The Team House - Commandos Marine Veteran (French Naval Special Warfare) | Louis Saillans | Ep. 164

Episode Date: September 24, 2022

Louis Saillans joined the marine commandos in 2010 and became group leader five years later. For nearly a decade, he participated in military operations in Africa and the Middle East aimed at freeing hostages, capturing jihadist leaders or neutralizing terrorists. Thanks to the notes taken during his missions and to archive documents to which he had access, he reveals the reality of special forces missions with the greatest accuracy. It also retraces the journey of the soldiers of these units, who went through a drastic selection during which they suffered the worst physical and psychological ordeals. Through a narration of rare lucidity, he describes the daily life of these men who became warriors, the brotherhood of arms, behind the scenes of special operations and the hidden face of the fight against terrorism. A unique testimony, which allows us to better understand the work of these shadow fighters ready to sacrifice their lives to save ours and maintain peace. Check out his book at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08S49FSQ8 Today's sponsor: BUB's Naturals  https://www.BUBSNATURALS.com/ Use the code "TEAMHOUSE" for 20% your order! Pick up their collagen protein, MCT oil, and apple cider vinegar gummies today! BUBS Donates 10% of all profits to charity in Glens honor, starting with the Glen Doherty Memorial Foundation GO TO: https://www.BUBSNATURALS.com/?discount=TEAMHOUSE  or Use the code "TEAMHOUSE" at checkout for 20% off your order! FEEL GREAT. DO GOOD. Words that we live by. Thanks for supporting the companies that support the show! To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month  -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon! 👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch:  https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media:  The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #commandosmarine #frenchsof #specialoperationsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Teamhouse know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our team house. and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page, and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review,

why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, Espionage, The Team House, with your hosts, Jack Murphy, The team house and David Park. Your host. Hey guys, welcome to episode 164 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park. We got D-producing.

And our guest on the show is Louis Seillon. He is a veteran of Marines Commando, which is sort of the French equivalent of Navy Seals. I hate to make a direct comparison, but it's the French equivalent of naval special warfare. Louis served 10 years in French special operations. Before that, he was a pilot in the Air Force, multiple deployments to Africa and to the Middle East, as well as other deployments around the world, non-combat deployments. And he is also an author.

He has a book out. Actually, you can find the book. It's in French, but you can find the link down in the description to the Amazon page where you can pick that up if you're interested. Louis, thank you for joining us on the show at this late hour where you live. Well, thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to be on the show. And it's the first time I'm introducing my French book to an English-speaking audience. So it's a bit of an experience.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I hope that this interview convinces people that this is or convinces a publisher somewhere out there that this is a worthwhile book to translate into the English language and kind of bring to the English-speaking world. But here on the Team House, we really like to talk to our partner forces, our allied special operations partners around the world. We've talked to people from what Denmark, the Philippines, Australia, a number of different places. There's so many allies that we haven't had on the show yet. Ohio. We need to. Ohio.

But we're really excited to get this sort of unique perspective from you, Louie. And as usual, I was wondering if you could start off by telling us a little bit about your background and how you grew up, what your upbringing was like and what that path was that took you towards French military service. Well, I grew up in the southwest of France. I grew up in a, well, yeah, more, I was going to say a middle class family was a family that struggled to stay mid-class. So I was in between low class and the class, but I never lacked anything really during my education, well I feel. Times were sometimes hard, but I went through fine. I did a normal school. My school itinerary was kind of normal.

I was never a very good pupil, I think. But things went okay. I was good at sports, good at languages. and I was rubbish more or less at all the rest. But since I was, I think I was a nice kid. The teachers tolerated that, so that went okay. And eventually I went into high school and I studied physics because I intended in becoming physics teacher at first.

I had no one no military family no one in my friends or family were from the military and it's something I never never thought of doing

it's it came to me at some stage in my physics classes I think and I felt I liked physics I liked the world of physics but something I hated was just sitting at a at a desk just like what we're doing now but just with copies to learn lessons to

learn and stuff it's just not my thing so I kind of got bored and eventually I decided I to go into something more active and so that's how the military came out well my first actually my first encounter with the military was me going at at the weekends I used to I used to go to university. And then in the evening, at the weekends, I used to go, I used to work in a fast food. And with that money, I went to an air club and I learned to fly small aircrafts there. And there, the instructor that actually taught me how to fly, he was a military professional, military pilot. And he flew combat helicopters. And he's kind of, yeah, so he was my, my first encounter with the army any any kind of pushed me nudged me to go into the into

that direction and that kind of opened the door to me and I by after after some time I settled with the idea of going into the military and I said why not try that out and and so that's how I got into the Air Force so my first my first my first army I went into I enlisted in the Air Force as a student pilot an officer cadets. I don't know how you call them in the USA. Yeah, like a cadet, yeah. A cadet, yeah, there'll be it. And so I did that for three years. I got my, my diplomas to become a professional military pilot. I didn't, I didn't get them all, obviously, because it's a long, it's a long course, but I had all the ones to, that was equivalent to, to a professional

pilot in the civilian world. So I didn't fly any armed planes, like I didn't drop any bombs or anything. But I knew how to fly a plane, basically. And from there, again, I felt this was interesting. I spent three years. It was absolutely thrilling. I learned a lot. It taught me a lot of discipline. Flying an aircraft was a bit of a big deal for me.

I was just maybe 20 years old. So it was still a kid. And so it taught me a lot of things. and I learned how to become a soldier really, and that was thrilling. And after a while, I just, actually, I remember this one flight. I remember this one flight with one of my instructors. And it was a very long flight.

It was a three-hour long flight. And although I was a pilot, I was in command, I remember kind of dozing off during my flight. because it was IFR so he couldn't look outside. It was all dark. And I remember just going, oh, I'm falling asleep here. And that kind of ringed a bell. I opened up a sequence in my head saying,

is this, you know, the exact thing you wanted to do? Like, is this going where you want to be later on? Can you project yourself in 30 years doing what you're doing now? although I knew I was at the beginning I'd still load the stuff to learn and you know it's just at the very beginning of this and so that kind of you know yeah it got me it opened a thinking process in the background of my head for for a bit and then eventually one day I saw on the the airfield I was on this was a yeah it's the Air Force it was an Air Force big Air Force airfield and Pirate troopers came in and they did a whole week where they did all their jumps for the year to validate their

qualifications and stuff get them up to date and very kindly they came over to us and said you know I know we know we're in the learning process guys so if you want to come out with us and we'll show you the gear and you know give you a bit of a change

got another one yeah yeah Yeah, it was a bit like that, yeah, a bit of a trap. And so, of course, I was, I was, I was, all over the place. Oh, yeah, this is, this is fantastic. So I went to see the guys and they told me about all this. And eventually the pilots came at the sea and said, listen, guys, we're doing, you know, jumps all week.

So if any of you want to come out, come and hang out with us and stay in the cockpit during the jumps in between your flights, feel free. so I was next thing you know I was in the cockpit with the guys they were flying the plane and I was just observing what was going on and eventually I'd go at the back at the cargo and I see all those guys geared up with their helmets with all the stuff there NVGs there's guns everywhere the shoots there and I remember thinking there's this awkward silence at the back. It was very noisy. There was noise of the engine

and eventually the ramp drops open and just the wind whirling and it's cold. But the guys were very, they looked very calm. They looked very confident. Even this guy that was lying down on that box and that was about to be pushed off the aircraft. So I was thinking, you know,

there's something weird like this and very intriguing and also very attractive if you see what I mean is you kind of feel your your I felt that was I was in the middle of a of a clan or group or something and I felt the bond I felt the confidence they had they were checking each other's gear so I could see they were very loyal to each other and stuff they were very confident in each other and And it kind of all, you know, sounded like very attractive to me and eventually I said, right, you know, this is it. That's what I want to do. I want to jump off that way.

I want to be with them. So, but that's how I got to get my mind around switching armies and going from flying aircrafts to basic training in the Navy to get into the, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, the commandos. What was it? First off, can you kind of explain how the French military is structured for us and then tell us why you chose the Navy and the commandos? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, the French army is divided into three big main armies, which is, of course, the army,

what you call the army, well, we can't call ground army, La Mide d'Eux. So they lead all the land operations. Then we have the Air Force and the Navy. So that's kind of a classic three branches. And then we have the National Guard. That's what we call the gendarmerie. So they're kind of military police. And they deal with frontier work.

And they do also policing. So they actually in town we have police units. and in the countryside it's the Gendarmerie that acts so they're actually military guys and they do policing in the countryside so

they're actually four there are four great branches in the military and I was in the Air Force and I wanted absolutely to switch to the Navy well absolutely I felt I had to go into these Navy commandos I don't know why

because in the Every branch has their own special forces units. So Air Force also has, just like the Americans, the power rescue, is the exact same. Then the Navy have Navy special warfare. And of course, the Army has all the Rangers and the equivalent in the French military. And I felt that to switch to the Navy. because at the time there was this TV show going on showing those French Navy SEALs being trained and they had one very charismatic.

There was this one very charismatic guy who was one of the instructors. And he's very famous now. He wrote another book in France and he's very famous. But also he was the only one you got to know when you were interested in Special Forces. So you hit special forces on the internet or you wanted to, although there wasn't very much of internet at the time, this was 2007, or 2010, maybe. The only thing you got information from was this training of Navy commandos. So I didn't really know about paro rescue or Rangers or anything else. And also the rumor, because that's all the intel I had, the rumors.

was that the training course was extremely hard and it was probably one of the hardest in the army that you could go through. And I knew nothing about this. And I was like, I knew no one from spec ops. I knew no one from the Navy. And so I just said, right, sounds hard. And I just feel I have to go through this. So at least I can confirm myself to my decision. And whether I get through or I break my teeth on this, at least, you know, my conscience is clear.

I know where I've been. And Mike Horn, you know, the famous adventure, Mike Horn, the guy from South Africa. Do you know about this guy? No, I'm not familiar. No, not offhand, no. Not familiar. But anyway, he did the, he went around Antarctica by foot. So he did that by foot.

And he went against all the winds and tides. And when people asked, they said, why did you go against and not with the winds and tide? And he just said, if I did it in the right way with the winds and tide, all my life, I would have wondered whether I would, I would have managed to do it the other way around. The hard way, basically. Yeah. There was kind of the same idea here. I was going, right, this sounds hard.

I could go in any, I could just, you know, enlist in any regiment. in the army and just go, right, I want to do any few stuff, eventually be a para something, I don't know what, I want to do the same thing as these guys were doing. The guys, I eventually got to know what the unit I was with, because at the time I didn't know who I was with in the cargo of that plane. And I discovered later there were GCPs, so it was kind of, yeah, kind of elite soldiers in parachutist reginal. And so I was like I could go I could very well go there

But since I heard about this this training for Navy commandos I was like all right I'll go and and and break my teeth on death first and then we'll see but I won't go through this so So that was a bit of a of the the origin of my of my decision and and that was one of the first one of my first one of my first let's say big accomplishments was not only taking the decision but also having to go across one of my the worst enemies I ever went across in my life which is the French administration and that was a big of a bit of a deal because a bit of a big deal because I had to go from the airport to the Navy and there is no there is nothing scheduled for that you know nothing's made there's no there's no pathway for that

because you're trained to be a pilot people are investing in you to become a pilot and so they expect you to you know it to go from a to z in your training but when you come out in the middle you know there's no one that's going to tell you oh that that's fine yeah help you to go elsewhere so so i had to i discovered how you could you can bribe colonels with cognac and all kind of drinks. And eventually you get your way through. And yeah, so I ended up in the Navy. So you didn't, you didn't even have to finish like your full term in your air, in the Air Force.

You were able to transfer in your service? I finished my, my, my, my equivalency of my diplomas in the, in the civilian, yeah, in civilian world. So, which meant if I drop. out, I still had my diploma to become a, and I could become an airline pilot after this. I could go, I could immediately switch to airline pilot because I already had all my, all my diploma is okay. So, so I knew I had this done. That was my milestone. And from there, I could switch to the, to the Air Force, to the Navy, sorry. So let's talk a little bit about your initial journey into the Navy and making it over to, uh, select.

and a little bit about what that, I'm sure that was an enjoyable experience. Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a hard experience. As you know, it's something where you discover yourself mostly, discover who you really are. That's how I see it. I ended up in the Navy and I did basic training in the Navy to become a, we have the equivalent of infantrymen. It's like Marines, yeah, basically, it's like Marines. in the Navy. So they're infantrymen, in frontiers, sorry, that work for the Navy.

They keep the ships, they're the one deployed with the ships. And so I went through the basic training with them. And that went well because I was well trained before in the Air Force. I prepared everything. There's one thing I learned from the Air Force is how to do proper briefing. And that was the only, way I knew how to plan things out was to do a briefing that was extensive enough so that I could anticipate as many cases as possible and as many situations.

So I knew I was switching for the Air Force to the Navy. I knew it was going to be rough because I was going to go into basic training. And so I trained. I used to fly and back from the flight I used to go running or I used to go to the gym or workout so I'd this yeah double schedule every week and so basically training was okay well it was hard obviously because you all I also physically was I think I was okay but mentally and psychologically it was hard because there's a lot of learning to take in because it's basically learning infantry and it's learning how to use your

guns and grenades and how does a group and all kinds of stuff. And so that was six months, maybe maybe four months. And then I went directly into the training. Although you could volunteer directly after your just four months basic training to go directly for the commando integration course. And so that's where things kind of got very, very rough.

So that was scheduled as follows. as follows and you have four weeks of selection and these are this that's the hardest part it's really extremely hard it's a bit like hell week in the seals they talk i know they talk about it all the time but it's a bit the same and so it's four weeks where there's you you have there's sleep deprivation you're wet all the time you you've only have a few minutes to eat cold meals and you're walking all night with big bags and rucksacks. I suppose it sounds kind of, I know on this channel it sounds kind of routine, but, uh, well, it's a similar to the selection course that we all go through.

It's a commonality, right, across these different nations. They, they put you under some stress to see what you can handle, right? A scooch. A scoge of stress. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And there was a, I thought it was quite brutal. because I remember having psychological issues after that.

I remember not being able to, we were wet all the time. Like we're physically, they made sure we had no moments dry. Like weekends were very, were very cut up because we had to stand guard on our building, on our training buildings. So I stand guard day and night. So as the course goes on, the numbers dwindle. So you end up being very small numbers, but there are still 24 hours in the day. So you have to split that up. The pieces of cake, you have to split up, become bigger and bigger as the group number diminishes.

So the weekend, we spend standing guard, and when we're not standing guard, you can take time off. And you can leave the base just for the one washing machine. But that's it. So it's kind of harsh for the four weeks. And after that, it kind of, the training becomes a bit more technical. So you learn all the guerrilla tactics and all. And that's two other months after that. And at the end of that, you get your beret, your green beret.

So that's three months all in all. And then you go into commando, you in commando an operational commander unit. During your training process, and what else does those three months consist of? I mean, are you learning underwater demolitions, diving? No. No, no, no.

It's very oriented on guerrilla warfare, land and nautical warfare. So we don't do any diving at all. We at the end of the training, we do at the end of the three months, we do an extra month of parachute training. So we learn how to do parachuting. And then you've extra courses that add on later on like demolition or we do a bit of demolition. We do a bit of all during the two months of training.

But it's just a bit of all, a bit of shooting, a bit of guerrilla tactics, a bit of demolition. But no underwater. Okay. They have you working with the Zodiacs? Yeah, exactly. It's more of Zodiacs and nighttime operation, nighttime raids, and Hilo raids and whatever. Very cool. Louis, I got to take just a minute here to give a shout out to the sponsor of our show.

It's Bubbs Naturals. Bubbs is a company that works with the Glenn Doherty Foundation, who is a Navy SEAL, a really good guy who, sadly died in Benghazi, Libya, when the CIA Annex was overrun. But Bubbs makes a number of health food products that they continue to work with the foundation. I've used this protein for many years. the MCT. I mean, everything's great, but the MCT powder's fantastic. They also, this is a new product. They have these gummies, apple cider, vinegar, which I promise they don't taste like vinegar. They taste like normal gummies. They're delicious. Help with your digestion. And the protein is interesting because it's flavorless, completely flavorless. You mix it in with coffee, soft drink,

whatever you want. And so you go to bubsnaturels.com, use the promo code Teamhouse, and you'll get 20% off your order. So that's bubsnaturels.com. Use the code team house to get 20% off your first order. We're really happy to support this company and work with them. So go check those guys out, please. All right. Thank you, Bowie. Which operational detachment are you assigned to? And actually, we should take a little pause here, I think, to talk a little bit about the history of your unit. If we could get into that a little bit to give people an idea of where these guys came from, what their origins are. and sort of what their mission is. Yeah.

The French commandos in the Navy, you can break them up in four main units, five main units, actually, and they all bear the name of a deceased commando that either died during into China or in Africa. So the four, they all have four very famous names, sorry. So there's Montfort, Trepel, Joubert.

Panfantino and Uber. And they all have a, they all used to have a very specific application. So Montfort used to be demolition and mortars and long range shooting. So that would be their specialty. Trepel and Jobert would be kind of the same. They'd be assaulters. And Panfantino would be Reki. So they'd go in for reconnaissance techniques.

And then you have Uber and they do all the sub-aquatic warfare. Is that correct? Yeah, sub-surfice. Yeah, sub-surface, yeah. So they were specialized in sub-surface. So now we kind of have mixed them all up because of the operational needs. We have so much need of a huge. human resources on the battlefields that we kind of had to mix everyone up and say, you know,

we all do a bit of all now because we couldn't afford having, you know, just two units deployed at the time. So now they all deploy at the same time. Well, one after the other, but we have, we have to have them. They all got sucked into counterterrorism. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But we still, they still keep, they try and still keep a bit of a specialty in each, one of them especially in new bear since they are the only ones that do subsurface actions and so yeah but all in all we kind of mixed now and we kind of do a bit of all in every unit although each unit is still is still independent from from the others and then we've no go ahead i'm sorry go ahead with two extra units that have added on with

with years and that are kiefer and bourchardier and Kifah and Porchalier are two units that one of them is for all the vectors so either parachutes or ships ribs all the kind of stuff and Kiefer is a unit that has it's a pool of specialists so all the K-9 electronic warfare all these guys will regroup in Kfer and so they will we'll go and grab one of them for a specific mission or what, that's how it works. And which one were you assigned to? So I did time in Tripel and Jobert, and they're both soldiers' commandos because I like Vyingdoors in.

Yeah. What is the sort of the operational history of those two units, if you could tell? They were created during the Indochina war. that was in the 50s. Vietnam. Yeah, Vietnam. They used to be river units, and they used to do raids.

They used to have boats, big ribs, and they used to do raids all along at the rivers that went into China to kill and capture, basically, units and overrun outposts, enemy outposts. So it was very early, deal with that acquired a bit of a commando style and because because it was you have to be fast

have to be brutal in areas that were usually possessed by the enemy or they were oh yeah they were held by the enemy and uh and all the most of the the knowledge the commando uh got from guerrilla warfare comes actually from the british uh because uh all that warfare we used uh comes from the Second World War, where the French troops, when the German armies overran France, part of the French troops disengaged France and went to other allied countries. And some went to England, where they learned all the SAS techniques, and they brought them back to France at the end of the war. And from there, we kept these techniques, and we developed,

we developed them and used them for in the China War, Algerian War also. Didn't, wasn't Jack Cousteau involved in setting, helping to set that unit up? Well, Jack Cousteau did a lot in subsurface activities because he's actually the guy who invented the, the scuba. Yeah, the scuba system. yeah scuba system he invented the scuba system so that was a major major asset for for divers but i think the main the guys that were the most the leaders in the area of this subsurface warfare were the italians yeah italians that's fantastic the minis subs combat divers yeah and i i think we we transferred some of the knowledge from the italians also

for the for the combat divers fascinating and then you get there in 2010 had these assault units already been deploying on the war on terror or other French military missions what had they been I arrived I remember arriving at my unit first first big events that took place was a ceremony so we all came out with our kids kids or brand new kids and I was lined up for the ceremony in my with my unit with my new unit and the ceremony was a was for the arrival of the oh I'm losing my English I'm sorry that's okay of the coffin of okay guys that are just deceased in Afghanistan and his teammates were there and they were also crippled there was alive but crippled and I remember my my

first ceremony was this coffin coming in so I was barely arrived and I was like facing with what was going to happen to us so yeah it was a bit of a Afghanistan was a big thing for French units and I remember all the all the change that involved because before Afghanistan we didn't have as we had the odd mission here and there but we didn't have things as intense as people could find them in Afghanistan. I didn't do in Afghanistan, so these are stories I heard from, but I noticed a real change between the beginning of my time in the units and the end where I remember training my first country airs and trainings where you, we used to stack up against build. when we have to clear rooms and we you know throw the grenade open the door and we'd run in and people were rushing to take angles and I remember thinking oh this is rough you

know and when when you when one of your your senior and COs would catch you thinking you go yeah you know well this is the real life you know we know the real deal is the first guy, second guy that goes in, they'll probably die. So, but that's the deal. And I was kind of going, oh, wow, really weird. I remember taking shots, you know, with the training rounds, taking shots and my, and then, you know, hiding and then going, well, I can't go in. Like, people are shooting at me.

And my NCO is going, what the fuck are you talking about? Just push in, you know. Right. And I kept saying push in. And I remember going, oh, this is rough. I don't get this. And eventually with time and all, all these tactics moved around. Yeah.

And that was, to me, the consequences of Afghanistan and the guys we lost. And I saw it in this room clearing, which is kind of the pinnacle of the counterterrorism units. Yeah. Is, you know, clearing rooms. I saw the difference. And at the end, we started, you know, clearing the room from the outside. Yeah. and taking, you know, opening angles from the outside and all.

And so I saw the mindset totally changing between the beginning where we had to push and push all the time. And at the end where, you know, you stop yelling and, you know, you do things nice and slowly and take time and open up discreetly and kind of be, and made a lot of sense. But then I was, you know, I was just, I was the new guy. I couldn't say anything. And that was perfectly okay.

But I felt the change over time. Yeah. And eventually on deployments, I discovered also why you don't just run into a guy waiting to do with a KM. Yeah, right. And it makes sense, you know. Yeah. And we've talked about that with people before, too, because Jack and I both saw it also where they're, you know, in the late 90s, like the hostage rescue model was the model that everybody was using, which is get it. You're trying to save a hostage.

So everybody gets, you get all the guns in the room at the same time. Everybody dominates their, you know, their point. And, you know, and you collapse your vectors and this and that. But when there's no hostage and the bad guys knows that's your tactic and they set up bunkers in the rooms and other floors and everything else, people start to learn that lesson quickly that maybe we should go back to World War II style clearing where we clear the room from outside the building. when I'm dating myself a little bit but when I got to Ranger Battalion it was 2003 and I think our CQB was still a lot of lessons learned from Somalia from Longadishu and yeah exactly as you described as we changed drastically very quickly to over a couple years to I don't want to get into too much detail about TTP. maybe they still use some of them, but a much more organic way of clearing structures. And as you point out, it became, we accepted, I think, that there is an operational art to this, right?

It's not just about kicking in the door rushing in. You look, feel things out a little bit. Take a little look see. If you can look through a window and choose somebody from outside, then do that. If you can try the doorknob and the door opens and it's quiet and maybe you just go. in under night vision yeah yeah you don't have to blow blow every door down it also it makes it all the sense like in real life like if people shoot at you with their seven six two rounds it's bloody i mean i've seen people duck and dive for you know you're not standing up and you know

holding your they used to say orient your your your your plate carrier right uh towards the guy. Right. I was like, what the hell? I'm going to duck and dive and move around. I'm not going to stay there. Right.

And so it makes sense in the end. But yeah, so that's a bit of an evolution I saw through time. But that was Afghanistan for me. It was this big change from doing stuff with a bit of, you know, everyone's ideas coming in and still happens, which is fine. But then eventually having, you know, the roughness of reality come in and step in.

And from there, you're like, okay, right, this is the real stuff. And this first ceremony for me was a bit of my eye opener and saying, okay, this is not just, you know, this is just training or everything they told me in training is not just gobbledy group just to look good. No, it's real. And what was it like when you showed up to your first maneuver element? I mean, if you could tell us a little bit about what that was, Is it a platoon? Is it a squad?

What is the... It's a group. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a group and we're 10, yeah, around 10 guys. A group is around 10 guys. And I was a new guy in there and it was rough. It was rough because it was the way it is.

It's a very strong hierarchies. I think they're mostly fair, but they are very rough. So you can't, you know, you can't mess around and it's the real deal. And they're all Afghanistan veterans. Exactly, yeah. And all the guys were coming up with these Afghanistan stories. And I was with all the other new guys,

when we were like, oh, God, this is serious like you. You know, what they tell us about the stories, they tell us like with, in a very, in a very non-important way sometimes, like saying, they don't want to brag. And so they just come up with the story. during an exercise or something, so, oh, yeah, guys, remember, this can happen

because they happen to me, and when they say that, like, our eyes light up and we're like, oh, this is the real deal. So it was kind of exciting also, and, you know, to have these guys around. But it was rough because, you know, they were expecting the best out of us. And in the end, you know,

after thinking, you know, with time, I realized that three months of a selection and training process, plus a few extra training weeks after that, is very little for a commando. Since there's a lot of knowledge to gather, there's a lot of things to update all the time, to train for. So, yeah, days were long. And as a new guy, it's a bit of big piece to bite. So was there a so yeah. I'm sorry.

Please go ahead. No, no, no. Oh, yeah, you're going to ask, is there a formal way to. Yeah. For people to command. Yeah. There is. And you get a, you get a bit of a, a, what's the word?

Like an indoctrination type of thing? Yeah, yeah. A bit of an in-doc, yeah. And so you've to, you know, do maximum press-ups, push-ups, and they give you loads of stupid tasks. and kind of try and see where you're limited is as a teammates. So that comes up very fast and you've loads of, yeah, physical and technical, technical tests they put you through that are totally informal and they do this. You know, after most of the senior RNCO have left, the junior RNCOs come over to us and they give us extra tasks to do an extra.

to do and extra tests to go through. Like we called the gun salad. It's where you know, take priority of guns and mix them up in a box and NVG's on and here you go, trying to bring back together and all kind of stuff. So, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, there's a bit of that, yeah. And I feel also that has strongly diminished the intensity of it.

I thought that was very rough, but it was, yeah, it was tough. It was tough. But now it has diminished a lot since there's a very strong turnover in the units because of all the deployments to Africa, Middle East and elsewhere, since people are deployed very often, there's a bit less of this in-doc when people come in because people don't have time to mess around with the new. guys. Right. And we want the new guys not to be able to do this gun salad properly with NVGs, which makes little sense. Right. We want them to be able to go to the range more often and be able to be operational as soon as possible. Right. Because we need them on the field. We need them on the battlefield. So that kind of has diminished. I think it's it's good. It's good because I believe in Well, it's good and it's not good, of course, because it's good in a sense that it's good to be operational fast and to be professional fast that I approve of.

But then the Indoc is also useful, I think, to create bonds before going to war, having bonds with your teammates is something that's interesting. Because it created a lot of bonds with the new guys, all the new guys we used to group together and help. help us out each other. And so that was very useful. And they helped that not create bonds with each other that we still have today. So about around what year was it that you, what did you arrived? I arrived in the, in the units in 2010, I think. Yeah, thereabouts.

So was Afghanistan still very hot? Yeah. I know very hot. But you. Yeah. Okay. Tell us about. The thing is we were at the end of Afghanistan for France.

And three years later, Mali opened and Syria right afterwards. So there was an escalation as soon as Afghanistan closed. Boom, we have Mali open up with the very first missions to stop Taliban, not Taliban, the anti guys, get grip of the main country, the main towns in Mexico. So we had to intervene there. And then we had to intervene also in Syria with the Americans in 2015. Is that? I can't remember exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. So it all, it all carried on. And so we kept gaining, you know, we kept going forward. And it was a lucky time to be in the units really, because you got to deploy in the in in in in good car it used to be good deployments like you used to get to see stuff and do stuff which was which is very interesting tell tell us about when you got the word came down of your first deployment um and you know how did you guys get situated get you know what was the train up like to get ready for that deployment and then you know heading overseas for it yeah well we in the

in the navy commandos we have a bit of an issue with deploying because we love doing extra training before we deploy it as more than anyone else. We have to train more than anyone else. Any other spec ops units, we should do more. And so we would do a main training where we would do all the renewal, all the updates of all the qualifications we have, whether it's land nav, sea nav, or jumping or shooting or whatever it is, demolition, anything. We get everything up to top notch and then we go for training, for extra training, for the deployment. So that would be maybe two to three months beforehand, before the deployment.

So we do deployment, we do training that's just only oriented to wherever we're going. So if we work with Helo's on the deployment, we'd try and work with Helo's beforehand in the same way, which would go for people or instructors would set up scenarios that would look like what we're going to do. And so they'll get us prepared for the area. and then we'd have a bit of a, we'd have a bit of leave, and then we'd deploy on the mission. And so it's a,

we knew some missions were, you know, more, more dangerous than others, but we deployed all the same, with the same preparation every time. I mean, you know, you never know what's going to happen. So, yeah. So we're about generally where are you going on the first,

deployment and what was the mission? First deployments were Africa and some of the missions. It was counterterrorism but oriented to it was both counterterrorism and anti-piracy. So we did a bit of both. We're proud for both. But then the most interesting ones were, couple of years later, where we deployed more into Saial and that was purely counterterrorism. And they were the most interesting to me because we're very lucky to get onto real combat missions

where, you know, it was really rough and we'd get, you know, yeah, we'd have proper orders and proper leaders that would push us into combat. That was really, really interesting. Was the French public very aware of what was going? going on in the different parts of the world and that you guys and other French elements were involved? Yeah, yeah. People are quite aware because French people tend to have a special attention over Africa.

Africa used to be half, maybe one third or half of Africa used to be French. they used to be a French colonies so a lot of African people a lot of African countries still speak French and so we still keep a lot of links with these people and so whenever we get deployed over to Africa people have a special

you know they they they're interested to know what's going on whereas whatever whatever whatever's happening in Yemen no one cares or where else where So yeah, there's a special problem with Africa

And then Middle East also people are interested in They are aware because they're still close It's all it's kind of around the Mediterranean Sea So I feel there's a there's a sense of closeness on what's happening And so yeah people are kind of conscious Although these recent wars weren't wars like What France has known in Algeria or Indochina where we lost something like 50,000 or 70,000 men.

Whereas here, like I remember in Mali, we lost 53 men, which is nothing compared to these other conflicts, although they are very close in time to us. So there's also a kind of a sense of importance in the awareness they have of the conflict. They know there's a conflict going on, but since there aren't very many people, you know, very many French dying,

it was the same in Afghanistan. Not very many, I think we lost something like 80 men or something. And so since there aren't very many people dying over there, well, French people die, I think they're not very concerned about the conflict. Whereas into China and Algeria, that was massive, like you. Everyone had someone from their family dying or being injured in Algeria and into China.

And so tell us about that first deployment. What was it like for you? Were there any interesting operations that kind of stand out in your mind? Like maybe your first combat operation. I mean, you must remember. Yeah, yeah. I remember very well. And I remember it was, yeah, it was, it was very rough.

I remember the very first one. It's a, yeah, it stands out in my mind because it was a funny operation. We had Intel coming in. We were on standby for a capture some guy, some jihadi leader somewhere. And so we were on standby with the team. And the guy, the intel came in and said, right, there's a bunch of guys with a few pickups resting beneath trees in the desert and we would like to go we would like you to go and check it out so it's that's kind of a routine mission in style and

all these regions in Africa so you get to just go and check on people and often it's not very much because you know the way the jihadi guys you go after the real hardwins are kind of scarce there aren't very many most of them are just combatants but you know they'll switch sides they'll change jobs they'll be a jihadi combatant for six months then they'll go he'll go back to trafficking gold or something so you often fall you often get these guys that or either something or are actually jihadi fighters. So we leave for that mission and we had a few, maybe an hour or two of a Hilo flight to go there.

And I remember asking how many guys there are and if there are any weapons, which is the basic, you know, questions that we ask before we leave. The guy, I remember my, my, my CEO saying, no and no, we don't know how many of you are and we don't know if there's any weapons. Just go there and we'll see. That's kind of tricky because it's all it's kind of exciting because you're like, right,

anything that could happen, you know, everything could go sideways. So this is very exciting, but that's the exciting part. But the kind of, the other part that kind of, that's kind of concerning is that you're having the clue what you're going to deal with. So you don't know if you're supposed to bring a rocket launcher or rocket, grenade launcher or any demolition or you don't know what to bring. And the problem is we have these heloes. We fly in French army, we have these very special heloes. They're very good for flying into mountains at the top of mountains.

They can go very high because they're very high quality suppressors at the front of the engine. They compress the air very well. They hold records actually for, from flying at the top of mountains. But in the desert, it's a scam. It's a scam because

the heat, the temperature is so high, they consume too much fuel, so they have a very low cargo. So that's an extra stress on us. What is the helicopter? Is it the lynx? No, it's not the lynx. It's a Puma.

A Puma. Okay, gotcha. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And there are different versions of them. We were very, I was on the very modern version, which, you know, gunners on the side and stuff. But the guys would go like, it was a, I remember, I remember later on as a team leader with the same heroes, I remember having to, having to fight with the pilots to get that extra five kilos on, onto the cargo. And I remember we, in the team, we'd just have to drop all the water we had. Right. Even in DeSar operations, we'd drop all the water we have just to get the extra, extra commando on, the lightweight guy, you know, the one that was 60 kilos.

We'd get him on and we'd drop a few mags in a bit of water and we'd get this extra guy on. Oh, my God. So it was very, it was very complicated for us to get to know what gear we had to bring and how much we could bring. it so well so for instance I wouldn't bring when I became team leader later on I I would not use any machine gunners anymore because they were too heavy ammunition was too heavy and also they were not precise enough so I'd

drop out all the machine gunnery and take all the only sharpshooters so I'd have two sharpshooters in one group because I felt they were more useful and I could make more out of them than a machine gunner. A machine gunner can't clear a house. Oh, I can.

It can. Yeah, yeah. In a harsh way. Whereas my sharpshooter, if he has a short gun, it can actually clear rooms. He can have to. So it was a bit of a negotiation every time we left. So this

went on for this mission. Negotiations. We didn't know what we were going after so we didn't know what kind of gear we had to use so we had the standard kit we'd always use with a few grenades a bit of all we'd leave and and I remember this was in full daylight which is pretty unusual because we often use of course nighttime operations in Hilo because the drones would see things much clearer because of the heat contracts and and also we'd have NVGs the enemy wouldn't have any right very difficult so combat superiority would be for us at night time although but this mission was taking place

at daytime because they just felt we we had an enemy that was very volatile can I say that yeah so yeah they the guys at the sound of an engine they pack up and leave and and drop guys off during their pass so we'd lose everything at the end there would be anyone left so we had to act quick so they decided to deploy us in daytime so we all went on to the helo and we didn't fast rope over the area i remember before reaching the area you know i try and listen at the cons and the aircraft know what's going on and I remember this chattering going on

and trying to realize how many guys they were and at the beginning I thought it was something like three or five guys but then at some stage I hear three or five guys one or two pickups one or two technicals and I hear motorbikes

leaving the area I hear guys running off the area and I'm like how many guys are there? People, there are people everywhere. In my cons, I only had to figure what was going on because I couldn't see. That's a lot of people, you know, running around. And this was a drone transmitting all the information to us and the Hilo. And maybe three months before landing, I start to hear gun sounds in the in the cons. And I hear, and I'll see this afterwards because afterwards I took up the footage from the

helos to see what was going on and it was this scene I was I'll remember all my life I saw a Rambo scene in real life we had what would usually happen with the heroes is that what the transport heloes we were in would be preceded by the tiger you know which is a the equivalent of the Apache maybe yeah and so he had a he had all the missiles and rockets And he'd especially have this 30 millimeter gun that's linked with the helmet of the pilot and stuff. And so he was starting to shoot at people downstairs. And I remember his camera pictured this guy.

He was shooting in the sand and in the bushes. So it makes a lot of dust. And I remember this guy popping out of the dust with a heavy machine gun, PKM. And the band that was dragging. He was dragging a long pad of ammunition on the ground. And he just took the gun at the, and from the hip, he started shooting at the helicopter, you know, legs wide open in the middle of nowhere, going everywhere to the helo, so the heel. That was kind of my first encounter with combat with this guy, Rambo, running out and shooting at heel, who's KM. So eventually, that guy got shot very fast.

although he ran a bit because because the pilots would shoot and they would do massive smoke area loads of dust dust area and so the guy would hide back in

and so the pilot would lose him and so that that took a bit of time to resolve but eventually so I was hearing this I was going oh the stuff is going on and so eventually I reach my I look at the helo and I see the helicopter shooting at the ground.

I'm like, all right, this is the real deal. But then also I'm thinking, ah, you know, it's fine. You know, we'll land a hillo. We'll have done the work and we'll just have to, you know, grab a few prisoners or whatever's left of pieces and buried him and boom. And so I'm thinking, you know, I have to say on one time, I'm going, ah, he's going to kill everyone. We're going to have no one to deal with.

And on the other hand, I was trying, at least, you know, he's dealing with the with the Rambo guy, which is fine by me. Right. And so eventually we, we hover around this big kind of forest. And we land nearby because we insisted on landing. We hate, my team used to hate fast roping. Fastroping is crapped. I do not like it. It's fancy.

It's good for the movies and stuff. Well, I like a good heart landing with the helo. Where you just walk off. That's the best thing ever. Anyway, so the guy nicely nanzus near the forest. And he's supposed to land us. We told him, like on the briefing, we did a very fast briefing with the pilot. And he was told to land us behind this...

this hill there's a hill sandy hill in between the forest and our drops on our landing zone so at least we're covered and we can climb up the hill and have you know we can see what's going on in the forest and we can shoot people if they have to and stuff and i'm i stick my head out of the helo to see what's going on and i'm like where's the hill and i see the helo is starting to you know to hover and and to to incline to get the landing he's going into his landing movement and i'm like there's a problem there is no hill like between the enemy area and the landing zone there's just this very wide area with nothing to cover it like nothing like it's it's just sand and dust and eventually i i i i discovered why this happened is because when we briefed we briefed very fast on a piece of

satellite picture and the satellite picture there was this shade of a hill that wasn't a shade it was just the ground that was a funny color and we thought the funny color was a shade so we were like oh we'll be safe behind the hill no hill and the pilot and the pilot going oh this is the GPS point that's perfect I land them on the GPS point without you know thinking right enemies right there right anyway so we're landing it's too late to to warn anyone you know don't don't drop us here it's too dangerous we're not right next to these guys one of them was Rambo who knows maybe we are rambos in there and so he drops us off and I remember very well it drops off we all

walk out and I'm like, ah, this is fine. It'll do. And I can see the forest ahead of us. It's maybe four, maybe 500 meters away. And I can't see anyone because it's dark. You know the way in the distance beneath the trees. You can't really see it because of the shadow. And you can hide in the shadow very easily. And so I kneel and wait for the, you know, the dust to fall down from the helo. the hero leaves and as soon as the hero leaves massive guns by

it starts shooting from the whole of the forest lights up and we're all pinned down. All lying down for our lives in the middle of this nomad land and they're just shooting at us and we're like

there's nothing to do like we're just nowhere to hide and I'm like checking around people and people are looking back at me going what the where do we go? And so eventually we just think, you know, if we're going to die here, we may as well die running or doing something.

So eventually we step up with a few NCO, step up, and we start rushing to the forest to the other, the extreme end of the forest. So not facing us, but the extreme end on the side, thinking if we reach the forest, at least, you know, we're hidden to it. And at least they can't see it. So they still shoot at us, but they won't be able to see us. So we run across these 400 meters. It was the longest 400 meters I ever run in my life.

And we get into the forest. And that's where it got really, really complicated because it was a very bushy forest. So you couldn't see, you couldn't see further than maybe three to five meters. And we knew there were people waiting for us. and there were numerous fighters in the forest. And I could hear the chatter on the radio. And I could hear that the helo couldn't see the guys because of the heat contrast that was not strong enough

since it was daylight. Right. He's like, I can see heat spots everywhere, but I'm not sure. I don't know what it is. And he wasn't going to shoot every heat spot he saw because, you know, He has that much of ammunition and also we're here and you know things are going to get complicated if he runs out of ammo

And so we start you know we gather all around as a group which kind of go around the end of the forest and we say right This is you know classical infantry work. We're going to line up and just so that the helo knows that the line is us And then we're just going to move forwards and that's what happened we just move forward. I was it was the most stressful hunting party I've ever been to there were people everywhere shooting at us

hiding it was so yeah we got I got face-to-face encounters with guys I came up onto guys like it was it was that road

like you guys your group was bounding forward towards this tree yeah we're just bounding forwards we're going fast we said right we're having a fast pace at this because we're not just you know we're trained for it we know we know how to do this we know you should check you know we're not going to call each other saying oh yeah

I'm ready you can you can no no we're going to check each other very fast and then we're just going to move very fast because we don't know what's ahead of us and I don't want people ahead of me maneuvering faster than I am so I'm going to maneuver fast so I can cut into me maneuver whatever to do it because they didn't were here and so eventually we start kind of you know walking very fast into the forest and bouncing from tree to tree from bush to bush and i remember this moment where so yeah we start seeing our first dead people and i remember crossing these these dead guys and eventually uh yeah we get to this point where one of my teammates we were a group to clear a small

small area maybe five yeah ten first ten square feet maybe a little more and so we get into the area and we get pinned down by these two guys hiding in a in a kind of a hole behind a bush very very dense bush so we couldn't see them we couldn't see we saw I just saw the smoke and the the fire but I couldn't see where they were so we all started shooting at the same area and I remember very clearly the helo saying I am drifting right above you so he's the he was in this special maneuver or he's not driving forwards like this one where the way you actually usually see them he was tilted sideways and drifting like this and he was doing

that so that he was as slow as possible as stable as possible and he was actually how you know going as slow as possible so that he could help us as much as possible and these guys were did an absolutely fantastic job because they were actually exposing themselves a lot by doing so and I remember this guy saying we're right above you call us out we're ready right now call us and we were we were being shot and we didn't know where the shots were coming from we could just see it was kind of this area we weren't sure so we're shooting everywhere And so I remember calling into the radio saying,

okay, we're good, you can shoot. And just calling my two teammates are nearby, kind of just to move out because we were, and I know that we weren't very far because I saw the footage of this afterwards. We're 10 meters away from these guys. And the danger close for the rounds are 70 meters. And so we were kind of,

I kind of call in the shot. And I was like, did I do the right thing? As soon as I hang up, I'm like, is this going to fall onto us? And so he shoots the hole where the guys were in. And eventually that gets them, more or less, I suppose. We went up flicking a few grenades and then moving around. So we get to see the hole. And so the guys were in peace, but it was a bit of a bit of a stress.

And we carried on like that for maybe. all in all it was maybe a kilometer long or 800 meters long and it was really really stressful and at the end they were like over 20 fighters and you guys went in with 10 or less we were 30 we were 30 we were 30 30 okay we're 30 guys but like I remember

we were just my team in the forest because some of the guys raced off as we were We were Oh so they went after the other group Some went off And so other guys had to go off And leave

So to the point where we didn't have any I didn't have any Soldiers at the end We didn't have any teammates We didn't have enough teammates So I had the guys from the Hilo From another Hilo Come in

Drop the The Sharp Shooter that was in the Hilo out and come and help us out, help us out, because we didn't have enough guys to deal with all the fighters we had ever, ahead of us. So, yeah, it was pretty rough.

And, yeah, I remember we, yeah, anyway, so there you go. No, you, you mentioned that it was too, like, it was too hot. They couldn't get a temperature differential for the flare, for the infrared. How hot was it when you got to, like, It was around 40 degrees. Around 40 degrees? Yeah, so about 104 Fahrenheit. Yeah, and that's very close to body temperature.

Body temperature is 37 degrees Celsius. So 3 degrees Celsius. Yeah. You're hiding in a bush. Yeah. You can't really tell. And were you guys out there with no water? Yeah, no water.

Oh, my gosh. Like we couldn't afford it. It was too far out. It was like, ah. But then it went fine because the heloes, you know, came in and out. And after that, so after that, we had to deal with all the, you know, the aftermath. So we had to do the battle, the BDA. BDA, yeah.

Like search all the bodies for intelligence and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That took us another 24 hours, no, 12 hours, something like that. And all in all, we spent 24 hours on. the area. So it was a long day and Helo kept coming in and out so you dropped this off a few packs of water so it's fine. But it was a bit of, yeah, a bit of an experience. And it was good fun though. We lost like we lost no one, which is absolutely amazing. Yeah. Amazing. I still don't

know how it happened. But I remember getting this one guy. He was actually ambushing another teammate. Like I remember moving around the bush and seeing this is a funny part. I remember going around a bush and another of my teammates was on the left and he was going going to face that very bush I was I was I was cornering. I just took the bush and move on and then something goes no there's a light that flicks on in my lot in my head and I'm like the bush had something weird in it and there was a surface that was in right. And I remember going, there was a round surface in the bush.

There was are spiky bushes with no leaves, just spikes. And like there's something round and spikes. It was wrong. And then I came back a few steps and I'm like, that's an ass. I could see the ass of this guy sticking out at the back of the bush. and I remember going he can't see me so I just walked up to him

and I shot I didn't shoot his ass but I shot beneath the ass so that you could feel the Buddhists flicking the sand onto his ass so he just turned around very slowly and he dropped the AK but I remember my teammate

was just going to face him and he was waiting for my teammate so yeah that was lucky so that was how lucky we were So you took the ass man prisoner. Yeah, yeah. It's a big guy. I remember, I remember taking him like, ooh, you're a big guy.

And eventually he turned out to be the kind of team leader for the guys. Because all the other guys were either much younger or much skinnier. And he was kind of thick. And, yeah, it was a big guy with a nice watch and stuff. And so, yeah, he got a. he was you know you can do

practical questioning yeah TQ yeah yeah so he he got a bit of that so how did you guys manage EPWs during this like live firefight the these

enemy these prisoners how did you manage them during the because you're still moving it like yeah that was a bit of an issue yeah well i had to drop people off i had to drop guys off like as we were moving forwards uh like if two guys surrendered we'd have to go you're staying with them yeah one guy had to stay with them yeah so at the end i remember i remember one guy he was surveilling like seven guys holy shit he was like he was living his gun scanning seven guys lying seven adult males

on the floor when it's good. I think since they were, they had their we call them a puke. Now it's a prisoner under control set. Yeah. Puck, yeah. Puck, yeah.

And they all had their puck on. So they didn't know. There's only one guy looking after the seven of them. So it was lucky. So we're lucky one of them didn't take it off and go, oh, he There's only this small guy

Yeah Afterwards But yeah So it was it was very tricky Very tricky And we actually stopped The action Because I won't

We didn't I remember clearing bushes We're two of us at the end Yeah Right I'm like Right Dude I was telling the other guy like

We've got to stop Like We're yeah We've got to clear the whole of Africa here Right Re consolidate Yeah we had to regroup and reconsolidate and reorganize ourselves because you know the way in the desert

there are people everyone like sometimes i don't know if you've had that feeling already but like sometimes you feel the desert is absolutely empty and and when you stop in an area for for a bit and like when you're on a rekey mission mission or something you you you end discovering like there are people everywhere. Yeah. Like our kids coming out of bushes. And this guy walking around a plastic bag in the middle of nowhere, flip-flops. And that was kind of the situation.

Like we cleared our area and we could still see guys over there. And we didn't know whether they were jihadi combatants like leaving the area or villagers from a nearby area coming in because they heard the sound. and they saw the heroes and they wanted to, they were just curious to see. So you kind of, I remember it often, it happened on several occasions, we kind of had to stop and say,

right, they're not, they're not with the situation because that's what the, that's what guerrilla fighters do. They mix with the population. Right, right. So they just, you know, they, at some stage it just dilute themselves in the population. So you need to set a barrier to know where you stop and, you know, you end up, you know, violating families, homes and making them prisoners. And you're like, what am I doing?

Like, these people have nothing to do with what we're dealing with. Right. So it's kind of. And everybody owns an AK. And so somebody comes outside their house with an AK. It's like, are they just coming out? Are they coming out to join the fight? Are they just trying to see what's going on?

Yeah, exactly. So sometimes, yeah, kind of, but I remember saying, you know, it's not that. I think, I think I was, I was in a, and then a drill and rush. And I was very excited, like, for having survived up to now and, and all the gunfight and stuff. So I was like, I was, I was like my team. My teammate was hyped. He was, he wanted to clear the rest of the whole fucking area. And I was like, yeah, I want you too, but we're just a two.

of us, man. So if you fall on anyone else, we already saw what happens to Rambo. Yeah, exactly. So this first mission was pretty eventful, to say the least. Yeah.

It was the first really eventful mission. We had a few missions before, but it was no massive gunfighter or anything. Right. And was, it looks like we may have lost the movie. We'll see if he jumps back in.

Probably just a little glitch with the internet connection. But folks out there, thanks for joining us today. And if you want, you can like us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, right on all this social media stuff. And down the description, there's a link to our Patreon page. If you want to get these episodes ad-free. There's a ton of bonus content. on our Patreon, like, you guys pay our rent. We appreciate it.

You buy us the booze. So hook some brothers up. Louis is... He'll have to dial back in in a second. So next week, we're going to have Nicholas Moore on the show. He was, I believe, a 275 Ranger. Went up to Platoon Sergeant. I haven't read the book yet.

I'll be by them. Yeah. Had a pretty extensive career in the Ranger Regiment. So we'll have him on next week. And then we got an extra episode coming up in October with James Gleporta, who's a investigative journalist with the Associated Press. Louis. And I'm back.

All right. Thank you. I don't know what happened. Hey, technology. It's not so bad. So any other, like, highlights from that deployment that stand out in your mind? Well, yeah, there was this, what I, what I, I liked with my with my job this is another mission I love this is is our

the missions where we came in at night to get these guys in the houses and stuff that was boring their tents and stuff I loved the way you we could switch from either being having to be ultra-violent like in very aggressive and I mean these other missions where we barely spoke during the mission like everything was just we communicate with attitude, it just moved around very swiftly in the houses and stuff. I remember this one time where we got into a house. That's a great memory.

We're looking for this guy, he's an indicator. He's a, we know it's a guy he gives intelligence to this terrorist group. And we need to capture this guy because we know they're preparing we got the intel that this guy is preparing to kidnap Europeans in the area. So we have to intervene and grab this guy beforehand. And we have these two buildings.

And we're two teams on the job. So building A and B. It's in town. And we drive into town. We park the cars. We walk a few hundred meters in the darkness. and there's no word spoken. And I take building A with my team and the other team takes building B.

And we walk into this house when we get the green from Paris and they tell us, okay, you can go in. So we step in. And what I loved was that we had a senior NCO that was, you know, he was, you were. he was yeah he was linked with the CEO he was very experienced but he was a bit of a

bit of a bit of a bouncy guy like he was very excited very very very easily and I remember him being very hyped for the mission and kind of pushing us and and kind of roaring

calling out orders very loudly whereas we were in the middle of a town and I was like in town I'm not at ease because we had no helo we just one drone extremely high that couldn't see very much no helo's to stay discreet and so I knew that if things had to go sideways we're a small team so we're not going to do very much like we're not going to survive very long so we're better off like not doing any sounds not you know real good Commando style really and and I remember having this guy and he was just annoying me

because he was jumpy and he was moving. Seo was a great guy. CEO was a really calm guy and everything was really easy and soft with him. But there's the NCO he was linked with that was over us gave us orders. He was just a pain because he was moving all around or very tight and stuff. I was like, calm down. This is going to go fine. We're just grabbing this guy and leaving.

So anyway, he gives us the green and like he roars it. He goes, oh yeah, guys, you've got a green. And we're just outside the door. Follow me and you will survive. Iron Mike. Get to their chopper. Yeah. And I'm like, we've reached up to here and we have had no radio conversation.

Like with no radio exchange with the rest of the team because we, we have this policy where we say I used to be the re-adio guy in my team and I know radio always works during training and before we leave and as soon as they need them anymore right that's a classic so I used to say no

no cons cons only if there is a problem so you know call out people if there is a problem or if there's something you can't deal with at your level and so I remember just before reaching the door we left the guy in the alleyway that was a bit of a there was a bit of a

story funny story also because we had a sniper two snipers covering the roofs so they had to climb onto the roofs as we were we were walking to the door these snipers have to walk to the roof and there's this alley where we said we'd have to drop off the ladders in case the door wouldn't open and so we'd have the ladders handy if we had to climb into the compound et cetera et cetera blah blah blah blah and I remember there was a bit of a race to leave the ladders

because the last one to leave the ladder would have to stay posted in the alleyway and that was the thing no one would want to because everyone want to be in the house right right right and so he was the last one so there was a bit of a race I remember

to leave the ladder and, you know, go stack up and not be the one at the end that has to stay in the alleyway. I'm saying this because the guy in the alleyway got, eventually during the operation, got two guys walk up to him in the middle of the night. This was a nighttime operation, so two guys walk up to him,

and he eventually just pushed him away with his laser. He didn't even shout out at him. He just lasered him and said, you know, I'm armed, I look dangerous, I am dangerous, just stay away. And it didn't even calm that. So he didn't even tell us what was going on. Because he just felt he was in control. And as long as he's in control, he's not interfering with the team leader and going to annoy the team.

And he's saying, oh, by the way, I'm in control here, so don't worry. Right. Like, from A to Z, if you're in control, then don't say it's just, if something goes sideways, then we need to know. And if shots are fired, we'll know, because we'll hear them. So anyway. So no cons.

And we get to the door, stuck up at the door. Sensillo shouts out. And we walk in. And I love the way we walk into this place because we walk into the first area. And then we realized the whole of the family was lying outside in the compound.

Yeah. And the courtyard. Courtyard. Thank you very much. and we didn't have any other options than just walking over them and so we actually at first I remember walking over them and then turn around and you know working my NVGs and going right what did I walk over

and then eventually discovering there was a whole family there and they were still sleeping and the whole team walked over them and they were still sleeping and eventually we get round the courtyard to this other room clear the area clear the buildings no one there

fine last building the guy's there we grab him and I don't know how we managed to not make him cry or no one shouted or anything and we grabbed him and we left and I remember my NCO

having to calm down the NCO I was roaring in the calm that he had the jackpot and da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da so eventually we're like we'll talk about this later just leave and so we eventually

leave and I remember being the last guy to leave and walking over this family. It was still asleep when we left. So crazy. Yeah. And that was just fantastic. It was a great memory for me. It was like,

no one knew you were there. No shots fired. It's good operation. It's a perfect operation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was good fun.

And, you know, we got the right guy. Yeah. Luckily. And so, and we just left. And we had a bit of an encounter at the end on the expo, because we came in with. civilian vehicles and leaving we came across the local army that didn't know we were there and we didn't know they were there so in the middle of the night we

came across these ten technicals facing so that was a bit of a stress it took us maybe a minute or two to figure out who was what but at first we all just burst out of the vehicles and we spread out onto the onto the road like ready to shoot and so But that was a bit of a, that was the most, yeah, that was really frightening for me because like the 50 cows, we're all aiming our way and all. I was like, ooh, this is, if this goes sideways, it'll be rough and it'll be fast. Yeah, and it's tough, you know, because I'm imagining a lot of those places, the local forces, the official forces are using the exact same types of vehicles that the bad guys are.

Exactly same, yeah. The only thing we only realized they weren't the same. same when we really got close to these guys and so they had uniforms on and from there all right okay so your your local army fine but until then like they're with technicals and they're you know with the with the lights blaring your way you can't really see can only she shadows move around the vehicles you're like whoa yeah there's something you brought up that i wanted to um follow up on louis you said that you guys were up to the objective area and you had to get the green light from Paris, which is interesting. So there was the special ops command

in Paris had to bless off. Like they had the final order before you were able to actually hit the target. Yeah, because it was a special target since the guy was going to supposedly kidnap these European guys. We had Intel from the French secret services that said, grab him now. And this is... Interesting. Yeah, this is very important grab him before he manages to carry on his deed. So, yeah, we had to wait for Paris.

We often have to wait for Paris for guys, yeah. We don't have very much maneuvering space. I know a lot of... I met a lot of Rangers and the guys have a lot of winders. span of actions they can do without having to wait for Washington to say yes or no. Well, in my point of view, whereas we have a lot of restrictions up to the door. We have to wait for Paris to say yes. Yeah, that's, that's tough.

I mean, I understand that there has to be command and control, but to the point where it's like, you're on the door ready to breach. That's, yeah. Hey, Louie, I just, doesn't happen all the time, but yeah, once in a while, get this. That's got to be frustrating as an operator on the ground. Like, you're in a village, and I think for people who might not be familiar with this scenario is that villages can come alive and you can get like swarmed from all sides once they become, like, if it's three in the morning and you're sneaking up on target and that call the prayer goes off, like, you know it's

going to be a bad night. Oh, yeah. I remember one of my NCOs when I came into the teams. He told me about the story in Somalia. The guy was escorting Legion convoy. They had this

these there weren't tanks, but they were yeah, troop transport vehicles, armored troop transport vehicles. And so he was on one them with a Legion team and one of his mates another commander he was on the other another vehicle ahead of him and they arrived on the dirt roads and they arrived on the

round about the first vehicle run around and to the left or ahead I can't remember and he went around and he crushed on its way the vehicle crushed one of the local vehicles and it crushed it basically drove onto the whole of the back of the body of the car the driver was safe was okay was untouched but the car was smashed and the roundabout was very large it was a very large roundabout so by the time he crushed a guy he was quite far away from the other vehicle and i remember him me it was the fright of my life I feared for my life that day because there weren't very many people around but since the guy in the car came out of the car and started a row with that that that armored mini tank or transport vehicle that had stopped to check if everyone was okay it started around with them people flocked from everywhere

like he said it was I never saw that and he told me a memory told me the whole Legion team they packed up into the vehicle in a minute in a few seconds you realize people coming from everywhere with stones and sticks

and so they closed everything and he ended up on the top of the roof of the vehicle with people all around like you know pushing and moving the vehicle and stuff and I remember I'm telling me if I'd shot one shot at these guys I would not have had enough bullets

for every one of them and he had it all his whole kids and it's like if I shoot one of them I'm dead because they'll swarm me so many of them and in a sec they came out of nowhere I just the route tracked to everyone everyone started swarming the vehicle

I was so impressed I knew if I couldn't shoot I had my gun and I couldn't kind of, you know, was pushing people away. But I know I would shoot one bullet if I was dead. And that problem often gets compounded. It's like you said earlier, how insurgents hide within the civilian population, that if you get one person in that crowd that actually start shooting at them, how do you identify that person?

How do you eliminate that person? How do you protect yourself without it becoming an international incident? Will we let's, I mean, it sounds like, You definitely got your feet wet on this first deployment. Walk us into deployment number two. What were, what was the mission you were set you were going into this time? What are some of the high points that you recall from that deployment? I mix, I mix missions up.

Yeah. Between two and three. Yeah. Yeah, I kind of mixed them up. I remember this one mission. It was kind of like this first one in the forest, but it was very, it was very rough we had kind of

the same situation where we were called upon the small group of guys under the forest and so same kind of situation where they in broad daylight were sent in helios onto this group of men in the forest

and I remember first time I had a really strong encounter with this I kind of you know I was pumped and I I was excited and stuff by time I got to this one I kind of my mind had changed you know I felt we were maybe gonna have to well maybe gonna run out a look and and and maybe one day I was gonna get shot at the end so I don't know if you know what I mean it's when you go through a few

a few, yeah, a few battles like that. Well, not battles, but they're five fights. Sure. You feel an untouched. You're like, oh, right, I'm invincible, actually. And then arrive a stage where you see, you're, well, hang on. Am I really invincible or are I just going to run out of luck? I've been lucky up to now, and now I'm going to run out of luck, you know?

Yeah. And that was kind of a, that mission was kind of that like that. I kind of felt, you know, we're running into something that's going to be very rough. And this time maybe someone is going to die on this one or be injured. So, yeah, it was very stressful. And it was kind of like last time we arrived on the ground and very fast we got engaged in this bushy forests. They are very rough for infantry because you can't see very far. and I remember

I remember very well being fixed in the middle of the forest by this one guy and he got maybe 20 of us in the forest two teams and he

held us off for I don't know I don't know how much time I don't know you know if it was maybe 20 minutes half an hour he held us off like this one guy And I still don't know to this day how he did it.

He was in the bush and he started shooting at us. And we were taken in turns between the teams on rating his position. So at one stage we'd stop because we understood we was shooting at us. But the same time as the other story I was telling you about we couldn't see very well from where he was shooting. But we know it was very close. but this time we couldn't see the fire from his gun we couldn't see the dust and stuff and so we stopped

and eventually we told the other team like we'd already killed three guys before that so we were already you know stressed and perspiring and everything was very stressful and I remember me telling the other guy

all right if you want to give it a try and you know writing this position go go for it And I remember them walking up, yeah, walking up, shooting everywhere, every bush, and walking back with the guy still there. And I was like, oh, this is going to be rough. So eventually, I remember this is one of my schoolbook moments where I saw every caliber being shot at this guy. We shot him with 556-7-6-2. we shot him we sent

we swung loads of grenades at them 40 mil 40 mill millimeter that's where that's the day I discovered that outside it's crap yeah it's great yeah

crap and with the drone not the drone the Hilo 30 mil 30 millimeter sorry from the drone that didn't do it

and so at one stage I even thought and I would didn't do it but I even thought of setting fire for the whole place I was like how long is this going to take and eventually I don't know how we got it because we just shot everything we had literally at this one guy and and it was yeah I got loads of lesson learned from this I discovered that if you're well hidden and you're really well ambushed you can you can stop 20 guys and a helo and a drone and everything you want and I remember

this teammate he was on my left I had no grenades left and I told him you you chuck your grenades and he grabs his grenade

and he sends it he was really excited to send his grenade and he sends it to the other team so the grenade lands live in the middle of Tennessee oh no

have to fall back even more so the grenades flows off and then they come back. I remember this other guy he had from the other team, he decided that the 12 gauge was going to be his main weapon.

I don't know why. I don't know sometimes when you spend too much time on standby, you end up having weird ideas. It's an artistic choice. Yeah. Who are you to limit his creativity? And so he decided

12 gauge was fine for outdoor combat. And so it was his main gun. And I remember him shooting everywhere, like going boom, boom, boom, and stop having no effect. Right. Absolutely no effect. And also, he thought it was a great idea not to have all his bullets in a pouch or something, but have them a bit everywhere, you know, on these straps.

So he could have them a bit everywhere on his chestplate, on his arms, on his forearms. And he had them everywhere. but the result was that when they did the maybe second or third attempt of going up to this guy and running back eventually he ran out of he didn't run out of ammunition but they had a few left because from running up and running back

they all popped out from the straps and so they were all over the face but they look great in photos right yeah exactly all the photos they look great they had them everywhere it was absolutely when we did the BDA I was like, oh God, they shot a lot of ammunition. And I was picking them up.

I was like, this is full. And this is full. Anyway, so, yeah, it was a funny story. And we ended up on a very dramatic situation on this one, because I remember after dealing with these guys, they were a bit less, maybe less than 10 guys. The very last one was a kid. And he was a kid. kid, but I was obsessed with this last one because we knew he was hiding at the very end of the area, the bushy area.

And he wasn't moving. And I was, I was, I suppose I was kind of scared and, and also, or maybe very, very cautious on this last one because he wasn't shooting Alice. and I knew he was there because we'd seen him we'd seen him maneuver behind his his teammates and since he wasn't shooting at us I just thought you know he's waiting for us and he has this belt exploding belt on him

or suicide vest on him I was thinking what do we do like do we or I was all I was all I had all these questions going on sure as we were slowly you know moving on to And I was like, what's going to happen?

Is he going to blow up? What do I do if you blows up? How much time do I have, you know, to extract people from here? And, you know, we think about your 10 minutes platinum golden R. How far am I from the and that? And so I'm very, I'm thinking about all this. And at the same time, we're shooting everywhere. I remember the tension was as high as I've ever experienced it.

And we would have so many encounters, close-call encounters, that I remember guys that were on my team that were known to be kind of cold-blooded and very, you know, that had a very even temperament. They would start shooting at all the bushes. Yeah. Like at literally all the bushes. Yeah. Like we'd come across an area, they'd go boom, boom, boom, boom.

Next area, boom, boom, boom, boom, every bush. And so that's when I realized, you know, people were all, we were all in the same state. We're all amped up. And so we arrived at this last guy and we know he's here. And eventually we run up onto it. And I'm thinking, what do we do? And we see he has, we discover as we were moving around to him. And this is, I'm breaking this down into sequences, but the whole movement took maybe a few seconds.

but you know everything was very clear in my mind and I can break down the way we walked up to him we moved around we shot him because he had a gun laying on his lap and as we move around

because we can only see the bottom of him and as we move around we see he's showing his hands to us and I come across his gaze and he's kind of it's a kid like 15 years old and I see him and he's kind of imploring him.

He's kind of imploring. He's, you know, it's pitiful. And he's looking at us with his hands up, and he's foot of, and I can, he's not foot of blood yet, but I know he's wounded and it's not going to be long. And I'm kind of, do we finish him? And there's this bit of question, you know,

you're like facing him and he's looking at you and like, ah. So eventually we jump onto him and we make sure it doesn't have, have a suicide vest. So I kind of grab his torso and try and feel his shape and I feel nothing. So I'm like, oh, like this is a relief. This is probably the last guy and he's no suicide act.

I'm like, oh, survive this. This is fantastic. And I put by the hands out, I'm like, he's wounded. I can just loads of blood on my hands. I'm like, he's not going to make it. And that's where there's a whole situation that comes up where, were three of us on this guy after we've searched him

I tell one of my mates like yeah go on no at the time I was team leader so yeah one of my still one of my mates but one of the operators I go like you know go put a layer strap on him or a

tourniquet or something just you know what I say is we say a technicum it's a Like a tourniquet, a turnicot. Yeah, but we say, no, we say just deal with him. Instead of saying we deal, when it's medical, we say, uh, technique.

We say, uh, do your technique on him. Okay. Basically. So I go, you know, do your technique on him. Uh, but anyway, I'm like, I'm saying that so that the guys have a clear conscience. And when he dies, they say, at least we try something, you know, oh, and he's dead. But at least we've tried something. But what happens is,

this senior NCO that's the CEO's as in the situation he's with the CEO that the guy that works with the CEO comes up to me and at that stage I'm team leader and he comes up to me and says we're not dealing with him

leaving and I'm like I let two of my guys on him and the area is clear I know I knew this is the end of the area after that it was desert like it was open open area so I knew there wasn't any danger close they could have been further on but I knew it was a helo round a two helo round and they were looking ahead of us so I knew the areas was was under control and so he he kind of was slightly behind the action so he

didn't really see what was going on and when he reached me was like taking decisions very very fast and I felt I knew he wasn't clear with the tactical situation. So I just tell me, you know, I'm not leaving that guy. He's been technical, you know, he's been dealt with, so I'm leaving him there. So we get into a bit of a row, you see, because

he, I feel, and I might not be right, but I see he wants to be, you know, the big dog saying, oh no, we can leave that guy. He's an enemy. Let him bleed out. It's fine. I'm like, whatever, you know, you haven't deal with this guy,

eyes and the eyes. And, you know, you haven't had his blood on his hand and he's a kid and you know at least give him a chance yeah since I'm saying that also and at the same time I have in mind that as I was saying we're a very lightweight here we don't have any much gear we have one one medic and and one nurse so they have gear on them but I own I know they only have a certain amount of kids and so if we keep this guy alive they're going to break out a kit for him so that's another kit

if anything happens afterwards I'm not going to have able I'm not going to have for one of my teammates or one of my operators so it's also a kind of hard decision because I started dealing with this guy I could have very well left them

and say, you know, right, leave him there, he'll pass out and eventually die from blood loss. But I said, you know, deal with him. To put a torticade on him, and it's fine. But what happened was the nurse rushed out from the bushes and he grabbed a hold of the situation

and he actually saved the guy. And so this was kind of, I didn't expect that because by seeing the guy, I just thought, you know, there was at least a liter of blood out. He bled out at least a liter. And I was like, he's seconds,

minutes, if not seconds away from passing out. And the guy actually saved them, to my surprise. And so that created kind of an innuendo, because the guys afterwards were like, why did we save that guy? Like he had a PKK on his legs. Right. He obviously took shot at us.

and you saved you you gave orders to save him right and at the same time I was like I wasn't just gonna let him bleed out with nothing else to do because we were actually going to just sit there and wait and we're just going to wait with him at you know there I mean there are situations where you know we acted differently because you know in the middle of combat right yeah right people die it's the way it is right but this was the end of an action on I knew it was end and it was the end and so my decision was was kind of hard and at the same time I feel it was the right decision but I understand that you know people said I wouldn't even now today some I talk about this situation the book and some of the guys and some of you know ex-commandos

sometimes discussed this and they they go to me very simple right I would have left and let out I understand totally the decision. Yeah. It was a hard one for me and an interesting one also as a human. Like I was educated me a lot. I mean, you've both between like the desire to set fire to the area that the guy was in and this situation. It's interesting that war, you know, like war movies are interesting and there tends to be like a black and white in them. but there are so many nuanced decisions in combat that people who either and and like you say some of the guys who said i would have left him and you don't fault them for that nobody would fall for that

people people listening to this might say oh you know you said he was a kid but kids get recruited into combat is horrible it's it's despicable but a kid can kill you just as easily as an adult if they're using a pkm or an AK or something else like that. And now it's... I think it was a good decision to make, though, in the end, I mean, if you were still in combat, it is what it is. You got a job to do. But you knew you were at the end of your limit of advance. Yeah. Well, it was a, it was a bit of a... I took a chance also, because, you know, I'm not, I'm not a... I can't see in the future. Right. Right. I could have been wrong. Right.

Like it might have been another situation, and we might have been projected to a very similar situation. I might have got a wounded in the team, and maybe we didn't have enough kits for him in the end. So I would, in the end, I would have saved an enemy fighter. Right. And one of my guys might have bled out. And that would have been my responsibility and my fault. Right. Louis, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit.

You mentioned to me that there was an operation you were apart. of where you had to respond to an American mission and kind of follow on to the aftermath. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your role in that and how it unfolded. Yeah, it was a mission where American troops got ambushed. And there were Rangers, a small team of Rangers that were with local army. Special forces. special forces yeah yeah okay

and yeah but the americans were rangers right no the americans were special forces green berets oh they were special forces yeah sorry sorry but uh anyway so yeah the big gal ambushed and we were called onto the onto the rescue mission it was funny because

I remember uh being on a on a on a on a French base nearby and seeing a helicopter from another unit facing ours taking off in a rush. And I remember running to the CEO going, where are we going? And he told me we're going nowhere, nothing's going on. And I'm like, something's going on because the unit facing us is moving.

So eventually he picks up the phone, makes a few calls. phone calls and next thing we know we're in the hillo leaving for we don't know where we don't know how much time we have no idea and we're just flying for seven hours in the helo would a refuel in the middle in the middle of nowhere i don't even know where we were like i know we crossed borders no i didn't even know we crossed borders we went from one country to another and i didn't nowhere we were we landed in an area my CEO was too busy on the radio and I was with the rest of the team and we were like in the middle of nowhere in a kind of a camp with locals and it was maybe yeah it was middle of the night and I remember very well we always

we didn't have anything to eat or to drink and we're just just laying in the dirt on the ground waiting for orders. And these two Americans came out of nowhere. CIA guys with a pickup and briefs us on their warehouse. And so we eventually, to where their warehouse was. And so we eventually followed them up to the warehouse, which is the shittiest place, shittiest outpost I've ever seen. seen in my life.

It was pieces of wood stuck together with a kind of a metal roofing. It was crap. And I remember very well walking into what was the kitchen and also where they stored all

the MREs and seeing this 50 year old normal looking white guy curved up on the floor sleeping with no blanket, no mattress, nothing, just on the floor of the kitchen and going, oh, that's awkward and crossing, going to the next room, which is the CEO where everything was

laid out and, uh, what the operation center, sorry, where everything was laid out with cons and few computers. And I remember there was this spec ops guy, uh, that we had, uh, I met on our base already, he was there also. And we're trying to realize what was going on. That's where I realized I changed countries. And eventually the guy from the kitchen came in and realized he was a helo pilot, a contractor for the CIA.

And so we were kind of settled there to organize and get organized on what we were going to do, to retrieve this one missing speckoff American. And the guys told us, they'd managed to bring back most of the guys, apart from this, the guys that were dead from the ambush and this one guy that was missing. And so we were very concerned for the guy that was missing. I saw the guys who came back from the ambush and they were I was two, I think two things struck me.

The first one was the shock I could read in their faces. They were like in a state of shock. You know, they were staring at the ground all the time and kind of not, you know, they were silent. They weren't talking and you could feel the shock. And also they were all, they had all volunteered to go on the rescue mission for this one guy. So, you know, I was kind of taken about. like these guys that had just survived an ambush where they lost a few of their teammates and they were back in the fight and they were willing to go back midgety in the fight I was like what are these guys made of and I remember also we had logistics problems and

problems in Washington this time we had the greens from Paris but Washington we didn't have the greens for everything so we didn't have the greens for everything so we didn't have the green light for everything so we figured we were better off taking two to three hours rest before we we left in the very early morning for the rest commission and i remember they directed us to this so you know temporary shelter where they had their their bunk beds and stuff and the guys from the spec ops went to bed and so there were rooms left and

they were empty and we were looking for rooms to sleep in and like we realized there were the rooms of the guy that had just died or they were missing and I remember very well the guy is going

no we're not sleeping there they close the door and we went to sleep on the floor and the shelter next door because it sounded it was this like no one said anything well we just felt you know if this guy's dead I'm I'm out of respect I'm not sleeping in his bed like I'm not touching his gear his gear staying there if someone touches his gear it's his teammates I'm not going there

so there's kind of this we didn't express it but it was like yeah you know this is just kind of solemn it's the middle of the night we were starving we didn't know where we were and we're all very confused we know what we know what why we're there and what we were going to do that was perfectly clear but in this situation we're like I'm better off sleeping on the ground than in a dead man's bed so we moved we went to the other shelter where we remember slept it was it was fun in the end because you know you know you kind of make a bit of a you these situations where there's a lot of drama you kind of um you kind of um you have to have a bit of humor.

Delighting things out. So we messed around in the shelter because it was so small. And we were maybe seven of us or eight of us on the team. And we're all cramped together. And so we're all stuck together to sleep. And we slept in our gear. And it was fine. We just had a few MREs and it was fine.

And the next morning we're two to three hours later. We woke up and it was still nighttime. remember and we took the heloes and we went to where the last where we had detected the last signal from the survival beacon the guys had on them the blue force tracker yeah blue first right yeah and so we the guys had the last position of that and also the scan the area the drone that scanned the area to see where if they get find human, human signs. So we had a few ideas of where to go.

So we went onto the signal and I remember the signal was very close to where the ambush had taken place. And during the ambush, I know if French fighter jets had to do low-pass flights on the area to get the the enemy the enemies away and the gunfight at the area i don't know if i don't think it's the fire jet i'm not sure about this but i know shots were fired from both sides of course and and it's and it actually activated a local fire so the forest was in fire and by the time we reached there the whole area there was a whole area that burned out And I remember very well it was night time and arriving at the area and there were flames on the horizon

And we were searching for this guy with our NVGs just look at the ground just hovering around at the area with flames all around This kind of apocalyptic is is really weird And so we were all like there were maybe four or five heloos on the area just hovering around and scanning everywhere and eventually we jumped to another area we didn't find anything we jumped to an area where we we did the drones thought they had to identify the body and so we landed there and we started searching the whole of the area we didn't find anything unfortunately and uh and uh so eventually yeah we we we went back up uh we went back up up to the heroes went back to the to the outpost and we got a call a few hours later from a local in a video oh no between

times between times we were grouped in a bigger French Air Force base in the area and from there there were loads of American special forces poured in and they were by the time we got there there were maybe a hundred extra American Special Forces There's a whole J-Soc package that deployed specifically to recover A missing American soldier, yeah

How many, how many guys is that? I'm not sure exactly how many but like C-17s with helicopters and operators like ready to roll, yeah Yeah, I remember seeing at least one or two American aircraft C-17 maybe I think I think it was two C-17s on the when we landed with the helo on the air on the on the on the airfields there were two C-17s at least and

maybe even extra I don't know I remember those two and anyway so yeah we were grouped there and I remember planning out to raid the nearby village the village that was closest to the ambush. And that's where things kind of got off hand because the Americans obviously were super eager to get the guy back. And we were like, we were there to help or we were glad to get chip in.

So I remember the briefing with all the guys and so all these big American Special Forces in the in the room and we were there also and I remember this one guy

probably CIA guy but I remember I don't know why I remember him he had this look he was with dark curly black hair and he was in

he had jungle boots and jeans and a shirt and he had a plague carrier with the you know the way Afghans made a homemade plate carriers

he had one of those which above it his kit was strapped on above it so it was two different items and he had this roller helmet so it wasn't you know it was a plastic helmet it wasn't ballistic

it was like a not a score helmet, but plastic. And he had this gun. It was a 14-inch, probably 7-62 with double scopes. I remember very well, and I was like, ooh, that's a bit of an Indiana Jones. It had this Indiana Jones look, you know, and I found a very exotic. I didn't know who he has, probably a CIA guy or control. tractor for some some unit i don't know anyway it was fun to see all these guys assembled together

and so uh briefing took place and the briefing was simple it was we're gonna array the whole of the village and i was like okay fine what does my team do and uh they give us the area where suppose uh every unit had you know one we call it a fuso in french described probably uh Like a, yeah, yeah. Kind of a corridor where you know, yeah. Yeah, sector. And so they gave me my sector and I started counting the houses in the sector. And I remember it was over 100 houses in the sector.

And I'm like, we're just 10 of us. And we'd have 100, over 100 houses to deal with. and the next door team and the next sector had the exact same amount of houses over 100 and so I was thinking how could this go right?

No, we lost Louie again. We did this on purpose and this is the thrill of live TV but we did this on purpose to keep everybody in suspense. I know I am. Yeah, no, this is the this is just the reality of doing these things live

and that we're live streaming it. So, we're going, we'll do it live. Yeah, exactly. Well, I'm sure Louis will dial back in in a second. It's not his fault. Uh, so yeah, again, next Friday is going to be Nicholas Moore, who served in the 75th Ranger Regiment. And then, uh, we're going to have an extra episode on October 3rd with James LaPorta, who is a former Marine and a investigative journalist with the Associated Press. And then we have, uh, Tim Weiner coming on the show. He is a also a journalist. He's the guy who wrote Legacy of Ashes, a sort of seminal history of the Central Intelligence Agency. I read the book. It's pretty fascinating. We'll have him here in studio to talk about the book

and some other projects he has going on. Louis is just dialing back in here. Louis, you got us. Okay. You kept this in suspense. You said, how can this go right? Right. So you're talking about how you had your sector, the guys to your, to your other, to your side had their sector, and each one had like a hundred houses in it. Yeah. And so I'm, I'm just realizing, although we have heloes and stuff, this is going to be, it's got to be very rough. Like, how are we going to do this? And eventually, the mission is turned off.

And I, because we all died probably on this. But so, yeah, the mission is turned off. and they say we got Intel apparently in the village in the village one of the guys is an informant for an agency and they got the information that

they found the American and so we're all you know all very excited and we're like great let's go and get them and so we hop on to the heroes we head for the village and

on the on we do a refueling on route and during the refueling of the helos and there were a group of Americans there that had organized the stop with the, it was in the middle

of the desert so there were just a few trucks, fuel trucks gathered together and I'd pick up with a few Americans in it and so we do the refueling and the Americans are settled there and we start chatting with them why they refuel and

at some states a guy walks up to us and it was this team leader from the spec ops we knew from the base come up to us as guys were sorry plans have changed we're still going to collect this this american but he's dead yeah so we're not we're we're really sorry but that's how it is and i remember all these big dudes big beards uh you know all the tattoos and looking very very manly and they all started crying and hugging. Wow. So yeah, it was, and we were like, we were like kind of in shock.

Really sad, really because we're looking forward to collect this guy because he were thinking of him all the time because he was having a real rough time. We didn't know whether he'd been captured or not. So, so yeah, everyone kind of broke down and so we carried up. we carried on and eventually we just did the air support for the Americans that landed and we saw the, the, the, they did them collect the body and lay out the flag and bring them back into the

Helo and back his family, I guess. So yeah, we just did the escort. We were there all along just to do the safety of the Helo and, and what up. So, yeah, it's that story. Yeah, it is a sad story. And not to put like a, a happy, you know, bow on it or anything like that, but I think it's important to point out that the incredible

lengths that we will go to repatriate an American soldier. And we were not going to leave that guy behind. You know, that soldier fought till the end. And, you know, it's very sad that we were not able to, you know, bring him back alive. But that all of these soldiers were immediately launched from the United States, that you were, you know, we called on our allies and that the French were able to help us out immediately. It all says a lot about the coalition that we formed and about the bond that we have, the promise that we have to our teammates that we are not going to leave an American soldier dead or alive. We are not going to leave them out there on the battlefield. And so I really appreciate what you did, Louie, and what those operators did out there

that day to bring that soldier back home. Yeah, it was just important. We just didn't get there in time. that's my own regret really there's nothing you could have done he was killed in the in the battle um it's it's it's no it's no one's it's the fault of none of you um you know it's it's you know out of our hands right yeah yeah but anyway that's it's one of the sad missions i have amongst others but uh i i enjoy i enjoyed working with the americans and the they're they're i was really astonished by the courage of their teammates that went right back into battle, ready to fight, you know,

to recover their teammates, that was really, really a lesson for us. Like to see that, although they'd lost, they fought, they'd lost some of the teammates. They were back,

uh, immediately. Uh, and would know, you know, with no, no questions asked. They were just waiting to go back onto the heel or back into the fight.

So that was pretty amazing. Yeah. A bit of a lesson for us. The, the last thing, uh, to really get on. I know we've kept you incredibly late,

especially late your time in France, but you were deployed to the Middle East, and I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how that deployment differed and what your mission was like there. My deployment to the Middle East wasn't very, I didn't find it very interesting. It wasn't as interesting as we had in Africa, really,

because it wasn't very very, very, it wasn't a moving, it wasn't a moving battleground. Things didn't move very much and so it wasn't very interesting. Also, there was a lot of IEDs involved and that's something I don't, I don't appreciate very much. I mean, it's not that I don't appreciate, but I hate them. I hate that kind of conflict where you blow up on IED, just hell. Yeah, there was funny stories though.

I remember one of my friends on another mission in the same area. He, when he was driving his SUV, these, you know, Toyota armored SUVs. And I remember him just, the utopia drove on the road. And he saw something weird in the dirt, in the dirt, like something was emerging from dirt. They just gave a small swerve to the to the steering wheel and so he just drove around and it was like, nah, that was weird.

And he eventually called the guys behind them and told them to stop. And he drove on and there's more and said, listen guys, something weird on the road. Eventually the the fusing team came along. It was this big tank, you know, with the rolling thing. And so he eventually when they reached the area when he saw this weird thing, he didn't, he didn't drive on because he felt something was weird. The tank blew up, well, the thing blew up just in front of the tank.

And there was actually an ID just for around. So, yeah, I know. I don't really like that kind of, that kind of area, no. I have some questions here from the viewers. I'll try to get through them pretty quick. Danny asked, did he did you conduct joint ops with the Foreign Legion

particularly, and I apologize for my mispronunciation Do Yem rep? Do you rempe? I know Americans are obsessed with foreign Legion. I don't know why. I don't know why.

Well, I know they're great guys. I know they're elite troops and some of my mates from the commandos came from Foreign Legion. But I never got to work with Foreign Legion because Farrell Legion is not special operations. They don't work with special operations. We work essentially with special operations teams. and so we never get to work with these guys. I got to, I got to

the train with some of them. Like you get to train with some of them and to meet some because we do, we jump from the same aircrafts and we do stuff together in same areas, but we don't like deploy together because we're not fit, we're not meant to work together.

Although the GCP and especially this the Dezim Repp, which is among all the regiment, is probably one of the best. It's not the best. And the GCP is the small elite of 30 team of 30 guys in the

regiment. That's what Joel's Brothers was in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do the missions, like do the, does the French government use the Foreign Legion? Is there a mission set completely different than the rest of the French military? Not

today. Not today. It used to be, and it might be in the near future, who knows, but they're not, they don't have a different set of missions today than they have the same missions as the army as conventional army. They are conventional army today. The only thing is they were used by the French. It's an old tradition we have.

It goes out hundreds of years ago. really that the origin to the the genesis of Far Legion is mercenaries working for the king of France he just brought them in and called them they were all they're all strangers like they're all foreign people

and they just said right we're taking you in now you can stay foreign but we're taking you into our army which is very conventional like here before the 20th century yeah and also there was a very strong use of them after Second World War where

a lot of German German soldiers flee from Germany and were and were brought into the Foreign Legion we used these Foreign Legion these German

soldiers in the Foreign Legion I have those of stories from these Legion guys that telling me that all the instructors they used to have, the old guys, they all used to talk German in between them. Like, they all used to talk German together. They all used to be loads of SS guys. And so they trained the Legion,

like they used to train the SS units or the conventional German army. Yeah. So that's also what's quite rich. What's interesting with the Legion is that they get the best of all the guys they get to gather. Yeah, there is an American fascination with the Legion for sure. Dave, if you pull up the questions on Patreon, please. No, no, the Patreon questions.

Oh, the Patreon question? Sure. Danny asks, have you ever served with any graduates of Icoli Polytechnique? Aikovych. Yeah, I have, yeah. that's our our MIT. Oh, okay, cool. Yeah.

Yeah, I have. Yeah, yeah. Scott says, saw a video that the French military is able to get a lot for how little they spend. Any insight into how they do this in the pros and cons? Yeah, well, French budget has dwindled in the last year. It has diminished a lot. And the last year, the defense budget has diminished a lot. we still manage to keep a kind of a baseline for the budget.

It's quite high in comparison with other European countries because we're still waging war, because we're still sending people out to Mali, to Miliq and elsewhere. So that helps us. That helps the Ministry of Defense to justify the budgets. Of course, that's how it works. But then I have to admit that French military are particularly good for human intelligence.

And I'm going to be perfectly frank in what I'm going to say because it's going to concern the Americans. We work very well with the Americans in Middle East and Africa. Why? Because that's my opinion, and please forgive me, it's offensive, but it's my opinion. the French are very good at gathering human intelligence because they have this they have a way of dealing with populations that's very they they they mix very easily the French mix very easily with local populations like for instance in the French

bases in Africa you have every Thursday you have locals that come into the base to sell artifacts to sell stuff they make all the locals can come into the hospital to get to get fixed so the hospital is almost open to all the population locally so these are little things that help us mix with the population and also were as i said earlier uh the all these african areas even the Middle East, our areas where we've hung out for years, if not hundreds of years. And so people get to know the area and so are used to people. And so that's how we managed to gather human intentions farewell. Americans can't get that as well.

It's hard. Yeah. Because Americans stick out. Yeah. Usually. Like you can tell American, in an airport, you can tell who's American. Usually. And so they stick out and they're not very good at mixing with populations.

And so where that comes out handy is that French get human resources quite easily, whereas Americans get technical intelligence, technical resources very, well, very handy. They have them very handy because NSA, because all these. intelligence services that work very well for the Americans because it's very technical. And we don't have them as well. Ours are not, are far way more, far way less developed than the Americans have them. I don't know if I'm clear. Yeah.

It's a cultural efficacy, really, that you're so embedded in so many. They call it France Afrique for a reason. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. Which leads into John Pierre has a question. What are your impressions of French intelligence? there seems to have been shortfalls, particularly highlighted during the climax of ISIS's reign of terror. I don't know exactly what he's talking about there. Maybe he's talking about Bessalon.

Oh, yeah. No, Bessalon is in Russia, no? The massacre of Besson is in... The schools. The schoolhouse. You're right. You're right. I'm sorry. What's the massacre that I'm talking about that took place in France? Oh, yeah, it's a clanglon.

Thank you. That's it. Yeah. Now, these are two different issues because just like in America, you have the FBI for domestic threats and you've CIA for external threats, right? But France is kind of orchestrated the same way. Like you have DGSI. That's for the interior. I stands for interior. And DGSI. E stands for exterior. So it's quite easy to remember. and both of those services work in intelligence to protect French people and French interests. The problem is they don't communicate very well because historically, that's a complicated issue, but intelligence services don't work together

because if they work together, they can also become a bit of a threat It diminishes their value. Yeah. Yeah, and also diminishes their value. And if you have different services, it encourages in emulation. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It helps them fight to get the best intel. Yeah. And so you have a number of services in France, and they all fight to get the best intel. And every morning, the president has this briefing. And I know that in the briefing, all the services are there. there and they all fight. They have a small box of information they can hand over. And I think there are, in every morning briefing, there are three boxes with one box, box in red,

which is the main information you've to remember today. And they all fight to have their information boxed in the morning briefing of the president. I know it's a fight that happens every morning. And that's very important to understand. So it helps having the best information possible because you all, you know, they all fight to get the best intel possible. But on the, on the downside is that don't communicate very much. Yeah. Because communicating is giving Intel and Intel is their main resource. Right. Right. Right. Like intelligent services live around the Intel. Like it's not about a budget. It's not about a number of people to have. It's not by the actions they've led is about who has the best intel at the best moment.

That's the main goal. And so if they share it, then they're useless. I've seen it before. I've seen services fight to steal Intel from one service from the other. Like in a good way, like it's a fair fight, but it does happen. I mean, we, we, I don't want to say we had because I don't know if we still have, but like we have the director of national intelligence for exactly that same reason because of 9-11 because there was not intelligence sharing going on you know like it's people have 11 they're trying

to mix like they i know they've they've set up uh organizations for the different uh different agencies to talk and you know together about these domestic and foreign threats that are sometimes the same like just like for Bataklon as you said but a terrorist threat that was domestic but that was organized from the outside right so you've to identify outside what's going to happen inside right you have to follow it up as it goes inside and i know that's you know the GSI uh they can't work on uh there's loads of problems like legal problems. And it's the same for Americans. I know. It's that you can't, DGSE cannot work on French people in France. Right. The separation of the election state. Yeah. It's the same for the

CIA. The same with CIA. Yeah. That's a bit of an issue because I mean they can't have a follow up. Like as soon as they have, if they find a French guy training with ISIS, let's say in Syria and they find him outside, they follow him up. If he switches and and let's say they lose him and he goes by Turkey and enters the European Union and he ends up in France they can't, they don't have the

means because they're not allowed they don't have the means to intercept that guy in France. Right. They have to hand over to the GSI the whole package. Right. This is where he's from. This is where he trained. This is why he did. Right. They don't like that because that's handing over files.

Right. They don't hunt over files. Right. They can't just say you guys need to watch them, they need to give them why they need to watch them. They need to give them the entire package. Exactly, the whole story. And they don't like that. Yeah. What they like to do is give orders. Yeah. Say the GGSC will say to the GGSI, look after this guy.

The GSI will say, why? They'll say none of your business. Right. And they're like, well, fuck you. Yeah. I'm not looking after this guy. Yeah. Danny asks, why does so many U.S. military terms have French etymology, for

example battalion regiment revelry sergeant lieutenant etc i you have any thoughts on that louis absolutely because france ruled the world yeah yeah i i think yeah the the the french influence uh in their support for the american revolution and lafayette um probably i i don't know i'm not that's louis gettos It's Louis Gautils, Louis XIV. He's the guy that did most of it, like 90% of what we know today. And French, like, you know the way Americans weaponize the dollar. With Bretton voice. Yeah.

It's used as a weapon by the American government. Well, the same way they use culture, like with Hollywood. And the same way they use the language. language is part of culture and you can weaponize it. And I know France in the 17th century, they weaponized the language and made it the main language everyone had to use. That's why there are so many French words in the English language. And it's not just in the military.

Like it's everything. Like a lot of, I mean, there are two totally different languages. Right. It's a Latin and Germanic language, but English is, Germanic and French is Latin, but there still is loads of words. I know that I looked it up before, I don't have the numbers anymore, but I know loads of words from English language come from French. And the same way today, loads of French people are talking with English words in their everyday life. Yeah.

Because English has been weaponized. Yeah. Well, and I mean, French, I don't know if it still is. considered but for for the longest time it was considered the language of diplomacy like it yeah absolutely it like if you it is in theory yeah in united nations i think they the official international language is french yeah yeah we uh get to learn fun french words in political science reprochement these types of terms very good very good uh jackson asks what was your impression of uh what was your impression of one R-P-I-M-A-S-A-S-G-I-N in action division,

is there not a rivalry between the units? Of course there is. I mean, how can there be? Right. There always is. Like the same way there's rivalry in different units in America. Yeah, absolutely. There is everywhere.

All these units are made of guys that have character. because to go into spec ops unit, you have to have character. Fast truth tests, tests to survive in the group, you have to have a bit of character. And if you have character, you create rivalry.

That's how it works. Yeah. Dave, what do you got there? So, Isaac, I'm going to ask two of your questions. Let me choose two of them. Did Louis ever encounter a truly random operas

in Sahel, like the Wagner, group, Australian PMCs, any of, were there people out there that were just kind of out on the fringe? No. Not that I can remember, though. And with the withdrawal from Afghanistan's had strong impact on veterans in America,

how has it affected French specs off? This is a good question to bring up your post-service life with veteran service organizations, too. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of people are questioning today the government and the politics we're leading. Because the same way you're leaving, the Americans are leaving Afghanistan. We've left Afghanistan 10 years before. But we're leaving Sahel today. And we're leaving all we've done over there to make the area secure.

So there's the same kind of disgust in a lot of military people, especially those that have lost, you know, family and friends. It's particularly harsh on them. And so, yeah, that's very hard. But yeah, so sorry, but you were saying, yeah, Jack, about the veterans organization. That's why I do today indeed. I work for a veterans organization.

It works for all the young, new veterans that France is having at the moment since France has had a long tradition of veteran organizations since because of Afghanistan, not Afghanistan, but because of Algeria and war and the China War. And we're going to renew this today with all the guys that did Afghanistan, Mali and Syria and all those, all those areas. Did, you know, when Americans came home from Vietnam, they weren't, they didn't have a great reception.

The public was generally, you know, in general against the war and not just the war, but the, the soldiers involved with war. Did French soldiers in Indochina, did they have the, did France have the same sort of reaction to them or was it viewed differently? It's very peculiar because France has had a long history of combatants, of soldiers. France has had any number of wars on its ground and also outside in the colony. and so it's not new for France so there wasn't any trauma with war but there was well to my mind

there was a and I think you talked about this with the Canadian interviewer you had the Canadian the JTF2 operator yeah and he he talked about this because the Legion Fire Legion was

Oh, that's Joel Struthers. I'm sorry. That's Joel. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Okay. But when, for instance, for Algeria, there was this, I think it was the same for under China and it was the same for Vietnam.

There were two wars going on. There was the war, the physical war going on. There was a guerrilla war. There was terrible in all these countries that was led by communists or slavs. depending on where you're talking. But it was always the same war. It was guerrilla war. And there was a second war going on every time.

And that took place in America or in France. And that was a war on the public opinion. Right. It was a war on the population to tell the population that the war was leading, was wrong, was dreadful, was horrible, it shouldn't do it, et cetera. etc. It's kind of a more psychological warfare really

and I know very well the case of Algeria because I studied a bit and into China is the same the Algerian war were was military won by

the French military like they won a guerrilla warfare which was maybe the only one that was won in 20th century The problem was, since the enemies of France, they were, we call them Algerian rebels, since they saw, they understood they were losing this war,

they used psychological warfare on the French population in France to make them feel the war that was waged in Algeria was unfair, it was horrible and should not have. and unjust on the population. And that's where the politics kicked in and obeyed the public opinion. Well, I'll obeyed, it went in the same direction as the public opinion. And in the end, it said, you know, Algeria is going back to the Algerians and were leaving them independent. That, in and among other reasons, because it was also in the 60s, where all the colonies were being,

becoming independent also. So it's not the only reason, but it's one of the reasons that pushed, that helped the Algeria rebels to get through was that psychological warfare that helped them.

It was the same in India China. Yeah. I mean, we see it now even. I mean, there's a massive, in at least in America, there's like an accusation against soldiers like waging war against brown people. It's like, well, we fought beside those people who wanted to keep their countries free.

Like, it wasn't just, you know, this nationalistic kind of, let's just tell these people what to believe. You got any more Patreon questions? No more Patreon questions, but something has come up on in the chat that we have to address. And it's come up a number of times. And people want to know, are you really French or are you an Irishman on the run? Well, I'll tell you the truth. I am from the IRA, but I've been trying to hide this for years. But a number of people have mentioned that your accent sounds very Irish.

Yeah, I might have a, it might have an Irish origin, yeah, indeed. Yeah, just a scooch. Yeah. Well, Louie, you're awesome, man, because you're over. in Europe and we have kept you up way past your bedtime and no problem it was a great pleasure talking to you guys I really I really appreciate it man and this was like an amazing eye-opening interview and I think our audience is also going to be similarly illuminated by it so really appreciate your time on a on a Friday evening and we hope to talk to you again real soon um any

any final things I mean your book the link is down the description for our French readers out there. And if you're an English reader and you've ever thought about trying to learn French, this is the perfect book for you. It's written by a military man, so you know you can, you know you can handle it. Don't read French. You will. Yeah. Do, is there anything else you want to plug Louis, the non for, not for profit of veterans organization you work for anywhere you want to direct people? No, not yet, because we're still, we're still building the organization. So it's going to be set up soon, but no, no, no, no, yes. Once that's up, please let us know, and we will, we will gladly plug it.

We would love to. Thank you very much. It's very common. Thank you very much. Thank you, Louie. Have a good night. Louis, thanks so much. Thank you very much, guys.

We'll see all you guys next Friday with Nicholas Moore. So take care.