the kind of enhanced screening sergeant major. But, yeah, you do not want folks who want to do something else.

Right. If you want to do something else, you need to go do that. Right. What you're here to do is to be a DS medic. And we had two kinds of medics. We had clinical medics and direct support medics. And so to a direct support medic, we pulled from all services. And from, except, yeah, all services that actually had medics, Marines don't have medics.

And essentially a soft back ground. You had to have a soft back and you had a certain combat qualification. Because that's what I ask. You know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, know why, you know, how did I make it? You know, how did I get this par? And they're like, I'll never forget, they're like, Uriah, nobody's here by a mistake.

And so that was, it was pretty fulfilling just to hear that. And then, you know, the next thing, you know, because it was, I had already went through the, I guess, the screening portion, and I won't talk about that because it's important to keep that component protected. Yeah. And so they're like, we're looking for folks who will reach for the brass rings, knowing they could be styrofoam and hoping they could be brass.

And so I was like, okay, that's a lot to think about. Yeah. But essentially it's like it's willing to try something unknown and that we can't talk to you about and we're not going to. Yeah. And so that's why it's really important to. to keep that, just not for people to know. And I think it's important for people to know things are out there and to challenge yourself because I think that where we are in today, and I don't know how folks feel, but it's just how I feel.

You know, I have two young sons who are in the military, all three of my sons served, all paratroopers, proud of that. and I think that we have a culture that's and it's throughout time we pay homage to the court jesters and not the gladiators and folks need to have an appreciation for the folks who keep our nation safe

and folks and young service members and people and civilians who have ambition and want to challenge themselves they need to know there's other things out there. And even soft is the best way I can describe it is soft is like a multi-story building. Yeah. And there's floors. And even the organization that I was part of has floors where there's people who work at the first floor and they kind of do first floor things.

And then there's people on the 20th floor. And the people on the 24th floor do things that people on the first floor do things that people on the first floor. first floor don't even know about. Right. Yeah. And then there's buildings across the street. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so there are a lot of things if you have ambitions to do things. I think it's important to know that there's things out there. And those are the people that you should really respect and admire. And I have the utmost of respect and appreciation for being able to be a part of that organization because it's extremely special and I didn't really going back full circle to where we are is when I signed in I didn't realize how special of a place I was at.

Yeah. And I certainly didn't feel worthy of being there. Yeah. And I had signed in, so going to my background, right? I'd done some things, right? And I had experienced combat and loss and was working with, you know, tier one elements essentially overseas. And I'm signing in with another guy,

so I'm medic number five and he's six or vice versa. So there's only seven of us for this whole place. And we have other medical people, but direct support medics. And he, so I was a 68 Whiskey Whiskey One, a soccer medic, and he was in 18 Delta, who was also an 18 Bravo, who had also been a,

a sodic and a Sephardic and all this instructor stuff. And, you know, and I was like, I was like, man, I got to step my game up, you know. And, and so, you know, I really had an appreciation. And it was really like, it's like, you know, a small fish back in a big pond. I felt like where I was before, I became a big fish. Yeah. And, you know, I knew what I needed to don't. And I was very, I felt I was extremely good medic. Yeah. And very competent medic. And I don't say that with any ego. I worked hard to be one of the best medics in, and I think the inventory, you know. And so now I think I made it to the major leagues, and I got to step my game up on the small fish again.

And so, yeah, so it was just, I was surrounded by very impressive people. And that's just with respect to the medical section. You know, people who were extremely accomplished And you just kind of get humbled instantly again You're like, okay, this is next level. Yeah. It's interesting because I want to focus real quick on what you say. You know, we talked about soft getting a lion's share of the glory. But also when we talk about soft,

we are talking about shooters getting a lion's share of the glory. But there are shit-hot mechanics that make that mission possible, right? Like people who aren't just content to go out to the motor pool and do the service, like there are people who continually learn who can make magic happen.

There are cooks who care about their jobs. There are, you know, like, no matter where you are, you don't have to be sort of the tip of the spear to be the tip of the spear of your field. And one of the things I always appreciate about the military was just the vast number of opportunities. If you want to go get it, you know, if you ask around, if you put in those 4187s, you know, for every school you can think of. And, you know, like the opportunities are there a lot of times.

Yeah. No, I think you touched on an interesting point. So later on my career, when I went back to Bragg, you know, as a senior leader on the base, you can. trying to get hosted and kind of toured around. And, you know, and I got invited over to the organization at Bragg, and they gave me a tour. And so it was at lunchtime, and probably a lot of people know this, right? There's the places where the shooter sit at and the place where the other people sit at. It's kind of like high school.

It was really odd. But it was essentially like, oh, we sit over here. And I was like, that's okay, that's different, you know. And, but, and I noticed that even were. working with the guys in the Navy at the beach. It's very much us and them's when it comes to the support folks. I can say although there's a very clear distinction in line of who's the guy and who's not the guy, the acceptance and the respect, mutual respect for what people do,

was beyond something I've ever experienced before. And you definitely, when you're in soft, and especially a CA guy, you kind of know you're a C.A. Yeah, right. You kind of know, and you're a Ranger, probably working with, I'm guessing with Delta, you kind of know you're a Ranger. Right, right. There's no mistake you're not one of them.

Exactly, right. And so, and there's going to be times where they draw that line, I'm guessing, when you're in supporting them. And so there, it was very much different. You were much, I think it was because of just the necessity to support things they did

and keep them going because those guys, it's different. They don't. And I'll try to keep this focused on just how I supported folks from a medical perspective and kind of leave it at that. Because I think,

it's still pretty cool to be to be quite to be quite honest and and so but yeah so those guys they a lot of times it's not like you're going and coming back there's some folks that do that they come and go but there's some folks who go and they just go and they're gone and everything's got to keep going for them because folks you know they have families and they have everything on the backside. And so you, it's the thing that I've seen, like my experience with the military, and again, just keeping it on the healthcare centric, your families aren't getting seen at the age station, right? Right. It's not normal. There are some other elements that actually do extend a little bit more for the family, but that's one of the components, like the family's very taken care of.

And so, you know, the positive light is there's folks doing this, and I think that they know that their families are being taken care and we would do anything to take it and it's very concierge based medicine it's like hey if if I need to you know at at 6 o'clock at night run over and drop some medicine or pills off to somebody's house that's not abnormal

and you got to think this is like you know you're a medic and normally like in a normal we'll just say in a conventional unit you're kind of your time's practicing medicine ends at like E5, E6, you know, you're E78 still like doing sick haul and passing out pills and taking care of people's families and making sure they're taken care of. And so there's that dynamic of the job where it's making sure that they just have every their health stuff and order. And then there's everything that you may not think of

that you need to do to make sure that they will be taken care of medically if something would happen. And so that gets pretty, that's pretty interesting. So it was the first, you know, with the, well, let me, let me pause on that and kind of go back to where we were. So, so I get there. Sorry, I, I derailed things. Yeah.

It's okay. I definitely want to touch on it. But so going back to when I got to start, get there, and, you know, I'm just learning. I'm taking on all the information. You know, I'm getting, you know, just in processing, and then I'm going to where I'm going to work out because not everybody works at the same place. And so I'm, you know, getting told where I'm going to work. I already kind of know because it's where I'm going to live. So I know the area, but then I kind of get.

my headquarters stuff done and then go out to where I'm going to work. And we find out that we traditionally did not participate in this tasking, which is if you've ever been a part of J-Soc or the organization or any one of the units in there, like we touched on before, you know the place exists you don't know what they do like I feel comfortable I've talked to enough people with and without telling them anything

because people like where do you what did you do that's the first thing and soft like the butt sniffing well I worked up in the D.C. area they either know or they don't know and if they know they think they know everything but they probably don't in reality is that's

okay and if they don't know it all then it's too much to you just leave it alone. Yeah. Just like, well, there's something else up there and that's where I work. Yeah. You just kind of leave it at that. So we didn't play in these taskings

and so we were getting the taskings to do the mega stuff. I think you've had folks talk about that before. So the medic who had kind of brought me in and recruited me, he had just

came and now we were going on a second rotation. They needed somebody to backfill him in a rotation. So he was just getting ready to go on his, and I needed to get spun up. So I had to do all my, you know, I got in-processed, and then I have to do all my basically training

to get me full mission qualified because to be a direct support medic. So I had to do a paramedic transition because at the time, I don't know if they get paramedic certification out of Sockham. Yeah, I don't know if they... They lost it for a while.

Oh, they did lose it. The schoolhouse lost it. I don't know if they lost it. Or if they just didn't see the value in it or whatever. For whatever reason, they didn't. They weren't paramedics. And it was a requirement, if you're a medic, you need to be a paramedic. Okay, so I had to go do a paramedic.

So it's a one-month crash course where you basically learn all the information about the medicines and all the stuff you don't deal with in military medicine, cardiac drugs and just endocrine system disorders and geriatric medicine, pediatric medicine. Right. Basically everything beyond trauma medicine, right? military medics no trauma and then operations because you got to know where to park the ambulance how far it needs to be back just all this weird stuff that's on a paramedic exam yeah so you go through a crash course and do that then you have to do your shooting courses um and you have to go through driving training where you go and do all that so you're shooting and driving and then um paramedic and then um just some basic just i guess indoccur in dock training so I completed all that to backfill and get him in the meantime I learned about another program that they were doing for medics but because of how I looked I wasn't a good fit for that program so I didn't get to do that so and then the weird thing is there's people who kind

of didn't want to do the tactical stuff anymore so they went and kind of gravitated toward that and I was still okay doing, you know, running and gunning, if you will, type stuff, more of your wearing a uniform type stuff, you know, in the combat zone. And so I was, once I finished all that, signed up, and that was my next deployment. So roughly, I want to say it was probably less than a year coming back, from Columbia than I was back

in Afghanistan and you were in Iraq shortly before yeah so you've been yeah yeah so and the thing is like

you know like I had mentioned just whatever number it was I think by the time I got there I'd done five or six seven trips

throughout the world and it had caught up with me, but the excitement of something new, you kind of suppress all that, right? Because you want to, you're eager, you, we're all in, right? Yeah, like, that's the thing. It's like, you got something going? I want to be on. You're like fighting for to go out the door. Yeah. It's like, no, no, I want to do that. Let me.

And so, you know, send me, right? That's what everybody says. So the, so, you know, I, um, get fully ramped up. get a funny story about the organization and the medical folks we didn't have a history of actually having medics forward in places and or doing those kind of things so the gear kind of sucked you would think you would have all the best show right right oh no like I went to headquarters to get my so I get my drawl and you get like all the The cool thing about is you get all the like the REI stuff. Like it's like an REI vomited on you.

You get like money and you get to go buy all this stuff. Yeah. You like you got all the stuff you really don't like these super cold weather sleeping bags and $700 boots. Yeah. You know, it's just like stuff. You're a kid in a candy store and like, you know, so you take advantage of that. And so, but what I didn't have was like just. The weapon system, like the optics,

were just kind of antiquated older stuff. And just the body armor. It was just like older plate carrier stuff. It wasn't like newer stuff. So, yeah, that was the first odd thing about the organization that gave me all this shit. But once I got into Damnick, they gave me a full issue. So they took care of me.

But they did that for everybody. So all the augments came together. So this was September of 2009. So get down there to do my in processing, and you kind of just do an in-doc, and you get some legal briefs, and then you go and meet your folks at the squadron, and then you meet your team leader,

and then you go through their version of Army calls it CIF, but it's like a unit level. They could get your unit issue. You go to supply and get all your stuff. And then next thing you know, on a plane. So went from like civil affairs to on a plane with SEAL Team 6. Yeah. Which, I mean, you had already been exposed to the task.

You had already been tasked to them. It's just that now you're in a much more direct. I think that is the key. difference, right? Because it's like you're, it's kind of like being attached to an ODA, right? You're an attached, but you're not really doing their stuff. You're doing your stuff

working with them. So I think a lot of people get caught up in this stretching it. It's like stretching what you've done and just like, look, at the end of the day I did my job. That was my job to do and I did my job. And I worked with those guys, but

that doesn't mean I was one of those guys. And it doesn't that I had their training, nor does it mean I knew, you know, like everything or did everything they did. Right. There was times we touched and did things together, and there's, you know, jointly operations, but then there's, for a large part, they're doing their things and we're doing our things. Right. And they're synergistic in the fact that in the mission planning, in the higher picture,

they work together. But that doesn't mean, right. You have some civil affairs guy in the stack with you. That's not how it is. Or at least that wasn't my experience. And so while I had done stuff with those guys, it was much more after the fact. But now it's like, okay, your job is to be a direct part of the team. I mean, you're a shooter first, right?

Everybody says that. You're a shooter first, soldier first, right? Yeah. And so, yeah, so that's the interesting fact about coming from that organization is people really don't question you. That was the one thing that I noticed. It's almost like a credibility thing. You know, I'd like to think it was because me, but I think it's just like they don't ask and you don't say anything. And they're like, okay, well, all right, you know, this is what we're going to do.

and you're part of the team. And I know that wasn't the same for everybody else. And so on my rotation, there was a guy from, I think, from J-Sach-Main, and then they had one of their medics, and then they had some medics from the A-Medic, it wasn't a lot. You know, I think there was only,

I don't know how many teams. They'd fit on both hands, how many teams outstations there were, but from the 160th. And so I knew, because he had told me we had talked before, and we kind of keep, you know, we'd talk back and forth on the, you know, on the computer chat. And he's like, yeah, you know, they're giving me problems. They're not going to let me go out with them. The 160th.

Yeah. And I don't, you know, and not to say that happened to all of them. And it's not to say that they all didn't, but it was just at that point of time with that and guy. and so but for some reason and I thought I attributed it to it's like okay

we don't you know kind of what you do but if you say that you know you're a direct support medic you know so it's kind of kind of weird out of curiosity how come the Omega's or the seals

needed attached medics when they have their own corps they didn't at the time So that's actually a good point. So all these units were growing at the time. So again, like I told you, I was medic. I think five, right?

And that means like on the manning, they're authorized five, right? Because they're manning documents. And at the time, they were using PJs. So the assault force, I think, was all using PJs at the time. It was actually one of our guys who later went to them, who built their med section. and I think he got, he was from, I think, Marsok. Okay.

And he took a bunch of Marsock Corbyn's and built their med section before they had medics, but they were clinic medics. And I could be wrong in this, but that was my experience signing in because they had medics. I remember they had a female, a male, the ones that I worked with, but they worked at, like, so they worked at the J-Bad clinic. They deployed Ford, but they worked at the clinic. That was their job. We'll have to ask somebody from...

Yeah, ask them. It's better to come from them. Because, I mean, Corman could go through buds. And then... Well, that was the problem. That was what I was told. If you were going there to assess, it was kind of like beneath you. So it was much different than what I've heard of.

Again, like, so I've never been part of either of those two organizations. But what I had heard, it's much more socially... acceptable for an 18 Delta to go be a direct support medic for Delta, then a seal corpsman to go be a corpsman there. I don't know. Oh, I get it. If they're going to assess, they're going to be an eye. So same way with 18 deltas.

If they assess, if they go through selection, then they're not really, then their primary role is a shooter. Yeah. So they're not necessarily there. They're not part of the medic. They go through two different tracks. I get it. I get it. That makes sense.

Okay. So our organization was no different. So they, so, so they hadn't set up any corpsmen that screened, any seal corpsman that screened, they were a shooter first. So they wanted some sort of direct support. They weren't, they weren't going to do. They wouldn't. What was told to me is they won't even come screen to be a medic. Right.

They won't even do it. They screened to be a shooter. Exactly. Which is much different because a lot of deltas really enjoy, I guess, and there's not to say that there's some that don't. But like my TL was a prior corpsman who was in a shooter. So he was, but he was a shooter. He knew how to be a medic. He was a little bit dated, but he knew how to be a medic.

But so Bragg had a fully functional med section. and could support themselves. They relied on augments, which is why. That makes sense. Otherwise, there would be no reason to task to fill their medic villains. Yeah, I mean, I don't know why in my mind. Like if an 18 Delta doesn't screen for direct support, but does actually does the long walk,

they're not, even though they still have that medical knowledge, their first and primary mission is as a shooter. Right. So same with Damnick, I'm sure. that yeah and I think they've all offer them positions so I've been told like if you go to the brag based organization and you don't make it there's a pretty good chance if you want a job and you are an 18 delta that you can be a direct support makes sense their organization I think is the same but no one is willing to take it they want to go and I guess

screen again. Okay. Our organization, we have the opportunity to because a lot of those guys are medical from whatever services they are. But we've, at least in my tenure there for six years, when you knew that that wasn't their passion. Yeah. They wanted to do that.

Right. And so that, they would. screen, a lot of them would screen and then you would just figure out that they, they were better off to go back and track and go be a team sergeant or go be whatever they're going to do. Because, you know what I mean? Like all of the medical people went up there with every intention. And you have, there's something that I used to say, it's you have to be comfortable being the man standing next to the man. Right. And you've got to know your role and be comfortable in that role. Right. And some people aren't comfortable in that role. And it's always like, well, it's the easy foot in the door. Right. I'm going to go screen to be medical.

And then once I figure it all out, then I'm going to go. And you can pretty much all those folks are weeded out. Yeah. Because they'll usually tell you. Yeah. Yeah. And it's part of the process. Yeah.

It's figuring that out. And they don't want to put that investment at somebody if they're just, then they want to go to, you know, be the guy. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, I think, a key difference between the three organizations. And so, so yeah, so yeah, getting, so back on track. Yeah. So we all get there. We get assigned our teams. And so I ended up back in, you know, back going back to Afghanistan, end up going back to Assadabad. I'd been there before doing my round robins of payments to folks. And so I'd already experienced, I kind of knew the landscape. and so but never really knew that that bait that concrete building what that was you know that's it's a very

different structure there's like one building that's like one of these things are not like the other right and so and so getting to work there on the compound there and so I get there and right away I can say that um was instantly like integrated well and And a lot of guys didn't integrate well. And I think we can talk a little bit about that. There's some, there's some history with that organization and just outsiders. Are you talking about the organization, Damnick? Or the organization that you were partnering with it?

Okay. So, yeah, so being over there and then outsiders coming in and either something happened. I mean, you just look at the media, I don't need to talk. about the scenarios. Yeah. And so I didn't experience that. I had a great team leader, phenomenal guy. At the time, I was now an E7.

I actually got selected for E8 on the trip. He was an E6, which is really weird. That's the thing that's the Navy, because even though I was like an E7 selected for E8, I was kind of like the equivalent of a Navy E4 because I wasn't a chief, right? Right. Like that's some weird shit. Yeah. Like, I don't know what it is with these little chief boxes and shit.

Like, I don't know. I got a brother's in Navy. So my brother's a nuke in the Navy, an officer. He was enlisted and then became an officer. But for some reason, there's like, I don't know what it is with the Navy and the chief thing. It's second tier royalty, right? Because the officers are royalty. They have their own mess deck on the ship.

and then there's also the chief's mess on the ship. And then all the, you know, all the peasants. It's institutional elitism. Yes, yes. So it's breeding it. Yes. Yes. That's interesting.

Yeah. It's like what you try to weed out, but they've actually. I mean, they wear different uniforms. Yeah. You know, then. Yeah, I guess you get a stripe on your leg when you're in the army. Yeah. I mean.

I'm going for you. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it all goes back to, you know, a ship being its own kingdom with the, you know, the captain of the ship being the king or queen. And then then you have your officers and officer country and everybody like jumping to the side when the officers are walking down the hallway. And like I said, there are different levels of mess. Chow halls. There's your officers chow hall, which is very nice.

There's the chiefs chow hall. which is nice, you know, just not a little bit nicer or a little less nice. And then you have the enlisted and we're down there eating, you know, well, I mean, great food, pants it and an adobe and, you know, and everything. But, yeah. So here's another thing that I think that helped me out as far as integration. There was this medication at the time called, what was it called? It was factor 7A, I think.

So it was basically a medication that, that helped with clotting if you were shot. It was extremely expensive. I think it was like $1,800 a while, and hardly anybody was carrying it, especially not point of injury folks. And so, and I forgot a lot of the components of it, but essentially, like, when I was learning about a guy

who went back through med refresher, so part of being a, you know, a Sockham or 18 Delta or Seal or PJ, whatever, you have to do your med refreshers every two years, I had heard people talking about it And I was like, hey, I want to be carrying that because if something happens to these guys, I want to be able to do it. So I told my, our docs. And so part of the cool thing about that place is the docs are like, okay.

Well, if you want to have it, then you need to educate us on it. And then we'll write the protocol, but we want to make sure that you know how to use it safe and effectively. And that you're not going to hurt somebody. and so I basically had to do all this research and then essentially the docs wrote a protocol and I was able to have it and carry it and carry it on every mission and I told it and like I said my team leader was a corpsman so he had kind of told the guys and he's like hey man this guy actually like got us this like latest shit that's out there and he's one of the only medics carrying it and so they had thought that was pretty pretty forward thinking and they appreciated that

And so I help that, I think that helped me with my integration. Like I said, like I, like, it's as an augment, like, like, even like the room assignments, right? Like, it's like the, it's like the chow all, right? But my room was right next to their rooms all in order. Yeah. So some of the guys, like some of the optimates were down the hall of the other rooms. Yeah. And so, you know, I had gotten a, the, one of the prime real estate nice rooms and stuff.

So, you know, just all these little subtleties that they're like, And I'll tell you that's the weird thing of my career. It's like I said, like I described, like I was a medic for all these different people, like going and integrating with the Rangers, and then this ODA, and then this IOSL, and then this, and now I'm here. And so you kind of got to learn how to build rapport with your civil affairs training, paying off, right? And so it's like, hey, guys, like here's, you know, and help people.

It's always like, and the other thing is build and do, like, help out, right? Yeah. It's, you know, just do things without being asked. Right, right. It's a huge, like, it's actually a skill I actually look for people, character trait. You know, just the ability to just see something need done and do it. Yeah. And then don't have to wait to be asked.

And so, so, yeah, so I, you know, instantly hit the ground. And so things ramped up pretty quick there. We had done, you know, our team leader, I think, was being observed. There was a senior chief there, but he kind of just set back and kind of just, I think he was mentoring him. And, but he was kind of, he actually assessed us. So he was actually assessing us. He would take us on hikes.

If you ever been to ABAD, he would take us at this thing called Bull Run. Yeah. And I remember, I totally forgot about Bull Run, yeah. So, and for time. And, oh, man, I'll tell you. So I already told you my gear was shit, but I got some good gear. But what I didn't know is at least these seals, I don't want to say that all of them did it. They actually, their ideal of a basic load and the armies traditional or the SF of what you carry for ammunition and weaponry is a little bit different.

So for me, like anywhere I go, you train, train like you fight, right? And I was trained a basic load of six magazines and one in the gun. And then you have a sidearm and you have magazines. And then you have obviously your water, your radiosource, an extra battery, your nods. And then me, I carried, at the time I had kind of divorced my aid bag a long time ago and created a March belt, essentially a battle belt system, that everything was configured on my kit or in this,

so I didn't have to carry an aid bag. And what I learned is I was way too heavy. Because, you know, I'm carrying an M4. These guys are carrying MP7s. Right. You know. I have 4.45. I've got seven magazines.

They've got three and one in the gun. They don't carry sidearms. They're like, and so I had to learn. It's like, and I, you know, luckily enough, they were willing to teach me. game they're like hey it's too slow don't transition move let somebody else shoot them um just all these little ttps that they were picking up and learning because i think a lot of the um tactics were changing at that time frame because they were losing a lot of guys i think in iraq due to kind of like the old

room clearing ttps and so they were instantly sharing that with me they were like hey this is how we're and this is how you need to learn how to clear a room now. You don't do this. You know, this is not hostage. There's no hostage in the room, right? And so, and for me, like, that was new to me. Like, I had no formal CQB training. I had some just unit-level stuff from having rangers and stuff teach me that were my team sergeant.

But as far as a formal, like, a classroom, you know, you would go to this course and complete this course like Sephardic or any of those kind of courses I didn't have any of that so essentially it was like they gave me that training and sure I knew what I was doing

and so that was you know again like they didn't have to do that right and there's probably some that wouldn't do that they would just be like okay well if you don't know what the fuck you're doing then you probably shouldn't be here and so you know I truly appreciate

that aspect of that and you know I still communicate with a lot of those guys to the day but um so you know fast forward they um make sure good to go and uh we start getting operations so you know we start having um you know targets that are actionable and um i think um we did some small stuff um here and there but then the main stuff started happening around December of 2000 and there's a lot of interesting events that happened in December 2009, at least for me. And so the first one was we had a pretty good target happen right before Christmas. I think it was like on the 24th, so it was like right, you know, Christmas Eve. So I don't know if it was the 23rd because obviously operating a period of darkness.

Or if it was 23rd, I think it was, we, it was. end up hitting it on Christmas, but pretty big target. And so as the, me, so like my role, like the medic's job is not to get shot, right? Right. It's kind of like the team leader. And I have to explain this to people sometimes. It's like the medics, I always wondered that. And I always questioned that about the range.

Like I was never in Ranger Battalion, but I hear these stories of the medics in the stack. And like, I always have been the number one and two. And I'm like, why? Yeah. What was their plan? If they went down. If you got hit. Yeah.

So my job was to essentially be an interior blocking position. So basically they clear a compound right outside that door. And so that's what happened on that house. You know, really, so this is, we are in Kunar Providence. Those mountains are very relentless. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know how long the opposite was to walk in there and carry those fucking ladders and everything and all the stuff that you know about. And we have obviously our folks from the agency with us and then our team of Afghans that do these type of operations.

And so we get straight set up on the – the compound, there's like a little low wall in front of it. It's kind of like this compound structure that's going right up. It's like we walked in through the water, like through the river, and then there's houses and then there's like a huge like cliff. It'll come into play later because there's these fighters that come in after. But essentially we set up on this compound, and as soon as we get up on this wall,

the on the terrace it's like a three story or maybe a two story structure maybe it's just two stories we start seeing heads pop up and as soon as those heads pop up

that's obviously when shots start getting fired and so as soon as that happens my job is I already know where I'm supposed to be we have our building our grid reference system and I know I'm supposed to

to go to building the 10 series building and sit right here. And so as soon as I get in position, I see two guys walking. And so I end up shooting both of those guys. And they finish, you know, this stuff, these compounds get cleared in like, it's like minutes. It's not, this is not like you're staying there all day. Yeah.

I mean, you've done this work. So, you know, it's like super bad. And so it was my first experience, though. So for me, it's like it's burned in memory. It's a lot, yeah. Yeah, it's like a lot of things you remember your first thing, right? And so come to find out, like, you know, everything's done. You know, they've kind of got all the kids kind of corralled up.

And, you know, they're kind of keeping them calm. And, you know, people are crying. It's all the typical stuff that happen. Women are crying and screaming. And your kids are upset. And so you're kind of like, putting them in different rooms and they go over and in the the one of the guys that I shot ended up being the the target so you know it's like that's pretty cool for me yeah yeah it's like

oh man jackpot yeah i just got to one of the guys on the target list so um so um actually know what that's right um right before we right at we right at After that, those two guys, we started taking guys, that's where the cliff comes in the plate. They started kind of maneuvering a whole bunch of people, so there was a lot of cast that was called in. So all the cast is kind of coming in on this, the J-Tax calling in the hilltop. I think some of the guys find a bunch of, I don't know if it's like fertilizer, what it is, like bomb-making material. So he's one of the guys who's kind of rigging all that up to kind of

bit bit later as we're kind of moving off the objective. So then they're corralling the kids. They're doing, I guess, all the, you know, taking all the SSE photos. And that's when we kind of figured out, oh, this guy's him. And so I'm like pumped up. Yeah.

But so it's kind of a, I guess, a great target. Right. The guy that you're actually going for, you actually got them. No one else. People who are actually maneuvering. They're kind of eliminated. We find, like, and I still have some of this stuff, some of these, like, the, there's these black, like, embroidered head.

I have one, like, hanging in my office. And soldiers' ID cards. So we actually find, like, soldiers' ID cards. U.S. soldiers ID cards and some U.S. M4 magazines, Green Tip, Rout, you know, so we actually find stuff where these guys actually, they were involved with hurting U.S. soldiers. And so great mission, great target. We kind of walk out, you know, the long walk out. We get back, and so we're doing, you know, all the additional SSE stuff, and then just kind of nothing big, and then it's Christmas, right? Yeah.

And so we kind of have like a down day. And then the next day, another target popped. So, you know, you're kind of, they're triggered by something. You know, something either human or significant is. obviously triggering these things to pop. And so the next day, we get another one pop. So it's really,

it was kind of odd because you've got to think about it. It's like, so we're sitting there since, I think we get in there mid-October, but now in December, we're actually getting some good targets. So there's a lot of like waiting.

Yeah. You're just kind of waiting for something. You're building con-op. That's where I learned about con-op parties. So before I'd never done this stuff, this was like, we had a, for every one of these there was a fully done

con-out package already done. So the next, right after Christmas, another one popped. So we instantly go into planning and getting everything going and coordinating and figuring out. Again, we're going to do like an offset, drive in and then do an offset and walk in.

And I have the same response Same task. Nothing changed, right? My job is to kind of, I think it was me and the Terp. For some reason, I think the Terp was always positioned with me in the beginning. They would pull through and if they need them, they would tell me and then I would send him to what building system or, you know, what compound, what building in the structure. And so same type scenario, a little bit different layers. out, they start funneling through, and then, same thing, two guys like.

But this one, it's like really close. It's probably like, it was an elevated, like, it was almost like a wooden structure versus your typical mud wall. And it, as crazy as it sound like a rear porch deck. Okay. But I just remember I could only see half of them. And so, same type thing. So two guys kind of, they're going through.

You can hear them going through. And then two guys go out and same scenario. You know, it's like I can't see what they're doing there. They kind of, they were out the door, popped down, and then, you know, eliminate the potential threat. I don't know what they're, what's below them. And so finish, go through the whole compound. and they finished clearing the compound. We don't find the target.

There's, you know, it's like most targets, right? You have people squirting off in different direction, maneuvering to a different position. It's an important word. I learned to never say the word squirder. Yep, no. There aren't squatters. There are only maneuver elements.

There's no squirters. They're maneuvering to a position of advantage. And so, potentially. potentially that's the guy made it so we you know everything's done and we start heading back

the next morning like it's chaotic and so I don't know how the message came in but essentially it was the story that you kind of started saying it was like hey

we just had something I think it was probably like the elder for the area or something like hey people came in and and murdered you know 10 people

or 12 people last night and so instantly everything gets shut down we're a full shutdown and we're on full shutdown and as soon as that happened all of the all of our counterparts from the agency side disappear.

Like they all got on helicopters and left and rolled out. And so it's, you know, I'm an agman. I'm like, okay, this is not good. Oh, rewind one. On Christmas, because you send the sit reps up, you know, the after action of the mission, the unit commander call me so I'm a new guy to the unit so actually unit commander calls me on the phone and was like hey you're right you know I got word of you know first name you know it's kind of still with when you're dealing with the command even though everybody in soft his first name you know

when you're dealing with the commander he's like I heard about you know everything because it got briefed and you know just want to see you doing a good job and so it was it was really really kind of Yeah, yeah. Just cool, you know, it's like the unit. You would got the jackpot. Yeah, so it was really cool. And so had had that, then two days later, this happens. So now there's this, it starts getting thrown around like, hey, there's, we need to investigate this.

And it was. Now, did they say there were kids murdered also? They did. So that was the thing, that they were actually handcuffed or zip tied, zip tied up and executed. It's actually executed. Yeah. is the way it said. And that's not what happened.

Right. And so I'm like, oh, this is not good. That same time frame, though, up in, I think it was Mazda Sharif Mez. Again, because you have the outstation teams doing this mission, and then you still have the assault force doing their thing, right? So the strike force, so they're doing their thing. So they needed to ramp up, I guess, so they pulled all of their two, because I think, I don't know how they break it down, but I think like one of the troops essentially divides people

up and they run these like a mega outstations, I think. And then they can consolidate if need to. And so that's what they did. They pulled each of these two, basically organic to their organization guys. They got on a flight, and they headed up to all link up to hit a target. And so they're, I'm there. So it's like you had the chief of base, but I didn't really, it's so, you know, I knew, you should say hi in a little dining facility, but you're really not having conversations with them.

the medics you do like some of the the contractors that are working and and so um and i didn't know what to do so then it got came down that they were sending out an officer and ended up being a general officer because they're thinking war crimes happened right and so um you know i i'm kind of you know, kind of freaking out a little bit. And so I call back and I think I was talking to the troops arm major and I was like, hey, man, like, this is going on. What do you do? And he's just like, you do what you were told to do. And I'll just leave it at that because I didn't really know, like, how to respond to a lot of things.

Because, again, I'm a medic. I'm not one of the other guys. Right. So they have specific training for how to deal with situations. Right. And I didn't get those blocks of instruction. Yeah. And so, so, yeah, so an officer flies out, and I'm sitting there, and he's taking my statement.

And, you know, I'm like, oh, man, this is not good. And he ended up, the only people were left, it was like me and their intel, because they had a, you know, they have their, they bring their, equivalent of the I know is it into S2? Yeah yeah Essentially their

Each team has a Yeah Their their organic Intel guy So it's me Him and Maybe somebody else

But were you The only one on target Or were they on target also? No He was not And I believe I don't know Who they all they

At question But I know Of like the main core element because these teams are only so it's a medic two organic team guys from them and then you have these other white side yeah the white side the white guys yeah and um they were gone and so they um and i think one of those guys was rotating out because um he did and it's actually um it's always i'll say his

name because he's he was on extortion but uh j t so j t was um so j t was um um i'll say he was on extortion but uh j t so j t was our augment. He was our JTAC. So he was our augment. And he had made it, I think, through their green team. So they were flying a new augment in. He was going back, I think, to do, I guess, I don't know, whatever, what he had to do. And so, and the other guy, either he didn't go on that mission for some reason.

But essentially, I think I was like one of the main guys who basically had to go through the scrutiny of this. It was something new to me. I never experienced it for. And so, you know, I went through that investigation. But it wasn't really investigation because like now being like, you know, in a command team of a military organization. I know what a 15-6 is and all these. So this is not, it was more of collecting a witness statement. They knew that you guys had not.

handcuffed or zip tight a bunch of kids and exclaimed but they still had to go through the motion of yeah so yeah I'll tell you that I didn't know that at the time and nobody basically gave me that piece of mind right right and so it really kind of messed me up right right because I really started to question myself like did I did I need to shoot like you your mind just yeah yeah so I already like have um you you know you know, PTSD from everything else. And now, so now I'm like, did I just kill people that I didn't need to kill? Right.

Like, what, I know, I did everything I was supposed to do. Right. And I started to question every action. And so I didn't really know how to process that. Yeah. So, but to your point, basically, it kind of like just went away. Yeah.

Yeah. It wasn't like there was even any follow-up. It just kind of, he, this guy came out. To your point, I think he was directed to do an inquiry or investigation or whatever. Yeah, they have to. Report to their government because their government was saying, hey, you're going out to do this. So it was like, I don't want to call it, check the box or whatever, but it's kind of what it, hindsight, you know, looking at it was like, well, maybe that they were doing what they needed to do. to fulfill their obligation to look into it. I'm not saying that there were never any questionable killings of military aged males on targets throughout theater,

throughout Afghanistan, but you're talking about like 2009, 2010, right? People who had been in and out of theater by that time were used to the idea of, you know, these killer teams, killing kids you know like executing kids of using human shields of all this stuff that was not going on they knew it wasn't going on

and but you still have to you can't just you can't just at the highest level go that didn't happen yeah so so yeah so that's the 26 27 28th

we get to 29 December and anybody knows about I think it was 29 or 30 December of 2009. We instantly, I think, Chief of Base got a call that a, I think, at Chapman, they had just had a suicide bomb. The V-Bid, yeah. And instantly, I didn't really know what was going on at the time. And to be quite honest, I still.

I still really don't know a whole lot about it today. But people were not okay with the procedures that were allowed to not be followed, and it was instantly being talked about. And I remember that. And I know that those folks, you know, they made the ultimate sacrifice. Right decision, wrong decision. So I'm certainly not going to question their decision nor shed bad light on them. But it was being talked about that the person in charge did not make the right decision

and had told the other people to not follow the normal procedure in the sake of they were trying to build rapport with this person and to not do it. And ultimately, you know, cost people their lives. And I remember the medic. So that medic, the 160th medic that I mentioned, he was actually there. And that was his station. And he had told me the stories of just trying to stop the bleeding and put hold pressure. Man, again, I don't like telling other people's war stories. People need to tell their own stories.

I can only tell mine. But I remember him telling me. And you know, you remember certain things people say, but it could, like I said, it could be wrong of him. trying to control the bleeding just out of someone's neck and not being able to do it and they ultimately died and again like some of these things have led into me the same things I've worked on and deal with today just to simplify things and find solutions to deal with medical problems but but yes so that was um that was pretty interesting time frame so things after that between that incident and our incidents, things, not a lot went on after that. Because I think everything was

pretty much shut down. And so that happened. I didn't hear anything else about that. And then I think I was in country for another two to three months. So that's a lot of time doing, I call it ACAMP improvement. You know, it's just like you're improving your worksplace. And, you know, we did a lot of, again, like, I continued the report process. I remember these guys, like, they were still processing a lot of their losses at the time. And I can distinctly remember they had all these, you know how when you have, like, a memorial, you'll have, like, the guy's face. and they were pinned up all around the base.

And it was all of their squadron guys, these little stories about them and their life. And, you know, it basically said, you know, basically their awards and decorations and the units they'd been in. And so we had gotten this big printer in. It was like this cool big printer. There was like this long and it did like photo quality.

It was probably supposed to be used for maps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. but I made posters for everybody so I basically I took all of those those things from around they were just like little random just snippets of old paper of these things that these guys saved

and I had made a big poster and put their image in their name and rank under it and in the middle of it was an American flag with their skull and bones you know the squadron I was with and and so

and framed it and hung it up and put it right above as you walked out of the door and those guys really appreciated that and so yeah and so you know you talk

you think about like all you know I I watch these guys stories you know and I still talk to some of them those guys were unpacking a lot and you know you you talk about like alcohol right so alcohol's in soft overseas and it's probably in conventional forces too right you know general order number one right right right that was the one difference about the omega

trips like the agency has bars i don't know if they're supposed to or not but i know general mcrystal actually walked through when i was there and actually went and seen their bars and was like you know peeking their head in there yeah and it's a full bar it's not like hidden it's not like in somebody's room behind something or in a mouthwash bottle, it's a, it's a bar. And, well, I guess the only glamorizer for people who have a, it's a shelf with alcohol in the open. It's not like a bar. And so these guys, though, I think some of them were, their coping mechanism, like most

people's coping mechanism is alcohol, and there's some functional alcoholics, highly functional alcoholics that were just and you I as a medical person could start to see that and um I didn't say anything about it I didn't question it um I never seen any bad conduct um you know I never seen it impair their judgment their ability but it was certainly worth noting that these guys are like I looked at it not through the lens of these guys are doing something wrong. These guys have some something that's troubling them and they're dealing with it the best way that they can as well as maintaining an a herd of operational tempo yeah and so um you know I thought like dealing with my own stuff seeing that I was thinking like you know what psychology is going to be a big issue and the coming years. This is becoming to be a long war

and you're seeing it pop up everywhere. Kind of the stuff you said. People experiencing mass loss, how do they cope with it, taking out their anger, vengeance? And I know it was talked about, like, those guys definitely avenge some of their teammates. And they would tell you the stories of it.

And again, it's not, to tell. But they certainly did do business and take care of business. And some people scrutinize them for that and maybe rightfully so, maybe not rightfully so. It's not me for me to judge or to pass judgment. But it's certainly something that they, you know, they got to, they'll carry that, you know, I think just like Vietnam veterans and other veterans from different wars. They're going to have to

deal with that stuff. And I think that's why we have the veteran suicide rates that we have. Yeah. And, you know, hopefully we'll get to talk a little bit about it. I mean, I got to experience it towards the end of my career. And so I'm happy to share that just before

awareness because I think it's important for people to not it's okay it's okay to judge it uh well it's not okay to judge i it you can have judgment but um you you've never you know it's it's the thing you've never walk in their shoes you weren't there you don't know right so why you hindsight's always 20 20 it's it it's it you just don't know what the people are dealing with right and um people were we're we're imperfect beings, I believe. You know, we're flawed.

Yeah. We make mistakes. You know, I'm a spiritual person, you know. And that's actually helped me. I think it's helped other people in the community, but to each their own. And so, but yeah, that's, that was that trip. That was a lot to unpack there, but that was, that was a little bit, a little bit of taste of that environment.

So I got to experience a lot of different things as far. And so now I get to, you know, I get back to the unit and, you know, sharing these things with the folks there. And then we actually sustain that site for a good bit of time. And I can say everybody did not have the same experience I had. In terms of like integration? Yeah, certain guys dealt with integration. I can tell you there's one guy who got, he had a bad, something happened where they had a personality conflict with his team,

and he was not from our organization, but from another one. And he ended up getting beaten pretty good to the point where he had to, I think they put him in an ICU. And, you know, I've never heard that that story publicly. It's well known in the medical community at J-Soc. But it's not one of those stories that's floating out there. But that's one of the earlier stories of just some conflict. You know, why that happened?

I don't know. But it definitely happened. And even one of our augments, we sent a guy and he didn't mesh well. And, you know, he kind of got isolated. oh man his phone lines cut and his computer lines cut for communication and we thought we were going to have to get him out of there just because we were worried about something happening to him and luckily nothing did um he just kind of sat for a while and were were were these two incidents were they uh were were they solely with the dev group guy or the damn that guys or

Were they also with, like, the red guys? No, I'd never, after that experience, I didn't work with the Rangers again. Okay. So I actually didn't even know they did those rotations, to be honest with you until recently. The, it was specifically with those guys. And again, like, I had such a positive experience. I hate to even, like, I don't even know. I feel bad.

It's like I almost feel like, well, why did you bring me? bring it up then but it's for him it's you know it shouldn't happen right if you if you got put in the ICU I mean it shouldn't have happened and but it did happen and I don't know why I wasn't there yeah but it's but it's but it's one of those kind of known thing it's kind of one of those like um just an ugly mark yeah it's a stain yeah it's a stain that doesn't need to be there yeah It's like there's different ways to manage that. But again, going back to the psychological aspect, I don't know. I don't know what happened.

That certainly wasn't justified nor should be tolerated, but I don't know the dynamics. Yeah. So, yeah, so I get back from that and then it's, you know, just going back and doing the normal stuff, or it's not normal. Let me, let me, let me just, I guess try to provide some, a little bit of insight. What if I think what folks want to know is like, well, what do you do? And it's, so what you do is you do a lot of high-risk training support and support people becoming part of that organization.

And so really that's your role is to, that's where I was going to, a little while ago. Your job is to assure that every dynamic of the medical aspect of their job is taken care of to include initial training support, their selection process training support, their routine team support, their equipping, their gear, packing their stuff, putting them through enhanced training. So that led me, you know, again, what shaped me into what I'm doing today. You know, we had a medical training program that was skills for providers in austere medical situations. But essentially what it was is it's like your training folks, regardless of how they got there, how to take care of themselves, right? So it's like, I'm not going to be there to patch you up or your buddy up. And a lot of times you're you and you're it. Right.

So here's your stuff and here's all the training you need to use that stuff. And then make sure that stuff is good and you have the best stuff. And then, again, like medications and, you know, it's almost like the pre-equipping. But then there's making sure that you give them stuff that doesn't highlight them. So there's that component. I was going to ask you about that. Is there, being how some of these units work and how they conduct their missions, is there an improvised medicine aspect to it?

Like, look, you can't walk around in this environment with medical gear. So this is how you would use super glue. this is how you know it's kind of like the wilderness medicine approach yeah yeah so there there is and I'll tell you that's one of my frustrations with man things you shouldn't

say in a public form my frustrations with like the Katsi component the committee on tactical combat casualty care and it's when I they went very much and I think even a lot of the schoolhouses

so when I went through the schoolhouse you you made all your medical kit, right? There was no such thing. I think chest seals were just getting created. But you had like a cut trapper keeper with a petroleum gauze and tape, and it was pre-stucked to a board, and that was your chest seal. And your tourniquet, we already described, so we need to go out of that. And so it's sticks and rags, right?

It's a lot of, you have a lot of rags and sticks and gauzes, and you know how to employ them different ways because you understand principles of medicine. Right. You understand, here's what I'm. I'm trying to mitigate. Now, and this is a good thing, we actually have deliberate devices. So, when we went heavy to deliberate devices

and these things like the committees on tactical medicine, because principle-based medicine for people who don't have a lot of training, they can mess it up. So they want you to use deliberate devices, so they kind of shun you actually, even doctrinally,

a lot of if you read like basic soldiers manual for common task it talks about devices right that's a problem I'll tell you why that's a problem when you have a recall on a device and you've wrote in doctrine how to this is the device you use and how you use it what happens if that device changes right because every device now that I'm in the medical device industries has a different instruction for use And everything, even though they're similar, there's different nuances. And so I kind of in that committee was like, hey, because I end up ultimately later on in my career sitting on some of these boards. And like, I don't think it's a good idea we go 100%. Like, I think there's some things that should be agnostic.

Like, what if something new comes out? Now you've got to rewrite all your manuals. You literally wrote this device into. every manual. Now that's great for a medical device company because that means money. Right, right. And that's what it's kind of evolved to. Right. Big business. Your job is to get your device into doctrine. Once it's in doctrine, you might as well just go buy your mansion now. Yeah, exactly. Because you're going to do millions of dollars of business. And that's the industry.

And so, you know, and I'm even in that space now. That's where I work now. But I still, knowing where I've, you know, being where I've been and knowing what I know, I know like, hey, we can't deviate too far from principles and teaching people how to improvise. Because then, you know, it's like training prepares you for the known and education, the unknown. meaning I can, if I teach you how to take the top off this bottle then you're following step one, two, and three and you do one, two, three.

But when this has a screw on it, you're like, well, in the step manual it says pull it out, but this is a screw. Now, that may seem, I'm oversimplifying it, but the point is like if we ever get into large-scale combat operations, you better believe the supply system will be depleted and you will need to improvise.

And so if we totally take out how to teach people how to land nav with a compass, and you totally get reliant on technology and lose your principles and your basic fundamentals, I think that you can set yourself up for failure. So, you know, I, you know, so that's one of the things that we did is we did teach a lot of principle-based stuff,

but at that time, devices were kind of new to the space. So a lot of like, just your kind of, common, you know, your cat turnicates and things like that. At that time, they had already been employed, so people were carrying that stuff. But that's not how we were trained. But now, in the schoolhouses, it's all deliberate devices. And I think there's goods and bads with that. And so I would hope that in soft, they would still be principal-based.

I can tell you when you get to the basic medic and corpsman level, Right. Use this device and use it out you're supposed to use it. And it's like, well, there's maybe there's better ways to do that. Right. And, you know, sometimes things take a while to catch up. So, yeah, so we, there's a lot of instruction. So that's a lot of the, you know, the training support.

Where it gets kind of interesting is forward support. And it's not forward support like you would think. It's putting in systems and processes in place to ensure that you're taking care of. And without crossing the line, I'll just try to paint a picture. Say that you are, maybe you're Hispanic and maybe you're a little bit relaxed grooming and you're working by yourself in a big country. We'll just say you're working in Africa, right? So you have these countries and they're pretty big. They're like, you know, like America fits in there three times.

And people don't really understand that. Well, I think they do now, but they used it into. It's a whole other story that ties directly into this. And you're driving, and we'll just say you get in a car accident. And everything on your person would never link you back. to anything that says you're a service member and okay I need to do this right or maybe you know like your wallet gets taken or something like that you know because a lot of time that stuff happens in these places so it's putting systems in place that that will make sure

that they get taken care of because we're not going to be there to do it right and there might not be anybody else and people may not know where they're at right So that takes a lot of magic. And it's not really magic. It's a lot of planning and a lot of validating. And so my next couple of trips for that organization is that's what I did. I traveled a lot around Africa, East Africa, and I validated things. And I learned that's from one of our physicians.

So I did it and I got to do it by myself at times. And that's a whole different experience to traveling by yourself without a weapon in a country. Like in soft, you're like, of course soft people do that all time. It's like, that's what we do. And I'm like, yeah, you really do. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

I'll go with you a little bit down this, but I'm less like. So for me, it was certainly new, and it's a little bit scary, you know, just navigating around by yourself. And so I got a cool story, though. Well, it wasn't cool at the time, but it's kind of interesting now. So me and the doc, he was kind of showing me the ropes on how to, like I had known about med plans, and I had learned in Columbia about validating and, you know, just doing the other part of, you know, doing hospital assessments and figuring out capability and making sure that gets back to use of SOC validating.

That's a big part of the component of CA. So I had learned how to do basically medical infrastructure assessment and create documents and write plans. But I didn't know how to do it into the nittinoid detail of what they need. It becomes very specific. And when you look about a point. place with the underdeveloped medical infrastructure, like a lot of places in Africa or, you know, someplace in the Middle East, you got to really assess their capability because like that's

some of the things I learned. So like the first, so what we would do on this trip, so the first thing we did was we go to To Hoa and we pull mad plans and then we pull stuff from Yusuk and then we just, we walk the dog. Literally boots on the ground walking the dog and every, everything and so this trip we're doing it up by Manda Bay so we're up close to the Somalia so you know being by yourself with no gun up there is maybe you know a little a little sketch right it's a little sketch so um so um i think the place is called lindy lindy so there's Manda bay and then there's another you had to basically we had to get in somebody's speech boat and it's just a taxi driver it's just some dude like pay this dude money and getting a

speed on the way so we get over there and so basically that's what we're doing we're walking the dog and so there we're supposed to be a clinic there so okay if somebody we need to then they're this clinic so we're validating this clinic um we get off the boat and like a couple um we're walking up the road, you know, we, you know, are asking, you know, basic directions. And the other important thing is, like, your dress, right? Like, and so, so I had kind of learned down in South America, like, to don't dress like your typical REI, like all the shit I got from REI. Yeah. Yeah. So the first thing I learned was, like, soccer jerseys are pretty universal. Yeah. Like, you wear, like, some kind of short capri pants and so maybe some sandalie shoes with a soccer jersey and like not like a

backpack but like a you know like a little yeah mannese yeah like straw bag you know so so yeah so we're so we're so we're like these two like um european yeah tourist and you know kind of guys walking around and you got your speedo on underneath and just in case one of it yeah yeah uh yeah yeah uh yeah And so, like, a couple minutes up the road, we start noticing we're getting followed. And, like, okay, oh, shit. So, you know, we just keep doing, we're doing. We kind of, you know, we're just, like, we don't have a pre-designated plan. Right.

Like, this is our plan. Right. And we're out there, right? and so we end up stopping in the clinic I think we stopped in a little like hodgepodge pharmacy not like the pharmacy like you would think it looks like it kind of reminds me of exactly like here it's like these little storefronts that you're like you make cheeseburgers in here like I never thought that you'd make cheeseburgers in this gas station like it's not a gas station it's like I don't know, below somebody's house.

So same kind of thing. It's like this... Like these little bodegas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, like, little pharmacy. So as soon as we get out, the dude comes, these two dudes come up to us. They're like,

we know who you are, and we're going to kill you tonight. And just keep on walking. And so some of our folks had set us up in this, in this like

it was like a resort and I don't want to describe it too much I'll describe it a little bit I won't say what the name it has a name just in case people are still using it but essentially it was an open air you ever seen like it looks like the coolest

vacation in the world like it's like the sandals on the water you see these little open air they're just curtains like blowing in the wind on the water So we were on the coast and there's these little huts Like on the water open air And that's where we're staying at And it's shut down

It's not tourist season We're the only people There was one watchman in us Yeah Like what And so we're like Oh shit So we just keep going about it

And we're like I think we radioed back and kind of said Hey like we may have some problems And so we get back to where we're staying at and you know we're we're doing our job right and so we tell the watchmen hey you know

people are bothering us in town today you know can you be on the lookout and so we had each gotten our own little like you know again the vacation pericickevig palo we didn't stay in that yeah yeah so we like the whole night

like we're scared right we're like we don't know what the fuck is going to like who's going to come yeah so we're like it was like this, they had a central like facility on this little resort area and so we like

climbed, we end up staying upstairs and we were like we're just going to stay up all night, man, and the next morning like we're getting back on this boat and we're out of here. And and so like I don't know what time it is

in the middle of the night but I end up he probably was dozed off too but it was like it was probably like it was still pitch black though so that's the important thing it was pitch black and the next thing you know i hear noises and so i like i kind of like get up but i but i couldn't see and the next thing you know i see these red eyes and um i fucking jump up i like i like jumped up at lunch and then he jumped up and lunched and then um i forget i think he like had a like a headlamp or something and like turned it on and it was a it was a bush baby

do you know where a bush baby is yeah yeah a little like kind of marsupial or yeah yeah so like in this little area we had opened like some little cookies and like it was like sitting on the table I think it was trying to get these cookies or something so um so yeah so yeah there's no like great action story like where we like tackled them on the beach and yeah yeah drowned them underwater and slit their throats. But it was just like, you know, it was just like being in an environment where it's like, I don't have anything to really protect myself.

And in the way you're traveling, you're not bringing that stuff. Right. You're not going out and getting it on the economy. Like you can't have anything. It's not what we're there to do and it's not how we're supposed to be or with the intent of what we're doing.

So it's just a little bit different. And so that was, you know, and I experienced that twice. Once in, I think, Tanzania, that up there in Kenya. And then I got robbed in Kenya. That was interesting. Well, it was a carjacking. But it was this, I guess there's these TTP. for thieves and I certainly

did know it and we had a driver right like at that we had like hired a vehicle driver so we're like driving downtown at the in Kenya and you know the street it's just swamped and so

you're like you can't go anywhere and you can't really get out and we had been kind of told like if something happens it wasn't don't fight back but don't chase people down and beat them. Yeah.

They're like, don't do that. You'll get fucked up. Yeah. Like, they'll mob you. Yeah. So they kind of police themselves. Like,

certain of them, if they see it doing it, they'll actually not like it. And so, um, so we're like, we're like stuck in traffic and this guy comes and he hits the, the rear view mirror in. And then,

so what does the driver do? Gets, no, he rolls. So, oh, he rolls on the, Rolls down the window. As soon as he rolls down the window, another guy walking this way stuck his hand in

and hit the unlock button. And as soon as that button hit, we had one person in every door. It was like this door, this door, this door, and then the rear gate of the... They're like, what are they, like the toilet of surfs or whatever kind of vehicles. And so there's like five people instantly in the car.

on you and uh i i think they just they just wanted to rob us but luckily the only thing they took was uh my med bag so we were like we didn't want them to take all of our computers yeah so we're like uh we you know just like sticking our hands grabbing everything so it happened pretty quick but uh but um that was uh two exciting things from uh from that's wow yeah yeah i'm i don't know if other people haven't, but going back to like doing these assessments, and then going a little bit later into my career, like, we had written a lot of these, we had validated a lot of these med plans, and I remember communicating back to headquarters. It was either to our headquarters, and I think they communicated for us, like, I think that we don't have enough med support in

Hoha. And they're like, no, we're fine. And so I can distinctly remember there being like a continent map of Africa and it's showing all these little dots in Hoha. And it was like, what are you talking about? You don't have enough med support in Hoha

on the ground. And I was like, there's like, you see, look at it. And I was like, and I distinctly remember like overlying and sending it back and I overlaid a, map of the United States to scale. And I'm like, okay, you have an 18 Delta in Florida, you have one in Maine, you have one in Arizona,

and you have one, like, and you have no gray tail assets. It's, your plan is ISOS in contract air. Like, you know, you have, what are you talking about? you have. And so there's been some incidents. And, um, and, uh, you know, some of the stuff that, that I think that we had learned, we had had a service member in a Kenya and he wasn't part of soft, but essentially, um, it was like how guys access health care. So he was, um, you know, just a Kenyan who had joined the army and had, um, had went back on vacation. And what a lot of people don't realize is, I think service members and I don't know if soft people think like this,

But people think, like, especially if you're not doing anything swoopy, that your ID card is your magic access to health care. Yeah. That doesn't play in other place in the world. Yeah. It's fee for service. Yeah. Which means you produce, it doesn't matter that you're bleeding out right there. There's people bleeding out everywhere.

Yeah. You're going to die there unless you swipe a credit card or you have insurance to take care of you. and you have to make sure that it's accepted locally at that place that you're at. So a lot of us was figuring that out. So we had a service member. I think he was shot. It was shot or stabbed something domestically. And essentially he went to the first place, denied him care.

In Kenya. In Kenya. Went to the second place, denied care, and died at the third place. Oh, my gosh. Because he thought, like, his ID card was going to be. going to take care of it. It'd work for him everywhere else. Yeah. And so,

um, and so, and we had actually had, you know, unit members who were, you know, hurt overseas and assaulted, um, all the above and just making sure that they haven't something to take care of them, that, uh, that if that happened and they couldn't speak for themselves, that they had a mechanism to take care of. Yeah. And so, and that. and that's a that's a it's it's not a sexy thing but it's hugely important right right so um you know so leave that kind of kind of there but it's just yeah no it's fascinating because it's a fascinating

part of you know of these of these units or whatever the people i don't think people really i've never thought about it you know it's not something i've ever thought about you know the importance of of that type of support when they're is no support. Yeah. You know. Yeah. So that's, yeah, there's a, so it's, so I end up doing, doing a couple trips doing that, just validating some things. And then the next big thing that I can probably talk about that I did be just because it was, it was attached back to conventional soft was the invisible children stuff, the Coney stuff. Uh-huh. So it was over there, I think in 2000, that was one of the last things I did before I left in 2012 or 13.

So that was, I'm trying to think, I figure out the train of thought to describe. So people aren't familiar with it. Essentially, it's, this guy like, he kind of just took people kidnapped and brainwashed him into the jungle. Turn them in like child soldiers. Child soldiers. And so, and they mutilated these kids and people cutting their body parts off. And so, yeah, so we got, I got attached to go over that. and so went over and that was one of my first chances working directly overseas with the organization

or at least some folks with the organization and that was interesting so it kind of speaks to what I would like to speak to is some of like these guys like they're so unassuming like you would think like I don't look like most of them and especially ones that are really like doing stuff that no one will ever know about and probably don't need to know although I wish people would know yeah that's the best way I can say it I wish they I wish our average citizen knew the stakes and the price that these guys this is their life they've given it up for something that no one will ever know about yeah and when you really think that in perspective, that's pretty huge commitment, right?

You're not going to read about their awards and you're not going to know their exploits and stuff. So, yeah. And so, but they don't look. Like you would have to, like some of them, you'd be like, you're a special operator, like, prove it to me. Yeah.

Show me some paperwork. There's no fucking way. But these guys, are so intelligent and fit and they just don't they just don't they just they just had the the look that makes them perfect for that job yeah and so on this one we had this one guy and this guy had this knack for teaching himself languages and on this thing because of where they were trying to decipher this like code book this was the whole thing it was like this guy that's how they couldn't find him he a tonapah i think it's called or something essentially it would be like turn to page

four and he would give his his subordinate leaders instructions through this book and everybody had the decipher manual and so you know we're trying to break this down decipher this code and so um so we got these brilliant guys the whole inventory of dod they were looking for somebody because nobody's spoke this language. That was the other problem. And we had this guy who can like, you could learn language. It was fucking crazy. Yeah. Like, so I can, you know, like we're driving around with him. And he's, he instantly starts talking to everybody and he started learning word, learning word, using, learning word, using. And before you know it, he's using full sentences and full paragraphs. And you're just like, that's wild. They're like Google. That's what we call them. They're like, their GT scores.

they're you know they're they're they're apt it's so high that some of them are socially awkward they're just so intelligent yeah but they're just like these anomalies of of um service members and um so anyways the inventory they look and so they they finally found one guy like he was like a navy on a navy boat who happened to be from east africa and he was like a i don't know like a store clerk or something you know i think the navy has store clerks yeah yeah they work on the boat yeah and so So they flew him in. So it was like the coolest thing. I'm like, man, this is like the reach of this place.

Yeah. To just reach out to another service and say, we're taking him because we have a need for him. And you don't really get to know what the need form is. It must have been so cool for that guy too. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah.

And so, yeah. So, yeah, so this, you know, they're doing their thing and this guy's learning this stuff. It went on. They didn't, you know, no really. exciting had another you know people following a story on that one but it's not too exciting but um

but yeah so that was my last trip and on that trip um I found out that I had made E9 okay and so so in that organization there was only

um authorizations for one medical E9 and so um there was actually three of us, which is who all made E-9 on the same list. And one of us got the job and it wasn't me. So that was my time. You had to find a new home? I had to find a new. Well, I didn't have to find a new. I had to go to the academy. Oh, right. So I had to go to the sergeant's major academy. And that's, that's a fun story. So, and so yeah. So like I, you know, I out-processed the unit.

You know, people, I don't know if people ever talk about being like red off. You know, people here talk about read on. I've went through a lot of organizations and have gotten read on to a lot of things. Yeah. But very rarely do I ever get red off. I think that part gets like left out often. I think that's just like a pencil whip. So the unit does not do that.

Yeah. You get a formal beat off and you, that's when you sign your non-disclosure. All your life away. Yeah. And I've learned those are like for service members, even after. retirement there's like you know UCMJ yeah like you still are can be held to that stuff so there's you know so that's why I'm like yeah they'd be very careful about crossing any lines um so um so yeah so now so now you got this guy right so now imagine um a guy who went into soft as an e6 now and living his life

and civilian clothes from E6, not, you know, now showing up at the United States Army Sergeant Major Academy, I was a piece of work. Well, fortunately, there were a bunch of sergeant's majors around to let you know. No, what you have, so is the nation's most qualified for sergeants, everyone, 500 of them in your, class.

Yeah. So there's 500E8s going through this course. And here's the weird thing. So like a service member has to track, career track. And so since I'm not soft as my core MOS, now I go back to being medical. Right. Like hospital medical. Yeah.

Like, you know. And so when you, you're in those places like all your stuff is classified essentially and the first thing they want you to do when you go to these places are like

write your biography but here's what the organization the unit doesn't tell you how to it reintegrate there's no course right you just out process and that's it and I think that's why a lot of guys from

I'll say these places because there's a lot of places up there. They don't know how to integrate and no one teaches you how to integrate. Like I got more instruction on how to retire from the Army than how to re-assimulate into the Army. There was zero. It was sign this piece of paper and then that's it. Yeah. Next thing you know, you're figuring out how to put a uniform on and you show up days.

one and you don't know you're going to get picked to be like make formation or something right like soft isn't good at D&C like let's be honest right maybe the Rangers are good at it they're probably the best right I don't know I mean I don't know what they are currently

we'll say their leadership yeah I don't know that I don't know that we ever did D&C like I don't know that I've done DNC since that I had done DNC since basic okay so

When you have 500 of the armies and what's a joint service school, so there's Navy and there's just fewer of them. And there's a couple, we had like three SF guys in my class. Every, the best first sergeant, and they want to tell everybody how they're the best for, and then you got me there. Now, granted, now you have to career track. I'd never been a platoon sergeant, right? Right.

I'd never been a first sergeant. Right. And now I went from like hopping around like just being deployed basically for 11 years of my life. That's what I know. I know how to deploy and I'm a fucking good medic. Right. Like I will run circles around and I feel confidently saying that to the world. And so, but what I don't know how to do is like basic D&C because I haven't done it for.

Right. since you, you know, you go back to your track, like, A, knock, and B, you know, basically your MOS schools. Yeah. Or your leadership development schools. Yeah. For your pay grade. And so, yeah, I was, I was a bit of a mess. And so my classmates had a lot of fun.

So, yeah, so I did, I did, so you do the academy, that's a year long at Fort Bliss. and because I did, you know, I did well in my career, I was a first-time command select. Wow. And so there were several, so there was like, I think, 50 medical people in my class, so it's all the medical almost, it's not just medics. And so there's, I think there was like 10 of us who got selected to go straight into a command position. And so I did. So now you got this dude who can barely make formations.

Right. Never process soldiers for UCM. That's what leadership does, right? It's like take care of soldiers, deal with the disciplinary issues and their health and welfare and, you know, that kind of stuff. And so my first assignment, though, was Alaska. So it's like And I didn't know I was like

Well this would be a life experience So Fairbanks Alaska So that was my First experience outside of soft And like After running for a good period of time And ended up there

And how was that for you? I tell you it was I didn't think it was going to be good because I was in charge of Medak, Alaska, which is essentially what Medak means is medical activity. So all of Army medical activities in the state of Alaska. That's a lot. Yeah. The state of Alaska is big.

I don't know if people know that. And so what I did, though, is I focused my time on helping soldiers. and doing what I knew best, which was training, which is not a CSM's job. I was doing like first sergeant shit. So now I was learning how to be a first sergeant, right? But maybe a platoon sergeant. And so I think I have said a lot of them,

but I enjoyed it. So I would create programs. And when I got to Alaska, though, Korea was starting to spark up. And so, So my, the nominative CMS, so the general officer had known a little bit about me. And so he was like, hey, things in careers are getting pretty heated. And we don't know if we're going to fight on the peninsula.

can you create a medical program because we think that we may have to hold casualties. So back to now we're at prolonged field. Right, right. This is 2015-16-ish. So I went into the position in summer of 15 because the academy graduates every summer. So I went in. So maybe I'd finish like my pre-command courses at Leavenworth. to go learn how to be, you know, it's really just a lot of, it's, there's prepositioning you for,

prepping you for command. And so he reached out and asked me, can you create a course? And so, you know, we think this thing is, and based upon what you've done, you're probably the most capable to help us do this. And so I created a program called Delayed Evacuation Casualty Management out in a little hospital in the middle of Alaska, Fairbanks, like Central Cold Cold Alaska, like negative 50 Alaska. And so I pulled together some folks and some stuff that I learned over the year and then some stuff that Soft was working on because it's kind of the beginning of prolonged field care. They were putting together, I think some committees or organizations. and took some principles that they had already developed.

I didn't develop it. And then basically what I tried to do was fill the gap, the knowledge gap of the principles of what they put together with the knowledge base of the conventional medic and try to meld them together. But there's knowledge gaps. Because when you talk about the skill set of a soft medic or an 18 Delta, and someone who goes through medics school of three or four months.

They're vast. And so we put together a really good program and got it accredited. And it actually became an Army-wide program for a while. I think it's still taught a lot of places today. And so I was up there for a couple years, and I got to just really just, I enjoyed it. my time. A lot of people say your battalion time for folks that don't know. That's an organization, at least in medical, it's about a thousand. You're supervising roughly about a thousand people.

It's a little bit larger when you get to your maneuver folks, but for medical, that's about the density. And so really just created programs for them and sent them to a lot of cool schools. So the cool thing about going to the academy is you know every sergeant major everywhere. So the network is tremendous. And so, like, if I had a young soldier that was just, like, doing great things, I could call up, you know, the guy from airborne school and say, hey, I want to get this guy a slot. Can you get him in? And you'd be like, yeah, okay, I can work him in. Or, hey, I want to send somebody here.

And so I really just took advantage of just, like, creating educational opportunities and training opportunities. and, you know, you really can't talk about you, or at least, I still really can't talk a lot about that period of my life, but I can let people know that there's some really exciting things that the military can offer. Yeah. And there's some people doing things that are tremendous. Yeah.

And, you know, and you can do those things. too if you seek those opportunities out and so you know just having conversations like that you know a lot of service members who were going to get out kind of turned them around and or just people who want to go to be a soft medic a good friend of mine was the senior sergeant major at use of socks so it's like getting a getting a kid to get to sock him was, you know, just helping him do a packet and give them a recommendation. So I did that for that tour and just did a whole lot of that, actually. And it's what I needed to do.

You know, the hospital didn't need me to run it. It had plenty of 06s and doctors, and it was really just for me. You know, they got that saying, take care of people, and then they'll take care of the organization. I don't have to take care of the organization. I need to take care of the people with the organization. So I did that and then, oddly enough, I got a call to go back and be the medical or offer the position to from the unit CSM to go be the medical side star major. Now, there's a downside of this story.

That's what I wanted to do. I wanted nothing more than to do that. The next command list came out, and I'd been selected again. And so then I was selected for a brigade. And when you're on what's on the command select list, only the Sergeant Major of the Army can take you off it. Oh, really? Okay. And the position at the unit did not qualify.

Was it below a command position? Yeah. So you would almost be going back, and they'll let you do that sometimes. Yeah. Like, if you're getting out, I was still at the time staying in. And I don't know how much time we have. I mean, we are deep in it. We're at four hours and 30 minutes right now.

Holy good. Yeah. But I want, this is your story. I want you to tell it. No, it's a long story. So I'll try to, I'll try to, yeah. Dee, are you all right? D is good.

All right. Our audience is holding tight. Okay, good. And so, so here's what. So I got offered the position. That's what I wanted to do. But I made the command select list. And when you're going in the command process,

you get to select your preferences. And I had actually got not only made the command select list, but got the number one job that I wanted. So I got my pick. And I had started my career in Hawaii, and I wanted to end it there. So I got selected to go and take the Tripler to be the CSM there. That's what I wanted because I was like, like I was saying, and I'll get into it. You know, in Alaska, my PTSD kind of started to act up.

and you know I had had some I'd had a a bout of where I was you know suicidal and I'd went and talked to a health care provider there and they'd got me back health and I had some help and I started some medications and actually went and got the Stella ganglion block for the fifth or six times so you had already had it I had it multiple times before and I'll get to that pretty quick so because I think it's an important aspect. But essentially got offered that job, couldn't get it because I couldn't get off the command select list, and then the Medcom, so the medical command, so CSM called me and he's like, hey, you're right, I just want to let you know that, I don't know if the list had been released yet, or was getting released. But he's like, hey, I've heard about all the great things you're doing in Alaska

and this program you created. I'm going to pull you from Hawaii. You got what you wanted, but I need you to go to Fort Bragg and do everything you're doing there times 10. And I'm like, what do you say? Yeah. No.

Yeah. Roger that. That's what you said. Like, no problem, sorry, you know. And so they switched my order. So not only did I not get to go back to the unit. I was switched and went to Fort Bragg. And so I went to the Womack Army Medical Center,

and that's where I ended my career. But my, and so I, you know, without going into the programs, they're really not important. But I created a couple more programs or just invigorated some. that were going in and had a lot of success with just getting conventional army medics paramedic qualified and critical care paramedic qualified and then the prolonged field care stuff making sure that they had access to that but really my health mental health started deteriorating

and so i had had my first stalact ganglia in block so again getting to the professionals of the units without mentioning his name he had had my first stella ganglia in block so again getting to the professionals of the units without mentioning his name, he had introduced it into soft for a sympathetic chain block to essentially alleviate the autonomic nervous system dysfunction of PTSD, the hypervigilance, to kind of turn the light switch off. And hopefully I did that justice. So we're talking about sticking a needle with viticane? So sticking a needle, I think it's repivocaine. Okay.

It's in the family. It's a long-acting lidecane into your neck. To essentially blocking that tone for about, I think it's like four to six hours, which is enough time to reset your system. And so our physicians at the unit brought that into soft, and then they went around and trained. And that's one of the things that I got to do. I got to fly to the other units.

and these operators who had 20 plus rotations overseas, you know, help them with their, provide them symptomatic relief. And so we, so I had gotten that in Alaska. At this time, it wasn't working for me. I had never did medications, so I got switched on medications. And once I got to Womack and I was there for a while doing things, And then, you know, I'm kind of speeding this along. But essentially, the shots weren't working and the medications weren't working,

and I was feeling like dead to the world. And so this is where Army Medicine almost killed me. I say that lightly, but with all seriousness, the provider switched my medications and sent me TDY. and so they abruptly stopped me off one medication, started me on another, and then sent me TDIY, and then

I went off the rails. And at the same time, my son, all three of my sons were active duty at that, no, my youngest was not yet, he is now. My middle son was not doing well. He was active duty at Fort Bragg. and so just the hurricane of events had caught up to me and essentially long story short self-admitted myself to in patients while you were TDIY no no so I had gotten back luckily I had gotten back and I immediately went to work and I went up to we to the executive medicine

and place it there. And I was like, hey, you know, I think I'm going to hurt myself. So they immediately, you know, I got treated well with dignity and respect. But spent a week in inpatient. And then three months an outpatient got flown to San Antonio.

And, yeah, then, so you took a step that most, I want to say most active duty soldiers will not take. You, you recognize what was going on, and you took steps to address it, right? Which, which I think not only will not a lot of veterans do that, but a lot of, but especially a lot of activity because they're concerned about how it's going to affect their career. if they're in soft like is it going to make them ineligible um you know i i mean i know that you're going through like a lot at this time but you are also seeking help what what was it what advice would you give soldiers especially when they're active duty and veterans but what advice would you give them that took a lot of that took a lot of strength um

It did. The advice that I can give them is, is people are feeling the same way you're feeling. And the first step is the hardest one. And it gets easier after that, at least my experience. It got easier after that. So, yeah, but it was. It wasn't, it's not to say that was easy and, or professionally embarrassing. Yeah.

And so that's, you know, I struggle with that a lot. You know, that's not the way I wanted to end my career. I had a pretty good career. And I'd actually been made the select list for a second brigade or to, essentially I'd probably be at the general officer level. I know I would. I was fast-tracking that way and folks kind of had plans for me

and I could probably upset those plans. And so it's just to have courage. It's personal courage really is what it is and it's taking care of yourself and taking for yourself because after the military, that's it, man. Yeah.

Like you're what you have the VA system is what it is. Start it while you're in, I would say. It's much harder once you're out. It's so much harder. And so I went through the med board process. And so, you know, I was, I joke about it, but, you know, a lot of people say the older guy, it's the body's broke, but the mind is strong.

And I was the opposite. The body's strong. I could keep up with any of those guys, and I probably still could to this day, but the mind was destroyed. And so I, you know, and I really embrace, and this is going to probably rub some people the wrong way. I embrace the D of PTSD, and a lot of people tried to erase the D. Right, yeah. And I'll tell you, the disorder is what it was. Right.

dysfunction, disability, disarray, everything was messed up. Right. And so it was a disorder. Yeah. It was 100% things weren't right. Yeah. And so, you know, while post-traumatic stress is a normal response to a traumatic event, it can certainly leave you in disorder. Right.

And it is it. And maybe I'm looking at it through the wrong lens. and maybe a clinician would think about it a little bit different. But so to me it's like acknowledging that things aren't orderly. And that's what I think is important. Right. And that's what I think the, the, the Stella Gangley and Block provided was a reset long enough to figure out what orderly felt like.

Right. Felt like. Felt like, because you kind of feel the way to the world. But it's more of the Band-Aid. It is. Okay. I would say because you have to do the work. Okay.

Because all of that stuff, right? and I experienced a little bit of combat, if you will, right? I'm certainly no war hero, and I certainly wasn't in any famous battle. But my rucksack got filled, and probably some of those guys got much larger rucksacks, and you have to process that stuff. And you certainly have to do the work to deal with it and unpack it, because you can only compartmentalize for so wrong. And I think, like, man, I don't know if you do experience this,

but there's so much of my deployment time, I forget whole people, like, I don't even remember whole deployments. I'm like, I'm like, how do I remember a whole deployment? I've completely double-wrapped that, you know, that package, sealed it twice, and compartmentalized it. Yeah. And it's buried so deep that, like, even thinking about, coming on here I had to like go back and try to open those packaged bags yeah

yeah what did I do on that trip yeah what's what's what what's something I can share and so you know that's if you don't unpack it eventually it's gonna that maybe that packaging's gonna wear off or rub a hole and it's gonna rear its head yeah and so you need to process it so I think that gives you some symptomatic relief and provide you the opportunity to take a deliberate, or to take a deliberate action to actually take the time to deal with it. Yeah. And so, you know, I'm a much better place.

You know, I didn't really talk about the DC times. You know, working in that unit, I traveled an hour every day. And everybody has their movie. I'll call it my movie that plays in my head. And my movie was strong at that period of time. and an hour and rush hour traffic for your movie to play over and over and over again every day for years that's what beat me up yeah and so when i left i went again back to an educational thing so new and exciting yeah suppress yeah then you routine sets in and yeah you know call them what

you want your demons or whatever yeah rear their head but essentially then then you've got to suppress it. And I think so people suppress it through, you know, adventurous activities. There's a lot of things people do, but you got to deal with it. And then because, you know, we're talking about post-traumatic stress, but then you throw in TBI or you throw in operative syndrome. Like, is medicine, like, do they even know at this point where one start, one ends and the other begins?

I don't think so because I think, Only, again, like to me, some of my stuff, I think, was moral injury, right? Yeah, yeah. And that's what mine was. I think, and people weren't using that word for a long time. No, I, I put it first on this show like two years ago. And so that's what I think, because I couldn't relate. Like, and when I went through the extensive outpatient program, there's a lot of things that you do, that you're like, no, no, I initiated the action.

I wasn't in reaction mode. I initiated the action. So for me, this is right and wrong. Yes. This isn't, so everybody's trauma is different. Right. And everybody, no one's trauma is any special or than anybody else's, right? And I learned that there.

It's like, hey, man, I can't, just because you don't have the coolest of cool guy store to go with your baggage doesn't mean I should say that it doesn't affect you a certain way. But, but, yeah, so I think there's that. So there's moral injury, there's the PTSD stuff, there's the traumatic pain injury. So I don't know if they've got any of that figured out. And I can certainly tell you from all of the shelling and just, you know, when 120s come in. A shell shock. I mean, it's a very real thing, right? Oh, yeah.

And there's also the idea that there are some, you know, there are some events for some people that are the intruding, like the inciting, incident and then for other people it's just like years of being on the edge and there's not like one thing that pops out it's just all of it put together and then like um the identity so post separation that's a divvill and so that's the encouragement i would say so the advice deal with things before you lose your tribe because i think when people lose their tribe yeah then they've lost their identity, they lost their connection, and they go into isolation. So two unit medics have now committed suicide. Yeah. One recently. I'm really sorry to hear that. Yeah. And so it was, that's a tough toll. They both, one was one of my direct reports. They both hung themselves.

And you're talking about two out of a tiny, popular. Yes. Two out of like less than 10 people. Yeah. And a third, a guy called me recently, and I talked to him before this show. He called me with a gun in his hand crying, and I didn't know what to do. And I had been there, and he called me. And he, so I'll tell his story. And he told me, and he told me it's okay if I tell his story.

he he shot a little kid he didn't mean to and he's been dealing with that baggage and he's probably on here right now and I hope it doesn't tear him up and I think about him a lot and so he called me and I was worried he was gonna

you know yeah blow his head off with me there and I am like messaging his daughter through LinkedIn and I'm calling unit past unit doctors saying hey such and such I think this is it and I don't know what to do yeah I'm not close enough where I can help him yeah and so I'm just trying to talk him through it and

luckily he didn't and he's you know but you know you got to check on people people say that but do they really do it right you know what I mean people it's kind of cliche I think a little bit but And so, you know, you got to keep your network close and check on those guys because that's what it happens. It's exactly like you described. People get out. They think it's over with. And then they actually are forced to deal with it. But now they're dealing with it alone.

And I'll tell you, when I was going, when I first got help, the doctor sent me to go in Walter Reed. And she, I'll never forget. So she had a painting on the wall. It was behind me. And it was a painting of a flowery pasture with a house. And she said, she said, all of you guys are basically like garbage men. She was like, the world needs you, but you stink.

And people don't want to sit next to you in church. So all of you guys want to live there. And she pointed, and I was like, it was kind of messed. up. But I knew what she was saying. Yeah. It was like they want to be alone. And so the last medic, and they've actually had more unit members commit suicide, he lived in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. With his family and, you know, his family found him. And I hope they're not, you know, listening to me retell it. But I just, it's so vivid and tragic. you know, his daughter found him hanging in a tree in the middle of their backyard.

Like, that's a lot. Yeah. And so, and I can tell you that's my appreciation for the unit. And hopefully I didn't discredit or do anything out of turn or overspeak. But every, almost every medical member of my time span, stopped everything they were doing and all flew and went to his funeral. Yeah. And I don't know if everybody would do that in every organization.

You hear about people passing away. Yeah. And so, you know, I have the utmost respect for the organization, how they take care of their people. Hopefully, you know, people appreciate what I did there and, you know, what I provided. And again, you know, hopefully I didn't do anything to To forge anything or upset anybody, but You know, I just really respect them and what they do and how they dedicate themselves to something that no one would know about And then this is the ugly side of it

And that's what's important to know and I know there's people who have came out and they've kind of been in these similar places, but, you know, like, they've lost their tribe. Yeah. So, you know. It's, and I think one of the challenges of people in organizations like that is when you're sitting in front of a doctor or a therapist, you know, a psychologist, what? Like, what can you tell them? You know, what, you know, what are, you know, what are you allowed to talk about?

Are they cleared and, and. I know that the organization ones obviously are, but here's the thing. So, when I went to the in-depth, I specifically did not want a military person. Yeah. I said, give me a civilian. I don't want a military person who's medical thinking they know what I've been through, because they've experienced their version of combat. Everybody experiences their own deployment.

Yeah. When I say the word deployment, you have your vision in your head of your experiences. Right. When I say to my, I have my own and so does everyone else who's experienced it. So I didn't want someone to think they know, like, I know what you're dealing with.

So I wanted someone specifically, he didn't have, they only could just kind of relate to me on a human level and process the information that I was giving them. And so, but as far as what you, I think you're still supposed to stay with the stuff that you're supposed to.

Now for me, I wasn't that guy, right? I was the guy who just made sure the guy was taking care of it. And so my stuff was usually working with other people and I could talk about that stuff. Right. While we're on the topic, I just want to bring up an app. We've had them on the show, but the app is sound off. And it was made for people with clearances, both active and veterans. It's a completely anonymous app. It was created by William Neely and, you know, a former agency guy. And his brother-in-law was a former team guy and, you know, went into like a horrible spiral and ended up ending his life. And one of the things I think a lot of people with clearances and a lot of people who have been, you know, in these organizations,

Whether it's, you know, you don't want, you're worried about losing your clearance, you're worried about losing your community, you're worried about red flag laws, whatever it is. When you sign onto this app, there are all these different organizations. And what they do is they get money from different, you know, different charities, different foundations associated with these organizations. And you can put in whatever organization, if you've been in three of those organizations, and it's all services, it's intelligence agencies, it's whatever. And they will use money from that bucket. You know, whatever you put in, they'll use money from that bucket. And you can hook up with a therapist, again, anonymous, and it's paid for.

So for anybody out there, they're trying to roll this out to conventional units. And again, it's not just about soft. it's just that those are the easily filled buckets as they try to scale the app but if you're a person who is going through stuff

you don't have to go through it alone please don't go through it alone you know war is hell and everybody cares their own thing and it doesn't even have to be from war you know I mean shit happens

but yeah I mean it's it's um it's tragic it's tragic it's tragic that we're losing people it's tragic that we continue losing people um and i say man everybody has their own story and and there's not like post-traumatic stress is not it's not a competition is you don't you can't look at somebody say well i didn't go through that so what right do i have you know yeah yeah and i can tell you it's that procedure's been used for people with you know you it's not yeah just combat you know sexual assault yeah so yeah um trauma comes in many forms and favors yeah and again it's like it's not

who's it's not it's not my job to qualify it and quantify yeah it's hey if you know if you're experiencing it's causing disorder to me that's why i embrace the disorder yeah portion it's Like if it's making you causing dysfunction, disorder, you know to not function how you know you should be functioning. And again, having intrusive thoughts and thinking about self-harm or harming others or anything like that, then that's not right. Right. And so, yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, and I think one of the challenges is, you know, we go through these events. It's like your buddy that you were talking to.

He went through this horrific event, and it's really, you know, it's really like refining purpose, right? Making these events that we went through mean something in our current life. You know, and like instead of it bringing us down, creating jet fuel from it saying, you know, not to make up for it, not to, you know, our buddies that we've lost, not to make. up for their loss but you know to to say I'm going to make something from this point forward you know to honor this yeah and I can say a lot of the you know the the one of the the main doctor that I worked with at my time there he had this saying you know he brought a lot of things he brought you know like stem cell therapies and different therapies to the organization like way before people were doing it like stuff that professional athletes could get

but he would he would say that you know people should be able to you know his job was about returning him to duty or being able to retire with dignity and respect and be able to function yes being a fully functioned a member of society again yeah so it's like you can't really turn the you know people transition and turn the chapter and have the next chapter in life if you're dealing with the baggage yeah the last chapter yeah it's it's like how are you gonna how are you going to how are you going to get into a new organization? How are you going to put your best foot forward? Yeah. And so, and then your family aspect, I guess that's the huge point. You know, a great bit of gratitude for my wife. You know, most military spouses, I fortunately have been

married now for, I think, 27 years, my whole career. She's a trooper. Yeah, she's a trooper. And that's the other thing. All of that stuff, your wife, why, she doesn't know any of these stories. You know, it's like in most, maybe some folks share them and maybe some don't. I'm not the sharing type. And so, you know, I appreciate everything you've done and putting up with it because it's tough. But, you know, so like, and I think that destroys a lot of marriages too. Yeah. Oh, 100%.

Relationships. Yeah. Especially as, I mean, I, you know, I think that as guys start to isolate. You know, we become more taciturn. I mean, even if we already were, but I think the isolation, the compartmentalization, right, it all sets in. And then you just, you become like this, there's like a wall between you that your partner can't understand. Yeah. And I think it's good that, yeah, that just, it's relationships, right?

It's your friends, family members, your money. It could be your mom, your dad, your relationship with your kids. Yeah. And I know it's affected all the above for me. Yeah. And so it's, you know, just a, it's a self-reflection thing. Yeah. Like, you know, and I'm certainly not perfect today.

Yeah. You know what I mean? You got to work out it every day. Yeah. And so, but I think it's being cognizant of, and self-aware, it's like, ooh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, anybody out there, whoever you are, whatever pain you're in, we love you, you matter. Hang with us.

Yeah. So for you, you know, you went through this. You had already had five SGBs at that point in time. You get chaptered out, or not chaptered, I'm sorry. You go through your medical, chapter out. You go through your medical. How, how. Like, how are you now and what was your process and what is your process?

So it's an outlet. So, like, I think most veterans, so, yeah, it's a great transition. So I'm, you know, I opened, well, when I left the service, I started with industry. So I started right back doing what I know, which was how to be a medic and, you know, working in medical device. And I had invented a device on active duty and took it through the patenting process. And so that is everybody, it's like having a hobby, right? It's like it's having an outlet, a positive outlet, because there's constructive and destructive outlets.

So for me, just putting everything into the next thing. Yeah. Right? And so that's what I did. So I am still working with a lot of the PTSD stuff. I think things like most things get better with time. I think, at least for me. Again, I can't speak for everybody.

And my outlet is I still have, it's that tribal connection. So being that I was working with industry and going to military bases and helping soldiers and talking to them. So I had that connection piece. And so really I just put all the passion into medicine. And so that's really what I'm doing now. So now I opened a business, 6-8 medical solutions. And so really what I'm doing is just trying to innovate in the pre-hospital space and figuring out solutions to problems.

Because what I learned is you may have to take care of yourself. And that's what I learned from some of these organizations. You can't always rely on somebody else to take care of you. you need more intuitive pieces of devices and equipment that solve problems either you know you can't just rest on what worked can always make things better there's no perfect device you know yeah that's i'm a fun you know there's probably no perfect weapon system right there each other things and you can always make them better so that's what i'm doing now so so i've um i've really a lot of my patient experiences and combat deaths are attributed to hemorrhagic, you know, blood loss.

Yeah. So dying from bleeding to death. And so specifically, there's been a lot of innovation in the tourniquet space, right, and hemistatic, so things that you put in people's body to help their body clot. But there hasn't been a lot. There's still some gaps there. So really that's where I've focused my effort is targeted pressure devices around, well, now you can put on a tourniquet, but if you don't take it off, you may lose the leg.

And that was good enough in the last war. A lot of people stayed alive because we integrated tourniquets. But my thought process is maybe the next war, maybe we can save some limbs and lives by learning how to convert. turnicates and doing some of the stuff that we didn't have to do in GWAT. I don't know of a lot of cases where they actually converted turnicates down, at least at point of injury, pre-hospital, tactical field care. And so converting tourniquets and then holding targeted pressure for bleeds that aren't amenable to tourniquets, so things higher in the inguinal area, the axila area.

and so I've, you know, patented a system of a targeted pressure device to actually where, you know, kind of simplifies that. You can actually just, instead of holding with your hands, I call them hands-freeing devices where you can actually use a device to put pressure right where you want it through non-circumfential means. So, tourniquets work. Basically, they constrict everything, right, and cut off all blood flow. Right. targeted pressure, you put pressure right where you want it, and you shut off that vessel. Right. And so it doesn't always have to be like a main artery. It can just be just an arterial or venial down the track.

And so that's what we're seeing in Ukraine right now. A lot of, because their evacuation times are like six hours, there's a lot of those soldiers because, one, they're not trained well. They barely know how to use tourniquets. But when they do, sometimes they're, they're applied to wounds that they didn't even need a tourniquet, but now they have these really high double amputees. And so what I believe is we got to evolve. Like we got to keep getting better. We can't just say, well, now we got tourniquets. We're good.

So I know that, you know, like during the G-Y, there was a lot of development in tourniquets, but generally it was just new methods of tightening the same band, right? that people were kind of with different types of fasteners and and tightners and things like that. But what you've invented is something novel in the tourniquet space. Yeah. Can you? Yeah, so I'll show it.

So this is essentially, you know, I called it a P3D. It's a poke point pressure device. So, you know, I named it after myself a little bit. I wanted a little bit of a legacy. And so essentially what it works is targeted pressure, What I kind of figured out is through like junctional and other devices, it's all about having a height offset, which meaning you triangulate pressure to pull things downward,

and then having a pressure head. And so a normal tourniquet basically takes everything and squeezes it inward and basically just squishes everything. Where this, because of it has a height offset, it basically leaves gaps in the, basically the strapping mechanism. So essentially, you have rooms to allow for collateral flow, and more importantly, Venus return. Right. Because what happens is when you shut off the arterial system, so the high-pressure system of an artery and a low-pressure system of a vein,

Ternicets shut off both systems, right? They're working for, they keep, they just shut everything off and nothing goes this way, nothing goes that way. When you put like bandages on too tight, what will happen is you'll shut off the venous system, so the return system. But you won't shut off the arterial system. So blood goes that way, and then what you get is called venous engorgement. And it's painful. And so this is the way that I equated to somebody. I'm like, have you ever cut your finger?

in a garage, razor blade, whatever. Okay. You ever like quickly just grab some tape and wrapped it around there? And then it stopped the bleeding, right? But then it started throbbing and hurting like hell? Yeah, yeah. Well, you had Venus engorgement. Yeah.

And so essentially what did you do? You loosened it up and what happened? Start bleeding. It started bleeding again because it needed pressure like this. Yeah. But the pain went away. Right. So that's what you loosen it.

Yeah. I can give you a hundred analogies. It's like going and getting your blood draw. You ever had to wrap the thing around too tight, and your arm turns purple? Yeah, yeah. And then it starts hurting, so you unwrap it, and then the pain goes away, the purple goes away, but then you start bleeding again. So really, it's the principles around it. So basically what I did is I've made a set of like heads depending on where you need to put pressure,

and you can go in wounds over the hemistatic, so it'll kind of say. sit in a cut. So actually inside. And then this riser, you can route any tourniquet, so they'll route. So everybody carries a different one. Right. So it's kind of, I call it, it agnostic, whatever tourniquet you use. Or if you have a bandage, you just set it on top and you can use it to create a non-pressure

bandage and make it pressurized. Yeah. But really it's about, yeah. Yeah, you can, if you guys can see that. So it applies the pressure wherever you need it, but just at the point that you need it. And then, yeah, and then the height gives it the leverage. So here I got one, so I also kind of did it in a bandage.

I'll just show you. So here it is, and these little channels just allow you to creatively redirect it. but normally a bandage you would just wrap around and to stop the bleeding you just keep wrapping really tight like this and you would create a tourniquet like a freck with the bandage so if you if you just have the height offset what it does is it isolates pressure downward this way you feel that just right on the point yeah right where you want it and I don't have to wrap as tight and I'm relying on isolated pressure versus circumferential pressure. Right.

And so really that's the key. And these channels, what they do is, I'll go backwards a bit, say that you just want a lot of pressure. Well, then if you want that mechanical advantage, then I can just route through these channels to make it tight when I want it. So if I want it tight, I can make it tight. but if I don't want to, I can. And so really what these are tools are for is tourniquet conversion.

Yeah. So right now it's all improvised. Yeah. So there's not a, there's not, there's something starting to come out. And, you know, I applaud all innovation. I'm like, hey man, it's all about healthy comp, make the best thing out there, our servicemen. I want my son, sons who are still active duty to have the access to the best equipment. So I think we need to innovate.

And so right now, that's what we're launching this, probably this winter. We're in manufacturing now. I'm going to get things to market. But it's really just about, like, advancing pre-hospital medicine. So that's my focus, and that's how I kind of stay focused and stay driven and trying to give back. Yeah. And so it's like it's a smart tourniquet. I mean, it's, you know, if you think of the old method, it's a dumb turnicet.

it's just like, and this is smart. Now, I know you patented it. What's like the proof of concept or the testing procedure for something like this? So for me, what I've done with it is I've put it through a lot of catavere testing. So when I first left the military, I worked for a big, large medical device company. And they specialized in perfused cadavers. And I actually wrote a training program for them for that and helped them take that technology to the market. And we actually train a lot of service members.

So cadavers that actually have flow? So cadavers that have heartbeats. Heartbeats. That's amazing. It's not a heartbeat, though. So what it is is essentially a piston pump system that pumps beef blood or fake blood into a cadaver at normal physiological pressures. So that you can essentially know when it's tight. enough. Now, cadavers, they don't have muscle tone and there's a little bit of difference. But for the

most part, what you can really do is check, you know, you can figure out the efficacy of the device. What a lot of people don't know is this space where these medical devices fall, these aren't cancer drugs. You can sell a device that you've never proven to work. Right, right. It happens all the time. And so, you know, you normally just engineer test them. You basically put them on pressure sensors and figure out different pressures and break tensile strengths. But I've taken it a step further and actually put it through a perfusion model. And that's kind of, I would say, the gold standard next to just actual human use.

But a lot of times you're not going to get that with these kind of devices. You get that retrospectively. And that's like we, so if you think like, so I'll give a little bit of shoutouts to the, I usually, you know, you don't want to mention product names in it. But like, so like the cat tournicking, right, I carried one, saved a lot of lives. It was made in, it was bench tested. It wasn't like it had uses before it is. I remember it, but they brought it into my Sockham class.

You could buy it and use it. When it first got made, you know, it was vented at the union. it on Bragg. Yeah. It's a kind of crazy story behind it. But essentially, you know, they kind of figure it's, you know, there's a, there's a gap analysis and there's, you know, they kind of figure out there's a need, we need something for this.

And they do some rapid prototyping or some prototype in engineering testing, but it's a lot of engineering validation and not a lot of actual use. You get the use after the fact. Yeah. And so, but you can do a lot of just testing on your own through like Doppler testing. Yeah. Yeah. I just want to say real quick, the company that's doing the perfusive cadavers, if you guys start

the next zombie apocalypse, I will be pissed. And what's the name of your company again? 6-8 medical solutions. 6-8 medical solutions. Do we have a link to that? The link is in the description. Yeah. And so, yeah, these are, so they're not up on the website yet because we're in manufacturing.

They're up there in concept. But we plan to have the stuff for sale here come December, January. We're in the, like I said, setting up all the manufacturing. The pressure bar maybe made right there in South Carolina. That's amazing. So anybody who has a medical kit in your classroom? which should be everybody. Your ED, your EDC kit, check out 6-8 medical solutions, and in a few months, pick up your...

What is it called being? The pole point pressure device. It's a tongue-quister, right? Yeah. So, yeah, so we have gone really long. I am, most of that is because of my rambling. Is there anything that we've left out? Is there anything that you want to cover of it?

There's so much you couldn't cover it. That's why there's books on the wall. And maybe, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I have a desire to do that. But no, I think that hopefully I did the folks I wanted to talk about justice as far as just acknowledging their contribution to keeping this nation safe. and I appreciate the opportunity I had to serve and still doing, and I appreciate those that continue to serve.

And I think those are the folks that, you know, we should be kind of honoring and so thank you for your time and thanks for having me. Thank you for your time. And everybody out there, I mean, we saw have most of you watching, so thank you guys. You are the heroes tonight, real troopers. We really appreciate it.

No, but we deeply appreciate you come up. I mean, I deeply appreciate, you know, you sharing not only your life and your career, but also, you know, like the post-traumatic stress stuff, like it's very vulnerable, you know, and it's, you know, you're talking to, you know, several thousand people. And I think that the more people are able to talk about it, the more we're able to normalize it, the easier it is for people who need help to get the help. So thank you. Let me get to our questions real quick.

I don't, Dee, do we have anything on? No. No? All right. Joe, so we're going to, we're going to probably breeze through these questions, guys. I mean, we deeply appreciate you guys contributing. How similar were the assaulters at your old unit? compared to like the other tier one units,

and what was your experience like with those units? I think we talked about that a lot. And I think that we could also say that probably that the focus of your unit wasn't really on assault. Joe's thank you again. Could you talk about the culture and caliber of a person that makes an SMU where you were at? was it pretty brutal meritocracy, sorry, to work there?

I mean, were people just basically recognized for their performance without like a lot of politics and stuff? I think that folks, you know, so the senior leader in me says that folks probably weren't recognized enough because there's such a high standard that kind of the things that are normally recognized in your traditional organization are kind of like basic expectations. Right. So I say that folks are recognized, but probably not at the same rates as others in other organizations. but it's yeah I think it's maybe the

the public recognition is what's not there and I think that's rightfully so because it's hard to talk about it when you're not supposed to talk about it's like how do you recognize it? Joe's thank you very much in the civil affairs work

you did what would happen if you were not able to make amends would the Afghan village just become pro-Talabat we definitely had some places where we could not make it right yeah and so um those um yeah i definitely experienced that once or twice um you just try to get out there there without making it worse and look um you know we're not john rambo so like you're not going to start a firefight with three guys against a village right so um yeah you just

you just yeah leave and so i guess the answer is the likelihood most likely i guess they are not happy with yeah yes forces yeah and a lot of times it's not just about making it so they're not pro talban like it it is done from a place where it's the right thing to do a lot of times oh 100% so yeah and if that was misunderstood um when you're doing those payments so those are like wrongful death mitigation. It's not because you killed a bad guy and now you're going to pay their family money. That's not the case. Yeah, okay.

It's that someone was injured, hurt, killed, most of the time it's killed. And it's collateral damage that is kind of making it right, if you will, or making an attempt to acknowledge onus without like fully saying like we messed up. Yeah. R.S, thank you very much. Thank you, CSM and Dave, of course. I had friends at Womack and Triple Nickel. Great talk show, man.

Thanks, man. Really appreciate it. Chris Perez, thank you very much. Shout out to your I, brother. Normally, I don't catch the team house, but I didn't want to miss your podcast. M. Corbyn, thank you very much. Be sure to hit that like button.

Yeah, everybody, please. If you're still with us, which most of you are, please hit the like button we really appreciate it and hit the subscribe button too if you haven't already Boodoka thank you very much thank you guys for what you do

thank you for supporting us we really appreciate it that is our show this is 299 our 300 show is going to be four hours of non-stop Dungeons and Dragons that's October 3rd that's October 3rd

yeah so we're going to go off the rails yeah it's a Thursday show we're going off the rails getting our dragon sling on. But thank you, my friend. We really appreciate it. And thank you, everybody. Thanks for hanging with us tonight.

It was a marathon show. And you see what happens when Jack's not here. This is me. This is my fault. But all right, everybody, thank you very much.