The Team House - Delta Force Operator, Green Beret & CIA Officer | Gary Harrington | Ep. 226

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

Gary returns for round 2.  I spent most of my career working in the shadows. While some of my service was spent with large groups, such as the 32nd Marine Amphibious Unit, serving in Beirut in 1982, I spent most of my career working on small teams or alone. We often lived and worked with foreign military units like a Kuwaiti tank unit in the northern desert in 1996. In 1998, I worked alone in Yemen. Trouble spots on my own became my specialty. After 9/11, I launched to Uzbekistan in the vanguard for 5th Special Forces Group and served on several teams in Afghanistan during 2001 and 2002, participating in major combat operations alongside Afghan indigenous forces. Often, my mission was to enter a country to determine if other special operations forces could safely follow and operate. If so, I would develop the situation and make ready for them to arrive. In 2002, after departing Afghanistan, I moved to a mid-Eastern location to prepare the way for the next conflict. Working independently and conducting successful, often classified missions on several continents taught me the power of prudence…and the skills that must accompany it. Find Gary here:⬇️ https://www.garyharrington.net/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Today's sponsors: PIA VPN If you want to enjoy all the benefits of Private Internet Access, now's the time to subscribe. Head to https://PIAVPN.com/TEAMHOUSE and get an 83% discount! Seriously… 83%! That's just $2.03 a month, and you also get 4 extra months completely for free! But you MUST go to https://PIAVPN.com/TEAMHOUSE Ree Medical ⬇️ https://www.REEmedical.com/teamhouse  Need accurate medical evidence that can maximize your VA benefits? REE Medical and their team of specialists are passionate and experienced about helping Veterans. Find out how they can help you at  https://www.REEmedical.com/TEAMHOUSE --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #deltaforce #cia #specialforcesBecome 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 to talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your hopes, Jack Murphy, at David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 226 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy, here at David Park. And our guest in studio this time is Gary Harrington.

We had Gary on the show once remotely. We're really happy to have him here in studio this time. I think Gary had a pretty extensive career serving in the Marine Corps and special forces in Delta and then in another governmental agency. And, yeah, we're just really excited to have you here, man. Well, thanks. I appreciate you guys letting me be on last time. and hey, get to come up to New York

and see you in person. It's great. So, we're to begin. We covered a lot last, I think we did three hours last time. The end of three medical. Okay. We're going to give a quick shout out

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That's R-E-E-E-medical.com slash team house. So, Gary, I mean, I think, like, let's start off a story about a young Gary Harrington when you said you were talking about being a young lieutenant in the Marine Corps. You had a story about a C.S. grenade that went awry. Yeah, well, I was the typical young lieutenant. Everything's black and white. And the Marine Corps, hey, hi-diddle-diddle, straight up the middle. A lot of motivation.

I don't know if I said it last time, but I never was a great person for respecting authority. and so right off the bat in my military career, I sort of bucked the trend. I think I talked last time I had a mustache as a Marine officer, which wasn't looked well upon. And in the basic school one time, I challenged an issue that I thought was unjust

and called the commander out on it and in front of everybody. And he said, you know, Lieutenant Harrington, someday if your brains ever get as big as your balls, you might go somewhere in the Marine Corps. And, you know, of course, I ran into him a few years later. But, yeah, I was, you know, I was a infantry platoon commander. And, you know, I thought, you know, I was pretty hard on guys.

I wanted to be a taskmaster. I had worshipped, no, maybe worshiped. It's a strong word, but really admired Yoni Netanyahu, and I read the book Yoni Hero of Entebbe. And I wanted to emulate his training style and the things that he did to prepare his people for what they did in Antebi. So, yeah, I ran pretty harsh training scenarios. And one time, some guys weren't doing everything as they should. they got lackadaisical on the tactical side. So I decided to hit them with some CS.

And I had the CS grenades from the grenade launcher. And I thought, it's CS. It can't hurt anybody. And it was in the woods. And I didn't really think about being a young, stupid lieutenant, that, hey, when this CS round hits a tree trunk and starts ricocheting around, you know, winds up hitting somebody. It's, you know, I mean, that's almost like an AD, right?

Um, so yeah, that was a lesson that, hey, uh, you know, things can, can hurt you, what seems harmless is not. You know, several years later, I was in a training exercise and, you know, it turned to, if you ever done, uh, force on force, sometimes it turns into that argument. No, I shot you first. No, you shot me, um, an argument. And I had some, you know, I was an officer. I had some young guy and his sergeant.

standing there holding a grenade launcher at me, you know, arguing with me over who was right on this, on, on this tactical call. And I said, move that grenade launcher off my stomach. And he goes, it's just in a loom round. I'm like from, you know, from two feet away, that's going to leave a 40 millimeter hole in my abdomen. Yeah. So, you know, you don't have to think. about those kind of things I think often when you're really young you know then later many years later in SF after you've made enough mistakes that you've survived or your

senior friends make those mistakes I was the guy that when the new team guys had this you know like hey what if you know like in Kuwait we find out old bombed out mortar 60 millimeter mortar so we stopped people start dropping a loom and grenade simulators down it to make all these things happen. You know, I was smart enough in my old age to walk over to the side and sit on this bank and look at him, go, I'll patch you up when you need it because I ain't doing that. So going back to the CS in the forest, so you shoot this CS, this 40-mike-C-S round. It starts bouncing off trees. did did the c s actually deploy

actually i don't remember that part because what i remember is it hit a guy in the cheek and then so did you tell him to like how did you respond did you apologize you tell him to suck it up and walk it off no i ran over to him and to see how hurt he is and i don't i can't remember if it knocked a tooth out or you know it wasn't a serious hurt and to be honest you know you know this was the old Marine Corps we kind of just shook it off yeah and I was like hey you know

didn't know do that you know I planned on it shooting it into the ground and uh deploying the CS and yeah that was it so after that I learned my lesson and like in the foxholes if I would crawl around in the middle of night foxhole to foxhole if I put them on 50% alert and I'd softly call out the names of the people in the foxhole and if I didn't get an answer I'd just pop a CS grenade and drop it in the foxhole which works really well when they're zipped up inside their sleeping bags as you probably all know I don't think you get away with that anymore probably there's a lot of things yeah yeah you know when I was in the core I was the old days you know I went through the PLC where, you know, the sergeants took the young candidates around the corner and I thought

that's how things are done. And, you know, my first, my first company in the Marine Corps infantry, I mean, you know, the commander wanted to play rugby. So it was his chance to put, you know, some licking on people i might have used uh physical um inducement a few times in the marine corps i got called on the carpet for that um and you know i understand all that now but at the time you're you're taught that's how things are right and in those days again you're young everything's black and white and it was i have to get these people ready for combat, a weak person, a person that doesn't pay attention, is somebody going to get other people killed? Therefore, anything I do to prepare them for that is justified.

Right. Now, of course, I don't view it that way anymore, but when you're young and idealistic, I mean, that's how you think. Right. It's how you justify doing those things because it's like everything's so important. Well, and especially in a peacetime military, I think that that the idea of how to make somebody hard or how to make them ready is very different than what the reality is. Because in a wartime military, often, they don't have time for that.

You know, it's like, get them trained up and get them deployed and that's that. But in a peacetime military, like, that's what everybody thought. That's, you know, the hazing, the smoking, all that is like, that's how we form unity. That's how we form a bond. And outside of combat, like,

how else do you do that a lot of time? Well, it's part of ritualization and a crucible that everybody goes through, which forms cohesion in a shared bond. Absolutely. I mean, it might sound sick to some people that aren't used to that to the extremes that it can go. But, you know, it was all part of that going through some ritual just as like Indian Braves were supposed to go through when they reached maturity. Right. Yeah. It's fascinating.

So what, and unfortunately, I wasn't here when you were on. So I might, if I ask you any questions that you've already talked about, you know, I apologize and I apologize. Well, she didn't want to, I won't remember. Oh, great. I wouldn't remember either. So, but so what led you from the Marine Corps to the Army? So as a, I went from the regular infantry to recon, Amphib Recon School, Special Forces Scuba School, Scout Sniper Instructor School, and deployed to Beirut.

You know, thought life was great. I'm living the dream, the adventure, 26 years old. Then I finished my time on the platoon. They said, oh, now you have to go be the training officer. Like, the what? The training officer? Up in the three shop? Yeah, so I went to there reviewing other people's training instead of doing it.

So that was a big blow to me and what I thought I should be doing. And to be honest, I started envying the sergeants and the corporals that were on my recon team because they were doing the do and running things and leading the patrols. And then the Marine Corps, you know, was foolish enough to promote me to captain. And so I got to notice, oh, congratulations, you're a captain. And now you get to go to Marine Barracks duty. And I was like, not feeling it. That's not, that's not me.

And, you know, we're young. I thought my role in life was to die in common. You know, it's hard and it's tied to some religious beliefs I had and some events that I thought that was my role in life. And like, you're taking that away from me. You're going to go and me do what? And then, yeah, there's a command path to follow as an officer if you do that. But I at that time didn't want any of that. Right.

I looked for a way to get out. And I, um, so I resigned and went to enlist in the army. I think last time we talked about I was in the middle of a MEP station, enlisting for special forces on active duty when an officer, uh, uh,

recruiting officer ran in, stop me from swearing in and said, and showed us a line in a reg saying, former officers of other branches of military may not enlist in the United States Army. Oh, wow. And I kind of was like, what? And, you know, it was a shock.

I came back. I'm pretty good at workaround. So I think as you pointed out last time, I found, I looked at the Army Reserve. That line wasn't in their regs. So I enlisted in the Army Reserve, Special Forces, got qualified as a medic. And then the Army had, I think, AR-210, whatever, said that if you got qualified in a shortage M-OS, which SF medics were, you could come on active duty in the Army. So now I showed up.

And they said, wait a minute, aren't you the same guy that we, I said, yeah, but here's the difference. Now I'm this. So how do you want to look at it? When you resign a commission, when you, you know, resign, you were a captain. What enlisted rank? Because like if you're a college grad, don't they give you E4 or something like that? Like what, what enlisted right? I got E5.

You got E5. I got E5. I think the Army did me better than the agency. Because later on life, you know, agency was telling me where I was out in the field when I was detailed. Yeah, GS-12. You know, like that. And I come in and they go, 11 at the very bottom, 11. Oh, and case off, oh, case officer, operations officer, no.

But that's what, you know, you can be a support officer. And maybe you work your way someday. In their case officer. To be in an operations officer. So you go to SF, you go to SF guard, and then you get active. And I'm sure you guys talked about all this. So Jack, I'll skip ahead to whatever. Yeah, I mean, we can cover briefly.

So you find your way to SF and then from the reserves into active duty. Right, seventh group. And what year was this? I probably showed up for, because I resigned Marine Corps in late 84, went through SF training and medic course and all that. So 85 and probably six. So probably, no, active duty, seventh group, 87. So seventh group at that time is like doing a lot of pumps down to like Honduras and places like that.

Yeah, I did the Honduras pumps. Train their special, there was a counterterrorism unit they trained, and I mean, there's a lot of going on down there at the time. Yeah, you know, when I went, I actually went to Honduras as a Marine, I think we mentioned last time, saw a secret one of those C, secret black sites that had been active in those times. And I went back in the Army the first time we were up at Lake Ochoa, way up in the mountains, this big lake,

because they actually for a while had a Honduran Special Forces unit. And we were training them. And I was the medic on the team and got to dive up in that lake, my first high altitude kind of dive in a lake. It's pretty cool. Yeah. So, I mean, that was kind of like also your first exposure probably to the special ops, but also what the agency was doing down there in those days.

Yeah. When I went as a Marine, I somehow wound up in the little village, late one night with a bunch of old former military guys who were applying me with drinks. And they were people that were. sort of working that program that was going into Nicaragua. I think Frank McCloskey we've had on here, Rick Prado. Yes. Well, and then.

Not trying to drop dime, but they were the ones supplying you with drinks. Well, and it was a lot. You know, I was, again, I was a Marine lieutenant. And, you know, that's my first time with all these foreign people and sitting around an outdoor table. and they just had lines of beers lined up and plying me with them. I remember I maybe in my life there had been five or six times. I've actually been knocked down drunk. That was one of them.

I remember getting back to where the platoon was, where the rest of the Marines were, and getting my poncho and walking over to this mound of dirt and just falling over on it on top of the part. Ponchum. That was it for the time. This is just a very specific question, but which wings did you choose to wear when you went to

SF? Oh, so I had not been to airborne school as a Marine. Oh, really? Okay. But I went to Special Forces Scuba School. So one of the pleasures I had during airborne school was

I showed up wearing a scuba badge. And those instructors started calling me on it that saying that I was a liar, that you can't get to scuba school unless you've been to airborne school. And I said, I was a Marine and I did. So every day I got to, you know, pay some extra punishment for, for my badge and did that. But again, I think at airborne school, they're just looking for a reason to do that. one of the funny stories about my time I went to Honduras

a couple times but one of the trips there and I think I went down a third time for a medical mission Medcaps where yeah one of the medcaps and in one of the missions there with my team we were down in La Seba

down on the coast and I met this old coot in a bar some old American guy and we were that's it's when we were training the guys up at lake of choa and to get to la saba to have like a couple days off i had ridden in the back of a steakbed truck for like six hours just some local guys truck to get there so i'm trying to figure how i'm going to get back back up to the end to the mountains and this old little guy says hey i got a plane down here you know i fly you go to I'm flying up to an airfield near there. You can fly up with me tomorrow. And I was like, well, hey, that, I mean, that, that would save a lot of...

Be trouble. Yeah. But then I thought about it. And I was like, something doesn't seem right. So I didn't. And it turned out, this was that flight. I don't know if you guys remember, but there was a guy that flew his airplane and crossed into Nicaragua and was forced down and was held prisoner.

for a while. He was kind of like a wannabe guy, I guess. It turns out. And some people thought he was a contractor or something with some of the activities going on. And I was thinking afterwards, I was like, holy cow, if I was a U.S. Special Forces guy on this plane

just trying to hitch a ride, why? So I could go to a little town and have a few beers and do a little recreating. Now I'm in a prison in Nicaragua. You know, thank God. So we've got to give a shout out to our sponsor here for the show. You want to do the...

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but you have to go to PIAvPN.com slash team house for a truly private digital life. One more time, Piavpn.com slash team house. so any other misadventures down in honduras that we should probably know about not that i'm willing to talk about on a live stream without protection from VPN without protection from a lot of people so let's uh let's jump forward a little bit what would a seventh group what could a seventh group guy do in a south american or latin-american country that they would be not want to talk about. We don't need a church.

There are a lot of church surfaces down there, right? There are. Very Catholic religion. Yes. And I'm going to stay away from the jokes that come to mind when I think of that. A couple kilos that go in the punching bag on the way home. Don't do it, guys. I did get stopped coming back out of Honduras or Panama one time.

Now, I'd been delayed. So you're there. And before you get on the bird to come home, I think they had a change of engine on an aircraft. So we were stuck a few days. And, you know, how they line all the bags up and bring the dogs through. So we're all waiting.

We're ready to get home. We've been delayed and delayed and delayed and then the dog hits on something. And, you know, we're all laughing. You know, like, yeah, what stupid, you know, blah, blah, blah, did whatever to cause this? And then they come over there and they're holding my bag and go, who owns this bag? And I'm like, hey, it's me.

And I went over there and they go, a dog hit on it for cocaine. And I was like, well, let's open it. There's no cocaine. And they go, well, it was that a dog wouldn't hit on it unless it had been cocaine in it or it had been close to cocaine. I go, it's not. It's, you know, I didn't have cocaine. They said, you know, well, of course.

the dog can't be wrong. Right. So somewhere you were, there must have been cocaine there at some time or other. I mean, I was doing whatever. I was doing lines off of it, but I brushed all that off. Yeah. Yeah, because I mean, those dogs. Right.

You know, because I think later when I was in Columbia with Delta in 92, some DEA guys brought some drug dogs through. And they were like just old. They were not, no, they were old, but joints laying around on the ground. And the dogs never hit on any of that. I'm like, really? Are these dogs that good? Yeah.

Or is the stuff that old? I don't know. Right. Well, let's jump over to that because I think that's like a fascinating period of a special operations history in particular is, you know, the whole hunt for Pablo Escobar down there in Columbia. At that point, you were with Delta, got the point down there. can you tell us a little bit about, you know, what that was like?

I mean, it's like one of these things that has entered into like mythology, the amount of, in some cases, nonsense that people talk about it. But, I mean, you guys really were down there, you know, looking for them. Down there, looking for them, my role there. And I went because I spoke Spanish. To be honest, I was fairly young in Delta time to be picked to go on a classified mission. But it was because I spoke spandit. And so I went and I was staying up at the prison that had the nice prison that I guess Pablo funded that had been built for him.

And, you know, I was with a person from a sister, J-Soc unit that had some SIGA equipment. and I was doing some surveillance with a long-range lens on a couple houses that were, you know, a few miles away down in the valley and, you know, take turns, pulling security for each other to sleep. Two people. Yeah. It's not really a great life. You're either trying to crash up or, you know, and I couldn't run the significant equipment. So we did that.

And, yeah, eventually I did get down to Medellin on my way out and got to go on the streets of Medellin. I remember that in those days, the cops, you know, the local police had been getting hits because people ride up beside the trucks or the vehicles they were in. And they'd have a guy on the front of a motorcycle and the guy on the guy on the. the back of the motorcycle was the gunman. And, you know, I know I rode in the back of one of those trucks with these guys. So I was decided the first thing I need to do is they're all sitting on the outboard side facing in. I said, okay, the first thing is I need to put you on the inside facing out. And at first, you know, it's just like any traffic anywhere in a big city.

Some people didn't want to stop. And at first it bothered me because I was like, you know, what can you do? Then I started thinking about it. I go, hey, this isn't America. So it's okay to lean over the side of the truck with your rifle. And, you know, if somebody still has the guts to want to come up, you know, a round or two in the hood, you know, nobody's going to, you know, care here. Right. So we didn't have to go to the rounds.

but being able to, you know, drop the rifle over the side and was able to stop vehicles from coming up beside you. So, you know, I felt it helped keep those guys. Yeah, very similar tactics that they use, like, you know, in Iraq and Afghanistan and stuff, when they, you know, with the VBID threat, they weren't as many, like, sparrow teams in those countries. Right.

Right. Right. But, but the VBid, the VBid, the VBid. the vehicle-borne IEDs were a big threat. But in Colombia, it sounds like it was similar to, like, what it was, like, in the Philippines and whatnot, where they had those sparrow teams, the two-man motor scene was. One of them got Roe, right? Yeah, yeah, Nick Roe, yeah.

At that time, so this is 92, Pablo's not in his custom-made prison at this point, right? No, he'd left the prison. And you guys are looking for him. Yeah. What was your perception at that time about, you know, where he was or where you guys were at in regards to the hunt for him? You know, I'm probably wasn't aware of all the details, you know, because I'm the on the nug end of this thing out there. But, yeah, he was long gone. You know, one of the things I did was like look through the huts, just looking, I'm, I'm looking.

looking for Intel. It's like, hey, wait a second. Has anybody really gone through this? Because I'm finding stuff like here's, uh, checkbooks that have account numbers and stuff. Like the SSE the person. Yeah. Has anybody done this? And, and I don't, I'm not sure that that had been done. But again, you know, we're talking 1992. Right. You know, a lot of that stuff didn't develop until after 9-11. So, um, and nobody had an idea where we was and a lot of the local populists they loved him and you know I wasn't sure we were going to get him and again in 1992 we did not have the robust um ability to track phones and and you know to my knowledge as we certainly developed later and particularly with the army or with the military that capability

The guy with me had stuff he could listen to. But I think that was much more refined and improved over that next decade. And I mean, it was a small team too, right? It was like, what, 10 guys down there? Yeah, initially two of us where I was. And then there were some, it was a mixture of a few seals and some Delta guys. down in Medellin. But the trail had gone cold at that point.

The trail had gone cold. I mean, when all of that did go down, what, the next year? I mean, did you have any, like, insights or any kind of takeaways from that sort of campaign down there? No, that campaign is where I actually wound up getting kicked out of that. So, or as a result of it. things that happened there so you know what happened after yeah having been there i was curious and i looked at stuff and then uh when was it bowden wrote the book yeah you know that you know some of that

i felt accurate some not um yeah i was interested in it but it's kind of like uh yeah they yeah then they sent you down there to do a job you did the job and and it was out. Yeah, it's not, and that wasn't as personal, like, the whole thing with Al-Qaeda and bin Laden after 9-11, it just seemed a lot more personal. I mean, even though, you know, I think these stories are also interesting in regards to, like, how we look back at a quote-unquote peacetime military when guys like you were, like, pretty active.

There's that. And you came, you'd just come out a couple years prior or a year prior from the Gulf War, right? Yeah, in the Gulf War, I didn't deploy in the Gulf War. I was doing training new in Delta. You know, so at a certain point in OTC, I think when you've been through the enough shooting and basic infantry tactics to where you're like a really good ranger, they say, okay. and I know Delta at the time had been talking about, you know, Delta going in if they could locate Saddam Hussein and getting him. And they said, okay, you guys in OTC, you're now trained enough to the point

that the Rangers will be the outer security, but then the inner security to hold off the Iraqi army units, yeah, are will be. you and you're going to fast rope in to these on these street junctions with a whole bunch of anti-tank weapons and you're going to hold them off

and it's like hey that's a one-way ticket it didn't look like it had a real high survival rate but you weren't a CQB qualified operator yet so it was like you're really

a high-speed cannon fodder, I think. It was kind of how I kind of looked at it at that point. But in the run-up to it, though, before that, I mean, weren't you there with Fifth Group in Kuwait? I didn't go to Fifth Group until 1996. Okay, okay. So in 96, I was my first deployment to Kuwait. Okay, so that's what I want to mixing up.

So you're sort of going through training, during the Gulf War and then ended up there during like the night no-fly zone years yeah and and then I went yeah that was back after we had the Iraqi war plan everybody assumed that Saddam was going to retake Kuwait at some point so it was you know how can we slow how can the SF people here work with the Kuwaitis to slow them down and and give other forces of time to come and, you know, establish a beachhead and get in there. And you told the story last time about, you know, how Saddam had erected this huge berm over there. And there's this big trench line and you kind of got stuck in it when you were moving an asset over back across the border.

You said there's another time you went in there and you found a skeleton? Yeah. So this is when I was detailed to the... agency from 2002 to 2004 so now it's after Afghanistan in 2001 and two and I'm doing cross-border stuff with some Kuwaiti like their equivalent of FBI and a case officer and my job was to get assets coming out of Iraq and go into the UN no-go zone and get those assets and bring them back to a secret debriefing place where the agency could debrief them and then to get them back into Iraq. And the, you know, so there was this big berm and a 15-foot deep, 15-foot-wide trench along the border to that part of Kuwait.

and you had to negotiate that if you wanted to get, you know, the other side of that ditch was Iraq. So, yes, technically, if you wanted to get on Iraqi soil, you had to cross that ditch. And, you know, we got to the point. I worked with that when I first got there. I had to work with them just to get them out in the desert and then work with them and get them up to the berm. and then work with them to get them, you know, further. And so one of the times we were down there in the bottom of this trench, one of the guys comes across a skeleton.

They bring me over there. And, you know, here's this old dish dash of, which is the, you know, the flowing robe thing that men wear there. And there was a skeleton inside it. there was no skull and I don't think there were hands or feet but it was the torso of a of a skeleton and I looked at the you know I remember looking at the label on the dish dash that trying to figure out was it Iraqi or Kuwaiti and so I thought well so either somebody murdered somebody and dumped them out here or some person got in there Got in this ditch and, you know, tried to cross a border and got stuck in the ditch and eventually, you know, expired. Lost our hands and feet. Well, I thought there was probably animals that had taken that off or maybe not.

And, you know, when you've been pushing a long time, we've all been on deployments where it's been a long time. for me you know 1998 and 99 I was in Yemen pushing hard

2000 Kuwait on a classified thing pushing hard 2001 to

in Iraq Afghanistan pushing hard straight to Iraq or Kuwait now 2002

3 you lose a little bit of your of the objectivity and maybe a skosh of your judgment so and you know we're military guys your sense of humor is sometimes a little

different so I'm like well what am I going to do about this skeleton and I started thinking about the CIA chief back there in Kuwait and he was always you know one of the games was predicting when the war would start because we'd had George Tennant come out and everybody talking about, you know, what date will the war kick off?

Will it kick off? And he goes, oh yeah, it's going to kick off. But, you know, when? And, you know, I just kind of, again, it's sort of the thing about me in authority. I thought it would be funny. So I took part of this skeleton and put it in my backpack and I took it back to station. and of course I always roll in at night after everybody's gone because I'm up on the border you know I do a regular day's work and then late that afternoon I jump in a car drive fast as I could up to the border and do this stuff and get back like 1 a.m. maybe sometimes midnight anyway I went I came into the station and went into his office and I piled the bones up on his desk. And I left a note and said,

hey, you're always trying to read the bones about when the war is going to start. Maybe this will help you. I thought it was hilarious. As a military guy, I'm like, it's hilarious. How did that go over with the CIA? The next day, you know, I remember, you know,

come on, you know, I typed with two fingers and I'm sitting in my desk waiting for it as he comes. in the office that day and goes back to his desk. I think this is going to be funny. And then I hear her screaming, Harry Harrington, come here. You know, and it was like, and I thought, you know, it should be something to laugh about,

but they did not consider it a laughing matter. And it was, where did this come from? And then it was like, well, here, because you tell me it's real. And I'm like, well, it looks like, it's real and then it turned into this you know and and look now i do see a different side of things that i didn't see in those days like in hindsight well in hindsight that is in hindsight that is desecrating you know a dead person um i feel whoever killed them and dumped them there and took away their extremities might have desecrated them more but you know then they were it was a big deal

because then it was like, we're going to get caught with this in the embassy, and it's going to be a big international incident. So then it was, you know, I got yelled at for a while. And then it was, you have to get rid of this immediately. And you have to do it in a respectful way in accordance with the traditions of this country. And I said, understood. I gathered the bones, wrapped them back up, and I left. And then I went to the nearest dumpster and dumped it.

I'm going to wage or hazard a guess that this didn't make it up in the cable traffic that day. No, no, no, it did not make it into cable traffic. And then all I said is like, is that taking care of? I just said, it's taken care of. Oh, my God. I can imagine the entire office freaking out. But, you know, in the Army, it would be a whole different thing. But, again, you know, that's one of those lessons.

You have to learn your environment. And that's a different, it's a very different environment. You got to read the room, right? Oh, yeah. It's different. Like, sitting there in the embassy, like in Kuwait, Saddam was launching scuds towards the embassy. and the chiefs of all the different departments had those warning devices that would give them a signal when they'd go off.

And then everybody in the embassy would sound the alarm. You had to duck and cover and get under put the mask on gas mask. Everybody practiced that. So here's embassy personnel, state department personnel, CIA officers that have never done this. up for, you know, putting on gas masks, you know. And the times where those alarms went off, people were really frantic because they weren't military. They hadn't really trained it.

And it was always, I remember sometimes when it went off having to help people, you know, particularly women that get the straps caught in their hair and now they're frantic trying to get it in. and it was having a hard time to get people masked because I really wasn't in a hurry to get mine on. And I'm hoping I didn't tell this last time, but one time I'd been at the border the night before. So I got in at like one or so in the morning and came into the office at eight the next morning to start writing up what happened at the border. And, you know, you're smoked. I was tired.

And about midday at lunchtime, I thought, I'm going to go outside. And this Kuwait, 125 degrees. And I'm going to get in my car in the parking lot and turn it on and turn the air conditioner on and take a nap. That's what I'm going to do for lunch. And so I was walking to exit the embassy doors. And one of those alarms went off. everybody had been on break because it was lunch and people were outside and i remember thinking well do i duck and cover or if technically if you're going somewhere and you can get there quickly

quickly enough you can duck and cover wherever that is so i think i'll duck and cover in my car in the air conditioning instead of paying attention to this so i get ready to go out the big heavy, you know, doors on the front of an embassy. And as I got to the door to open it, I looked. And here came everybody from the office with eyes. When we say see the whites of their eyes, eyes were like this. Mouths were open and gone like that. And it was like the running.

And it was like a stampede coming at me, you know, to get inside, to get in. So all I did was hold the embassy door. doors open and let them all pass to go in and and duck in cover. And then I went out to my car and got in there and turned on the air condition, reclined the seat back and was asleep like this. And after a while, I thought I heard a noise. And I opened my eyes and I looked. And all around me were these guys with gas mask on and white suits. white suits and it was the Marine

security people that in the duck and cover they were doing their sweep and found me out in the car and they're like don't you know we're in the shit right now well they

by that time they knew I was former Marines yeah is like okay did people carry their gas masks on them or did everybody like leave it at their desks and stuff like that left it at their desk yeah Yeah. If you went out in a car, you were supposed to, you know, take it. So you had mentioned a bit that you were on one of the ASAT teams, and kind of that got parlayed into Yemen, which then got parlayed into Kuwait.

I mean, you talk a little bit about, like, how that kind of progression took place, because your career, like, even as an operator or a Green Beret, Marine, is a little bit unconventional. It's more on the Intel side, I feel like, all along. Yeah. Well, someday, I'm going to write a book, and it's going to be called Against the Grain, an unconventional man in unconventional war. And I, I don't know. I, it kind of goes with my personality.

I just, I don't know. I don't like to, I kind of follow along, but not always. I can't always buy into everything. And so with ASOT, you know, I talked last time that my former Delta commander had asked me to help take part in this push towards more UW with maybe a new twist to it. And fifth group had some of the original guys I mentioned before, Steve Potit, but Mark Vorpal, David's. Stevenson those were guys that had been you know kind of pioneers and helping trying to formulate where we would go with that so you know I went to ASOT and maybe because I'd had the TS

clearance from having been in Delta and whatever else I graduated and again I was pretty lucky in A-SOT. I think A-SOT, you know, trains you to be an effective pilot team member. And they, back in my day, and it was really emphasized that. So after graduating A-SOT, just a couple months later, I got contacted by Soxent to come down and talk about, you know, a program. So I wound up going to Yemen to be the first SF person to employ the legally employ some of the things taught in ASOT or, you know, it was a test case to see what can we do. And that was in order to enable me to make accurate assessments for the security.

security of a ODA. I think ASOT, at least in its original stand-up, was so that, you know, your small detachments like a, like a special forces team in a foreign country, has the ability to establish ways to gather information and, and make its own assessment and protect itself from, you know, coup, terror, attacks or whatever it might be because you don't have that big support. The force protection mechanism. And so, yeah, I was the first guy in Yemen. For the people who don't really know what we're talking about out there, I mean, to the extent that you're comfortable talking about it, I mean, can you describe a little bit about what ASAT was? If I understand the history of it, right, I mean, before that, there was O&I, right?

Operations and Intelligence. Yeah, I'd been to that, which. is more teaches you how to be a good Intel officer on an ODA. And they had the RSTs at group, which were... Well, the one RST that did the surveys. But, yeah, for, so for A-SOT, like, they really did focus on, like, the final exercise is your, you know, you play the role of a team that has, been inserted into a country that we used to have relationships with but abandoned so there'd

been in guerrillas you're supposed to reestablish contact with this guerrilla force so basically every place we've ever been in a hostile country come on it's just like Afghanistan right right so um and you know there are way we learned the ways to communicate let's say sort of the old uh you know sticks and chalkmark things that people did back in the day during the Cold War so communications techniques

I would say and maybe some other stuff that you learned how to employ. We can say human as a broad term. And trade craft. You learn essential trade craft. Yeah, essential trade craft. Yeah, essential trade craft.

Right. Yeah. And so they deployed you to Yemen as sort of like a test bed to see like, can we develop this capability? Yes. And you, you know, it's really an honor to be the first person and an E7 to show up in an embassy and tell the defense attache, the ambassador, and the chief of station there that guess what I'm here to do. Right. Right. And I'm an E-Syce. seven army guy right and i and and they go no yeah no none of you and uh it took a lot of doing uh to try to get permission to get them on board with the get them on board with that

but you know but but but i think again they'd never heard of it well you know and i think you know we talked last time about about my assessment in Yemen and predicting that something like what happened with the coal could happen and going against the status quo and all the other intelligence entities and state department and analysts there and so I believe that that sort of bears out that having that experience that I seasoned military person who's deployed a lot and seen a lot can bring to bear with the proper clearances so you can see the right

information and skills to be able to have the freedom of movement and get out and operate and make your own personal assessment on the ground you know I think it offers a different view it's not that you know we're operators and operators' view isn't the only view, but it's an important view, I think, in a low-intensity conflict,

uncertain environment, or hostile environment to have other than that straight state department, CIA assessment. With things like that, both having a background in UW and Uncomitial Warfare and counter-terrorism, you know,

you have this experience that, say, an analyst or, you know, any other type of surveyor wouldn't have in the sense of if I if it were my job to attack this thing like how would I do it and and or if it were my ODA coming in here what would I want to know and there's I think that people who don't have that experience think that they can imagine those things but but often they don't necessarily have the on the ground experience to actually understand how those attacks And especially when you talk about like the coal or, you know, suicide bombings, like, you can imagine, you can kind of push it out.

How would I, how would I attack a tactical or strategic target if I weren't afraid of loss of life? If like if I had people just willing to like to kill themselves or whatever. And in my career, I think I learned that with the military, we have a preemptive and solutions. based mindset. And there's a problem or here's a potential problem. I'm going to solve it. Here's how I want to do. With a lot of the federal government and including love the FBI and a lot of people in

there, but there and after the coal, it was a lot of what we hear comes from FBI investigation. But those are more police-oriented after-the-fact organizations. They are built that once a crime has occurred to preserve evidence, investigate, and find somebody to prosecute and hold accountable for that. And that's their role, and it should be. And I think as a military person, you come again with that more resident. cell right here's how I would do it so I know better how to prevent it and and and I'm I'm gonna treat it as an attack I'm gonna go after right a solution right

and I'm not saying that's always the right answer I believe you know I'm glad we have civilians in the ultimate places of authority in countries and other places we go because hey if it's me I'm gonna give you that military answer right all the time Right. You know, there's nothing we can't do, not given enough resources and materials and personnel. We can make anything happen. Right.

Yeah. And that's just not feasible. Right. Right. And so how did you eventually, like, how did you, because obviously, especially like the chiefest station, here you are somebody with tradecraft and you want to go out and, you know, maybe set up low level sources or do whatever of it, you know, sort of do this. advanced force type of operation. How do you sell the chief of station on this? When at this point in time, obviously,

the agency and the military didn't necessarily have the same working relationship that they do today. You know, the first time I'll be honest, I got told no. And even though I showed them the paperwork and all that said, yes, they said no. So I waited. and I

re-figure you know I towed the party line did stuff made myself valuable then I wait a few weeks

and I you know went back through that reg and highlighted a few key phrases and all and came back

and said I'd like to readress this and here's this and then I said hey look I'm not trying to be you I'm not you

I don't want to do what you do I just had this little thing here. And I'm not going to step on any toes. I'll tell you and show you everything I do.

Were they a little more receptive with if you did it, pitch it as more of like a force protection? And I, always from the beginning, you know, this is, I think things changed much later, but it was a force protection issue because

deminers were going to come in a few months and a demining contingent and another ODA to do some trade some fid or some training of of some Yemeni unit and it was for force protection for that and and to be honest the first time I'm a new person they don't know me right and so it's no this looks funny and wonky it's never been done we're not doing it right and that's why you know you need to be on the ground a while and let them see who you are and get to know you some and then you know you need long enough to be able to pull the wool over their eyes right

right right get it past them right but ultimately that was the mission was successful yeah you know I was allowed to um be on my own more and travel around and do stuff and yeah I got um corralled once that hey you know what are you doing driving around yemen yourself and um nobody does that and you know you need to give in your you know you need to stay make sure you stay here in in this box uh yeah but but i was able to um you know cut my teeth get my feet on the ground and talk to people uh which led to my assessments that predicted you know what might happen regarding the attack on the coal. And I remember you telling me that like that was not well received.

No, um, no, the ambassador. In all my training, nobody told me that if you write anything, the ambassador has the right to review it, change it, edit it. I mean, it doesn't matter what it is. They have that right. And I thought I could bypass it. ambassadorial comment and review by just sending a area assessment back and that turned out not to be the case. The ambassador was angry. She flew down from Sanaat to Aden and called all of us in a room and, you know, talked to me specifically about my report, but she reiterated, you know,

some of her contingencies about, you know, we were just there to do a job and shouldn't have rifles. We were, you know, in her view, it seemed like just as much as a threat as anybody else in the country because we might do something that might cause a problem. Because her line of diplomatic effort was more of like, I don't want to say normalizing relations, but building diplomatic relations. You know, you know, to be honest, my opinion is her line of thought was, I can't have anything that, any kind of report that comes out that makes this a dangerous place that causes Hillary Clinton to cancel her planned trip here. So, I mean, to be honest, that's, I believe that. And I don't think I could be convinced that was any other reason for that.

I mean, and I understand, I guess, the political implications, but this is also like the makings of the scandal, too. Like if they do come there and then an attack happens and then there's a big thorough review, like the 1983 Bay route bombing. I mean, this was a big thing where there were people, you know, we talked to Mike Taylor about this. I mean, that, you know, there were people warning that, you know, something was percolating here, something bad was going to happen. And then a bunch of people die. And after the fact, it's like, ooh, we should. have seen this coming well and things on the ground in Beirut changed over time and it wasn't the place we first went into right but where would and and but yet but that that that becomes that

um that yin and yang between the civilian authorities the ambassador and the military people on the ground i don't know if last time i told the story but in Beirut you know i was covering the beach and had my recon platoon there on the beach outside the airport. Well, it was down on low ground, and there was a big berm and a big highway right beside that. Well, so to defend against that, because we're down in the low ground, I built two giant sandbagged machine gun placements up parallel to the road.

And at one point, we took these big giant, shipping crates, plywood shipping crates that came off a ship and put it up at the machine gun emplacement and put the sandbags around it, but then I was able to put a roof on it and put three layers of sandbags on top.

Why? Because I'm protecting from RPG and grenades. And, you know, I'm saying it again, I'm a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and I'm I'm there. And one day this probably a suburban or pulls up and some guy in a suit gets out

and he comes over to me he goes, who's in charge here? I am. And he said, what's that? That's a machine gun emplacement. Yeah, what's that on top of there? I said, that's a roof. He goes, is that wood in there? I go, it is. He said, well, that looks like

you're planning to make a permanent, it makes us look like we're establishing a permanent presence here. And I'm like, no, it's to protect against this. He goes, and he said, well, I want you to take it down. I said, who were you? He said, I'm Ambassador to Crockett. And I said, yeah, well, I'm Lieutenant Harrington. I said, and he goes, well, you take that down now.

I go, no, that protects the Marines. He said, I'm ordering you take it down now. I said, why don't you go on from here and when a competent authority in a Marine Corps tells me to take it down, I'll take it down. You don't know. I don't know. Ambassadors have the ultimate authority. I thought, yeah, I'm being just like yoni Netanyahu. Yeah.

I'm doing the right thing. Yeah. And he leaves. And about 20 minutes later, I get a call on the radio from the Marine Command. who's really upset. Right. And who informs me that, hey, you know, you need to take that down. But that, for me, was that whole thing of here we are now putting personal safety at risk.

Right, right. For political messaging. Mm-hmm. And it's not even messaging. No one in Beirut believes that your little bunkers thing for your machine gun is a permanent, persistent presence of Marines. You're not building a headquarters bunker. Right. It's not a concrete bunker. It's not a pillbox

like carved into the mountain side. Yeah, yeah. I would like to say that stuff can't happen in the military, but there have been a special forces sergeant major or two who have wanted guys to go out and paint rocks. Yeah.

Yeah. To beautify the area. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We know. So it's, and so while I might be hard on, you know, that ambassador for that thing at that time, and I'm pretty hard against

about Ambassador O'Bind's Bo Dines' choices Yeah, maybe there's a few military people that have done the same Oh yeah, I think area of beautification is specifically a military term Yeah, they don't have Foreign Service officers out paint and rocks

Yeah, that doesn't happen. Yeah. No. So what year was it when you wrote this report that, you know, that the ambassador didn't care for? That was 1999. I went there, I went to Yemen in 98 and stayed over into 99.

That was pretty prophetic. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Nicole, because the coal happened in 2000. Well, and remember in January 2000 was the attempt by the same guys on the USS the Sullivan's, and it didn't, you know, it didn't work out for them. And, you know, so then they retried and regrouped and retried in October. And the fact that they could that they could try it once and not be successful and then do it. And then that that doesn't raise like the threat level and everybody's defensive posture.

And maybe it did and it just didn't work. But the fact that then they could turn around and do it on the coal, you know, after their test run. Yeah, no, I understand that push pull between diplomacy and military security. But I mean, come on at a certain point. like no it's not well I think I told you before that that the Islamic army of Aden I showed up I'm told the accepted story was it's three guys in a fax machine that just make threats against Western Westerners and there are very few Westerners there at that time so then you know things go on there's a few

car bombings they get more active I talked last time about the arrest of the Aidan six while we were in Aden you know, and, you know, their direct tie to potentially trying to hit us and where we were staying. And then the hostage standoff, you know, in a fight and some hostages were killed. So to me, all the analysts and the intelligence agencies failed to take into account this escalation. And again, that whole thing of what we're military people. So, you know, again, I have people. I have people that are dedicated that have proven that they have access to weapons,

have proven they will take violent action against Westerners and have a stated interest. And, yes, I did see the SIG-int that, you know, so I understood that why people said it wasn't an hour. Al-Qaeda place and there had never been in the operations there and there were no direct operational ties to Al-Qaeda at that time. Okay, I get that, but I still have a bunch of inept guys that will do whatever they're right told to do. And they're getting better. And so again, my ultimate assessment, again,

with military experience was okay what if they ever accept operational control from Delta I mean from yeah from Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda provides training and operational right develops the operations or they host a cell right from Al Qaeda well and guess what the yeah and a whole thing was a cell that was hosted yeah and a lot of those a lot of those what we would call like minor league or or you know third tier whatever like organizations out there in africa and you know in in in the middle east who uh i mean in the philippine wherever who we would say well they're not a q it's like but they but they want to be and so they're trying to make their mark so that oh yeah a q will like send them funding and like they're trying to like step on the stage so they're willing to go a little bit further

That's what happened with ISIS. ISIS. Quote unquote, in air quotes, ISIS in the Philippines. I mean, they're really just bandits. But they're trying to get the attention. Same thing in the, again, quote unquote, ISIS groups in Africa. They're trying to get the attention of the bigger players. Get the money, get the recognition, get the funding, get the training.

The media exposure. So the way they do that is they go out and they try to make these big things happen. So the parent organ, you know, the organizational look back and go, hey, yeah, well, we'll pick you guys up too. And even on a smaller scale, like go to Syria, right, when you first had the

trained terrorists coming in from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Syria, the people they hooked up with became successful on the battlefield. Right. So now here's this guy.

Now the local that has brought in, you know, hosted a cell, is becoming successful. He's becoming bigger and more popular and more powerful. So now his competitor,

50 miles away, hey, I need one of those too. Right, right. And so now you get this and people are welcoming these franchises. Yeah, because it grows their power. It's really that much different

than us going into Afghanistan with suitcases of money and more, Lord. to be on our side. Right. So speaking of which, I mean, let's jump a little forward ahead. I mean, we talked about Yemen.

We talked about Kuwait. And the last time we spoke, the previous episode, we talked a lot about going into Afghanistan and Torabora, some really incredible stories there. But I want to jump a little bit further forward into the Kausd bombing

and sort of your awareness of that. I think we've had a number of guests on the show who have talked about the chaos bombing CIA personnel um do you want to talk about from from your point of view and what happened in the aftermath sure i so um this is one of those incidents right that it's a very seminal incident and it's very emotional to a lot of people so you know i'm going to caveat to anybody out there that this is my personal view right um um you know we had um FBI has or in law enforcement there's this saying the lust for the bust so it's sometimes you get ahead of your skis lean too far forward because you want to make that

bust so here Al-Qaeda played the agency masterfully right the triple agent yeah they dangled this guy they let photos leak of him with very senior al-Qaeda people you know so the whole thing with you when you have an asset you know what who is this guy what is he claimed to be can we verify that okay he's who he says to be what is his access well okay how we verify that access so who what is everybody looking for access to the top tier so Oh, wait a second. If we have what we think of is proof that this guy has access to the top tier, now then, you know, that desire to do something becomes very strong. And, you know, there are a lot of patriotic reasons that we all want to do that, too, right?

But then in any bureaucracy, I think there's also some career-minded people that like to latch on to things that have a big result because of what it does for their careers. And I'm not pointing to any person in specific on this. But because of the desire to get a big head. hit against a big person, the standard precautions, a lot of those were thrown to the wind. I'm sure your other guests have talked about just the tactical part, not searching a guy before he came in. That can't be. You know, I've brought assets and some of them were bad guys onto a, you know, you know,

the Ariana Hotel compound, but not until I or the GRS guys with me searched them to make sure they did not have anything on them before I would ever bring them somewhere where I'd risk other people to them. And in this case, right, you have this guy that gave a reason. he did not want to be searched, so the call was made not to search him. And of course, you know, that enabled him to detonate himself. And then what compounded that was because, you know, I worked on another top five al-Qaeda

targeting, event and I saw how that that draws people in. If it's a top 10 person, boy, you get some help from headquarters. Right. Right. Right. Right. And you get. And sometimes help you don't ask for. And help that you can't refuse. Right. Right. And a lot of them and everybody's coming in and giving their expertise and chipping in. And a lot of that stuff is helpful, right? A lot of it is. But there's just a lot of it. So the day that

he came, there are a lot of people that, you know, finally, finally we have someone, so it's just sucked in. Right. Which would never happen like on a regular, like, no, no. No. And why is that? I mean, that kind of goes to

the bigger question. One of the things I loved about special forces and particularly Delta was that it was an NCO-driven operation and that you know if you were if you as an NCO were in charge of this part of a takedown wherever it was left to you well you know they don't have that same mentality or ethos in somewhere like the CIA so you know and like take it if you were in a regular

infantry unit in the military and you get this for a big thing okay the senior officers are going to come in, right? Yeah, the general's going to lead the assault. Yeah, go on. So, yeah, I think, you know, it drew people in and it was this big deal. And then when you, I think maybe some people excused or, you know, you rationalize in your own brain why we're not doing this that we would normally do because, well, so-and-so is senior and they're here and they're here and They're buying off on this. So, okay, I buy off on it. And, you know, that happened.

You know, so it was, you know, it was, yeah, it was a shock throughout. And then I think that's the first time it really hit the agency hard because we've lost people, of course, in different assaults and different attacks and going back to They root and throughout the history, you know, we have the wall where people in the agency, you know, have given their lives. But here it was like in the war on terror since 9-11, here's a time where they actually targeted and attacked us in a larger scale and it was successful. So there was a lot of anger and angst about that. You know, the agency was able to, through different, through multiple sources of intelligence to figure out after the fact where that attack came from or where the guy,

that in charge of that was in Pakistan. And, you know, it took a while because you have to verify. And just that whole process to verify, I was involved in trying to verify that. It was a rough time because every single day I was getting pinged from headquarters. You know, have you verified, you know, because people, People really, really wanted to do something in response to that attack. But, yes, eventually the agency was able, that's out in the press, to go after and get Hussein or Hussein Al Yamini, who was the person responsible for the attack.

Do they tag him in a drone strike? Is that how that? Yeah, it tagged him. in a compound in in Pakistan and you know it was a compound that was attached to you know a housing unit so you know was but then over time you know they saw what were al-Qaeda coming in and out of that that house. So eventually the strike was taken. At first there were quite a number of people in that building. And we think about the bombs and how efficient they are. I think there were a number of missiles fired into that building. And yeah, it's a mud, you know, the buildings that we've all seen in

in Pakistan and Afghanistan. So it destroyed a lot of the building, but let's see, I think there were like 19 people in that building as they got ready to shoot. Two walked out like five seconds before, and then, you know, you think everybody's done for,

but a lot of people were just shaken and rubble and got up and walked away. But the focus of the attack was on the it was during cold weather so on the central room and you know the people in that room

were you know perished so and then the al-Qaeda comes and all came out with that guy getting getting killed so so the CIA

did get some measure of revenge for um on the people that helped initiate the attack on coast. You know, on that note, too, I mean, since we have you here, I can't help but ask if you had any situational awareness on all the stuff that went down with the bin Laden targeting. I did not.

You know, we all at some point when I was chasing after some, some top tier al-Qaeda personnel of course bin Laden was always a discussion and I spoke with some analysts from that team flew out and talked to me about what I was doing so we talked about that but I don't know that I do know like there is a guy a former SF an orange guy that was one of the key people that for many, many months help put together that target package. And this is a guy and, hey, Al out there, I'm not going to say your last name, but, you know, this is that guy that's that guy. Does the job and walks away.

He, Al is, you know, he's a really, really nice guy. And, you know, I just wish that people could know. that here's this guy who's never gotten any credit or acknowledgement for, you know, all that work that he did. And yet, you know, he's that guy. You know, I talked about being the guy with the experience to be in the right place at the right time to be able to make calls like on the coal and stuff. Well, here's the guy that had all that experience and knowledge. that was able to be in that role to help put together that, which I think, you know, helped lead to that successful takeout of bin Laden, right?

And I just wish that that guy was the kind of guy you guys could have here. Yeah, no, we would. I mean, it's interesting. We've also talked on this show about the guy who was the first one that shot bin Laden, who has never gone public, never said anything about what he did and the dev group operator. And it's just, it's interesting. And to hear that there are these guys out there that, like, did my job. And that's enough and walked away from it.

And I mean, I hope they're sitting on the beach drinking my tides somewhere, enjoying life. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. But with that said, Al and Red, I guess. Yeah. If you ever want to go to show, you'd need to have you. could you talk then a little bit about like the secrecy around it like when it when it went down i mean did you know it was coming or was it like so compartmentalized you were just like what no after

the fact yeah right uh sure everybody was really happy everybody on the inside you know i'd say i'm sure all the intelligence and law enforcement agencies you know you get you before the headlines hit You get that first reverberation through. Right, right. And there was a lot of happiness, excitement. I wasn't smart enough as some people were to save the newspapers with the headlines and stuff. And so, yeah, but the other details. And that's one of those things where I didn't, I'm not one of those.

people that I wanted to try to dig and call the people I knew and try to get them and talk about it because it's like, hey, they had somebody else's gig and they did it and and also sometimes it makes people uncomfortable, right? Like to, you know, when

you're friends with somebody and you try to pry that, you know, that's, you know, secret stuff out of them or whatever. They're like, you know, it's almost like you're leveraging your friendship right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, because, you know, and, you know, and I was busy doing other things too.

So, yeah, it was a great day. And part of it, part of it, let's be honest, in some ways it's like, who, we're in for a change now. That part's over. And it does change. Certainly the war on terror didn't. end with him, but it turned a page, I think, in the hearts and minds of the American people. And maybe that's important, right?

That we need to, you know, we're on our end in the military and in intelligence agencies. We're out there pursuing those goals and those objectives to lead that way. But then there comes that time when it's time to turn the page on that. Right. and you know if you give us like right would MacArthur ever stopped in Korea right without going into

China but but we need those people to say no it's time to turn the page on that and I think that's I think it's so doing this this podcast has been like so cool because getting to talk to people like you

who are there early on and Mark Polymeropolis gave us that print that's behind you about the invasion we've had Justin Sapp and J.R. Seeger on the show, those like initial teams that went into Afghanistan and we're kind of, all you guys were there for America in like a very dark time. There's this period of time like, are we just helpless? Yeah. And I feel like you kind of showed that like, no, we're not. We're definitely not helpless. Like there is a way to fight back. And then the chapter on that part of American history closed with the bin Laden raid, I would say. Yeah, I think it did. The two of us. again to a large part and and and that whole part of answering are we helpless right right and and you know

and and I go back what whatever people think about George Bush you know we will get you yeah and you know a lot of us believe that and we would never stop it's true that sometimes our government says no right but but there are Americans that that will give the best years of their lives to pursue these goals and these efforts, right? Right. Well, and, you know, it's interesting to me when people talk about Afghanistan how we lost in Afghanistan, because if you were just to take what our initial goal was in Afghanistan, which was to eliminate al-Qaeda, like, we did that fast.

Like, we achieved that goal in Afghanistan very quickly. And then it became sort of this, you know, sort of nebulous, ambiguous sort of war against the Taliban and other elements. But when it comes to what we set out to do initially there, we did it very quickly, you know. So it's, yeah, it's, you know, you talk about Bush and like when we went into Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaeda, you know, like talk about Justin Sapp and, you know, the guys we've had on. like you know like jr sager like they rolled through that country quickly it was so i was on four of those teams yeah and uh and with um and last time we talked about i stood uh in torra bore on top of the mountain with the in my op and i was telling those guys yeah you know this is easy now it's like playing king of the hill we've got the aircraft we're knocking them off the hill but to stay here

right and at the time time I said 10 years from now we'll still be here and it's not going to be this easy. I didn't realize it'd be 20. Right, right, right. But, and, you know, that's just the way it goes. Yeah. You know, we're talking about some serious things here and I mentioned before to you that I would tell you some funny stories about Frank Tony. That's what I want to hear about next.

Frank Tony. So, General Frank Tony, when I met General Frank Tony was when this coincides with that whole A-Sat thing we talked about. So he was the commander of Soxon, and I go down and meet Frank Tony. And Frank Tony is known. He was a hardcore military guy, you know, more rangerish than. and special forces. Yeah. You know, I'd say.

I was going to say like a Marine in an Army uniform, right? Yeah. And the famous quote for Frank Tony was, I don't need to speak no foreign language. I speak 556. Right. Right. He's like, yeah, I don't need no blankety blank foreign language.

You just shoot people. And that's all that counts. So, I mean, that's the way he was. And he liked things more the way Rangers liked things. So, you know, he's, you know, I go off and I go to Yemen to be this guy. Well, I'm in Yemen, so I'm wearing civilian clothes. My hair grows out. You can't hardly ever get to find a barber anyway, so who cares.

You know, and I'm working. The position they gave me in the embassy was working in the Defense Attaché's office as the operations. operational NCO because they didn't have one. So it was like two guys and a warrant officer or a colonel in me. And yeah, I'm in civilian clothes. I'm trying to fill that job while I'm trying to learn about Yemen and make my assessment about the security situation there. And General Frank Tony's coming out for a visit. So the embassy, you know, it gets all ready for this visit and the defense attache and the major and I,

because I'm the NCO, so I'm going to carry suitcases and stuff, go out to meet the general coming in on his little airplane. And I'm like, whoa, you know, I know the stories about Frank Tony. I really need to get a haircut and shave my mustache, but I was too busy. I didn't have time. So, you know, I'm not looking like a soldier would look. And he lands, and now I'm nervous because he's known to be pretty mercurial in his temper as well. And I'm just trying to stay out of his vision and line and not talk to him.

And they, he comes, he gets off the plane. They greet him. they come over with with his bags and they're sitting there on at beside the tarmac and then the major from the defense attach's office says sarned harrington take his passport and get expedited and get that through and i i uh start to go and he goes did you call him sergeant in this major who didn't like the fact that I was special forces and didn't like the fact that I claimed to be allowed to do some of the things that I said I was going to do because of ASOT took that opportunity to say,

hell general, he's one of your special forces boys. And Frank Tony looked at me. He just went like that. He went. And just started staring and looking. And he goes, you are special forces. I'll get your passport. And I took off to go expedited his passport.

And I think for the next couple days, I mean, I just tried to, like, he just would stare at me. And I just tried to stay. The next time you saw him, did you have a high and tight? no I couldn't get it right but then you know some things happened um the embassy didn't really want to deal with him so they kind of like and it was a holiday coming up so they were all like planning on taking off and he's there he's like I'm going to be taking around and showing around and everybody turned to me and goes he's kind of your responsibility and like okay so So I became his driver and tried to take him around. And I think one of the first times he really did not like me. And I think the first time we started breaking ice was there was a Special Forces detachment that was training a Yemeni unit down on the Red Sea on the coast.

And he was going to take a helicopter down to vanguard down to v. visit them. So I drove him out to this base and we're there and it was just chaos. The Yemeni military was, it was just a group of dudes. And eventually a hip started coming in. And there was like nobody knew. There was no guidance, no anything. So, hey, I do what a special forces guy would do.

I get out there. I start providing guidance to the helicopter and trying to get it to land. And of course, it's not, but it eventually lands. And so we're going to get myself, General Tony, and a few Yemeni officers are going to get on this aircraft and fly down to the coast. And so they get on. one of the Yemeni generals has his kid with him and he's smoking a cigarette and you know they all just get on this aircraft and there you could see from inside the door that there was a big like 55 gallon drum painted red that had JP fuel in it and the guy's leaning on it like this smoking a cigarette and his kids in there and then they decide that we need to send some security guys. So I don't know what they said to everybody, but the next thing you know, everybody wants to be the person to do that. So they all rush the helicopter. I mean, like 80 people rush the helicopter. And, you know, the NCO in you comes out. So I'm like, you know, blank this. So I weighed into the people and I start, Yemenis are not real big, right? And so I start grabbing people and throw,

going them to decide and I get my way to the door and I'm grabbing guys and just pulling them and throwing them out and I climb up on the aircraft and I look and everybody looks at me like that and so I start walking down and the first thing was that Yemeni general leaning over the fuel with his cigarette I went up to him and smacked his hand and face with the cigarette and to knock it out of his hand and I you know stomp out the cigarette and went like that and I walked down the line and you know there were guys that had their rifles facing up and so I grabbed their rifles and turned them down and walked back in General Tony was sitting at the back and when I got back there he just looked at me and kind of laughed like yeah that's my guy and we got on this aircraft and I don't know how we ever made it to where we were going and coming back. But then while we were there at this unit, I didn't want to encroach. There was an ODA there. They hosted the general. They were in uniform. They all went in this room where the officers were going to eat this luncheon.

And so I stayed out because I went in civilian clothes with all the jundis, you know, the really low-level Yemeni guys. and hey, I'm in there in the middle, you know, with my hand, goat grabbing and rice grabbing and eating with my hand and having a good time. After that, I said, well, nothing speaks the language like training. So I went outside and was doing some disarming techniques, and I was letting people with knives try to, you know,

see if they could attack me. and I was doing some takeaways and stuff like that. So I had this big group around me. And I guess the luncheon finished in there, and they came outside. And I guess the general came outside and sees this crowd of people around there. And then he comes in, and I'm in the middle of it.

And he goes, what are you doing? And he saw what I was doing. And I think, you know, he was like, okay. And so he looked at me a little, differently from that point because you didn't see me as this volume guy with long hair stuff and we go back and it was funny because it's a holiday we get back and um he's supposed to go to some dinner some big dinner that night and we are late and it's running behind and i'm driving him and as i pick him up after he give him a chance to get cleaned up and

I'd pick him up in the car and he wants to go to the Marriott Hotel and go to the gift shop. He said, I was here six months ago. And so we go in the gift shop and he's looking for a souvenir to take home. And, you know, we're looking and looking and I'm looking at my watch and like, geez, you know, I'm supposed to be at that dinner like already, you know. and he's looking and looking and he's then now now he'll talk to me and he goes sarnan harrington what do you think of this and what are you think of that and i'm like yeah okay sir i and then then he tells me you know i just want to think about that but somebody because he's passed now that you know at some point he looked at me and said yeah you know uh i got to buy

something to take home because you need one of those uh things that uh it's not his exact word but lubricates things to take home. Right. And he used a different terminology. But, and I was like, okay. And then I go away and I'm like, oh, man, it's getting late. And he calls me over there again, like the third time. And he goes, oh, it's hard to hear him.

I can't decide on this. He goes, I swear I was here six months ago. And this thing was $40 or $50 cheaper. And they want $90 or $90 or $1. $100 for this painting or whatever it was at that point. And we were so late. At that point, I'm like, hey, I guess I'll throw it all on the line now. So I said, so he said, what do you think?

And I looked at him and I said, I don't give a fly an F about that. I goes, you're a GD general. And it seems to me if you want to buy a blank. Lanking $100 painting to take home and get the effect you said you wanted, then you ought to be able to buy it. And at first I thought, oh my God, I've overstepped my God because he looked at me like he went red like that. Like that. He glared at me. And I was like, oh, I have really stepped into it.

And he stared at me. and then he broke out laughing and he goes you're right he goes and he bought it and then we get in the car and I start driving like hell

I'm you know cutting across medians and driving and he was I guess he was nervous he was doing like this in the seat and I was like what's up sir

and he goes I need to stop and get a gift For the hostess, I go, you have that bag of stuff that your aid has. They'll just give her some of that. We don't need to stop. He goes, yeah, sometimes I just get keyed up. He goes, man, I just wish I could have a beer. I go, the only place to have a beer is back at the Marriott where we just left.

He goes, well, I wish I, and I'll be. And I turned a car across the median, and we went back and grabbed a beer at the Marriott. And then I took him to his dinner. You know, it was funny because after that, you know, my thing in Yemen ended. I went home. Oh, oh, more and more thing on Frank Tony. So he gets that. He gets ready to leave the country.

He goes down to the sook and he buys this big sword. everybody came through buying stuff matter of fact general zinney had a plane that came through with all his staff and they simply to go souvenir buying in yemen it's okay um but he couldn't get his sword on the plane to go commercial plane to go home so he left it with me can you get this home and it was a few months later he was already home and uh general zinney's small plane came through for because he came in for a visit and i was like i'll get your sword home so you're going to tampa okay and i made a deal with the pilots and i'm going to stick his sword on the on the plane so i sent a note back you know of course as i've already put this into play i sent a note back to tampa that hey i got that and then it came back

do not put that sword on that plane because he did not want to be perceived as impinging on general zini to get a personal thing back and i was like too late it's gone and uh sent his sword back but uh you know after that you know i did a follow-on classified thing where i went to Kuwait to do the first AFO office thing where I supervised some ODAs doing some

battlefield preparation of the battlefield activities and General Tony was the guy I had to be brief You know it is interesting because I you know

He we got we knew each other Had you had time to get a haircut at that point in time Or Of course I did get a haircut At that point in time But it was just that funny. Yeah. Well, it's interesting, too, because, you know, prior to the GWAT, right?

Like, you know, you'd see guys from maybe debt A in Germany or whatever. Or the RSTs. But relaxed grooming standards wasn't a thing. And, you know, maybe with like Delta or whatever. But in general, relaxed grooming standards was like, like, people didn't like it. they didn't it wasn't a thing and it wasn't until we became more active i guess you know as a force on the world stage where um where it became just more of an accepted practice dude i had a i had a memo from my commander that said i was on relaxed grooming standards and like i got kicked

out of post gyms like you can't work out here really well it's like the sf guys at ford campbell you know if you didn't wear the ankle over the ankle white socks General Petraeus's sergeant majors would chase you down and that but what like what it's so crazy like the things that

especially a peacetime military I mean even in wartime I remember in Bogram how once like major commands it settled in how everybody was supposed to wear a PT belt at all hours

and that's the nature of it right crazy But let's be honest, when I went to Delta, right, we say relaxed grooming standards. What you want to do anywhere when you go when you're a new person is you want to fit in. Right. And you want to assume the identity of the people ahead of you. So back in the day when I went, you know, talking about 1990-ish, that the Delta uniform was to grow your hair longer. And you couldn't have a beard, but you grew that mustache out.

further than you could now it wasn't supposed to go down like this you can have but you could but you go past the ends of the borders of your lips which the military you know the rest of the military didn't allow and then what else the polo shirt and the straight-legged three button 501 jeans and the hush puppy high top shoes so what you're doing is I'm not wearing a uniform because I need to blend in but what I'm doing is wearing a uniform right right just a different right uniform right and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and I tell myself I'm blending man yeah yeah yeah but what I really wanted to be do was to be identified with those people other people that I right right and and and I think that was true I mean that was true of like every organization that tried to blend in is that all of their

was either from REI or North Face. Like it was, it's all severe. The beard and the ball cap. It's also in the OECLEs. But it's also. Yeah. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, yeah. But it's all 511 and R.E.I. And, you know, and that was to be the thing.

Yeah. The agency when I was out there that, you know, the agency before somebody would go to the war zone, they give you this, uh, payment to go out and buy clothes. so a lot of people went to or like you said REI but a lot of to Orvis yeah and you see that guy show up it's wearing the fisherman shirt the car new cargo pants yeah keen or whatever brand boots and all that stuff yeah it's all brand new stuff yeah yeah that you know and that's and look what they're doing their job one one of my favorite stories is about it's from the the Indians and the Pakistanis went to war in Kashmir in, I think it was 1999.

And the Indians, they're like, their mountaineer troop shows up at an REI in the UK. And they're like, yeah, we want this and we're going to be in the mountains. We need this and that. And they're like, oh, you need this, this, and this. And they're like, oh, how do you know that? They're like, oh, the Pakistanis were here a week ago. That's good. Yeah.

Well, that's like when I went to coast to open up the coast base in Afghanistan, we parachuted in all these, into the CIA sent all these crates that we parachuted in that had, you know, in addition to the arms and ammunition, were clothing, winter clothing, because nobody had winter clothing. So we're getting all these things that have the parkas, the, field jackets, boots, what's the brown, poly, polypro. The polypro, wool caps, boonie caps, all that stuff. So, you know, we start giving it out.

Well, here we are used to Americans. And we had to hold a class because next thing you know, here comes guys out wearing polypro on top of their. of their other clothes. And there's a guy wearing a boony cap. And on top of that is a wool cap stuck on top of that. And when it was like comical stuff, it was like, okay, we have to give them a class on how to wear the clothes. Yeah.

Yeah. Crazy. It's, you're absolutely right that it like it becomes a look. And by the time it ends up on like 12 inch action figure GI Joe's that it, like, it's a look. A lot of people are trying to replicate it. Well, I wouldn't even, I mean, by the time it, you know, ends up in Brooklyn where, all of a sudden, beards are super fashionable again,

and everybody's wearing some sort of shamag. Everybody's wearing a shemog or, you know, some sort of, you know, something around their neck, you know, when it's like part of hips or culture, like,

wow, this is really progressed from, you know. Yeah, because we, you know, it's about that we all want to be part of some group and identify with some way.

Sure. And it's, I think, even some ways subconscious that we do that. Sure, absolutely. Yeah. Gary,

I'd like to, like, Since we're a little bit jumping around, but I would like to jump back into your time dealing with Syria. Because that's a period that I'm kind of fascinating by, fascinating. And have some experience, yeah. Precisely. Could you tell us about, like, what your intersection was with the Syrian conflict, the Syrian Civil War, whatever you'd like to call it, a little complicated? But when did that come up on your radar?

So for me in as early as like 2011, super early, that I came back from the country I'd been in for the last two years and was assigned to Near East Division and the office that handled three countries of Syria and a couple other countries. other the Levant. No Iraq. Yeah. The Levant. It did not include Iraq and it did not include Turkey. And it did not include Lebanon because that was a EUR, Europe folk base. So, but they said at the beginning, well, you got all this wartime experience and things in Iraq aren't going well. and we think that will become the next hot spot, the next place. So we want you to be here early to be able to set the table, sort of like I did in the military, right, to step into build this up. So to transition ultimately when things get bad enough into a task force,

to, you know, to focus on Syria. So, um, so, that's what I did. And, um, you know, regular stuff for a while and then gradually things started deteriorating in, in Syria. What does that look like as you move from like phase zero operations to like, you know, kind of phase four maybe? Um, you know, you know, I really think your special forces training really helps you see that.

Maybe where people around me didn't. So you could see that. And I think one of the first things for me, and given my experience in Yemen and given my experience in Afghanistan, one of the very first things I said was, hey, this eventually is going to get big enough. It's going to shift to the military. So what I want to do is from the beginning,

I said, I want to include SOCOM and SOXCENT in on what we're discussing. We can get people the right classifications to talk about it, but we need to engage them from again because... Have them on the same sheet. How does it always start in a conflict? The CIA comes in first. It's under covert action authorities. So we start, right? and then we go up that ramp and hostilities escalate, right?

And then at some point, it turns over generally to special forces first and then to bigger army. So having been in the conflicts I'd been in, I was like, let's make this a little less difficult. Let's make it, let's include them at the beginning so there's a smooth transition. but you know organizational uh differences and the folks above me

and in the CIA were like no we can't no we can't do that and um you know at some point I I went with somebody down to

to brief uh at at uh at uh CECOM and in later SOCOM but the first time

I was like let's just share and talk about this like no we're not going to tell them everything and and I was a little bit disappointed with that but you know I understand

you know the military has it's it's in some areas doesn't trust the agency completely you know that was my experience in Afghanistan with John Mulholland and the whole reason I got put in there and it's the same with the agency and the Army and having been in both I see why there is some justification for each of those but I feel that the overall effort for the United States suffers right yeah one of the humorous things and I hope that whoever this guy is sorry I don't remember your name maybe it's a good idea

don't but um you know i'm sitting now in this agency office when we're going to detail a fifth group team to the agency to go do some initial stuff there so i'm like wow things have changed i'm not that guy now i'm on this end you know and um this team shows up and you know i'm i'm i'm i'm i'm I'm proud of my fifth group guys, and I want them to show a good face. And they come in and they start processing. And then like the second or third day, there's a guy that comes in in a suit. And he's wearing those five-fingered. The little athletic shoe.

In a suit. The five-finger thing. And a suit. That's what. Yeah. We did tie. Yeah. And he came in.

And I'm like, and of course, people in, Eastern are looking at me like, like hey these are you and I was like what are you doing and he said I got blisters because I don't wear dress shoes and I bought those dress shoes and I came here and I got blisters the first two days so I'm wearing these and I said oh no no yeah you go home your hotel whatever and get on I don't care what other shoes it is, but you're not coming in here that way. I said, you represent your group.

And he so we sent him back. Please tell me this was an officer. No, I'm going to tell you, I hate to say this. Haven't been one. But if it wasn't an officer, who's the next guy you would guess? The next position on a team.

Warren officer. It was the medic. So, bitch. So, so the five, fingers if you guys haven't seen them they're they're basically like athletic shoes that have a slot for each toe but they're just it's like they're like wearing like rubber ballet slippers with with each of the five toes so at that time that that was a artifact of the time that yeah i mean they were great for the gym you know they were they were they were great for which was working out that that's what they were

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I might be old school. No, but to wear them with the suit is ridiculous. You'd be better off wearing your OD Green Jungle boots. Yeah. Yeah, at that point. Yeah, at that point. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. So there's a bit of a culture clash, is what you're saying. Yeah, and the whole Syria thing for me would just reminiscent of Lebanon as a Marine. of what happened with the coal of what happened with Yemen it well Yemen and then 13 hours oh Benghazi Benghazi it was you know sort of the same thing that I got feeling I was somewhat more experienced in unconventional warfare at the very beginning I was arguing about how we were going to

prosecute the war in in Syria and there was this big group of people led by I think a lot of people on the National Security Council and Hillary Clinton at the State Department and senators like McCain that were really pushing the Free Syria Army as the people that the America needs to tie up with and the free Syrian army was a group of retired Sunni generals that lived the good life in Turkey. And they claimed they had all this access and influence inside Syria. And the appeal to people to senators and senior government officials was that, hey, here's somebody in Turkey that I can fly into Turkey, go have a nice dinner

and sit down with these people and talk about mutual goals and how they can help and I can promise them money and I've achieved what I need to achieve for my personal and national political right right and you know I was arguing that based on my experience that it's not that general outside that used to be out there it's the guy on the battlefield that's going to gain influence and then when we started seeing I forget what we called them at first before they became ISIS the the trained guys trained at the Afghan terror camps the Khorasan group yeah the Khorasan group came into Syria that those it helped those local commanders become the people that had the influence on the ground and we all know you

lead from the front and and that you know politicians may talk about the big picture and guys in Turkey but it's the other people that are in game popularity and I disagreed with the way we prosecuted that in you know I felt that if we're going to get involved we should send teams to go and you stay and you live and you you're there for the duration and you go but you know we've just morphed as a society as a in the national defense arena where it's easier to build bases in jordan or surrounding countries and pull people out and you send people for 90 days you know because that's not disrupting everybody too much and so i can go here and i can have my gym and my chow hall and train people for for 90 days and, you know, we'll all feel good about sending them. That's exactly what happened. And, and I was against that.

But, you know, that was me. The interagency programs in Turkey and Jordan. And I mean, I've had a lot of people from CIA, and I don't think there's really such a controversial view, but I'd be interested to hear your take on it. people said that we got involved, that we got invested in the Civil War, the Syrian Civil War, way too late, that maybe if we had invested a little bit earlier on, we could have found, quote, unquote, moderate rebels. But by the time that we did get involved, it was kind of too late. All those so-called moderates had already defected to extremist sides because they were the ones that had the clout.

They were the ones who had the funding from the Gulf states and that, like, we had just gotten involved. We missed the ball on it. And, well, if we're going to get involved, we've gotten involved in a real way too late. But even in the beginning, I questioned why. And I'll tell you that from what I gathered coming from the National Security Council and the White House and the State Department was that the people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, And other people that are still players in National Security Council, that they all consider Libya a big win for them. Because the president said he should go.

They're a little drunk. And so I know some of the details about how and what happened in Libya. And so from my standpoint, it was an abject failure in there. And we had no influence in Libya after zero. With our boy after? Well, and here's the reason why. Again, my whole thing about these generals in Turkey is that the U.S. weren't to be involved, but not really involved. Right.

So when you're the guy that whispers in the guy's ear that you should do this and that, but you're not the guy that will go out with him and do it. yeah you're not the guy he's going to turn to when it chips her down so when liby and did we had no influence and but then politically and in the press at home Libya was a success right president says this the Gaddafi went down and we did do a whole lot other than like airstrikes and right so but then it was like so this is what we're going to do because i was like do we really need to get rid of aside. Right. Do we really? Because we have this. But then there's that

the, I think the back side of that that I don't know how many people talk about is that we upset a lot of our allies in the Arab world, particularly in UAE and Saudi Arabia and Qatar, because we took Iraq, which was Shia majority, but ruled by Sunni minority, but

somewhat stable, right? And we flipped it. And we flipped it all. And it was, it was mostly secular. You know, like, say what you want. Like, Saddam, Saddam was a horrible person. Yeah, he was. But he,

and he liked to talk about his heritage back to, you know, through the Quran and everything. But, but, and he was, and he was a tyrant. I'm in no way saying that he was a good person or there were benefits to him. But it was a, it was a mostly secular, like he didn't care about religion so much as he cared about himself.

You used Beth Party, communist party guy. Yeah, yeah. But when we look at that at Assad, people saw the opportunity. And to me, you know, I really try to stay out of the political realm, but I view, I became to view this as all. Right. That there were people that were looking at possibly potential future presidential runs. And a current president that, like, that, wait a minute, if I make this statement and he must go or here's my line and we make that happen, then I've won a political. It's a big foreign policy.

And like I said, those three Arab countries put a lot of pressure on us that you took a Sunni-ruled country and flipped it over to Shia. Well, next door, here is a Sunni country ruled by Shia. So let's balance the legend. The other interesting wrinkle in that, too, is the Russians also that we told them that this is not going to be a regime change operation in Libya, but pretty much from day one we were engaged in a regime change operation. Libya was the biggest, if not, maybe the second biggest client state of the Russian military hardware. After Gaddafi's gone, next one up is Syria, right? Yeah.

Where they have their only, well, yeah, they're only a warm water port. Yeah. And it's Russia's second, yeah, I believe second, yeah, would have been second largest client of military hardware. So they got involved in both of those countries. Yeah. And then the whole Iran thing was serious. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It was a mess. And, you know, I didn't understand why we really had to go with that. But I'm a military, at heart, a military person. That if we're going to do it, then here's the way we should do it. Right, right. And I'm for, let's go for it all. Right.

And not this. Halfway pressure from the borders right here and there on my end and it's never going to work. Yeah, and it's weird that we have this the fascination with the Middle East and is, you know, and overthrowing these regimes, these tyrants. And they are, you know, they, they are dictators. But we don't provide a viable solution after that. Like if, if when we look at Libya, like not. saying that life was great under Gaddafi, but it didn't get much better after him when you

consider that they reopened the slave markets in Tripoli. Like, it got bad. And, you know, even Libya, which we would consider a third world country, refused American diplomatic efforts at first that we won't even see them. You're right. So, you know, and now, and it's really funny that i think during the obama administration we people like to ridicule the bush's foreign policy with bush rice where it was let's make the places that are hotbeds for terrorists um for for building terrorists and and and creating terrorists and make them into viable countries where that people can earn a living and be more democratic and then we won't have the things that.

So that was all the Bush doctrine was ridiculed. But yet here we went in the Obama time. That's sort of the same thing. We go to Libya to do this. Now we go to Syria. Right. Right. And it's like in these places that are dictated, it's almost the opposite where the,

The Bush doctrine was naive in the idea that we can go in and sort of, you know, give these places like a means to not be these terrorist hotbeds. You know, we flipped it with the Obama administration to let's go to these places that, you know, are stable, but it's not sort of our definition of stable or the way we want them to be stable. Yeah. And make them unstable. And then we've got the same issues. Yeah, it's Our foreign policy, I think, throughout history has been

just very misguided. You know, I feel like in World War I and World War II, we understood it, like we understood what need to be. If you break it, you buy it, and then you set it right. And since then, we've just been kind of this half, you know,

toes in, Until we decide that, and it's too cold, let's back out and leave it to themselves. That might almost be like not the worst thing in the world to like see like, well, who's going to win and then we'll back. But instead it's like we kind of go all in and it turns into a big shit show. I think last time I made a mention that I had an argument with a Taliban guy before that I was seeing this guy and he was really pissed with me. And he said, you know, in the 80s, we worked together and we defeated the Russians. You know, then you abandon us. So now you're here fighting us.

It's not our fault. You abandon us. And I said, yeah, but that's America. Yeah. Right? Just ask the Kurds. You know, if you, if it's China, okay, you got a 25 year and a 50 year plan. Yeah.

But in America, we have a four-year or eight-year plan. Yeah. And we're, that's just the way it is in America. And honestly, not even always. We shouldn't apologize for it. Yeah. And I have come to think that the way American politics is, the way our society runs. And I'd say politics, but it's politics as it affects our national defense strategy,

that we would be better off at adopting a more a stance more like Israel does, which is to tolerate X amount of punishment or aggression, and then when it reaches a certain point, we're gathering intelligence and we're doing that, we're going to go and we're going to make a strike. and we're going to decimate some centers and disrupt and set you back. And then we're pulling out. Now, we're not going to fix your country.

We're not going to try to stabilize it. We're not going to try to rebuild it. We're not going to try to do any of this. It's really punitive and disruptive. But then you don't wind up in these 20-year conflict. And you don't do that. We're in right now with Niger and the coups happening. And we have a couple of drone bases there that we kind of want to maintain.

And yeah, it becomes a foreign entanglement. Rightly or wrongly, but I mean, we keep doing it. Yeah. So towards the end of your time at the agency, you had a senior ops job. I don't want to put any words in your mouth. What can you say about that? Yeah. So, you know, I think I made.

You know, with the agency, a lot of things going on. I think religiously I was being pushed. My faith was pushing me towards things that were unsettling me. And I became discouraged after I had some success on some pretty high-level operations in the agency. You know, I, that's where I started really. seeing what the folks in the National Security Council and at the from the White House and state department are saying and I'm up on you know in briefs on the seventh floor and and I'm like nah this is not what what was that conflict for you was it a question of like the truth isn't being

told or was it a question of like your morality feeling it was tested well I would say it's some of both. I think the morality part was more maybe personal and that I was a person very focused on getting a mission done so I believe the I would do whatever it took to get a mission accomplished. Now that sometimes

came in a conflict with who I believed I was on the inside and spiritually and there comes a point where you've if you've lived that life for so long that you become in so much conflict with yourself, it starts manifesting itself in emotional, mental, physical,

as that outreach. But then, for me, just the hypocrisy of it all, that we all want to believe that we're doing the nation's work, we're defending the people, we're there, and we're willing to give our lives, for our fellow citizen. And then when you start seeing that the weight or impact that politics has over that. And when you see lives lost and some of that may,

the root cause of that may have been political or personal, professional and, you know, greed or, you know, desire to get ahead, um reasons it starts it just not a good feeling bad right like i ate that steak but you know damn it was something wrong with it so that you know that that all started having its impact on me and um you know i was in this job where you know i came back from this country i i thought yeah i i think I'm going to look at something different. So I took a job that was a senior leadership job. It was the ops officer for a group in the agency.

But it was not one of those get-ahead political jobs that you need to have to move to the senior levels in the agency. And I, you know, a lot of friends said, you doing this because like all my buddies and people that I'd done some stuff with were in really key positions in the agency and so you're doing this and I was like yeah because I'm doing it because I got to change and you know I think I knew that I wanted to get out but I sort of needed some time and space to do that. You're also like moving a little bit away from the kinetic operations.

Yeah, for me, yeah, I'd been in super high stress. Now it changed. I was in operational stress, either from being undercover or chasing a significant target and having everybody from the president down in my business every day, that, you know, super high stress to now it's shift. where, I guess I took that energy and focused it back on the leadership of this group that was hurting. The agency does not do a good job developing leaders. And I went back to the basic leadership that I learned as a Marine officer and felt I was making an impact there.

You weren't using CS on them, though, when they weren't. I didn't. I didn't use the S. I did. I would like to say that it was a hard and long learning curve for me, but I think I did eventually

learn. So, you know, I just focused on the leadership thing. But I kind of used that time to start thinking about there's got to be something different.

As somebody who, you know, had a pretty illustrious and unique career in the military, I mean, you were an officer, and then you went enlisted, and then you knew you were in the agency, and you saw sort of both sides of that. Do you, we, like, I get the impression, I don't want to speak for Jack. I get the impression that it's very hard to move into the general officer arena or the SIS arena without, I don't want to say selling your soul, but without, becoming a sort of a spoke in the wheel

if it were, you know, that that, that, that, that, play the game, that you have to make certain compromises. Would you say that's true? Would you say that my impression is false? Like, what was you, because you have a lot more firsthand knowledge than I ever would on this. You know, so I would say,

A, that is true. there are compromises that much be reached. But I think my life experience says that, you know, it is this constant give and take between close-in focus and a wider focus. When I was a young lieutenant, my focus was like this, right? And that's what Marine Corps wanted for me. My focus is like that. then you start getting more senior you start looking wider you know as a platoon commander

there were times i ordered my people to do certain things or adhere to certain things and sometimes i did not really believe in what i ordered them do but i was ordered to do that and so my vision went wider and then through either your seniority as you rise in authority and rank, you have to have that wider vision that a leader

has to see not just what needs to be focused on but what's to the left and right and what's over the horizon that worked for me in Yemen and it's worked for me in some other places. I think the challenge

of senior officers is that you can get so focused on that wide thing that then when something key comes up that needs to be narrowly focused on you might miss that and it's like do we have that's where I feel like a lot of foreign militaries and places like the agency fall short is that there's not enough development in that NCO lower level leadership thing where that these people people can you leave it to them and trust them like you know you know in a Delta squadron that troop that's gonna do this part of that hit they got it right know right and this troop's gonna make that assault on the aircraft right that

you're giving them left right limits their intent that that's it you know officer you can come on this aircraft after we clear it yeah tell you can come up yeah and and and that's You know, we need that wide view of leadership, but you also have to have it tied to here. And I think that's the challenge for senior officers, you know, and, you know, God help them. There's some that do a damn good job of that. And there's some that don't. And I feel, you know, I can say, you know, I personally don't think that people in charge now do that.

I think they've sold their souls to the political side. You know, one of the things that we wanted to ask you about, and I think you wanted to talk about a bit, was, that you just touched upon, was, you know, some of the key takeaways from your experience across the Marines, the Army, Central Intelligence Agency. even philosophically speaking what were some of the big things that you came away from that experience with that you'd like to share with people for me

one of the things is lessons I think I learned is about judging people again we mentioned earlier that when you're younger everything's black and white and I think I used to make pretty snap judgments about people

I think my first lesson that that might not be the right approach was as a Marine officer. I had a guy in my first infantry platoon who was overweight. Now, we're talking the 80s, right? And he parted his hair in the middle. Now, you know, in the 80s, if a guy parts his hair in the middle, he's a doper. I mean, that's how you know. He parts his hair in the middle.

He's a guy to be a doper. And he was a little overweight, and he just wasn't that image of the Marine. And he was a problem. That guy always got in trouble and getting arrested. And this, I had to go down to the jail and see him a few times. And, you know, so I made certain judgments about him. And I put him on my list of, I'm going to do my best to get this. guy out.

But then I looked into his record and I'm like, hey, well, this guy, you know, his first assignment is in Okinawa and he goes into a burning laundromat and saves some old Okinawan woman that was washing people's clothes in there and out. You know, and he gets some award for that. And I'm like, wait a minute. Here's this and here's that. And in my young and my youth, I thought those two things can't go together. You have to be the squared away guy that's that's Strack and this way to be that.

And then, you know, I had to reevaluate my assessment of this young guy. And, you know, I remember calling him in and saying, like, hey, I read that. this about who are you because here's what I see but who are you and then I learned he just didn't fit that mold or think the way I thought so I gave him some kind of like kind of admin duties and stuff and quit expecting what I thought I should out of a young hardcore charging Marine yeah and he performed well Well, I was like, wow, I didn't know that. And then if you go forward a bunch of years later to being me, being kicked out of Delta and having to go places or want, you know, explain myself and my career to other people that I want to, to trust me and give me jobs.

that I was like, wow, you know, I really hope people don't judge you. Right. Just based on that. Don't see you as the guy who parts their hair in the middle. Right. Don't see me. Yeah, as the guy that parts their hair in the middle. I just want to say that in the 80s, putting your hair in the middle and feathering was very fashionable.

I'm not saying there are any photos of me like that going around. I'm just saying it was fashionable. And it may have been, but as young Marine. Yeah. So, you know, I think that was a big thing for me. The other thing was, you know, just different perspectives. Like, I'm lucky enough to be here with you guys and telling my story, but there are tens of thousands of people and they all have those stories. and they may be different in the detail and the location,

but they're stories. And we're in the military, right? So we all got a really focused life experience for whatever number of years in some peculiar incubators. But we're no better. There's no Delta operator that's any better than any cook in the army.

Right. Different job, different motivations, different drivers. But if both do their job well, that man is no better than the other man. Right. And those of us in the military or intelligence agencies who have been fortunate enough to go forth and live these dreams and these adventures. But what about the people back here that are sitting at home working in a factory? They're really no different than, we're no better than them. Right.

And I think sometimes we can close ranks about what we've done and who we are and say that other people aren't the same as us. They don't know. They haven't lived it, so they're not at the speed. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, that's true. But, you know, when I first, you know, I think in the first episode, I talked about my rural background, my family. And when I was traveling around the world and seeing the sights of the world, I've been to the Great Buddha, I've been to Shinto shrines, I've been to some of the biggest things, sites that a person should see,

and thought, wow, how fortunate am I and how disadvantaged or my relatives that are living back in, you know, Stony Point or Taylor'sville or Hickory, North Carolina. And that I'm really seeing the world as it is. Then I, but eventually I realized, no, you know, they have lives.

They have family. They have children. church, they have community, they're happy, they're contributing to life. My life is really, you know, in some ways, my life is different, but in some ways, it's not as good as theirs. You know, the person I admire the most is my brother, who never served a day in the military. He's been a great family guy, worked for the fellowship of Christian athletes, been a pharmaceutical salesman for a lot of years,

never did any of the things that I did. But, you know, I feel very privileged to be where we are and the brotherhood that we're in. But, you know, I don't think it's any better than other people. It's different. And it's fortunate we don't see those guys. And there's no podcast focusing on them. Not enough.

Right. I think that, and we've talked about this before, I think one of the things that, you know, people in our field have to admit is that there was an amount of selfishness to our lives that we were doing exactly what we wanted to do. And we left family, we left people behind, we left wives behind, some of us left kids behind. Like, we left people behind to go do.

Like, we can say it was all. for the service and was off for the country. It was. And it was. But for us to. But we also did it for us. Like we all either grew up wanting to do this or at some point, you know, somewhere along the line decided we wanted this life of high adventure or whatever.

And we did it. And it's like you could look at Lewis and Clark and say, yeah, you know, they did these things by exploring the states, but they also wanted to do that. Like they weren't, nobody compelled them to do that. and so you know

and one when you're talking about people in the conventional military or parts of the agencies in the intelligence community the logs people the cooks the mechanics the people that don't get any credit but worked especially like out in Afghanistan and Iraq they were out there

working in a 110 degree weather or cooks who like get up at three in the morning to start food prep like nobody appreciates them but yeah but they were their asses off. Yeah, yeah.

You know, mechanics out there fixing vehicles in Iraq, nobody wants to be that person. The contractor that fixed for air conditioning. Yeah. Good guy. Yeah. Good guy. I like him. Yeah.

And they were every bit as, as, you know, as significant to the war effort. And then even outside the military, you're right. Like, people who are grounded and who have roots and who have just dedicated their lives to their families, into their careers, into their community. Like, there's no superiority that I think the people from the military and the special operations community can, like, ward over. We chose our paths just like they choose their paths and no, neither path is superior to the other.

I think our stories are generally more fun. You know what I mean? Yeah, they're different. You know, have you ever, like, have you ever, like, I'm. When I went to the agency, you know, you try to blend in. Okay, so I was a little bit older than most of people I was around. And people are sitting around telling stories. And, you know, eventually, like generally I stay quiet,

but eventually you want to tell a story. So here's people telling stories about this time where I was doing this, where I was almost scared to death and all that. And then so, like, then they turn to you. So you don't tell a story. So you tell a story about somebody dying on a free fall, or somebody splatting on a free fall accident or something like that. And then I'll go, and then you realize, oh, right,

and then everybody just shuts up. Yeah. And it's like, and then like here's another subject. Well, well, one time, you know, I did this thing with these women. You're like, yeah, well, one time I'm in there like. Right. And everybody. then after a while

you're like I yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's like it's like but it's that context thing

it's like yeah people tell these stories but like well okay maybe not everybody came into contact with dead bodies

and other things and so it's like yeah yeah you know you have to learn and like yeah

yeah yeah that's uh that's, I think that's something we've all come into contact with that. I think that's something a lot of people have learned when they get out of the military is that your stories are not like the same. Like you really need to read the room. But that goes with the other, I'm curious as to your two transitions. Like for me, I was so mission focused. And that's, be honest,

my, when I went to ASOT was right after my first wife left me and took with my kids and I was I was not in a good place right so adventure excitement and all these other things come my way and it's a way of putting all that behind right I was mission focused for from 1998 until 2011 I was just mission mission mission mission I would go to a place and I would focus my life on that mission. And I would live that mission. And I don't care what happens back home. Right.

I've given my parents' power of attorney, whatever happens, and I'm just here to do this mission. And I was successful. And then in the government, I got in the agency. I continued being successful, but it's like, okay, I can write a proposal and get funded for this. And in the government, given permission, authority, and money, I can make all kind of things happen.

Really successful, good things. When I left the agency, I thought, I just applied that same focus to civilian life, and I'm going to be successful. and I was like and that's not the way it has worked for me and I'm used to life doesn't matter mission

and then that well I think the struggle I've had over the last but seven eight years after leaving the agency is that wow it's not the mission and the end result isn't as important important as that daily grind, right, routine and process.

Right. And it's like, wait, I'm never a process person. I'm a mission focused results oriented person. Right. You know, do this. And it's like, yeah, well, you know what? No. And you also have time to fill your life with something, the whole rest of your life.

And it's like, what does that consist of? Yeah. Well, and for me, you know, to be honest at this point, some of that is cooking and cleaning and shopping. Yeah, yeah. And trying to establish a business and doing this and that and all the other things and taking care of the dog and all that stuff. And it's like, you know, and to be honest for years, it's like, ah, I'm going crazy because I need to focus on a mission. Yeah. And like, how can I do like this?

I got to stop. Yeah. And it's a hard, hard transition. And I think some of the issues we have with. PTSD and the suicide rate for veterans is is tied in some respects to that. I, I, 100% agree with you. Like, I don't, I don't even know if, like, if we can split between TBIs and post-traumatic stress and then the lack of purpose and mission. Like, I don't even know how those threads can be entangled to say, what is post-traumatic stress?

what is TBI related. They've called it the operator's syndrome. It's a combination of PTSD and TBI. But also, but again, like you say, there's also that existential thing of, even if I find a mission, even if I find a purpose and something like that, the stakes are so much lower, right?

How do I, how do I care about something where the stakes are so low? You know, you see, and not in look like human suffering is is all relevant so it's not to say when you're under heavy fire

that it that somebody undergoing office drama that they're not feeling the same stress levels because there's almost there's only so much stress we can feel and I had those of the agency that you know people I supervise that and you know

and it was hard for me yeah it's hard to relate as an SF person or this and you're okay. Yeah, it's hard to relate. And it's hard not to dismiss it, you know, because you do have to have that empathy to realize it. Look, just because their life isn't online,

doesn't mean that they don't feel like distress and things like that. But, yeah, I agree with you. But there is an element, I believe, and I certainly don't want to be misinterpreted are to come across as implying that there's an ego factor to PTSD. But there is a thing of, and I get this from former Marines, before combat, you know, back recon Marines I know, that that was my life.

That was when I was my best best. That was when I was who I was. And that's when I met everything. And nothing I've done since. counts or matters and I just wish I was back there and and I think that it's and particularly for people in roles that aren't maybe combat related but that are adjunct to that or close to it participants in it that um that here I am now and everything I do is valued and worthwhile and mean

this and now after I'm this yeah and this is in this is who I am and that's you know that's that's that's a sad thing and and what bothers me now is that

as veterans it seems like we have taken on a tenor of like almost this pal of darkness and that our service needs to be couched and the damage it's done to us

and the hardships we face. And those are real. They're real people suffering every day. But what I hope that we could do as a group of veterans is to focus on

the experiences I have equipped me for this world that is changing. This world that faces some probable uncertainty and difficult times to come. And no one is better able to face those and meet those challenges than we, based on the experiences we had. So I am not crippled by my experience. I am

prepared. Empowered by it. Yeah. It can also provide like a contrast to appreciate like our lives today. Yeah. How fortunate are we to live in a country like this? Yeah.

And to be able to like raise a kid in a world like this or in a country like this. Yeah. And it might not be like. Perfect. Like yeah. It's pretty good. Yeah.

Or I might not be the guy that's out doing it, but I might be the guy that's explaining. this experience to my child so that they well you're you're honestly right now you're also explaining it to other young soldiers and giving them a sort of pathway yeah and civil and you know it's interesting because you mentioned something that i don't think is like brought up enough is that like we talk about you know combat arms as particularly special operations but combat arms in general like going from 60 to zero into the civilian life but if you're not you know if you If you're like a cook who loves your job, like a military cook who loves your job, and you know the people you're cooking for.

And you, like, you know what you're doing, particularly in a combat zone where, like, food is literally like, it's a huge morale issue. Right. Or you're a mechanic out sweating your ass off for a logs officer who's moving or a logs person who's like moving stuff constantly. And then you, like, and you know you're contributing to the fight. Even if you're not trading lead, you know, downrange or whatever, but you know you're contributing to fight. And then you come out in the civilian world and you have a job. Like you can get into a lot of logistics or into the culinary field or whatever. Does it have the same feeling for somebody who's cooking for a restaurant?

You know what I mean? It has something. There's something there. But the thing is, is that I'm sure that, you know, we haven't really talked about that much. But I'm sure that there's something for those people, too, who have, you know, gone from. You support roles in those environments and feeling that same purpose and that same, I'm given 110% for, you know, for this effort. And then you come out and, you know, you deal with the world of this feeling. Yeah, it's a challenging environment.

Do we have questions for Gary? I just realized that we. Actually, real quick, Gary, what are you working on now? Like, what's, where are you now and what are you working on? Because you're working on some kind of exciting things, right? Well, I hope they're exciting. So, you know, for me, you know, we've been talking about our past experiences and what that does for you. And I guess I believe that it's not like, why did I go through the things I went through?

The good things, the bad things, the hardships. There are many, you know, some we didn't talk about. over these two podcast near-death experiences where I somehow made it through and came out. What's the reason for that? And, you know, I guess that I came to view that as that the lessons I learned from those experiences. You know, we all went overseas to fight against terrorists or what we, perceived as bad people.

Why? Because we wanted to go over there and fight the enemies so that the people back here would have a peaceful, relaxing life so that people could be safe and have peace of mind

here. Well, so we all learned special skills and principles and techniques to do that. But then things changed. We started back, you know, back, you know, some years ago with a few terror attacks here.

You know, I'm talking post-9-11, like the couple that shot up people in San Bernardino and some of the other terror attacks. We'll now do to changes in law enforcement and policing and stuff. we have random violence, we have more acts of random attacks and mass shootings and all these things. So now the things that we all fought for to keep away from home, they're here. And any of our loved ones are a turn or two or a neighborhood or two or an incident or two away from running into a potential. deadly conflict or action or circumstance. So I started thinking that how do we take what we all learned, all those principles that you learn through all your training

and all your expertise and techniques and convert that over into a system or a way that families here can take advantage of those you know I think it's not just that that we that our society has become more violent and and there's more animosity towards each other but it's also a fact that our youth are more distracted and have less learning opportunities than we did so we have on one hand a group of potential victims our families that are less prepared.

And on the other hand, we have a society that is more inclined towards violence and those two interact. So what I did was try to take the lessons and principles and techniques that I learned and developed both for myself and then later when I had a family living undercover in some foreign countries. countries to keep myself and my family safe, provide for security and self-sufficiency, right, into a system that we call the power of prudence. So that is all those principles and techniques that we learn adopted to families here. And we'll be releasing that soon. from the power of prudence that's called the prudent parenting course so what that does is walk people like us or younger parents through the process of how to mentor those same principles and some of the habits and techniques that we all know into their children's daily lives so that they are more able to take care of themselves that's fantastic How do you, like, how do you sort of divide that teaching kids prudence and being that parent from just being paranoid and worried all the time about everything?

You know, one of the things I teach people, like I travel and work with individual families and some family offices to teach these subjects. And I said, no, you know, when I tell you these things and I show some random attacks and stuff, I'm not saying that you've lived your life like this looking around all the time for an attack. You can't live that way forever and be sane or healthy. So you have to learn when to relax and when to dial it on. But yet some of the things that we're teaching our kids, Like today, Hugo and I were driving up here from Virginia, and we stopped at a rest stop to eat. And there was a mother that had her stroller with twins in it.

And I would say they were maybe one and a half, two years old. And these twins each had identical iPads and from, and they were just like this. So, you know, we start in an early end. of indoctrinating our kids pacifying our kids to be involved in this and not what's around me and part of that thing is that that you know and and like so I teach like my I have two young daughters they're now 14 and 12 that hey when we go to a public place here's our checklist we always do when we as we settle let's look for exits here's the exit we came in where alternate exits.

Next thing we look for is cover. Here's what cover is. It's something that protects you from bullets or projectiles. So here's what cover is and here's what cover isn't. And then we look for concealment. So what happens if something bad happens? We're moving towards that exit, but we're using cover and concealment to get to that exit to get out.

And then it just progressives. You teach them more. Right. And, you know, those are the things, you know, that maybe a generation or two ago were inherent in people's lives. But now our society became so reliant on somebody else taking care of our safety and security that now that that's crumbling or falling apart, we're not prepared. Yeah. Where are people going to be able to find these courses? Well, one of the places they're going to be able to find it is through you.

Okay. And we're going to offer your listeners a discount to be able to pre-buy this course. I haven't final. We have the course finished and most of it finally edited, and it will be coming out in a couple weeks. But, you know, we, want to offer that to your listeners first and then we will you know offer this course called the prudent parenting course uh for sale and the other the um so at gary harrington dot net they can find the power of prudence right uh like they can find you there and some of your stuff there but parenting

with prudence is a prudent parenting course will come out and i haven't we haven't really put that out on social media yet and uh but yes that will be coming out in the next few weeks okay fantastic um let's hear questions i did see one question or like we can't watch the chat uh but i saw somebody ask something that sounded like an inside baseball question because they wanted us to ask you they wanted us to ask you if a hot dog was a sandwich is a hot dog a sandwich yeah is it that not an inside maybe they were just i figured that was an inside thing you know i i i i don't know question i'm but i'm going to say no from my personal opinion yeah but because explain

your reasons gary uh i i i think my reasons and and and god help me i'm i'm sorry to all my friends out there who know me as a nice person you have an opinion it's okay go with it this okay so i i i'm sorry to all my friends out there who know me is a nice person you have an opinion it's okay this is it Okay, so I think the hot dog versus sandwich thing is sort of that Asian versus Caucasian equation. Is the what? Say that one more time? Asian versus Caucasian equation. But the hot dog is like pretty uniquely American, I think. The hot dog is kind of vertical.

Uh-huh. And the sandwich is kind of horizontal. So is a hamburger sandwich? So a hamburger is a sandwich. It is sandwich. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. It's a hamburger sandwich, right?

But it's all depending on perspective, too, because, like, how do you, I mean, granted, everyone, oh, you roll the hot dog like that. It is, it is meat between two pieces of bread. Yeah. Yeah. That, I mean, that really is, like, we're peeking behind the curtains into the mysteries of the universe right now. Yeah, I'm sure that the Earl of Sandwich, yes. They did not have the technology. yet to analyze all this.

To make dogs. Yeah, yeah. So they made sandwiches. But at that time, the Erla sandwich, but in Germany at the time, were they making brats and putting them on bread? Were they making brats or veners? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We're going to have. With some swan? But here's the question. We're going to have to get an expert for this. What were the Chinese doing? Dude, this is racking my brain right now.

I'm freaking out. I mean, pork buns, but those obviously are not a sandwich. I know. Because they're enclosed. That's true. Come on. No better questions than that. There's no better answers.

Actually, we only have Louis, Louis Vasquez with thank you for your donation saying thank you. I mean, just appreciates the content. Are we talking New York, NYC Ballpark Hot Dog or Chicago-style Hot? I mean, Chicago-style hot dogs are really the only way to eat a hot dog. Is it because the onion? The pepper, I think. The pepper on it is...

Well, the only true, like, real sandwich is the sandwich you used to get at a small race car track in Southern America, and that's the fried bologna sandwich with onion and pepper on it. Well, I'm equally as sacrilegious. I think the sausage peppers and onions

is better than a hot dog. It's probably... Probably true. Well, Gary, thanks. And, you know, again, check out Gary at Gary Harrington. Are you on social media? Can people find you on social media? I'm on social media on YouTube and on, yeah, pretty much all the social media, not TikTok,

not some of them weird-ass things that the commies are open comedy people. But the real Gary H. you know on YouTube and Facebook. Do you put out a lot of YouTube content? I put out YouTube content every Friday. I have... Okay, so you're pretty regular.

So I'm going to check out Gary on the Real Gary H. Yeah, and LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram. But no only fans. I think that's what our guests are our audience. Only fans. Yeah, that. I mean, the first. fans only stuff. No, I don't personally, I'm not a purveyor in that. And I'm not yet.

It's okay. You use your VPN service to go and check that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we don't need to know. We don't need to know. I heard there's some good VPN available. Yeah, VPN, everybody. Do that, you know, and if you carry that the next step further, there is some good medical resources that can help. your records to and that's important that's important because the VA everybody you get at the VA

acts like the money is coming from their pocket so so getting remedical getting remedical is like so actually I actually want to note that because you know I'm I probably need to

address that issue myself remed medical is your place like I we did some research into them they've got great people have said that that they've really helped them out like just if you go on reddit and see like people remedicals really help people out it's good you know that either that or being a three or four star general right really helps right right right yeah if you don't have a congressman in your pocket remedical is is the way to go why is it that all the three and

four stars get a hundred percent disability and a lot of people don't do you did you i didn't realize this until recently someone told me when you're a retired four-star you get base pay for life I didn't know that I didn't know that so coming up this Friday the next episode I'm not going to be here I'm going to be absent you guys have a story that's really good Dee thank you yeah yeah you really you really hype that you really hype that for the viewers thanks man Gary, thank you so much for spending a Friday or Tuesday night with us. Thanks for driving up, man. Yeah.

Deeply appreciate it. We'll have to have you up again sometime. No, thanks. Hey, good to see you guys. Good to meet D. And look forward to working with you guys in the future. Yeah, hell yeah. Absolutely.

I'm watching you guys now. So my eyes want to see it. But no, you know, it's interesting content. And I'm also somewhat curious as I'm watching your podcast and your publications and all develop and grow. Yeah. And it's kind of good. You know, I kind of pull for everybody that's been one of us and doing us and trying to do something different now. Yeah.

And see how that goes. Yeah, it's odd. I mean. Throwing darts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

but it's fun. I can't complain. But it's good to be throwing them instead of catching them. Hell yeah, right. Absolutely. There you go. For sure. For sure. So Dave and Dee, we'll catch you guys on Friday. And Gary, again, thank you so much, man. And we'll see all you guys next time. Thanks, everybody.