The Team House - Delta Force Commander | Pete Blaber | Ep. 243

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

Pete Blaber commanded at every level of one of the most elite counter-terrorist organizations in the world during most of recent history’s most significant military and political events (Panama, Colombia, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq).In 2006 he retired from the military and transitioned from leading elite combat teams around the globe, to leading elite corporate teams for one of the world's largest and most innovative Biotechnology Companies.Check out Pete here:⬇️https://www.peteblaber.com/Buy Pete's books here:⬇️https://www.amazon.com/stores/Pete-Blaber/author/B096PN57BW?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Today's Sponsors:Vitamin 1 Water ⬇️ELECTROLYTE AND B-VITAMIN ENHANCED / SUGAR-FREE / CAFFEINE-FREE / DYE-FREE / GLUTEN-FREE / NUT-FREE / KOSHER / 4 DELICIOUS FLAVORS / JUST 5 CALORIES PER 8OZ. SERVINGBuy direct here ⬇️https://a.co/d/gvF18C5---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To help support the show and for all bonus content including:-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter:https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#deltaforce #theteamhouseBecome 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 Team House 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 as 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 hopes, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey guys, welcome to episode 243 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park. And our guest on tonight's show is the author of Common Sense Leadership Matters. This is Book 3 in the series.

Toxic Leadership destroys by Pete Blaber. Pete served as a officer in Ranger Battalion and then in Delta Force and has gone on to have a successful career after the military. And we're really excited to have him here on the show. to talk about his series of books and his career, especially his most recent book, which is about the operation in which Pat Tillman was tragically killed. So Pete, thank you for joining us tonight. Thanks for having me, guys. So as usual on the show, we'll start off at the beginning, Pete. Tell us a little bit about, you know, what your upbringing was like and what led you towards military service. Sure. So born and raised, O'Park, Illinois.

suburb outside of Chicago, great place to grow up. I was the middle kid of nine kids. Still to this day, I am amazed my parents and how the heck they did it. But my mom was an amazing taskmaster. She used to have a big matrix of jobs that we had three days a week. I usually had to wash and clean the bathrooms and mop the floors, swabbing the decks in an early age.

And, you know, just a normal upbringing played baseball, football, hockey. Probably my favorite pastime favorite, what I think should have been a sport, was bombing cars, throwing snowballs at cars. You know, it's the beginning of my, I think, infantry men life. I realized I, you know, loved both the thrill of the hunt and the thrill of the chase. And so, you know, I took it pretty seriously and probably, again, caused my parents quite a few heartaches, you know, running home, hiding. Why are you hiding? Some guy would come flying through the yard, searching for us. In high school, I ran cross-country, played hockey.

ran cross-country and, you know, the cross-country was kind of an extension of that bombing cars. People would go, why are you running cross-country? I said, well, I want to get to a state where nobody can catch me. And I just, I can run forever and no one has any chance of catching me. And, you know, I think cross-country does that. It gives you an incredible endurance, you know, teaches you to deal with pain in your own way. And, you know, it was, unbeknownst at the time, one more step in the process on the way to, you know, joining the military and becoming an infantryman.

I was not, you know, like a lot of guys you talked to on the show, I certainly was not a model of scholastic excellence. You know, I just being in a classroom, all that stuff was not for me. My brothers and sisters were, you know, super smart, straight A students. So, you know, I was like the, you know, the unspoken semi-retarded brother, you know, special ed guy. And, you know, it was really just I could not stand, had no academic discipline and just did not like being in the classroom. So I graduated high school. It was time to go to college. I went to Southern Illinois University, which is at the bottom of Illinois.

It's the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. And I chose Southern Illinois not for its athletic programs, certainly not for its academic programs. I chose it because it was surrounded by the 275,000-acre Shawnee National Forest. and my first time down there coming from a suburb of Chicago, I was, you know, just, it was like nirvana. You know, just this endless rolling hills, a place you could get lost in, you know, camp out, do whatever you wanted. And it was pretty much the, you know, the focus of my college career too. Every weekend I was out hiking in places like Panthers Den and Devil's Kitchen, you know, just wilderness in every direction, exploring it. And, you know, just learned to navigate, things like that.

You know, right when I graduated high school and got into my first year college, that was the Iran hostage rescue mission. And from that point on, you know, that was the thing that turned me toward the military. As I mentioned, I didn't know anything about the military. There was no military around Illinois. I don't think I ever even saw a camouflage truck when I was growing up. So I really knew nothing about it. But when that happened and, you know, the news came out about what happened, And it just had an incredible effect on me that eight, you know, American heroes died in the

middle of Desert One. They gave their life to save the hostages in Iran. And so, you know, I was, again, a runner. I was doing triathlons in college by that point. So I would just go on long runs and think about my future. think about, you know, what a great country I lived in. What an unbelievable upbringing I had. And, you know, my conclusion was I need to pay something back to the country. And, you know, in my last two years of college, I started going to recruiters to try to figure out what, you know,

what was out there. And, you know, Jack, I heard you on one of your podcasts say you didn't know anything. And I was the same way. I just did not know a thing about the military. So the first, someone told me to go, you know, to the Air Force and fly jets. And I didn't want to do that, but there was an Air Force recruiter right there. And I went down, talked to him. And it didn't take long for me to come to the conclusion that I was in the wrong recruiting office. So I started going to Army recruiters.

and I put plural because it took me four recruiters to get one that would just give me what I wanted. They were all trying to get me to sign up for things I'd never heard of. And, you know, I will add that I was shocked at the time because I, for some reason, I thought everyone, if you're in the Army, you're an infantryman. So when they started talking about tankers and artillery, and Medical Corps. And I was like, what? Who does that?

And that's what they all, they tried to get me into. And that's why I kept going to new recruiters. And I finally found one. I still remember his name. The name was Terry Story. And he said, what do you want to do? And I said, well, I want to join Delta Force. And he goes, well, you can't do that.

You can't sign up for that. you could do that when you get in, but you've got to have an MOS. And I said, well, like what? And he said, well, you probably should go infantry. And I said, yeah, that's what I want to do. So I signed up. My contract was for infantry OCS. That's what it was called back then.

And, you know, when I graduated, I hopped on a train and it took me off the basic training. You have to make it through Basic in order to go to OCS and then you know you're a PFC and if you make it through OCS you get commissioned. If you don't you go back to being a PFC and you know OCS is at Fort Benning so I would have gone you know across the post to AIT. But I didn't have made it through OCS. It was also a great experience. Like I said it was It was torturous, but I was an endurance athlete so I could do like a thousand push-ups at a time and, you know, never even wins. So it was fun for me to go to OCS. And then, of course, my first, while I was there, I started picking brains of prior service guys or guys who were going to OCS prior enlisted. there were a couple of E7s in there.

And I would ask them, hey, how do I get, I want to go to the Rangers so that I can get to the unit. How do I get to the Rangers? And they said, yeah, well, you can't go to the Rangers. You've got to go somewhere else first. And I said, well, where? And they said, the quickest way is to go to Korea, do a year in Korea, and you can get to the regiment.

And I did that. I went to first and 38th Infantry Camp Korea. Again, amazing first tour of duty. I did, you know, great battalion commander, great company commander, Freddie Rewoff, great First Sergeant, First Sergeant Johnson, Vietnam veteran. Did my three months on the DMZ, you know, you get to patrol with live ammo and layout live claymores. So really a cool thing, you know, in 1986. to be able to do that. And, you know, I say that because in the 80s,

the prevailing wisdom was there would never be a war again. Yeah. You know, you kind of missed everything. And a lot of us didn't really accept that, but, you know, in the back of our heads, we were like, oh, my gosh. You know, I may never get to do C-combat in my time in. And so being able to patrol with,

live ammo and layout live claymores was a really, really cool thing. And sure enough, you know, I applied to go to the regiment. I got accepted, came right back from Korea to Oakland, and then drove up to Fort Lewis, Washington. I was assigned to Second Ranger Battalion. And back then they didn't have, you know, rasp or wrist or whatever it's called now. You just went right to the battalion and, you know, I went there. I served four years. It was an incredibly formative period of my life.

Both the battalion commanders I had were amazing. Colonel Ellis was my first one. My second one was Colonel John J. Mayor. And, you know, he had an effect on me that would stay with me for my entire military. career. He was just a fantastic battalion commander, approachable. He would talk to PFCs the same way he would talk to the regimental commander when he came down. I was a, you know, a junior lieutenant and, you know, in the regiment, junior officers usually fear their battalion commander. I had no fear of my battalion commander. He was, you know,

funny he was full of wisdom you know he would he would he would correct you when you were wrong but he was just an amazing guy and that permeated the entire battalion it caught me what a command climate is you know command climate is based on the sum total of choices made by the leaders in that climate system And it's a leader's job to monitor that climate. And he did that incredibly well. You know, he would fire bad people, get rid of them right away. And, you know, everything he did he had kind of a principle to.

And he once told me, you know, you can be the funniest, best guy to hang around with in the as a commander, but if you turned a blind eye to toxic, tyrannical subordinates, your guys will despise you just as much as they despise that tyrant. And he said, one of your primary jobs is to get rid of those guys. That's what the guys are dependent on you. They're going home every night, miserable, going, man, I hope the boss does something about this. And again, you know, that stuck with me my whole career. He was incredibly tactically astute. You know, he taught me you never move with any element without leaving a stay behind ambush.

And my entire military career, I was always leaving stay behind ambushes. But his, the real wealth of knowledge was not so much military, but life knowledge. and a spree to core knowledge. He would say the best form of welfare for the troops is to get them in home in time to eat dinner with their families. And you guys both been in the Ranger Regiment, so you know it attracts a lot of these, you know, borderline psychotic type A personalities who, you know,

they'll stay till 10.30 at night. Right. You know, pushing pencils, pushing papers. and trying to stay a little later than the guy, you know, in the next company or whatever. And so he would, he not only said that, he enforced it. He would go around at 6 o'clock and go, why are you still here? You know, who's telling you to stay here? And he kicked, you know, guys out of their, out of their company areas.

And, you know, everyone, not just me, loved that about him. You know, the other thing he caught me was to always talk calmly on the radio. And, you know, he did that during a big FTX where we were searching for, you know, the precious cargo. It was a nuclear device. And I was a platoon leader, and we found it. And I got so excited I got on the radio and squeached, you know, I found the precious cargo. And, you know, it's embarrassing, to say the least, but only retrospectively when he pointed it out to me, you know, after the mission was over.

And he said to me, look, it happens to everybody. Just remember, any time you go to push that, you know, your push to talk button, take a deep breath first and speak calmly. When we speak calmly, we calm the way we act, and calm like panic is contagious. And, you know, he's right. That's been proven by science. But, you know, in aggregate, again, it just had this amazing effect on me. Everywhere I went after that, I tried to, you know, not mirror, but recreate that dynamic, that positive. you know, command climate dynamic. And, you know, along with that, you know, be in my behavior,

be like he was, which is, you know, humble, unassuming, you're not the center. It's these guys, the guys on the ground. Your job is to take care of them. And it served me well. My company command was the 7th Infantry Division, Fort Ord, California. Again, 130 the greatest guys I could ever have asked for in a company. My first sergeant, another Vietnam veteran, first sergeant Carbajal, fantastic guy taught me a lot. Two months into my command, we invaded Panama, and we were seventh ID, so we didn't jump in, we flew in.

And, you know, I ended up in the center of the city. I got the mission to protect the new presidential palace. President Indara was the president who had been in exile. He took over Panama and all of his exiled subordinates. And we just ran missions for about four or five days straight, using the intelligence from these guys who were in exile. They just come to us and say, hey, you need to go over here to this, this grid, this location, some of Noriega's lieutenants are hiding there.

And we captured a number of his subordinates. On one mission, we were going. It was a tipper that Noriega was hiding in the Communist Party headquarters. And, you know, to get to our targets, we basically jogged down the street. We didn't have Humvees, and even if we did, I probably wouldn't have used them. You know, imagine trying to get a bunch of light infantrymen in and out of Humvees in a city. It was much quicker to just move at a fast pace. And it was on that mission that we were, I had a platoon plus and then me and the first sergeant in the back.

And we were about halfway there. and all of a sudden, all hell broke loose, you know, a firefight. Every guy in the platoon was firing his weapons. We were in the back, you know, so probably at that point strung out like an accordion, about a block and a half behind the lead guys. And, you know, I was taught be patient. Don't get right on the radio and start yelling for a sit rep, let the front guys figure out.

what they got, give him some time. So, you know, I gave him what seemed to me like a minute. And I just said, you know, one-six, this is zero-six, what do you got up there? And no answer. I tried it again, no answer. So me and the first sergeant started making our way to the front, which is incredibly difficult to do in an urban environment and a firefight because, you know, you're not a line of troops anymore. Everybody is all over the place. There's guys under cars, guys in doorways, guys behind garbage cans, and they're all shooting. So, you know, the potential to get shot was pretty high.

But we weaved our way forward until I came to the lieutenant. And he was the front guy laying down, you know, shooting his M-16. And, you know, I tapped him on the shoulder. and I said, hey, man, what's going on? What do you got? What do you got? He goes, I'm not sure, sir. There's enemy up there. And I go, where?

And he's up there. And I said, what do you mean up there? And he said, that window over there. I said, you mean where those curtains are flapping? And he goes, yeah, he's behind that curtain. I said, you know they don't have air conditioning here that they keep their windows open. That's just a curtain flapping in the wind. And he goes, oh, I didn't know that.

I said, why didn't you get on the radio? and give me a sit-rout. He said, well, it's too busy shooting my gun. So we immediately called ceasefire to the platoon, and, you know, I didn't think much of it. I will add, the building burned down. But we went to our target, dry hole, got back, and about four years later, I was in the unit at the time.

I was in an airport, and I ran into a guy who I knew from the 7th ID and we started talking and you know you always search for common ground when you when you meet somebody he was like yeah and I was in Panama and I was like wow I was too and he said yeah I was in the city and I was like yeah me too and he started talking about this massive firefight he was in I was like where was it and he gave me the intersection and that was the intersection between our two elements the demarcation line And from talking to him, I realized that it was his company on the other side of that building. I don't know if someone had an AD or someone saw something, but, you know, one shot started it, and it was a, you know, friendly firefight.

very luckily no one was injured or killed in it but you know I totally went to school off it it changed my mindset about fire fights from that day forward including you know all I was in the unit at the time so it really changed every every situation I looked at differently and you know asked hard questions of myself if I was in it or, you know, if it was a kind of lesson learned historical thing. And, you know, I started realizing how common friendly fire was and how easy it is in a combat environment to get into a friendly firefight. Pete, let me just take a quick moment. We got to give a shout out to the sponsor of tonight's show, which is vitamin one water.

I really hope you guys will take a look at them. we drink it here in the studio. It's veteran-owned business. And they make a sports drink that is similar to other sports drinks you may have heard of, except it doesn't have all the sugar in it, but it does have the electrolytes and all the things that you do need. And you can go and find vitamin one on Amazon right now, best place to go and get them directly. So please go and check them out. We really appreciate it.

And please also take a look at our Patreon. The links down in the description. if you want to get these episodes ad-free. We also want to do a couple quick shout-outs, Posterity, Ciderworks. Thank you very much. We were drinking you last show, and we didn't call you out because we were too busy enjoying your cider, but it's Posterity Cider Works. This one, it's like, I think, small-bass cider, right?

Like, it's good cider, kind of homemade in a way. This is in the garden, and it's actually dedicated to our friend Dave Bannon, who is on the show, who recommended this brand to us. And also want to thank Brett Allen for sending us his books, Sly Fox Hollow, and Kilroy is here. We have not had a chance to read these yet. They have great reviews on Amazon. So check them out if you're looking for something good to read. Thanks, Brett.

Actually, I wanted to, because a lot of your books are about leadership. And, you know, and you've talked about a couple of the influences. But I want to ask you sort of going back in your leadership journey, what is it like, showing up as a butterbar, you know, lieutenant in an infantry unit, in Korea, which is, at the time was the hottest thing going, right? Like you said, live ammunition. And you, like, were you given guidance in terms of, because a lot of these guys are as old, if not older than you, in your, you know, in your platoon, things like that?

How does a young lieutenant manage that? Or were there things that you learned while you were there? It's got to be challenging, right? Yeah, yeah. That's a, you know, it's a great question, Dave. It's, I mean, I think it's the right of passage. And it's a little tougher on those new guys for a reason. You've got to prove yourself.

You've got to earn your credibility. And, you know, I always felt that way. I always felt, you know, not like deficient, but I knew I didn't have experience. And, you know, my upbringing taught me I'm wrong more than I'm right. So, you know, in order to flip that ratio, you tap into this wealth of knowledge around you. And, you know, I mentioned my first sergeants for a reason. When I talked about my tour as a lieutenant at 275, I did not mention that the sergeant there was the same sergeant major for my whole four and a half years,

Sergeant Major Leon Guerrero. And he took it upon himself. You know, his job is to train all the NCOs in the battalion and to mentor them. but he took it to another level. He also, I believe, saw that his duty was to train the lieutenants, and he did.

And I think that should be in, you know, most sergeant majors should include that in their duty description. He's the guy who taught me don't be in a hurry to die. You know, that's what happened on LZX-ray. That

lieutenant ran off his helicopter into the jungle. saw a via con right on the edge of the jungle who took

off running and he ran after him and his whole platoon ran after him. He never

told them what he was running after. And when he finally stopped, they were

surrounded and LZX-ray was really the, you know, the battle to save

the wayward platoon. And he taught us that, you know, and he would say

to me all the time, and I was, I was that lieutenant. I was overly

aggressive you know, subject to my aggressive impulsiveness. And he taught me, you know, don't be in a hurry to die. Leaders who are impulsive lead their people to their deaths. And I never forgot that. You know, I packed that with me through my whole career and it saved me and my guys countless times. So, you know, as a butter bar, it's kind of the same thing. You've got to earn your credibility. obviously physically, tactically, but you've got to listen. And, you know, you've got the wealth of knowledge around you.

So it's only a matter of tapping into it, asking the right questions, and, you know, be impatient because you're not going to be a combat, you know, hard and wise veteran in a few months or even a few years. You just got to keep building on that knowledge. Yeah. Were there, whether it was in Korea or Ranger Battalion, you've mentioned like some good leadership examples. Were there some blatantly, whether it was on the officer side or NCO side, some blatantly bad examples that were learning experiences for you? Well, all my, I think all my battalion commanders, I was very lucky.

So my battalion in Korea was an amazing Vietnam veteran. You know, just I can't say anything but good things about him. Same thing when I got to the Ranger Regiment. Both my battalion commanders were great. You know, probably peers. You know, I learned more from peers and as a lieutenant captains. And there were plenty of those. There were, you know, guys who were hypocrites,

guys who, you know, were A-holes to their people, guys who were tactically incompetent. And, you know, you learn vicariously from those guys, just like you do from the good guys. You know, I'm never going to be that way. I'm never going to do that. I'm never going to treat people that way. And, you know, you can really go to school off of those incompetent people just like you can off of the incredibly competent people, just like you can, off of the incredibly competent. at once. So, you know, most of my early military career, though, I'd have to say I was just blessed with great senior leadership and senior non-commissioned officers. And by the time, so you were in

Seventh ID, a company commander, when does, when does the idea of like going to selection kind of come to your head and you start thinking about going and making the leap? Yeah, so it was, it was already my head I knew you know the criteria was you had to have a successful company command as an officer to go to selection so you know I was I I would have stayed in that company for as long as they'd let me stay but you know the military it's two years and out and so as my two years were coming up I started the process contacting the unit you know going through all the prerequisite stuff And, you know, Seventh ID was at Ford Ord.

So about a month before I finished command, the unit selection team came out to California. And I did my psych and PT test at the Presidio of San Francisco. It was still open as a military base. I ran my two-mile part of the PT test underneath the Golden Gate bridge with boots on. And, you know, I was kind of a running machine at the time. So I was, you know, going to Max V-O-2 trying to set, you know, my personal best record. But I can still remember running under that bridge just going, man, I love the military. It's just such an amazing place to be. And, you know, sure enough, things worked out for me with the psych and the

PT test, I went to selection right after I got finished command. I think I finished command in in August or September and then I went to select the next selection, which was I believe October. And again, fortunate, didn't get injured, made it through that. And, you know, I was in the unit in the in 1991 so was I was only at ord for the shortest possible period of time I didn't have to serve as a staff officer it was just command go to tryouts and then you know off to the unit and for a long time I was you know the only one who in the unit from the seventh ID two more guys came a few years later before they shut it down. But yeah, that was my transition. I, you know, it was because I was influenced by Desert One before I even got in. I knew that was dealt on the ground. So

even though I knew nothing about really what they were or how they operated, I knew from that day on that that's where I wanted to go in the military. So, you know, it worked out. So, and, In 1991, you get there. I mean, tell us a little bit about, like, what the vibe was in the unit at the time, what the mission was like. I mean, like, if you can take us a little back in time, you know, to the mission and the culture of that era. Yeah. It's an interesting time. And it's, you know, it's, there are some senior NCOs who can explain it much better than me.

They've explained it to me and, you know, enlightened me on it. It was kind of a transitionary time. because the military was still kind of transitioning. You know, you had the old school guys who were there in the early, early days and, you know, firing MP5s and wearing those black watch caps, things like that. And this was definitely, you know, the step into the future. Everything was modernized, you know, weapons, commo, nods, had, you know, were taking those massive leaps in the 90s. So it was a really cool transitionary time. You know, my first,

I went right to a troop. I was a troop commander, my first job. And again, because I've seen a number of your episodes, two of the guys in my troop, Gary Harrington and Dale Tomstock were both in there at the time. And I'm sure many more that you'd recognize. But those are the two I saw on your program. Just, you know, I think the unit was kind of, you know, finding its new way at the time. And, you know, missions were changing, but a lot were staying the same. You know, aircraft hostage rescue, aircraft take down, those type things were the same. But, you know, new missions were coming on.

the counter narcotics was, you know, became the biggest mission for the military. A lot of people don't know that, but Bill Clinton, you know, signed a presidential decision directive, making that the number one priority for the military. And inevitably, you know, showing the changes, that's what ended up driving my first big missions. I went down into Columbia with the first groups after Pablo escaped. I did four tours in Columbia, spent two Christmases there. And again, incredibly, incredibly formative. Just, you know, learning how to deal with embassy people, learning up close how the CIA operates. You know, I was still a, I was a senior captain at the time, which is rare in the unit.

Usually the junior officers are majors, but because I had that, you know, fast pace through command, I was still a senior captain. But here I was down in Columbia, you know, working out of an embassy. I, you know, blend in anywhere as one of the principals. So, you know, I would wear a suit. in the embassy and then I'd go out, you know, to visit my guys and spend time with them operationally in Medellin and Cali and all over that country. It was incredibly dangerous time to be down there. Pablo was blowing the shit out of the country.

So, you know, there were car bombs, there were mailbox bombs. We were armed all the time, you know, even whether you're in a grocery store in Bogota or, you know, you're down in Medellin or Cali. And so, you know, again, just the building blocks, I think, of the future of the unit were there, you know, forming teams based on, you know, competencies. So, you know, teams, like a homogenous team was not sent down there. Guys were picked from different squadrons. Language was a big part of that. But disposition was a big part of it, too. You guys know this.

You know, you get the full spectrum of people in any unit you go to. Some guys are just not really capable or wired to be, you know, interacting in an embassy or interacting with foreign, you know, generals, colonels, and, you know, other guys are incredible at it. They're just, you know, you watch them in awe as they deal with these people. And so I learned a lot down there. Mostly it was, it was about, you know, human hunting. Most of the lessons were how you find people who don't want to be found.

you know, this tireless search for clues and always tapping into anyone who has any type of information, you know, totally open mind about it, not getting caught up in, you know, a military approach to things. We saw ourselves down there. We would often talk about, you know, what do cops do in America when they find, you know, a fugitive. They don't, you know, call in two SWAT teams surround the place and then, you know, begin an aerial attack. They just two or three guys, you know, figure out what they got. If it's a fleeting opportunity, they go in there and they interact with the environment. And that's what it, that was the big lesson for me, you know, and also patience. It takes time to find people. It's very difficult. You've got to have guys on the ground and you've got to listen

to those guys religiously or you're never going to find who you're looking for. So just, again, great tours. I went, I actually went left Columbia on one tour, flew to New York and then flew to Mogadishu, Somalia for Somalia. and then when that ended, I flew back to Columbia for another tour going after, I believe, the Cali cartel on that one. Did some of those like manhunting techniques that your unit was developing in Columbia kind of transfer over to the hunt for Adid and all those guys in Mogadishu? Yeah, totally. And now, you know, again, you had kind of, you know, your question about the unit and the transition. You had, you know, these competing schools of thought.

And so, you know, my school of thought in Mogadishu was different than, you know, the special operations command above us and the way they wanted that prosecuted, which was helicopter-centric. And, you know, if you talk to guys who were there at the time, they know, you know, I was already anti-helicopter. And that's not anti-helicopter pilot or anti-get-on-a-helicopter. I just don't believe, I believe it's the last resort as an assault platform. If you can get there on the ground, if you can sneak up and achieve surprise, do not default to the helicopter. And so my thing with Somalia was these helicopters are going to get us, are going to get blown out of the sky. We did before anyone went over there, before C Squadron went over there, we all did rehearsals. And in our nighttime rehearsals, we did, we timed infilling on a black off and infilling on a little bird.

and, you know, a little bird can break, flare, and hover in about five seconds. So if it's a roof or a balcony, you can unask those guys in about a total of 10 seconds. A black hawk, it takes 45 seconds for the best pilots to break, flare, and hover, get the ropes down or, you know, land. And so it's a huge amount of time. and you know you're dealing with in a place where everyone has a gun so our our thinking was you know we should be going to the targets hidden inside they were called sSTs shit-sucking trucks because they drove throughout Somalia and they were like garbage trucks no one bothered them because they were sucking up all the shit and you know my thought was in a bunch of the guys it wasn't And my idea, a number of my guys came up with it was, you know, let's go in low-vis. Let's swing all the way around. Mogadishu is like an island.

Very abruptly turns into scrub desert. So, you know, if we need to get to the other side of the city, let's make a huge arc around and then come in through the desert on the other side. But, you know, the helicopter mentality, the kind of Vietnam direct assault mentality was very prevalent with senior ranking people at the time. And, you know, that kind of won out. But it was, you know, the same thing. The guys were amazing. I know you've talked to guys before.

You know, when we were in Mogadishu, we had pro-tech helmets on, plastic. pro-tech helmet. So the unit's always been at the forefront of research and development. You know, most of the, you know, equipment and rigs that you see today were developed by guys in the unit, either sewing them up themselves or buying them off the shelves and then sewing and modifying them, which is the way the whole army should be, in my opinion. And, you know, that was the other thing going back and forth between the unit and the Rangers. I always thought the Rangers should go back to, you know, the old school Rangers of the, of the, you know, early 80s where they still had 550 cord in their boots. And, you know, they too were allowed that leeway to, you know, wear their equipment.

different ways. And I know there's probably some senior rangers gas feed with me saying that, but I really believe that. You know, guys should be allowed to modify their equipment so that it's ergonomic. You maximize that ergonomic efficiency. You know, everyone's chest is different. They're arms. So, you know, let guys explore, invent, you know, and let them. them build better equipment constantly. And that's what the unit did. And that's what we did start. Even in Mogadishu, you know, that was the last of the pro-tech helmet.

Yeah, yeah. They were never worn again. Pete, you know, just one thing I wanted to ask you why have you here is something I was told a ways back, but I never really got the whole story on was about Columbia and that before Pablo Escobar was eventually. you know, killed by the Colombians, that we made like several attempts to like ramp up capture kill missions for him. I was just wondering if you had any like visibility on that. Yeah, you know, I'm not sure what what exactly, there might have been times that guys in

Medellin thought that was, you know, the best course of action. But what I remember is we were, no one told us this. We were being micromanaged down there by Southcom, which was in Panama at the time. So, you know, you had a four-star general in Panama with a bunch of two-star general underling staff officers. And again, you know, there's no combat. So this is like the only show in town. And they could not keep their fingers off it. But, you know, we still operated very, freely down there and we came to the conclusion ourselves that you know unless it can't be avoided we should stay out of any direct contact direct action like mission and that doesn't mean we can't take them all the way up to the breach

point we can't advise them we had we had shared radios with them the agribusio on their HRT But we, you know, in our own minds, decided, hey, we're here to lead them. And these guys need to be the ones to get Pablo. And it makes the most sense for them. It makes the most sense for the mission and for their country. If it's us, it's going to open a Pandora's box of problems. So we were very much, you know, set on that.

And ultimately, that's what happened. You know, Pablo, people still are not clear on that. But that was 100% you know, Colombian mission. Those, the young captain who was the son of the colonel who was in charge. He was out there. He was using, you know, U.S. provided direction-finding equipment. But it was not any kind of magical technology. It was, you know, literally driving around hoping you pick.

up a frequency and hoping the voice on that frequency, the, you know, the, the, the troves and the peaks on it match up to his voice profile that we had already embedded in the system. And that's what happened. And they, you know, they direction found him on his phone. Then they happened to see him up in an upstairs window called in the rest of the Colombians and they did that 100% on their own. And then bouncing back to Somalia, I mean, were you there

when the battle took place? We got there that night. So I was in A and that was C. So we were, it was actually the changeover night. We were there to relieve them. They were going home that next day. So

we were there and then we took over. They were pretty much decimated by the mission. So we took over the, you know, hostage rescue mission to find Durant and rescue him. We flew, you know, I don't know how many missions in and out of there, all on little birds. We didn't use any black hawks. And, you know, again, a lot of breakthroughs and technology there. Lasers, we learned just how incredibly lethal.

and valuable lasers were. You know, we were flying on one mission. We had four little birds. I was the second little bird offset from the first, and we were flying nap to Earth. And I looked forward. It was just dark. You know, it had just turned dark,

and so I had my nods on. And I saw ahead of the first helicopter, this person run out of a house. into the yard. And, you know, it was a woman. She had something in her hand. And, you know, I didn't know, I knew it wasn't a gun, but she had something in her hand. It could have been a spear or anything.

And, you know, with a helicopter at that height, you never know. And she pulled it back. It turned out it was a black frying pan, probably her most valuable possession. And she pulled this thing back to throw it. And I put my lady. on it and at the exact second I put mine on it three other lasers zeroed in on it and somebody shot and that frying pan flew out of her hand as she tried to throw it at the lead little bird and I'll never forget that shot I'll never forget

you know seeing it that I could still see that picture in my nods and see those lasers converge on the frying pan and so you know a lot of that technology was experimental at the time, but just took off after that. And, you know, today every, every M4 has a laser on it. I don't think we ever have really talked about this aspect of Somalia. But so you get there right after the big battle. And were you guys like trying to keep the pressure? Obviously looking for Mike Durant, but also keeping the pressure on the militias.

Was that the mission at the time? Yeah, it was, you know, it was crazy because there was a lot. lot of political pressure coming down on the whole thing. If you guys remember, you know, we wanted to go after ID, but we didn't want, you know, to kill anybody or get anybody killed. It was crazy. There was no AC 130 up, you know, just senseless decisions made at the national level. So it was kind of a flux period. No one knew what was going to happen with the mission. And so we just did what, you know, any military guys to do. We just, Charlie Mike, let's continue with the same thing

and search for both Adid and Durant at the same time. You know, we had some, there were just some amazing lessons learned on interoperability there. You know, a lot of things happened with the Rangers that created a lot of, you know, a lot of conflict with those guys and you know those were interoperability things and a lot of them were personality driven again you know leaders who instead of being open and you know accommodating were rigid and and narrowly focused on you know what they were going to do and how

they were going to do it and I think that ended up causing a lot of the chaos that occurred during that fire flight. So do you think a lot of that was personality driven? And I'm going to like throw some stuff out, which may or may not be true. But were there like, were there officers that were of a rank higher, whichever unit that thought that that should be respected? Were there Rangers that were sort of the old school were the best light infantry? And you guys are long hairs and that should be respected?

Were there any Delta personalities that were like, where Delta shut the fuck up and do what we say? Like what were some of the elements that were going on if you know them? Yeah, I think, you know, the most were going on with the, there was a company commander, Ranger Company Commander and the Ranger Battalion Commander. And, you know, the movie alludes to it a little bit. But, you know, they were, they were just, they were, they were, I guess you said,

old school, they were old school. We're going to do it our way, and that's it. And, you know, the Rangers, when the firefight started, we're out there in a convoy, parked in a convoy. And, you know, just everything was set up to go wrong. The battalion commander in his vehicle is leading that convoy. You know, that makes no sense. when, you know, who puts a battalion commander in the front vehicle, you know, as a navigator and

as a convoy commander, nobody. And that, you know, that caused a lot of the problems, certainly a lot of the casualties. They went back and forth through that kill zone, I think, three times. Because he could not figure out. He was getting, he was being told where to go from a helicopter. So, you know, all of us have been in helicopter circling, no, you can't tell a guy in a city to take a left turn or a right turn. And then, you know, make your arc around to come around the other way. They took a bunch of wrong turns. I think that front vehicle split from the convoy, you know, on its own, went down an alley away from the convoy. The only thing that stopped it was a Somali with an RPG at the far end of the alley popped out, so they threw it in reverse and went back.

And, you know, then there was just, I'm not, I can't speak credibly about the personality at the, at the company level. I just know that there were unit guys in, in that same building, and that company commander would not answer his radio when guys, were calling one ranger bled out in there. And Scott Miller was the troop commander at the time. He was trying to call him and he wouldn't answer his radio. So, you know, I'm not being judgmental here. I'm just saying it was a huge interoperability problem. And, you know, personalities.

You can't come to any other conclusion than personalities because you know, in those situations, you know, rank means nothing. Your job is to make the best decision and solve any problem using logic and common sense that comes up. And if you've got to subordinate yourself to someone of lower rank or of another unit, who cares? You know, you're doing it in the name of, you know, the mission and your men. And so it always just amazes me when I hear stuff like that. And that had a big impression on me too. You know, I went to school off Somalia.

It was the final nail for me on helicopters. It was, you know, also a nail for, you know, always search for that asymmetrical approach, that out-of-box approach, do not default to what every enemy. in the world expects America to do, which is to come in on our shiny helicopters and fast rope onto targets. Yeah. Yeah. You know, just like Jack and I saw this in the G-Wa,

and I'm sure, you know, like everybody else did too, how like tactics evolved, like things that used, people used to think where the standard sort of went by the wayside. Did you see that happen with Somalia too? Were there just some like wake-up calls in the community for you guys? Yeah, I think, you know, our professors, which is all the, you know, troops are majors and team leaders, they totally went to school off it on CQB. A number of things changed on CQB tactics and techniques.

Certainly, you know, you know the probably one of the biggest lessons, was, you know, never go on a daytime mission without your nods and without expecting you're gonna be going on a nighttime mission. So, you know, a lot of little things, a lot of equipment things, I already mentioned, the pro tech changed after that. And you know, I think the, I think in general the mindset,

because, you know, it's very clear that that was the most intense combat since the Vietnam War, and it was kind of a wake-up call, you know, to everybody that this is the new way. This is the, you know, insurgent warfare, you know, asymmetrical sounds trite, but it's true. You're fighting against guys who aren't, they don't have doctrine and they don't have tactics, techniques, and procedures. And why, you know, while you can smoke those guys in, you know, incomprehensible numbers, they're still very effective. They're swarming you,

and you've got to be ready to defeat the swarm. And, you know, there were a number of teams, unit teams, who did that. They did not stay put, which I also went to school off of. They said, well, I'm not staying in this place. Let's go out and just move and destroy the enemy instead of letting them creep up and destroy us. And they did that. Paul Howe, who wrote a book about it,

but he's an incredible warrior. And to me, we've had him on the show too. Did you? Okay, so he, he, I never forgot him. He gave a AAR. He wasn't in my squadron, so I didn't know him that well. But, you know, my lesson from Somalia was almost,

everything he said about it. And he, the way he prosecuted, the way he reacted, the way he adapted with his team was the way I thought everyone should have performed while they were there. And, you know, he's, you guys know, because you know him, he's an unbelievable warrior, incredibly competent, incredibly intelligent. And, and his approach to, me was the takeaway. Never sit against the swarm. You know, it's like when you're being swarmed by bees, you don't just sit still. You swat them back, you move around, you haul ass away from the swarm. And he did that. He took the fight to the enemy and, you know, he's a very modest guy, but, you know, what they, what they did accounted for a lot of the casualties that the

Somalis took there. And so after Somalia, you make it, you said you went back to Columbia on one more trip, looking at the Kali cartel after the whole Escobar thing was settled. And sort of what was like the rest of your duration there before moving on to the next assignment? Yeah. So just, you know, we went right from Colombia, Bosnia, popped up next. And so you guys asked earlier about, you know, influences.

on GWAT. To me, the, you know, the Ph.D. in human hunting came in Bosnia. We called it the living laboratory. We now technology, we were able to operationalize technology. So there were no Google Maps at the time, but, you know, there was special mapping software that you could put on a laptop, a mini libretto laptop and, you know, hook it in inside your vehicle and a low-vis way. We, you know, we learned how to rig low-vis satellite antennas on top of our vehicles. The blend-in thing was huge. You know, you were always basically undercover. And, you know, same thing. Just like police, you're not going to be successful unless you're out there hunting for clues, you know, piecing together clues, just like, just like, it's a case, going back, sharing everything you learn with your team, you know, picking up the

knowledge, the understanding of the environment collectively, not individually, and, you know, doing it while undercover in a, you know, it was dangerous, but it was a fairly forgiving environment. So, you know, we could test anything out and test any concept out. And we did. And, you know, that went all right up, really, till 9-1-1, that living laboratory. And so I've said this. I'm sorry to interrupt, but can I get you to scoot, like, a little closer to the camera? And do you have, like, a light in front of you?

If you can flip that around or something, because you're just, like, so washed out, I'm afraid we got you looking like a space alien. on this program or Bigfoot which i guess we could talk yeah i don't mind that turn that that's much that's much better we can actually see you now yeah okay yeah yeah yeah thank you what happened there yep so um what were we what were we talking about there uh about how things evolved uh during the bosnia campaign and all of the ttPs and technologies that you guys evolved Yeah, so, you know, that's where we learned the low-vis comms, the operating in a low-vis environment, and, you know, guys on a continuous mission, we were there for a couple years, two or three years, so you were rotating in and out. It was all pretty much NCO-run. Our sergeant majors were the guys who ran the safe houses, and it was very complex because you're.

You had all these low-vis vehicles. You had a lot of weapons. A lot of us were, you know, under aliases. So it took a lot of highly involved organization to keep things from, you know, falling apart. And to keep the continuity because you had to go out of your way to pass on knowledge with each tour, each new team that came over. We ended up settling on 90 to 120-day tours, which we thought was about the right number. Anything less was a little too short. Anything more, you know, started really burning guys out. But really everything, you know, that I did with AFO or a lot of what I did with

AFO in Afghanistan was based on knowledge I learned in low-vis environment in Bosnia. And I, you know, I want to turn to your book soon here. So I'm not going to go too deep into Afghanistan. But when that, are you in Sean Naylar's book, not a good day to die? Yes. Okay. So, yeah, I'm, I'm friends with Sean. So, I mean, maybe I can direct people towards his book because I, not that I wouldn't love to talk to you about it here, but since we're like an hour and 10 minutes in, I want to make sure that we have plenty of time to, you know, unpack everything in your book.

But before moving on, I mean, is there anything about the Bosnia campaign? Is there any particular operation that you'd like to highlight before we move on to the next thing? You know, yeah, I think the one of the big ops that I write about in my first book, the highlight is just how important humor is to imagination. And this kind of goes back to the climate that I talked about initially and how important having that kind of climate is. you know, you guys know this, every military guy who's watching this knows this. You know, we survive off laughter. And, you know, without laughter, you know, you're going to be stressed out. You're going to be a zombie.

You're going to be frustrated. Military guys are, you know, like a bunch of amateur comedians, you know, always trying to get a laugh out of even the, you know, some of the darkest circumstances. And so when you're trying to plan it on, you know, one of the most famous, you know, bits of advice that old school senior leaders always give you is they say, all right, knock off the crap, we got to get serious, it's time to plan. And it turns out that's exactly opposite of the way. way our brains work. You know, humor and insight are indelibly linked. So humor makes you think

of creative ideas and insights you'd never come up with unless you were laughing. And a lot of that has to do with contrarian thinking. The brain is a natural contrarian like machine. If I say black, you think white just naturally. So what that emphasizes is even some of the dumbest, like most foolish ideas in history probably gave birth to some of the greatest and insightful ideas, especially in the military. And, you know, we kind of, I kind of knew that just from experience. That was always the way we operated, but Bosnia, we took it to another level. And so, you know, trying to figure out how to stop a vehicle with a, uh, a very one of the top three principles that we were going after over there,

who is in the vehicle with his security detail and his daughter. You know, how do you stop it in a non-kinetic way that will ensure that you're not going to kill that daughter while you're trying to capture this guy? And, you know, we sat in a safe house who was probably two, three in the morning, and we just started brainstorming and any idea was a good idea and you know that's where I talk about like the idea of you know a gorilla costume and the idea was get some guy out there who just you know makes them go pull their face up to the front windshield and go what in the fuck is that and it's that moment where we had a special round it was called a slamming.

round and I don't know what happened to this thing. It's a fantastic device. I believe the Austrians came up with it. It's like an RPG round. It's about about that big, the round, but it has a stick on it that fits right into your M4 barrel and you fire that thing just like you fire a normal round. And it's called a slam round. It's like a RPG concussion grenade. So when it hits something, And it's like a flashbang. It creates a concussive effect that knocks people out for about 10 to 15 seconds or knocks them incoherent. And that ended up being the concept we came up with.

The mission ended up changing based on weather and a few other things. But only through laughter and hilarity did we come up with that concept. And anybody could come up. One of the great ideas This came from one of the most junior guys in the group, which again shows that, you know, you know, making good choices is about options.

And the more options you have to choose from, the better your choices are going to be. And that's what we learned on that mission. It really, that too stayed with me all through Afghanistan, Iraq. If you're planning, you know, get comfortable, be like you guys are right now. Sit down in a good chair, having something to sit on seriously. And just, you know, laugh because humor and insider and delving link. So next time you hear someone say, knock off the shit, it's time to get serious and start planning. And, you know, raise your hand and tell them that's not how the human brain works.

I also like before we move into the book, because the book is, you know, a lot of it has to do with later on the GWAT with, with Tillman. But I want to say that from the unit, you went back to Ranger Battalion. And you happened to be there at the same time I was. And I remember like the whispers around the Chow Hall because, you know, there was pistol Pete, the guy, you know, who had, you know, who was, he was there. But also I think that your presence, because that was a time when, when Ranger Battalion was in the regiment, but particularly I think second battalion. And I think part of it had to do with you being there. and your influence. It's like you mentioned,

like you got Jerry Barnhart there, you know, which was, you know, a resource that Rangers hadn't had access to up at that point in time, you know, the Gracie's like bringing civilian experts

for these things that when you were there is also when we were allowed to go to the tactical Taylor and have woolly peat bags sewn into our rucksacks and, you know, and have our web gear like altered. But that, wasn't something that Rangers were, that was something that there were people in Ranger

Battalion that were actively resisting and fighting because it wasn't dress right dress. Yeah. No, it's a great point. And, you know, I was fortunate going back there because I knew now the, you know, platoon sergeants and first sergeants were guys I was, who were team leaders and squad leaders when I was there the first time. And so knowing them and, being able to connect to them and talk to them about, you know, hey, what do we really need? What is the battalion need to, you know, take that next step? So their feedback was amazing. Ted Kennedy, who's in my book, was incredible influence on me.

You know, just one of these guys, you just cannot believe the wisdom that comes pouring out of them. So, you know, most of those things you mentioned, Dave, were, you know, ended up being executed because of feedback I got from those NCOs. You know, on the equipment side, since we've been talking about that, you know, I came back and showed, did a demo of why the Rangers need to switch to an AK-47 vest, which is, you know, what we used to wear. before it was part of the MOLA system, before it was part, you know, embedded in your body armor. We did a demonstration of trying to IMT, trying to get magazines, and just showing, you know, this thing that the only reason the Rangers didn't have AK vests was because, you know, they were too cool. And this is where the Rangers, you know, the old school NCOs begin working, some of them, against the system. You know, they just do not want to change. And, you know, these guys would tell me that.

They're like, hey, we've been telling them, you know, for the last couple years, we need to do CQB. We need to do target discrimination. And, you know, it's the sergeant majors who at regiment and whatnot, who come back and say, no, no, no, we're Rangers. We kill everything on the target. We don't need to learn how to, you know, discriminate targets. We don't need to shoot and move. And that was one of the other things that we did while I was there. We set up the first maneuver live fire shoot and move, maneuver live fire range on Fort Lewis, where, you know, you started on a fast rope that was between two trees, about 100 meters apart.

You had to crawl that thing in whatever technique you wanted with your weapon. You came out, you shot from 100 meters down a road at a target. You shot 10 rounds. You picked up, you sprinted forward. You climbed up on top of what used to be, you know, they had those sheds over all the shooting positions. You climbed up on top of that. You took shots from a kneeling position on that. You climbed back down, ran over, went through a pipe.

And, you know, it was the purpose when we brought in the regimental commander and the regimental staff, they were like, yeah, well, why do we need to do this? And the reason you need to do it is because you need to teach yourself how to shoot when you're out of breath, how to find that respiratory pause. And like, so we've been training all those years, we, the entire military, you know, laying on ranges in a prone position. which is not how you shoot. You're all amped up when you're shooting, and that's the way you should train. And so we did. And again, you know, everything we did there

was based on feedback from those senior NCOs. Same thing with Barnhart. You know, they've been trying to get someone to come and teach them shooting techniques, advanced shooting techniques for a while. And so when I came, you know, they said, hey, how can we do this? and I was like, you know, we can do it.

And since I was the S3, you know, it was only like 20 grand to get Barnhart or something. And we were spending, you know, a hundred grand to rent the Mouthsite, you know, some obscure post. And so, you know, I just used that money to spend on Jerry Barnhart and new equipment and stuff like that. And so, you know, I think more than anything it speaks of, you know, you know, the value of, you know, going back and forth between units, you know, especially on the NCO level. Greg Birch did that at the end of his career. He was the battalion of regimental, I believe he was regimental sergeant major, too. Yeah, he was in Afghanistan. So he did that of his own accord, you know, he had already accomplished everything you could accomplish at the unit,

and he did it because he started, you know, where I started, A company 275, and he wanted to go back. He still to this day, you know, he loves rangers and so do why, because we see them, you know, as the future of the warrior class in the military. And so, you know, they need, they need, they need insanity. Most of the time, Rangers have all the right ideas. They just can't get those ideas and operationalize them. And, you know, sometimes you need a little bit of help to do that. It was a fascinating time because it was being pulled like Taffy, you know, where you would have people like you come in and sort of be innovators and these other people who understood what needed to happen. And at the same time, I had a platoon sergeant who said, we don't need to be doing

the CQB, we need to do patrol-based activities. That's right. That's what Rangers do. You know? And it was a fascinating time for Rangers. Yeah. Yeah. Pete, I would love to have you back again at some other time to talk about the rest of your career. I just don't, I know if we get into it, I'm not going to have any time left to talk about your book here, which I definitely want to get into. But if people, your first book is the, the, the mission in me. The mission the men and me. Yep. The mission of the men and me.

So people didn't go and check that out if they want to hear a bit more about Afghanistan. And I'm sure we can have P-Pak. You did a lot in, if I remember right, you did a lot about Bosnia in there too, right? Yes. Big Bosnia. That story that I just told is in there. And then Naylor's book is not a good day to die. But we didn't have Pete back again to talk about that stuff.

So let's launch into this into book three, common sense leadership matters. Tell us about what was the genesis of this book? Like how did it come about? Why did you write it? Yeah, thanks. It's so, you know, indirect, strange thing. But, you know, it started for me in Baghdad International Airport, 2003. I was actually commanding the unit.

I went over to our staging area for Iraq as the ops officer. The unit commander had a brain aneurysm while jogging on like the second day we were there. So I became the unit commander for Iraq. And, you know, of course, JASC was, you know, you know, waiting with bated breath as that happened. And, you know, we ended up infilling into Iraq, a huge indirect route into Iraq after the invasion, which was, I don't know, we were behind enemy lines and out in the field for, I think, 26 or 28 days, something like that.

And when we came in, we went to Baghdad International Airport. So it had just been taken, you know, by the Thunder Run. We occupied that to begin going after, you know, high-value targets in the city, specifically Saddam and his henchmen. And so I was commanding, you know, in biap, and we were conducting nonstop ops. And the reason I, you know, I recounted in the book, book, the reason I remember it so clearly is because on the 30th, yeah, 30th of May, we had what ended up being the biggest casualty producing, you know, op that we had, we had up to that point,

neither wore. And nobody died before guys were injured, two of them seriously on a target. And it was a target that, you know, it was, they did. everything right. They got in there. They took out the first four or five guys. And then, you know, some crazed dude came running out with his AK on automatic and spraying everybody. And he hit four guys on that target. So those guys were flown back to biap that night. And it was, you know, a typical unit staff. I had like three guys with me. And so we ran out to the helicopters to take those four guys off the helicopters. And obviously, you know, we couldn't get four stretchers off quickly.

And all of a sudden, all these rangers ran out, 12 Rangers, and started helping us. And we transloaded, we brought them into, we had a J-MAL setup there. We brought them in to be triage. They were going to be flown out to Germany. critical care unit, but they were triaged right there. And, you know, before one of the guys was put under with anesthesia, he said to me, a, Panther, we sure could have used a few extra guys on the target. Some of these Rangers for security would have been helpful. And I was like, got it, Chris, hang in there, and I'll get working on that right away. So I, you know, they put him under.

I went back immediate request to Joint Special Operation Command, hey, we would like a minimum of a couple squads, but a platoon worth of rangers to help us out to isolate these targets. And, you know, that was, I sent that mission up that night. Now those guys carrying the stretchers in, unbeknownst to me, and as they came out, I thanked each one of them. I shook their hands, said, hey, really appreciate it. And, you know, when a unit guy, like, talks to a junior ranger there, you know, they think it's, they were taken back. They were like, wow, this guy's thanking us. Right. And, but I was genuinely appreciative of it.

And that turned out to be, they were all from Second Platoon A company. And Tillman was one of the guys who was there. Oh, wow. So the next night, I was, I was, you know, we were doing more ops. I was on the radio and I saw a ranger come in to our area. I was coincidentally, my talk was set up in the Delta ticket counter area. And so I heard this voice and I was like, I know that voice. And it was, you know, one of the guys I mentioned, I'm not going to say his name because he's still.

active with another government agency. But I knew his name. He was a guy I worked with in both my tours in 275. And I'll call him Sard NX. And I was like, Sartnerx, what are you? You know, I was really happy to see him because not like personality wise. I was happy to see him because I thought it meant he was coming over

as the lead NCO to be my isolation force. But that's not why he was over. He just looked at me and he said, sir, can I talk to you in private? And I was like, yeah, sure. So I grabbed my long gun and we went out and walked, you know, along the inactive runway. And I said, what's on your mind? And he just went into this long litany about the command climate in the second battalion and how toxic it was. And, you know, he gave me in numerous examples.

They're in the book. And, you know, he was very clear. It wasn't just one individual. So, you know, and I try to get that across in the book. This is why climate is so important to understand. It was multiple. And, you know, I said to him, well, what can I do to help? I had been out of the Rangers.

You know, I left Dave. While you were there, I left in 98. So this is 2003. So I've been out five years. And I was like, you know, sir next. What can I do? And I'll do anything, but what do you need me to do? And he said, I don't know.

Can you just talk to someone in our higher headquarters, maybe get someone to come down and take a look? Anything will help. And he was very apologetic, you know, about bothering me. I'm like, dude, you're not bothering me. Senseless leadership in a combat zone is as deadly serious as it gets. And so I told him I had to go back. We had a mission going on, on a team.

target, so I had to go back and I said to him, hey, look, you have my word. I will, I don't know what I'm going to do or how I'm going to do it, but I will find someone and I'm going to make it known and we're going to get someone over there to check out what's going on. And, you know, again, back to this theme because we've talked to 275. We've talked about, you know, our initial battalion. Like when he told me that, it wasn't just the thing, you know, all these faces, you you know, went flying through my brain, I could see them. And I just was like, man, you know, those guys are struggling. They're sucking.

Those are good people. They don't deserve that. And again, you know, it's deadly serious when that shit happens in a combat zone. So, and after him, two more NCOs grabbed me on the way to the Chow Hall and said the same thing. So that's three senior NCOs. crossing command lines to tell someone about a problem. So, you know, internally, I only thought about this later, not at the time, but it, you know, it tells you how serious it is. Right. Because Ranger NCOs, I mean, you've got to be like waterboarding them to get them to

complain about anything. They don't complain. You know, you've got to coerce a Ranger NCO to tell you what's bothering him because, you know, you learn to suck it up and you learn that, you know, you don't complain. And so I knew, because I understood that about, you know, Ranger non-commissioned officers, I knew this had to be pretty serious for them to do what they did. And, you know, two nights later, I saw a senior Ranger officer, and I'm anonymizing him. just because I anonymize a lot of the guys in the book, but Rangers know who he is. And I approached him.

And I had a great relationship with this guy. You know, I had been in L&O with him when I was the S3 of the Rangers five years earlier. I knew him then. He was in the Rangers then. He was a rank above me. And I knew him that whole time leading up to that. never, you know, I never served with him or anything like that, but I knew him and had a very good relationship. And I saw him and I said, he was the most senior guy and he was the only guy

who was at Biap from our higher headquarters. So I said, hey, can I talk to you? And I pulled him aside and I said, look, here's, I want to tell you what three very competent NCOs told me. And I think it's pretty serious and you know you can tell me what you think and I laid out very carefully trying to use their words not to you know in any way throw in anything that that wasn't said to me anonymizing their names because I understood the ramifications and and how you know the regiment sometimes reacts when when people complain so you know I told them all the examples and he wasn't saying a thing and it was dark out and he was smoking a cigar at the time I couldn't see his face so I just stopped and said you know to let him talk and he you know took another

hit off his cigar you know blew the smoke out hit me in the face and then he stuck his finger in my chest and said you don't know you've been out of the regiment for five years and you don't know anyone in that chain of command. So go back and tell your anonymous NCO sources to stay in their lane, to do what they're told to do. And if I did nickel for every time a Ranger NCO complained about what he was told to do, I'd be a rich man. And they turned and walked away. And, you know, I was not, like, I had no expectation of what was going to happen there. I'd never done that before in that type situation. But I was confident,

you know, I felt like that was an emotional reaction by him. And I was confident that even the most selfish leader would, with time, consider what he had just said and consider the implications of doing nothing. And from a selfish standpoint, go, hey, I probably need to look into this because, you know,

this guy could make me look bad. And so, you know, that's what I just, I just trusted that something would happen. He would do something. Well, you know, I went back to commanding the unit. Within a week or two, someone came up and told me, hey, you know 275, just redeployed. By the way, our request for augmentees was denied by a higher headquarters. So these guys were sitting around doing nothing. They ended up doing nothing.

But for some reason, they weren't allowed to come and do missions with us. And they redeployed back to Fort Lewis. And my thinking at the time was that he must have looked into it, must have found this was going on. And that's why, because why else would you leave in the beginning phases of the Iraq war? Why would you fly back to Fort Lewis, especially when, you know, I've got guys getting shot because we don't have enough guys to isolate targets. So that was my conclusion and I didn't think anything of it. You know, any time after that, I did a tour.

It was my war college year after that. I was promotable to full colonel. I, you know, pinned on when they gave me command of the unit. so I had to do my one year off. And so I basically was off the grid in that next year. I didn't know, you know, what if anything happened? And it was many, many years later after I got out where, you know, Krakauer wrote that book.

And I finally read that book in 2015. And as I was reading it, and I didn't really. read it because a friend of mine said it was too political. Don't waste your time with it. But I read it in 2015 and I came across this passage where Crackauer had Pat Tillman's diaries and he printed three of his passages from his diary and they were a biap. And so I'm reading it and, you know, it's, they're in the book, but he says, last night, we helped carry in four wounded Delta Force guys. Somehow, you know, combat became more real. I never thought it would happen.

You never know. And then his next passage was, we're flying home at zero, 3.30 tomorrow. I'm not sure at the time. Thank fucking God. And so I read this and I was like, holy shit. Pat Tillman was, I didn't even know he was in second in battalion at the time when they were in Iraq, much less did I know he was one of the guys who carried the stretcher in. So, you know, I started talking to Ranger NCOs and going back and trying to piece this back together. Hey, whatever happened, you know, during that time.

And again, one of the guys I mentioned, Ted Kennedy, was, you know, a huge source of enlighten it from me. He told me about, you know, them returning to Fort Lewis, what happened. And he also told me for the first time that the same chain of command that those guys came and complained about to me was in place in Afghanistan one year later. And that's when, you know, I kind of realized, hey, wow, this is, you know, what do I do with this information? He also told me that Mrs. Tillman was still investigating what happened. She was, you know, talking to a bunch of the guys. She wanted to know anything, anyone knew about it. And so I felt compelled to provide her with this information, not thinking it was some key clue or anything.

thing. I just felt compelled to tell her about it and to tell her that Pat carried my guys in. And, you know, what a great guy was in Iraq. So, you know, that conversation led to her reading my book and then saying to me, hey, you know, can you, I have these investigative documents. I know you were in Afghanistan. You were a ranger. You know all these people. Could you? take a look at it and tell me what you think. And I said, you know, the only thing any of us could say to the mother of a fallen comrade, I said, you know, of course. And I drove up there that next day, 400 miles, and picked up the investigative documents, met her. You know, my first words to her were an apology for the Army. And, you know, just to tell her that we're

not, you know, everyone I've ever talked to is embarrassed about that. And, you know, I have no idea what happened, but I'll read these documents and I'll tell you what I think, even if it's not what you may want to hear. Because at the time, she was, you know, she'd been twisted into, you know, just wild ideas about what happened and not because she was, not because she was delusional or something but because she'd been lied to multiple times she'd been told multiple stories about what happened and so you know that's human nature anytime you know when you're punched in the nose once you learn when you're punched in the nose twice you know what is the like hey i'm done right yeah and so she was and uh so i started reading the documents talking to

every ranger i could talk to uh that was 2017 and um You know, Jack, I think I said this to you in a separate conversation. You know, what was a very difficult thing? I knew when I told her I'd look at it, when I got home, you know, 3,500 pages of documents. I spread them out in my office. And I just was like, hey, you know, I might as well get started. And I started reading one binder.

And nine hours later and about 100 sticky notes later, I was like just captivated by it. And I knew there was something there. I knew I needed to go talk to the rangers who were involved. And, you know, that began my journey talking to those guys. And, you know, that, you know, collectively, both talking to her and talking to those rangers just became one of the most. rewarding things that I've ever done in my career. And, you know, along the way, just fascinated by,

you know, the terrain, the circumstances, everything we've talked about already in this, you know, was very obvious, was very obviously going on on the ground that day. You know, guys making great recommendations, common sense. recommendations being denied, being told no, you can't do that, or not even being answered on the radio. And so as I accumulated that knowledge, it kind of came together with what I already knew about bad leadership and toxic leadership. And the more guys I talked to, the more it became, you know, just completely obvious.

but the real breakthroughs, you know, were from talking to them and then just diving into the terrain, the timing, the radio logs, seeing what people really said. And, you know, I started talking to the guys. It was a slow process at first because not many guys wanted to talk about it. It was difficult to find most of them. But with each guy I found, that guy. led me to a couple more guys. And, you know, patterns started to avail, just shocking patterns. You know, I don't have PTSD. So to me, it's, I don't know what, I can't like imagine what it is, just like depression. You know, people used to think depression is fake. We know it's not now.

And you can't imagine depression if you don't have it. And what shocked me was how many of these guys were absolutely devastated by what happened. And most of that devastation was built on guilt and frustration. And the frustration was they had no idea what happened. They never were allowed to see any of the investigative documents. They didn't know these decisions were being made behind the scene. They didn't know their platoon leader was being told, no, you can't blow up the vehicle. Keep keep going. You know, just senseless shit on top of senseless shit. And, you know, it had an effect on me.

It really, you know, instead of detouring me, it, you know, hardened my resolve to get to the bottom of it and help these guys out. Pete, can you, because I think a lot of people now are very familiar with, with Pat Tillman being killed in fratricide. But can you lay out what the mission was, what the scenario was, and where these command decisions and the refusals of certain requests were? Can you sort of lay out what the scenario was for us? Yeah, sure.

So it starts with terrain. And, you know, coincidentally, this area that the Rangers were driving around looking for weapons caches is what I believe there might be another one. It might be tied, but there's probably no more dangerous, hostile place in Afghanistan. Tribally, terrain-wise, same thing. There might be another chunk of terrain somewhere equally arduous as this area, but not more arduous. So both the terrain and the enemy are as bad as you can get. any time. And how do I know that? Because I fought, you know, the Battle of Shahi Coe, known as

Anaconda. And when we chased the foreign fighters, me and my recchi guys followed the trail of tears on the 13th day as they, the last remnants of the Al-Qaeda fighters fled. They fled west. And it turned out, you know, I figured this out about a month in looking at the map, where Pat Tillman was killed was eight kilometers west of Takar, which is, you know, the mountain where all those guys died in the, you know, the medals of honor and everything. So we chased them right to the border, right through this area. And as we were in that area, we knew from intelligence, but we knew firsthand from being in it how hostile that area was. I had a safe house in Oregon as the AFO commander, and I also had one in Kaust. So to get from Orgoon to Kaust, the straight line is to go right through this area.

We would not go through it. And when we had to, which was twice, I drove through it twice. We only had one rule, never go through in a convoy, go through in low-vis vehicles, buy as much time as you can, get through quickly. but do not look like an enemy convoy because these are the hardest core posthumes that there are. And it's a smuggling haven between Pakistan and Afghanistan. So it's not just those tribes. There's other people passing through there all the time.

And so I knew how dangerous and daunting it was. And so when I read their mission, you know, I still remember the moment it was actually in this office. all the papers were on the floor. I dropped the binder that it was in and just, you know, shook my head in disgust that they were just randomly driving around to find weapons cachets

and hoping that Osama bin Laden might be out back feeding one of the goats or something. And, you know, it was the exact opposite thing we should have been doing. And it's not even so much the ranger's fault. as it is the overall Afghanistan strategy. Just the fact they were allowed to go in there to do that for no specific intelligence

is mind boggling. And so these guys, the platoon and second battalion, flew into Bogrom and within three days, they were in their vehicles out driving around in the field with Now coming back into their base, what ended up being eight days. So these are brand new guys, most of them. A few of them had a prior tour.

They were there for a couple weeks in November of 2003. But other than that, no real on-the-ground knowledge. And not just that. The baseline ground elevation of this area is 6,000 feet. So, you know, lesson learned from Battle of Shahi code is you don't go into any area above 3,000 feet unless you're properly acclimated. And, you know, unknown lesson from that battle is most of those follow-on forces that came in were also flown out with altitude sickness. And that's a lot of these foreign forces, the, you know, other units, conventional units. And we were telling people that.

We were saying, look, you need to come to Gardez first and acclimate. It's, you know, it's right at, I think, 4,800 feet and acclimate and then go in. But, you know, we were blowing that off. So I would have stopped them just for lack of acclamation. But to go into that area and not understand how dangerous it was, was, you know, already a formula for disaster. and when you read the interview notes, you know, you read the S3, the commander, these guys talking, they talk about this firefight they got in, they say, well, you know, it was just a, you know, happenstance. We had been in that area for eight days and all dry holes, you know, no enemy contact.

And I feel comfortable sending guys back, five home vs back in there today. Well, again, I dropped my binder when I read that because in Afghanistan, if you're a history, you know, if you've read the history of Afghanistan, you understand that eight days of no contact means they've been studying you for eight days. Right. And you are eight times more likely to be ambushed because that's the only tactic they were using at the time. that's their tactic of choice, the far ambush. You know, you can go look online at the videos of how they did it to the Soviets. They are sizing you up, and you can bet they were sizing those rangers up. So, you know, on the day this mission happened, they had an inoperable Humvee,

and they were at a border control point called Border Control Point 5 right on the Pakistani Afghan border. And the platoon leader called it in and said, hey, this thing's deadline. It won't start. Recommend we leave it here or you come pick it up in a helicopter and take it back to Kaus. You know, deny. Drag it with you. You guys have been your behind schedule. And, you know, the Sink Matrix, your platoon on the Sink Matrix is all red.

And we need to get back green. So, you know, common sense and the response is senselessness. So these guys hooked up a deadlined Humvee to another Humvee using nylon straps and took off from that border control point five with a helipad, which, by the way, you know, a helicopter flew in the last spare part. It flew in the company commander and the XO to tell the platoon. leader, hey, you need to get back on schedule. The old man's really getting pissed. So off they go. And, you know, guys, you can watch the video online. I've posted it online. It was the fourth investigation videoed the entire canyon. When you see this canyon, they literally were dragging a Humvee through the equivalent of the Grand Canyon. Yeah. Like trying to get through the Grand Canyon with a Humvee.

And by this time, it had no front wheels. It couldn't be steered. So it was elevated. It was just two wheels rolling. And anyone who's done off-road work knows, you know, trying to get a jingo truck with a Humvee on two wheels through that stuff is an exercise in futility. So their request to blow the vehicle, you know,

I should say they dragged it for four and a half hours that morning. Their average speed was 1.5 miles an hour. So, you know, that's important, not just for understanding the futility of it, but think of the stress levels in those guys. You're in enemy territory going 1.5 miles an hour in the middle of mountains. Yeah. And to paint it for people, because those BCPs were generally on elevated locations. So when you say like the Graham Canaan is, like they're, they're towing something down.

switchbacks hand-carved roads. Yes. Like that hand-carved roads that are one vehicle wide that when you're in the driver's seat or the passenger seat. One Toyota Tacoma wide, not one home-wide. Right, right, exactly. You can look over the edge and see like the precipice. Like, it's right there.

Was the no to blow it in place and no to he'll back it out? Was that coming from the battle space owner? Was that coming from their? direct chain of command. Where was that coming from? Yeah. So again, important lesson here, which, you know, was illuminated to me once again by these senior NCOs who whose comment was, if you want to know what went wrong in Afghanistan, start with the way we tried to command and control it. And in this case here, they had just switched. Remember, this is only 2004.

So we're only really two years into it. And we've already pretty much lost our way because I was, you know, with the first guys in in the winter of 2001, 2002. This is the spring of 2004. And here's how the command and control was set up at the time. It was called the CFT concept. the cross-functional team concept. And the cross-functional team stipulated every staff was exactly the same around Afghanistan. And there were no more company talks, battalion talks.

There were just these CFTs where everybody, you brought all your staff officers. Everybody was in one place. They lived off their VTCs. That drove their schedule every day. So this platoon, who on this day as they leave Border Control.5, is the only platoon or so we thought out in the field at the time. The only rifle platoon, the other eight rifle platoons are back in planning the next dry hole. Their chain, the way they report, is back to the first CFT, which is it's Salerno and Koust. And it looks like all of them.

There's 10, everyone has a U-table. there's 10 staff officers on each side. 10 of them are supposed to be working on current ops and 10 on future ops. Don't ask me how that ever was explained to anyone. I don't know every op is future in my opinion. So 10 and 10. And then the CFT commander behind him is the lower level command. So the CFT is a battalion commander or battalion S3.

In this case, it was the S3. and behind him is the company commander and company XO. So when the platoon leader, he drove, I told you, the four and a half hours out of BCP5, they pull into this town called Magara. It's a Pashtun town, you know, something out of the history books 100 years back. They've, you know, barely ever seen a westerner. And suddenly this convoy of 10 vehicles. with Rangers in Space Age combat gear, get out with a busted up vehicle.

And that's where he's calling back for help. And his, you know, his first call is, hey, we got a deadline vehicle. It cannot go any further. Recommend we either blow it or you bring in a 47 to lift it out. They said, Roger, got it. they reply an hour later. Okay, so, you know, this is another binder dropping moment for me as I'm reading it. One hour later, they reply, you know, permission to blow the vehicle denied, and we don't have any helicopters.

Well, you know, in the interviews, remember, I'm reading present and, you know, future, I'm reading the interviews of what the chain of command said about their decisions to investigators. In that interview, you know, the battalion commander said, hey, we don't blow vehicles. It's against army policy. You know, it just provides propaganda to the enemy. And so, you know, that's why we denied it. Well, that's, you know, preposterous. I had just blown up an M1, A2 tank. $4.5 million tank in Iraq one year earlier because it flipped over and we were, it would take about a week to get that thing out of the hole it was in. Right. So I knew right away that was BS.

And the helicopter, you know, no investigator could ever find a record of a request for a helicopter. I just told them no, keep dragging it. You know, it's very clear they were mad at this platoon because it had fallen, behind schedule. And you guys know, the sync matrix. And this is where I go back to, these are lessons we have to internalize for the future. This modern command and control model is not modern. It's antiquated. And in my opinion, this is an example of the first time in modern military history where we've gone backwards. And we've gone backwards because of technology. In Vietnam, if those guys were out there driving around with those Humvees, their company commander, his FO, his two RTOs, and a small security team would have been on the highest centrally located hill camping out until they came back in with a PRC 77 radio.

But he would have been on that radio all the time. And anything they needed, he'd be giving them guidance or relaying it to hire to help him out. And in this case, this CFT concept worked exactly against that because, as it turns out, many of these lags in responses are in part due to the fact they've got these VTCs going on with the commanding general. So they're sitting in this talk, tactical operation center, you know, just enthralled with the VTC hanging on every word of the general, why these guys are struggling with a real world combat problem in the field, and they're either not answering them or going, tell them to keep dragging it, Ryan. You know what I mean? What are they? Pussies? And so these guys are told, no, you can't blow it. We can't lift it. We can get a wrecker out there, but the wrecker is not allowed to go off the KG highway.

Again, some obscure, someone made an SOP for the wrecker, which is a tow truck, that it could not leave the Kaus de Gardez Highway, which was 15 kilometers from these guys. So what they come back and tell them, after four and a half hours in Magara, being sworn by civilians, it's hot, there's biting flies, they're out of water, they're low on food. and again, for both you two and anyone watching this, you know, you can just imagine they're also probably red hot pissed off at this chain of command for the senselessness. They're told, not only do you got to keep tolling that vehicle, we want you to split the platoon because we need half the platoon to get to this other town called mana as quickly as possible.

No reason, no enemy, you know, It wasn't like they just saw UBL there or one of his underlings. It was because the sync matrix was still red for mana. So they told him rush off, get the mana, and, you know, that's it. We don't want to hear anything else out of you. And the lieutenant, you know, in my opinion, did a fantastic job. He gave three reasons why that didn't make sense. And one of the things I recommend in my book is we go to a new concept called logic of why that you don't just give an order.

You always have to explain the logic of why it makes sense. And that's how our brains work. You can't persuade anyone unless they understand the logic of why. And that's usually threefold, firstly, secondly, thirdly. And the lieutenant, this is why it's a case study. He did exactly that. He said, here's why it doesn't make sense. First of all, we'll be splitting up the platoon, and we only have one SACCOM radio,

so we're not going to be able to talk to each other. And if something happens, one of them's going to be, one of us going to be left out there without any comms. Second of all, we can get to the target. Second of all, we can't even clear MANA until tomorrow morning as per Battalion SOP. So why are we in a rush to get there before the sun goes down just so we can sit outside the town to clear it the next day? And thirdly, it's much faster if we all move together, go drop the vehicle off at the KG highway, then turn around and come back and clear the town.

And the answer was no. No logic why. Just no. Do what you were told to do and continue mission. And so they did. They split the platoon up. It's a random split. They wanted certain guys back in the rear for planning.

They wanted the mortars, the snipers, and a couple other specialty guys back. Well, the problem with that is when you're doing motorized ops, every vehicle is set up in a certain way with certain guys doing certain tasks. You know, there's gunners. There's guys who sit in the seats next to the gunners. And over time, they come up with their SOPs of how to operate. They're also organic. You know, squads are together. There's half a squad in one vehicle, half in another.

So when they split the platoon and they had to split it based on random criteria, they just disintegrated the organic nature of the, of these teams. So now you had team leaders working for squad leaders. They'd never worked for before. You had soldiers like Pat Tillman working for different team leaders and squad leaders. You had guys attached to different groups.

And look, we trained to do that. That's not a kiss of death. But it's a very subtle yet important degradation of that units. ability to deal with chaos and complexity. And in a situation where there's no time to even rehearse, to sit there and go, okay, you know, squad leaders, you're gonna do this.

If this happens, you do that. They didn't even have time for that. They just took off because they had to get to MANA before sundown. And, you know, that takes us into the canyon at that point. What I don't understand, you know, from a leadership position is how can you have an element out there? If you've only got one satcom radio for this element, how can you have, whether it's your,

you know, your lead element or the element, the stay behind, how can you have an element out there? Did you have no idea, no idea in the world what their sit-repe, you know, what their sit-rep is? Dave, you know, same thing. That's why I said it's another binder dropping moment. Like what leader is okay with that? And that's why, you know, that's why the book is important because it's a tactical book. And we've got to, not just in this incident, but others like it, we've got to memorialize those lessons. You know, this is basic stuff, you know, transplanted into modern warfare.

But it tells you that these principles are unassailable. You cannot divide your force randomly and arbitrarily. you can't send someone out to a place that doesn't make any sense just because you want to change a color on a sync matrix. You can't ignore your men in the field. You know, in the unit, when I got to the unit, one of the sergeant majors gave me a briefing on it, and he said, hey, look, you know, right now we're not a war, but we send out a lot of singleton missions. when one guy is out, is deployed. Everybody back here in the rear is in support of that guy.

So you might get a call at 0.3 in the morning to come in, and it might be something incredibly, you know, minimalistic. Like this guy might need special laces for his boots that are in one of his kit bags, in his locker. And we need to get them on a FedEx plane as quick as possible. When that happens, that's your mission and you take it as serious as possible. And because I served in Columbia, I understood that. I understood both ends of it, you know, between my tours and while I was out there. And the unit always lived by that.

Everybody in the rear is there to support the guys in the field. So this is one rifle platoon is in the field. these CFTs, which I'm sorry I, you know, we got distracted, the command and control arrangement's important to understand. You've got this CFT 1010 command in Salerno, which is Koust. They can't do anything unless the main CFT in Bogrum, which is set up the exact same way, but on steroids because it's regimental headquarters. they can't do anything without its permission. And it doesn't stop there. They're connected with the CFT in Balad, Iraq, which is our joint special operations headquarters,

and they can't do anything without the CFT in Balad telling them it's okay. So, you know, it's untraceable, but it's not, you know, it's not speculation to say that each of these requests were not just going to Koust, they were going back to Bogram, back to Balad, back down to Bogum, back down to Kaus, back out to these guys in the field. Yeah. No. And it's, and this is where, you know, it becomes to me such a historic lesson. And, you know, Jack, I saw a podcast you did where you talked about when you joined, you know, motivated by 9-1-1.

And, you know, I think you said on it, people forget. After 9-1-1, it was like World War III. You know, everyone was like, hey, we're at war. We're at war. We're a war with the world. You know, this is it. Well, it was also like World War II, right? It was like Pearl Harbor. And it was also like Vietnam, Gulf of Tunkin.

You know, when the shit hits the fan in America, we're a freedom-loving country. And most of us grow up like you did, Dave, like you did, like I did. We have our hardships, but we have an unbelievable upbringing. And we appreciate the freedom we're given. So when the time calls for someone to come protect those freedoms, patriots rise up and they say, send me. And, you know, I didn't fully appreciate it until I did this research, how 2001 did the same thing.

And many of the members in this platoon were those guys, were those patriots, including Pat Tillman. And, you know, we're all young at that age. Okay. So I've heard people say, you know, you were a fool if you volunteered for Vietnam. And whenever I read that, I was like, man, I would have volunteered for Vietnam in a second, you know, all the way through. and not because, you know, of some like policy principle, but because we want to protect freedom. And so you cannot understand the logic of why war happens or why our country goes to war. We trust that our civilian and military leaders are thinking those thoughts and are telling us the truth,

that we're going to war for a good reason and that this makes sense. So it's a contract. And those guys, those guys like Kat, those guys like Jack, that's our national treasure. These are the finest humans in our country. You know, there's only certain guys who will raise their hand to protect freedom, especially the freedoms of those who won't stand up and protect it themselves. So it's a small cohort. And when they do that, they don't really know what they're getting into.

And that's just reality. It's not, you know, it's not like a reflective of any of our intelligence. We have no idea whether you're 18, 19, or 25 when you're joining. And let's face it, when you're 45 in the military, you still don't fully understand why we're doing what we're doing. Right. But at that age, you have no idea and you're trusting. So that's a contract with the leaders, the military and civilian leaders, that from here on out, you're going to make good decisions and to the best of your ability to solve complex problems that enable those individuals, those national treasure, to accomplish their purpose. And that was not the case here in Afghanistan and not the case here.

And so when you hear about Pat Tillman and, you know, you can go on and look at his videos and they, you know, your eyes are water as you listen to this great American after 9-1-1 saying, hey, my grandfather served, my uncle served, you know, my family is served throughout history. I love this country. I love the freedom. It's given me, you know, my job is just, it doesn't matter. And he was a pro football player. And he joined. He loved. He loved. left that behind and he joined up. And same thing. He's a metaphor for all the rest of us. That contract was in place there. But in order to make that contract legitimate, we've got to start holding these decision makers feet to the fire with accountability.

And they have a job to do. And like I said, it's to make good decisions and solve complex problems in a way that takes care of the people that have volunteered. and that did not happen in this case. Pete, you mentioned, I'm sorry, Jake, Pete, you mentioned before the show that, you know, people will raise issues saying that the only people, the only reason people care about this issue is because Toman was a professional football player.

He was a national figure. He was known. That's the only reason people care. And like you said, it's like, yeah, maybe like that's a good thing, though, in the sense of there, there's a personality that's showing the issue. because if it weren't somebody who were known, these things happen. These things happen, you know, on a more regular basis, on a more regular basis than we would like and that people know. And the fact that there is a celebrity that is sort of like leading the way.

I was about to say, Dave, like maybe the reason why it's so well known is because the government lied about it. But then you're absolutely right that the government unfortunately lies about a lot of things. And maybe the reason why this story came to prominence was because the government lied about someone who had a level of notoriety and fame. Right. Yeah. No, guys, that's that's it. And, you know, he's a great American. You know, he was already a great American before he joined.

But, you know, what he did when he joined, that's why I used the comparison to World War II, where you had, you know, professional baseball players joining up, you know, flying bombers and stuff. That's a sacrifice. You know, he made a sacrifice. And, you know, you can go back and look on YouTube. He never gave another interview after that interview he gave before he signed up. even why he was in the Rangers, they were constantly pestering him. The battalion commander would call him in, and in fact, right before they deployed to Afghanistan,

he called him in and said, hey, look, I've got a great opportunity. We'd really like you to be in the Army calendar. And, you know, Tillman turned that down. And don't ask me what the Army calendar is. I have no idea. I can't even imagine what it is today. but he didn't give an interview. He never wanted any attention.

And when you talk to the guys, you see, he's like, you know, he's one of the guys, but he's a guy everybody liked to talk to. Even the NCOs, the staff sergeants, squad leaders will tell you, you know, he was just one of those guys. He was a great conversationalist. He was not a problem in any way. As I mentioned with myself, and I'm sure you guys were the same way, he was a warrior. He was aggressive by nature.

He wanted to take the fight to the enemy. But, you know, this guy made an incredible sacrifice, and he didn't want any credit, very humble. And so, again, it's not so important that he was a pro football player or, you know, anything. about his background, he's a metaphor for all of these guys who join to stand up for freedom. And if it weren't for him, if he was just Joe Schmedlap, we wouldn't have learned the lessons we learned from this. And we wouldn't have learned that, you know, toxicity destroys, toxic leadership. And we've got to stop sticking our heads in the sand around toxic leadership. You know, how many of us and how many conversations have you had where guys go, yeah, at that time, my battalion commander was a fucking asshole beyond belief.

Well, that guy should have been fired. Someone should have done something about that guy. Same thing. Sergeant majors, you know, it doesn't matter what level, platoon leaders, platoon sergeants, it doesn't matter. Yeah. If you're toxic, you need to be out of here because toxic leadership destroys. And that's what happened here. The just bad decision on top of bad decision, which just led these guys into chaos, into a situation where they, you know, by the time it happened, there was really no hope for getting out of it.

So can you, to the best of your ability, can you walk us through the events of that day? Yeah. So they took off, you know, at 1800 exactly. So they split the platoon, as I said, into what they called two serials, serial one, serial two. Serial one took off first. They were, that Pat Tillman was with them. The platoon leader was there. And they had to get the mana.

So, you know, I have maps in the book. And when you come out of Mogher, it comes to a Y intersection, you've got to go left to go to. mana and they took the left and about a kilometer and a half after the Y intersection, you come to the mouth of a canyon and it's one of the most dramatic terrain features you can imagine. You can watch it live on my YouTube channel. Just go to peatblaber.com or go to firefight.peblaber.com. And you can watch a drive-through during the investigation of the entire canyon. And you just will not believe this terrain. You will not believe how difficult it is to drive any vehicle through it,

much less a jing a truck with a Humvee. So they take off, they pass through that canyon. It's uneventful. Nothing happens. They come out the other end of the canyon, horseshoe canyon, and they're at another creek intersection. If they go left, they're going down to Mata. They go right.

They're going back up toward the KG Highway. They were a little bit disoriented, which is totally understandable. They did what all infantrymen do. They did a map check. While they were sitting there in their vehicles with their map check, the second platoon had taken off about seven to ten minutes after them. So they flew through the canyon, serial one, but serial two, remember, has got a jinga truck dragging a Humvee, and they're in the lead in this cereal. And now, I don't even think they were going 1.5 miles an hour.

I think it's less than that because to get through this creek bed, you literally have to make right angle turns back and forth. And just imagine a jinga truck to viewers who've never seen one is the same as a dump truck, same size as the dump truck or the garbage truck that picks your garbage up each day. That's how big it is and the weight's about the same. It's pulling a Humvee on its back wheels, so there's no maneuverability there. And so they're struggling to get through, but they were barely into the canyon, serial two, when two explosions happened off to their right, which is cardinal direction north, on the slope.

There's, you know, no one knows what those were. They could have been RPGs. They could have been mortars. If you read everyone's account, some guys say one, some say the other. It doesn't matter. Two explosions. One of them dislodged a rock, you know,

about the size of a humble. B came flying down. And so you can imagine watching this rock make its way down the side of this, this canyon wall. And, you know, they, they use common sense and zeroed in on it. And it ended up going right between two vehicles. And about 30 seconds later, RPK fire opened up from the ridg line. And, you know, there's there's numerous accounts.

guys saw guys moving up there, five guys in zero two and seven in zero one said they saw the guys running around. So serial two's in the canyon. They're lined up behind this jingga truck, towing a home v, and they return fire, you know, deploy, suppress, report. That's what you do in an ambush. But remember, your first immediate action in an ambush is to drive out of the ambush or run. out of the ambush if you can. They couldn't do that. So, you know, all of that accumulated stress from BCP5 through Magara is already, you know, flooding their brains. Now the worst, the most traumatic stress-inducing event that can happen to the human brain is occurring. And that's claustrophobia. They can't go left, they can't go right, they can't turn around, and they can't go forward. They

can't even see forward. And they can barely see the tops of the canyon. Only, only around certain bends can they even see the trees that, that outline the crest of this canyon. So they do what they should do, which is, you know, suppress the target to get them to stop shooting. Most of the guys just thought, you know, we're walking dead men. We're trapped. And literally, when you watch the video, you can see that the enemy could have killed them with rocks instead of bullets. They could have just started avalanches and dislodge large boulders to do the same thing that bullets would have done. But they, you know, Rangers being, you know, expert machine gunners, they opened up with everything they had. Now, it's important the terrain is just like

every military engagement always comes back to terrain. So when I did my research on this, I spent over 100 hours on Google Earth. And I don't want to make that sound like it was some really hard thing that I had to suck up. I was addicted to it. And if you go on Google Earth and look at this Slot Canyon, you'll get addicted to it too, because it's absolutely amazing. But what you see in the Slot Canyon is it's shaped like a mushroom. So it goes up, over, comes back and down. So exactly like a mushroom, up, out, and over. And so they're driving, and these are, remember, non-giro-stabilized weapon systems.

They're just on a stiff anchory, right. So the vehicle is in the toughest off-road terrain on the planet, which means it's bouncing up and down. The driver is, you know, scared chill as he's doing what he should do, which is drive. But he's got to navigate left, right, like, you know, literally like a Formula One driver to get around these rocks and boulders trapped behind this jinga truck. So the guys in Zero 2, you know, it's when you understand what they went through before they came out, you begin to understand what happened when they came out. out and you also understand what was happening to their fires. You know, the brain can't keep track of directions unless it has a known point to base it off of.

So the, you know, our neocortex, our thinking brain has these things called grid cells that tell you where you're at based on a known location. So think North Star, Snow Cap, peak off in the distance. It has to have that, but they're in a canyon, so they have no known point. They really can't tell anything unless they're looking at the wrist compass, which you can't do because you're being shot at. So as they go around this mushroom, their bullets are, you know, going in directions where, you know, they can't really predict where they're ending up. Now, let's cut, let's leave those guys in the canyon and go to serial one. Remember, they were doing a map check when they heard those mortar or RPG rounds. As soon as they heard them, they hopped out of

their vehicles and they were like, what the hell is that? They didn't know, but they could see the tracer fire arcing up out of the canyon. They knew it was coming from the canyon. Some of the guys, you know, just suspected it was serial two, but most of them had no idea. serial two had turned around and was coming back in the same direction as them. So nobody knew that the other half of the platoon was the one in that firefight. Some guys suspected it, but no one knew it. So in the heat of the moment, they said, hey, let's go up to a position where we can get overwatch, where we can see what's happening and conduct overwatching fire in case it is

Serial 2 to support them. So they ran up this path that was right next to their vehicles. A smoker run, it was about 700 feet, and they ran until the path petered out. And then they had to stop because they were taking fire. They could see the enemy on the same northern ridge line that Serial 2 was shooting at. So they started shooting two. But as they did that, they began taking unbelievably heavy fire, which, you know, the first investigation suspected was zero two. And in my analysis, I believe the majority of those fires that were raining down on them were the crossfires from serial two. Remember, 50-Cal, 240G, and saw, along with mortars, AT-4s. So all this ordinance is, you know, flying up and over these.

ridge lines. We can't discern which is enemy, which is friendly, but they were definitely underneath the crossfire from serial two. So these guys were in the canyon for about 12 minutes. You know, I told you it was less than 1.5 miles an hour. They're literally moving that slowly. The stress is building up. Zero one now is up on this spur, this elevated high ground. Unfortunately, the way the terrain is, you cannot see into the canyon from the top of this spur. And unfortunately, if you do a line of sight analysis, their line of sight radios also did not work. So they still had no comms. There are two purposes for running up there to make comms with serial two and to provide

overwatch fire support were now nixed by the terrain. but they didn't have a lot of time. There wasn't, you know, they were smoked. Remember I talked about equipment? They ran up there with flack vests and helmets. I believe, you know, that was the SOP that any time you left the vehicle, you had to have that on. I would never, you know, a lesson should be if you're running up into mountains after an insurgent enemy, you do not wear a flack vest or a helmet.

unless you want to. You know, I think it should be personal choice, but you can't run up a mountain at 6,000 and 6,500 feet with a flack vests in helmet. So they were smoked when they got to the top of that ridge. Remember now they'd split the platoon. So Pat Tillman, he's a team leader. He's got one guy that's with him from his team

and Afghan who decided to follow them up to the spur. and that's who he's in charge of. The squad is not his squad. He hasn't worked with them before. Squad leader's amazingly competent guy, you know, as good as they come. And Pat got up there. He assessed situation.

The squad was already arrayed by its two fire teams, as per their SOP. You know, that left Pat's team. What am I going to do? Pat said, hey, I'm going to go down this. this south side, there's a couple of big rocks over there. We're going to get behind those and see what we can see. And squad leader, yeah, sure, sounds good.

He looked up. It looked like a good position. And Pat, a young private named O'Neill, and one Afghan ran down there. And they took position behind a boulder, two boulders. As soon as they got there, they started taking fire from the south. And Pat directed fire south. So this is now the opposite direction, other side of the canyon, then everyone else is firing on the north side.

And they're firing at it. You know, to no avail, Pat turns around. He said, hey, I got an idea. Went back up to the squad leader said, hey, you mind if I drop my, we drop our gear. We run down to the canyon and go up the other side to see if we can engage. that enemy. Now, he never would have gotten up the other side, but as I point out in the book, his idea to drop his helmet and his flack vest and to go down to the Canyon Road, which is a creek,

was actually a good idea. And, you know, especially in retrospect, because the spot they were in was the most dangerous and deadly spot, you know, that could have been chosen. So, The squad leader told him no, you know, those guys don't know where you're at. Stay put. And he did. So they're in position. They're down the spur about 25 meters from this squad. The squad had stopped behind the military crest of the spur.

Pat went over the military crest down to these two boulders. No way, you know, for him to know what was about to happen or the squad leader. So it's only a lesson, a retrospective lesson for infantrymen in the future. You know, in uncertainty, never give up that military crest. Always, you know, stay behind it, stay protected because you got options. And the problem with going down off the military crest is you have no options. And so they were down Pat, Private O'Neill, and the after. Now, the Afghan had just joined him that morning.

No one knew him. No one knew anything about him. He would not, he obviously didn't speak English, but you don't need to speak English in a firefight. There were thousands of rounds at this point, including mortar rounds, arcing over their heads. You know, you could hear the sonic crack, which we all know when you hear the sonic crack,

that means the bullets under 50 meters. above you. That's the noise it makes as it breaks the sound barrier. So these are, these rounds are arcing over their heads. Mortar and two or three rounds are blowing up. And this Afghan is 10 feet in front of the boulders standing there with his AK-47, just unloading with his magazines. And Pat and O'Neill tried to get them to come back to no avail. You know, they tried waving, which again is universal. They tried using their weapons, you know, to get him back, but he would not come back. He stood out 10 feet directly in front of those two boulders, standing up, firing his AK

across the road. Well, now we go back to serial two in the canyon. They've been in there 10 minutes, changing out barrels. Some guys who fired their basic load. they're coming out now going west. So they've gone in every cardinal direction inside the canyon. So they're, you know,

uncertain of which way they're pointing. And remember, they have no idea where serial one is. And serial one has no idea that's even serial two. So when they come out of the canyon, it suddenly opens up and the creep turns around a small spur that is, you know, a finger off of this larger spur thereon. And that's the first time they turn and look in the same direction they've been shooting at,

the same main direction, which is north. They look north again, and there's this Afghan, bearded Afghan, AK-47, firing on auto, right over their head. As the first investigator says, he might even have been fired at them, mistaking them as, you know, Taliban. So the squad leader, you know, comes around that corner and he's in that front passenger seat, in my opinion, and in a lot, you know, a lot of the other squad leaders said the same thing.

You know, he did what almost anyone would do who's been shooting at an enemy on the Northern High Ground for 10 to 12 minutes and sees an Afghan on the Northern High Ground. shooting in AK-47. He looked through his ACCOG site and dropped that guy. Unfortunately, his crew were all guys who hadn't worked with him. So they have no preset verbal and hand-in-arm signals. All infantrymen know this. You shoot where your team leader or squad leader shoots. When in doubt, shoot where your team leader or squad leader shoots. So all of the cruiser of weapons in the back turn to where the squad leader is shooting, which is at the Afghan, who is 10 feet directly in front of Pat Tillman and the Ranger Private, and they open up. And in that fuselage,

which happened, you know, I don't even think it was a full minute that they were shooting in that fuselage right at the end. They, Pat was hit and killed. And so in the investigative documents, you know, there's all this conjecture about you know, Pat in the private, they were yelling, they were waving their hands. Well, every guy

in Zero 2 was deaf at this point. So, you know, in the book, I point out that they had no ear protection on. They didn't have Peltors on, which would have saved them. But the human ear can only take

sound waves that are over 127 decibels for 30 seconds. Anything beyond 30 seconds at 127 decibels leads to temporary deafness. And that temporary deafness can last, depending on the length and how far over 127 decibels you go can last from a minute to an hour, to a day, to a week.

And so remember, they're shooting everything they had for 12 minutes. and with no ear protection. So they're all deaf. And it's right in all of their, you know, comments to investigators, you know, squad leaders, you know, squad leaders saying, well, and then I turned to, you know, Jones, but Jones was deaf. So I had to shake him.

And every guy says the same thing. My hearing didn't come back for five hours. You know, some guys' ears were bleeding when they came out. So they're deaf. that's number one. So these guys on the spur, when you look down at the creek bed they came out of, it's clear as day because the crepe bed is, you know, all one,

one, one, or monochromatic color, it's all tan. So the Humvee, you can see that Humvee clear as day. When you look from the creek bed back at the spur, it's the exact opposite. The spur is this modeled rock formation, of, you know, both sandstone and lava. It's got black rock. It's got, it's all cracked up, so it's got shadows in between the cracks, and it's full of foliage.

You know, rare in Afghanistan, but it's covered with foliage, green foliage. And so when I got to this part, you know, I was, you know, up until I researched that part of it, I was pretty much, yeah, you know, it sounds like then they made a mistake. They didn't do proper target discrimination. But what you learn when you see the video and you see the pictures that CID took, these high-resolution pictures, you cannot see anybody on that spur. They're invisible. Totally camouflage, even at 100, even at 75 meters, even at 35 meters.

And then you add in the human eye. When the human eye is moving, rattled up and down, left and right, it can't lock on. to a specific target. So they're bouncing in a creek bed, firing their weapons, looking up at something that's completely camouflage, and all they can make out is it's last light. So that's the final thing. It's minutes before you had to flip your nods down.

And all they can see is this bearded Afghan firing his AK, and they just did what they had been doing for 12 minutes and fired. And it's not, you know, it's not saying they'd, did the right thing or or anything like that. It's not making excuses. It's just reality. And you have to apply reality in combat, especially if you're going to be judgmental about it. And, you know, the chain of command seized on that. It was a fate accompli. It was an open and shut case from the beginning. These guys fucked up. They should have known. They should have targeted. They should have seen them.

How can you not see and hear someone yelling from 100 meters away? Without doing any of the, you know, the research without applying practical common sense to a firefight, you know, they convicted these guys and set off, you know, a series of lies because I believe the chain of command saw it is, hey, this is the easy out. You know, it's not our decisions. It's not us tell them to drag it, to split the platoon, to go to Mana for no reason.

You know, in the middle of the night, it's in the middle of the dusk. It's them for not properly target discriminated. You know, I told this to Stephen Elliott, who he wrote that book, war story. He was on this mission. And I mean, they fried the load. lowest ranking guys possible.

The PL and a couple privates and E4s, right? They did. And so the really sad thing, Jack, about that is, you know, I'm not a psychologist, but it's my belief

from talking to all these guys that the majority of the PTSD and Stevens book, I think, is a great piece, if you want to understand what happens. to read what he wrote in it. The PTSD

is more about the investigations than what happened to those guys. Because when they got back to Battalion, remember, Pat Tillman, the most famous soldier since Elvis Presley was killed. And they fucking killed him. And

you know, to guys who are unwitting and who don't have the knowledge, they end up doing the chain commands dirty work and, you know, basically ostracizing and outcasting this platoon. You can read it in the book. You know, my interviews with these guys. No one would talk to them. No one would look at them. They immediately began disintegrating guys, you know, who weren't forced out of the regiment left because, you know, they couldn't, they just, you know, couldn't take the, the, that

and the guilt that came along with it. So, you know, on top of everything else, you know, these guys became additional casualties. And because, you know, to a man, the guys I've talked to are, you know, incredible human beings. They do what incredible human beings do. And they take that responsibility. They know they didn't do it. but they can't explain why it wasn't their fault. But even though they can't, they still take responsibility because they were there.

They fired. They should have known. And then they got to live with that. And as the months and years go on, the only way you can live with that is through a bottle, is through drugs, is through depression. And, you know, that guilt adds up to PTSD. And, you know, when I would talk to these guys, And you know, you can talk to Stephen about this.

You know, they'd be going along. I go, wait a minute. Did you read any of the investigations? No. Okay, let me tell you what was going on. Let me tell you what happened to set that up. You, and then I go through step by step and tell them, and then, you know, I always ended up telling them, you have nothing to be ashamed of.

were put into a situation where you had no way to get out of it. You had no way to figure out what was happening. You did what you were trained to do. And unfortunately, you were put into a box that once you were in that box, by the time they came out of that canyon, you can watch that video that I referenced and then ask yourself, would I have fired? Because in the video, it's a reenactment. The Humvee comes around that last mini spur. looks up at the spur where the Afghan is in front of Pat Tillman, and they have a guy standing there, you know, an Afghan role player firing his weapon. You'll hear the weapon firing. It's an AK firing away.

You cannot see anything. Yeah. You have no idea what's up there. And so you have to ask yourself, would I have shot? And, you know, when I ask myself, my answer is I almost assuredly I would have shot. I can't, you know, beyond that, I kid. And the Army lied to the American public, and then they kicked these young men out of the regiment. Yeah.

Told them that they were being released for standards. Yeah. And ruined just, again, the casualties, Jack, are still occurring. You know, two of the guys still have suicidal thoughts. There's a number of them who can't work. They're in the prime of their life. They're in the prime of their earnings. life. These are, go back to what we started with. These are, are, you know, national treasure.

These are patriots who signed up after 911. And that's where that contract comes in. And that's why accountability, there should be accountability. And we need to make it the standard for the future. Yeah, you can be a, you can be a commander. You can be a general officer. But let me tell you, and you'll get all the accouthruman that comes along with that. But let me tell you something. Something else comes wrong with it. Accountability. You better make good decisions.

You better be able to solve complex problems. Or you're going to pay the price as you deserve to. And that needs to happen because my suspicion is there's a hundred more examples of this or more in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I've had a number of guys contact me. I've had Canadians contact me and say, you know, hey, this was the most enlightening thing. I was in this firefight, this friendly firefight, and that's exactly what caused it, too. It was a toxic chain of command. You know, I've had guys from other units call and say the same thing.

And, you know, it's cathartic for them to hear this. But, you know, the rest of us got to quit sticking our heads in the sand. start, you know, accepting that toxicity has no place in the military. It needs to be the number one priority for eradication. When you see toxicity, it needs to be reported. You have a duty to report that. You have a duty to do something about it. And we got to weed these people out before they kill more of our national treasure.

That's the first aspect of it. But then in the aftermath of it, you have the, the cover up is worse than the incident itself. Right. That had they come out and said, we made mistakes and this is what really happened, this would have been a very different thing than had they lied about it for so long and tried to cover it up. And that's what, as you mentioned earlier, you know, after you've been lied to once, it sets off this sort of perpetual feeling of like, well, what is the truth?

Like, am I lying to you now? Like, what's going on here? Yeah, I know. Spot on. And, you know, there's a, there's a moment in this that's, you know, a huge crossroad. It's when Kevin Tillman, who's part of serial two, and, you know, his best friend and his brother in arms and brother in blood, he finds out he's been killed. He's back at Salerno. He's flown back with the bodies in the injured platoon leader and RTO.

And he's about to accompany Pat's body back to Bagram before it goes back to Germany and then the states. And he's standing on the ramp of the helicopter and the battalion commander and the S3 come up and talk to him. and they don't say anything about friendly fire. And this is 40 hours after the event, and everyone suspected immediately, and within 24 hours knew pretty much beyond a shadow of a doubt. Within 36 hours in the AAR, the squad leaders who did not shoot him,

we're all taking responsibility for what happened. And so, you know, in the initial hot wash, they knew that somehow they killed Pat Tillman. They could not describe it, but they knew it. So these guys know it, the battalion commander, the S3. And what do they do? They, in conjunction with the regimental commander, who they've already talked to and agreed, hey, don't tell Kevin. Not yet. We don't know enough.

They send him off without telling him everything they know. And all they had to do right there was go, Kevin, you know, first off, there's nothing I could say that's going to assuage the sorrow that you have and, you know, for the death of your brother. But I want you to know everything I know about what happened right now. the man next to your brother is convinced that he was killed by friendly fire. We don't know because this was a massive chaotic firefight. We won't be able to confirm that until we get the ballistic, the forensics back from the autopsy. But right now, we believe that Pat was killed in the crossfire between 0102 and the enemy.

As soon as I get more information, I will call you and tell you what it is. and you know good news bad news doesn't get any better with age the only thing that could happen right there was you know Kevin would have gone fuck and if anyone could

understand the chaos it was Kevin Tillman he was in the rear of serial two his primary weapon malfunctioned his secondary weapon had its buttstock torn off by the wall of the canyon so he was firing his nine millimeters in the canyon up at the enemy,

fired eight rounds from a nine mill. So if anyone could understand the chaos of that moment, it would have been him. And instead, you know, they didn't tell him. And, you know, these are guys who love to quote the Ranger Creed, but I'm pretty sure there's a line in the Ranger Creed where a Ranger never lies to another Ranger. And so to me, that's Robert Rogers standing orders.

Yeah, so not telling Kevin. right there is to me beyond comprehension. Like you know, that's the moment. And if they've done that, as soon as Kevin got back to Bogram, he got on the phone to his mom, Pat's wife, Marie.

He would have told them, you know, they wanted to know everything he know, which he told them at the time, you know, what he knew, which was the beginning of this fake story you know, about what happened. And so even he was

given, you know, unwittingly giving misinformation, but he would have been able right there to tell, you know, his mom, Pat's wife, what really happened. And, you know, they deserved that. They had every right to that knowledge just like anyone else did. But they were deprived of it. And then somehow the chain of command thought it was a good idea to keep it secret for another 35 days. So, you know, this this adds to the problem, you know, the platoon has internalized that they shot him, but they have no contact in communication with Kevin, so they can't tell him. They've been told the one guy that flew back to accompany Kevin in the body, he was told, do not say anything about friendly fire till we get all the facts. And, you know, it just went on and on, got worse and worse. And,

you know, 35 days turned into 35 months, turned into almost 20 years because, you know, this book just came out. It's 19 years from when it happened. And the truth was always there. It was always in the guys. And, you know, that's the added casualties. So these guys, there might be one or two guys who had PTSD from this, not 20. or 20 plus guys, some who've had nervous breakdowns,

blaming themselves were not allowed access to the truth, the information, and like good soldiers, took responsibility themselves and had to live with that guilt and that frustration for almost 20 years. Pete, you know, we mentioned what happened to the PL and the enlisted that were on that. Has there ever been any blowback for the senior leadership that were not on the mission that created these conditions? Did they just, are they still getting promoted or were they still getting promoted through the system? Yeah. So the commanding general, so, you know, the commanding general who is in charge of the investigation,

the J-Soc commander read every, had access to everything I had access to. So when you read those, you can read, you can pick one investigation, all except the one done by regimental headquarters. So you can pick any of the other three, and you can't read that without going, what the F, man, who makes these decisions? You can't not come to the conclusion that this chain of command was toxic. And that these guys were put into a situation that there was no way to come out of other than, you know, the luckiest of luck in happenstance. I mean, they were set up to fail right there.

And, you know, they didn't say anything. They had the same information. They didn't say anything about it. And to me, you know, they went on the J-SAT commander. became a four-star general, the regimental commander became a one-star, battalion commander became a two-star. So they were not just promoted once or twice, some four or five times. And yeah, there was no accountability on any of them. And, you know, still to this day, what I would always, you know, if I was to meet one of them face-to-face, I would say to them, okay, even if you claim somehow

ignorance, how could you never check up on the rest of the guys in this platoon? Anyone who hears this story knows how devastating this was. Anyone who honestly understands Pat Tillman in his place in this platoon and that he wasn't just admired, he was revered. And he was revered because he was a guy who was doing what all the rest of these guys did from all kinds of backgrounds. He had options. He had a multimillion dollar. a contract. He gave it all up. And did he ever act condescending toward them? Did he ever act like he was superior? No. He would go out of his way to help anyone out there to give him advice, to give him some water, some food. Again, Stephen Elliott's book, my favorite part of it is

when he arrived in the Regiment in 275, his first day, he's wandering through the battalion, trying to find someone to tell him where to go. And he runs into the patty. Tillman in the stairwell. And, you know, Pat's like an E4 at the time who normally would smoke the shit out of you. But Pat's like, hey, man, welcome to the battalion. What do you need? Hey, stay in the stairwell. Come up. I'll show you where your room is. I'll get you in there so no one sees you so you can smoke. I mean, when you read this, you know, your admiration for the guy just skyrockets. He was the kind of leader. we need in the military, caring, humble, all those things.

And, you know, yet we go and we treated, these leaders treated this thing, you know, the way they did and allowed this to happen. And unfortunately, it happened to a guy, you know, who. Do we have questions about? Epidimized everything good about our military. Yeah. Do you see a, you know, as I think that, you know, know, we've, we've read and we've talked about the idea they're more like staff, flag

officers, they're more generals now than there ever have been. And, and, you know, the number of, like, you know, officers and J-Soc at the staff level is incredible and stuff like that. Is there, obviously, officers, you know, officers are very important, quality officers are very important. Officers make all the difference in those elements. But we always, you know, officers are very important. officers make all the difference in those elements. But we also like, you know, we'll bitch about the treatment of officers versus enlisted a lot of times in the sense of nobody's getting a silver star unless the officer gets a silver star. And then, you know, awards are often based on rank. And then then we see at times where these senior level officers can do no wrong, right?

That their careers are not going to be inhibited by any mistakes they made. Do you see a solution for sort of bringing the officer corps, and not all officers, and I don't wanna say this, because a lot of officers are war fighters, but is there a solution to the admin officer, the political officer, to that kind of equation? Yeah, I think it's cultural.

You know, we have to change the culture, the way we look at it to your point. And in World War II, I believe there were four, four-star generals in the Army. And today there's 44. In World War II, we had, I don't know the exact number, I believe it was like four million soldiers. Today we have 425,000. So we definitely have too many general officers. you know, in 2002, 2003 in Afghanistan, you couldn't have the standard was no element can operate in Afghanistan

unless it has a general officer in charge of it. And that's why, you know, my group, an Anaconda, Shaikhoye Coat ended up with a one-star Air Force general commanding us because you had to have a general. And I think we need to culturally eradicate that idea and go in the opposite direction to power down. You know, your history proves your, you know, combat happens at the battalion level and below. I'm not saying brigade commanders aren't important because they should be training battalions, but they're not the ones who should be running ops. And it should be company commanders, platoon leaders, platoon sergeants and squad leaders who are making battlefield decisions.

So we, you know, this, again, one of the things that motivated me to memorialize it was as a historic lesson. We need to take this away. Our model is not the right model. If we're exporting that to Ukraine right now in these other places, then we're sabotaging them. because this is not the model. The CFT massive talk with, you know, a million dollars worth of 54-inch screens and computers running the whole thing. That's not the model. We need to go backwards to the guy on the hill, you know, who can talk and who feels the cold, who feels the altitude,

who feels the threat of the enemy making the decisions. And so to me, it's a cultural thing, and culture happens from decisions you make. We need to make those decisions. We need to make up our minds. We're never going to allow this to happen again. And also make it known to everyone that the reason that this thing went south, Afghanistan, was more to do with,

this command and control monstrosity we created than the enemy itself. Thanks for that, Pete. That's very insightful. Okay, so questions. Sessartan Oman, thank you very much. Love the show. Thanks for making this happen. Has the guerrilla idea or something similar ever been used outside of Bosnia? I don't know. I hope so. I'm sure other I'm sure plenty of other guys have have similar ideas. But, you know, it's, to me, it's disguises, deception, and diversion. You know, that's what it's about. Any form that takes, you know, contextually should be open. It should be open season. And that's what we need to train our future leaders to think out of the box, to not be constrained by the, you know,

helicopter, the, you know, platoon company battalion brigade model, you know, understand the problem and solve it in the most economical, efficient, and sensible way possible. And sometimes that involves dressing up like an ape. Thanks again for the very generous donation, Cessor Oman. The Daily Mail ran a story that in early 2000s the SAS was chosen over Delta for having more experience was sent in to rescue a CIA agent in Afghanistan. Brit tabloids so grain of salt, but do you have any thoughts on this? In the year 2000? Yes, in the early 2000s. Oh well I mean 2001 was you know my my frame of reference starts at 2001 we were the

along with the S.F. guys in the north, we were first in, down in the dry lake beds, South of Condahar. You know, I never heard of any mission like that. It was actually very difficult. The Brits were there, you know, in our staging base, but they were given very restrictive guidance. They were only allowed. Then remember, this is before anyone's on the ground. they were told they could only engage a target if it was had to do with poppy production and heroin trafficking. Wow. So the SAS was, you know, begging us to find a way to get them in into the fight. And I don't know what happened there, you know, their commander.

I didn't deal with them much after that. but their commander when I, you know, when I went up to him and said, you know, this doesn't make any sense. You know, he was defending the anti-drug mission pretty vociferously. So, yeah, I never heard of any other mission than that. I also want to give a quick shout out to one of our audience members. You may remember Paul Cunningham. He was my first PL when I was in Ranger Battalion. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So? Good to see you again, Paul. Hope you're doing well, buddy. Radioactive Lama, thank you very much. Great content, guys. Better than watching primetime TV. Well, we should hope so.

Good job, guys. We need that primetime TV mullah, though. You're going to get it. Thanks. Thanks for this more, Pete. Mike Montgomery, thank you very much. Question, what was the conventional wisdom regarding Los Pepe's while he was in Columbia hunting Escobar?

Like conventional wisdom, I mean, the conventional wisdom was what they were doing was, you know, what should have been done. That was a, to my knowledge, and, you know, I was probably as close to it as any American, me and my guys. there were all kinds of CIA takes on who the Los Pepe's were, DEA. So remember, those two were kind of in charge of the mission down there and battling each other all the time. We were down there, you know, walking this fine line between them. We didn't care who got credit for anything. The Los Pepepe's, to me, was an uprising. It was Colombians, police officers, their members of their federal law enforcement and their military who off duty were getting together going, hey, you know, the government's not going to stop this.

The only way is for us to stop this. And we've got to take these guys out ourselves. And the Los Pepe's did just that. And they, you know, of all the things that brought Escobar to his knees, I believe the Los Pepe's was probably the most formidable. They took out a number of his lieutenants. He did not feel safe. His family was not safe. And so he took all kinds of measures to get them safe.

And ultimately, those measures are what ended up getting him captured. So the Los Pepe's to me was just an organic uprising of people who had had enough of this guy, blowing the shit out of airplanes, blowing up, you know, cars in the middle of huge intersections, assassinating police officers by the hundreds. And they took matters in their own hand and were very effective. Stafford, Oman, thank you again. Were there Delta snipers on Overwatch when they took out Escobar? what are your thoughts on Mark Bowden's theory it was a unit bullet that killed him

I didn't know that was Mark Bowden's theory but and normally I would not comment you know so the fact that I'm commenting should tell you that it wasn't our snipers and I've already said it you know people who who you know deny that the Colombians accomplish that on their own are people who, you know, just cannot believe that other countries have freedom-loving, you know, warriors that can be just as affected

when motivated as we are. And that's what happened there. There was no snipers, you know, there was no unit guys anywhere near there at the time. And anyone else who claims there was is just, you know, engaging in theory and, you know, trying to, trying to guess what happened and make it a little sexier than it really was.

Joe's got you. Thank you very much. Would you happen to know the origin of advanced force operations? Did that concept come from Dick Meadows when he went into Iran, 1980, ahead of the Delta Rescue Force? Yeah, I, you know, so since, you know, I was the first AFO commander, I would just say it rose up organically. It was just common sense. We didn't even care. You could have called us a soap dish. And, you know, it would have been this, we would have done the same thing. We were, before that advanced force operation was a verb, not a noun. Right. And so it just meant.

going in ahead of the main effort and prepping the battlefield. And for clandestine ops, that means setting up safe houses, getting vehicles, doing low-vis recies so that when the guys come in, you can greet them, tell them the lay of the land. They have resources so they can operate. We turned it into a noun. We just called ourselves a FO. We were a conglomeration.

of all four services and some other government agency guys. So it was, you know, necessities the mother of invention and common sense is the father. And that's what, you know, that's how AFO was born out of necessity and common sense. You know, you mentioned Colombia and then we talk about Bosnia. You know, you talk about like the CIA and the DEA,

who both had a lot of, of undercover sort of cover type work. And then in Bosnia, did you guys have a good working relationship with like the CIA, the DIA, other Intel units, INSCOM and whatnot, where you weren't like creating this stuff? You weren't reinventing the wheel, but people were there kind of teaching you guys how to do this stuff? We had a great relationship in, you know, after 911 with the CIA. And that, again, was born out of Bosnia. We had worked with them extensively in Bosnia. And so we knew each other.

And many of the personalities knew each other. In my book, I talk about a guy codename Spider. You know, he was a very good friend of mine. We had operated together in Bosnia multiple times, along with other guys in the unit. He was a warrior, former Marine. you know, we trusted him. He trusted us. We shared information, even, you know, even information people were telling us not to share.

And, you know, so that relationship worked because of, you know, of personal relationships. And it stayed that way. Afghanistan, the early phases, all the way to Iraq. He was in Iraq. He came up from the south. I came from the west and the north. We ended up meeting in Baghdad International Airport right before the other event I talked about. So it was a good relationship, and it's always emphasized to maintain those relationships

and to make sure that they flourish. But they're very personality dependent, and so when you get someone in there who doesn't like, whether it's an agency guy who doesn't like the Army or the Navy or the vice versa then that relationship falters um session Norman thank you very much were there any other noteworthy innovations that came from the unit that you could that you can talk about during your time or after other than the police spike mats well dogs we brought dogs dogs dogs

operational dogs, so a lot of people don't know this. There were operational dogs were, the use of operational dogs was ended at the end of the Vietnam War. So I think that was 75. From 75 to 98, there were no operational dogs in the military. There were drug sniffing dogs, right? Everyone remembers the, you know, drug sniffing dogs. There were bombs sniffing dogs, the MPs had.

there were no operational dogs. You know, back to Dale Comstock, Dale Comstock was a dog trainer. And when he was in my troop, he had a number of, and I forget what kind of shepherds they were. But he had me out to his house, showed me these dogs. And he was like a lot of guys in the unit, they were saying, hey, we should get dogs. Look at all these things they could do. And so they planted that seed in my brain. When I became a squadron commander, I had in my squadron, I had one guy who had been classically trained at Lackland Air Force Base.

He was certified dog trainer, and I had two guys who were just kind of like amateurs. We did a brainstorming session. One of the big missions at the time was underground tunnels, and it was pretty obvious that dogs would make a – an incredible impact on that mission. So we flew out to Lackland Air Force Base, met with the colonel who was in charge of dog training. And again, no one gave us approval for this. We just did it.

And we told him our concept. And he was luckily, he was a historical believer in dogs. He was like, finally, you know, somebody sees the light. He goes, we'll support you guys, whatever you need. And we had to get approval from him because in the DA Pam, you can't have dogs unless Lackland, the dog command at Lackland says you can have him. So he signed off on it. My unit commander, Gary Harrell, fantastic guy just recently passed away. He saw the, you know, the potential in it too.

He said, do it. You know, it sounds kind of crazy, but go ahead and do it. it. So a week later, we flew two guys off to Belgium, bought two of the finest Belgian Melanois that money could buy, began the training process. And it was a process of discovery, you know, who's going to handle these dogs? If you bring in a dog handler, he's going to take a seat on a, you know, a little bird, take a seat in a vehicle. You know, what about small missions, and we quickly concluded that we needed to make operators, dog handlers, and this was a controversial decision. There were a number of people even in the unit who thought

it was heresy, but we did it anyway. Went off the dog handling school, got some proof of concepts done. Right away, you could see the potential of these animals. And we got money to build kennels. And like I said, that was 98. It took a while. The program was not solid. We went to Afghanistan. We took the dogs with us, but there were no specific uses immediately. Then Iraq happened 2003. We took the dogs with us. We infilled with dogs. We had special vehicles that had air conditioners built into them because dogs are very heat sensitive. they were worth their weight in gold as think about setting up a patrol base, a hide site in the desert. If you've got dogs that can detect by smell and hearing anyone, you know, 500 meters away,

that's an amazing force multiplier. And they were. But they made their mark back at our safe house, you know, once we got. established in our safe house once the country fell. We had a weird, like, I don't know if it was a suicidal attack. Two guys came in, AKs got into the perimeter. We had a big compound, and we released the dogs. Those were the first, you know, that was the first operational use of the dogs. I was there. I remember running up. All I could hear was and there was a guy laying there an AK-47, five feet away, and his face was in the

Belgian Malinois's mouth. It was Arco, and he was ah, that was the gurgling. And from that point on, it was, dogs were on every raid. The first two dog casualties happened on the Ude and Kusei raid. Uday and Couss they were Saddam's sons. They were barricaded on the second floor of the house they were hiding in. The team went in, cleared the first floor,

came to the stairwell, went up two steps, fuselage, automatic AK fire, just pounded the top of the steps. They released the two dogs. Two dogs went up there. They could hear them. you know, they could hear the dogs make contact with Udi and Kusei. The team followed after, you know, finish him off.

And one of those dogs was the first casualty. He was hit by an AK round when he got to the top of the stairs. But again, you know, another example in CQB, if you can have a dog, you know, move through these, you know, fire funnels. and to tell you whether there's an enemy there, they're worth their weight and gold. And they were. And today, everyone has them.

You know, we've probably got more dogs than we can handle in the military, but they've got their place, and we should keep them there because they're an invaluable asset. Yeah, those Malinaw, they're no joke. Like, they are so courageous and they're fearless. Yeah. Yeah, very loyal. You know, a lot of breakthroughs in training.

Like, I was skeptical that, you know, when you walk around one of those things, it's like walking around a minefield or a hand grenade with its pin pulled out and the spoon still in. You know, no matter how comfortable you are with dogs, it'll shake you. But, you know, these guys train these dogs. They acclimated them to the squadron. And you could walk through the squadron, walk, you know, through our bar area. And they were, you know, they were, they knew they were one of the team. And that did a lot for building trust of everybody.

But it was a training breakthrough because up to that time, you know, dogs were, you know, just the handler. And no one else could be around them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that we have another mutual from 275, Kelly, who was very involved. in the dog program, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Nation Wood, thank you very much for the donation. Clayton Jensen, good to see you, buddy. If you haven't watched Clayton's show, you should watch it. He caveats this question. He says, no specifics needed, just your overall opinion. And then he says, you touched on Sagan stuff used in Columbia, et cetera.

What do you think about the evolution of the I.O. guys? Ranger OST and J-Soc Sadez over time? Yeah, well, the evolution is just natural. You know, they've, they've learned as they go along, they've become, you know, more, you know, more mission focused. And, you know, that's the key with all that, all that electronic intelligence. You got to get it down in the hands of the operators, you've got to test it out. you got to give it proof of concept and if that all works you know you can you can share it with

larger groups um jingali thank you very much and this is the last question you guys let me shut up real quick yeah on listen um any plans to bring back the operational donkey like merrill's marauds had in well they did bring it they did bring them back in afghanistan the pack mules i mean s f was experimenting with them even before 9-1-1. One of the teams in Shahi Coe thought, you know, hey, the way to get our equipment up into the mountains is with the donkey. And I have a video of it. It's the team and me and two others chasing this donkey trying to, you know, trying to corral it to see if we could use it and it turns into just, you know, a keystone cop moment of hilarity. We're laughing so hard we can't even chase it anymore. And that's when we gave up on the donkey idea. But I think

it still has potential. All ideas like that, you know, I know they're trying to create robots now to carry equipment into difficult terrain. But, you know, I think that's a long way off. And if the situation's right and you've got a well-trained donkey and a guy who's handled don't see why you wouldn't use it. And that's it. Dee, did we have anything on Patreon? No. So next, actually the next episode is not going to be Friday.

It's going to be Saturday. And we're going to have John Dovey on the show, served in the SADF and then Sandif. Really excited to talk to him. It's going to be a very unique interview. Pete, thank you for coming on the show, spending your Friday evening with us. And again, his latest book is Common Sense Leadership Matters. Toxic Leadership destroys a case study, book three. I hope you guys will go and check it out.

And also the mission, The Men and Me, and then... Common Sense Way. The Common Sense Way, right. Yeah. Yeah. So, and it's a trilogy, right? in the sense that it all focuses around the idea of leadership, both positive leadership and toxic leadership.

Yeah, just common, yeah, common sense leadership applied using military stories, real world military stories. And, you know, the last one brings up the toxic leadership destroy his point in it. Perfect. And, yeah, Pete, I'd love to have you back sometime talk about the rest. of your career and anything else. We'll have to do it again sometime. But, I mean, thank you for coming on and doing the show tonight.

Yeah, I enjoyed it too, guys. You got a great show and keep up to good work. Appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. And before we roll out, anything else you want to plug, websites, anything else? People should go check out. Where can they find you? Yeah, I mean, on that book, there's a lot of good stuff, pictures of the spur.

You can see, you know, the view that I described. to the squad leader and the lead gun jeep looking up at the spur. They're colored pictures. It's on peteblaber.com. And you can watch the video on firefight.peeplaver.com. I would recommend anybody who is interested in, not just that event, but, you know, driving off road or terrain to go watch that video, it's pretty amazing. And I also have the maps on there that lay out the C-Sever.

of events leading up to the firefight. So check it out and enjoy the terrain while you're checking it out. All right. Thank you. And we will see all of you next Saturday. Thank you. And Pete, we'll talk to you next time. Sounds good, Jack. Thanks, guys.

Thanks, Dave. Take care. Have a good night. You too.