The Team House - DEVGRU SQUADRON COMMANDER | Matt Stevens | Ep. 278

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseA native of Charlotte, NC, Matt graduated from U.S. Naval Academy in 1991 with a B.S. in Ocean Engineering.  He graduated Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training in 1992 with class 179 and was subsequently assigned to the East Coast where he served in various SEAL Teams,  SEAL Delivery Vehicle Teams and Naval Special Warfare Development Group (NSWDG). Matt commanded at every level in the Naval Special Warfare Community to include a Squadron at  NSWDG, SEAL Team TWO, Naval Special Warfare Unit THREE, and Naval Special Warfare Group FOUR.  He served staff tours at the Joint Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, NC; as the Operations Officer at Naval Special Warfare Group TWO in Virginia Beach, VA;  and in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (ASD SO/LIC) in the Pentagon.https://www.honor.org/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#sealteam6 #devgruBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to. And we really appreciate that. So go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. Special operations. Covert ops. Espionage. The Team House with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 278 of the Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave. D back there producing somewhere. And the guest on tonight's show is Matt Stevens. Matt served as a Navy SEAL officer in a number of different SEAL teams.

Ended up as a squadron commander in development group. Then went on to a few other assignments. And today he is the CEO of the Honor Foundation, which we'll talk about in-depth. Before we jump right into it with Matt, I just want to take a moment to tell people about our Patreon. There's a link down in the description. You can subscribe and you get access to all of these episodes, video, audio, ad free, and you support the channel. We really appreciate all of you guys who have stuck with us and help us continue what we do here. So please check out the Patreon and the link below.

Matt, first question, man. I want to ask you about your origin story. Tell us a little bit about where you grew up, what your upbringing was like and how that took you towards the Navy eventually. Yeah, well, thanks for having me on the show. First of all, I grew up, started growing up in upstate New York, near Binghamton, New York, was there until I was about 10. And parents split up when I was maybe eight or nine, and then moved, I lived with my dad and my sister,

and we moved to Charlotte, North Carolina in the fourth grade. So continued in Charlotte through high school. And, you know, like everybody, there are a lot of people in our community, divorced parents, varsity athlete, played baseball. Thought I was going to be a major league baseball player more than anything. The military doesn't run deep in my family. Had one uncle who was an aircraft mechanic in Vietnam. And then he got his education, joined the Navy as a maintenance officer,

and he was in an F-14 squadron as a maintenance officer. Right around when Top Gun came out, which is about a year before I graduated from high school. And so I went on one of those Tiger Cruises with him, where they used to take families out. Like, it was pretty cool. You'd go on just for a day, three 9-11, standing on the flight deck, watching flight ops.

Pretty intense as a 14, 15-year-old kid. And really, like I said, I really wanted to go play D1 baseball. In retrospect, I wasn't any good. It got no scholarship offers. and that wasn't going to happen. But along the way, a kid, a couple years before me, got a, you know, at the end of the year, an award for getting an appointment to the Air Force Academy. And it just sounded really cool when they read this little thing for him.

He's like, hey, this kid's getting like a $350,000 scholarship. He's going to go play jets when he's done. And I just didn't want to do what everybody else did. And that kind of interested me. So I mailed away for Naval Academy catalogs. I graduated high school in 1987. So no internet, nothing on TV, no books about Navy SEALs or not a lot of them.

And just started digging into all the service academies just to do something different. All my buddies were going to, you know, UNC Chapel Hill and NC State. Smart ones were going to Duke. And so I just kept digging in and looking at it and worked my ass on. to get into a naval academy.

And, you know, everybody wanted to fly in my year. But I think the year before I got there, remember the Sunday magazine, Parade Magazine. It was like an insert in your Sunday paper. There was one article in there called The Toughest Men Alive. And again, this is like 1986, 1987. And it was about Navy SEALs. I'm like, holy shit.

This is pretty cool. I've never heard of this before. because up until that point, all the movies were about Green Berets, right? I'm going to put that in. All the books were about Delta Force. Just want to say that. It's changed now. So I was like, man, that's pretty cool.

And I think that's, again, not a lot of people want to do that or know about it. So I think I'm going to go that route. And so I went all in when I got to the academy and, you know, it was just lucky to persevere and get a billet and then get the buds. Is that like an atypical pathway for an officer that you can, in the Army we would say branch into, there's probably a different term for naval officers, to go straight from the Academy into the seal pipeline? No, that's the way it generally is. In our community, I know you guys need to be almost a captain to go SF to SFAS or anything like that.

But for us, the Naval Academy gets a certain number of billets where you go straight in. And we have, you know, slots for junior officers as the assistant officer in charge of a platoon, not the platoon commander. So, you know, your first pump, you're kind of the two IC versus the OIC. So very typical. There are other pathways where you can go, you know, if you get stuck on a ship or something and you want a lateral transfer, you can do that up until you're a lieutenant. that caps out around then in 03. Cool.

So the Navy SEAL question, you always have to ask the SEALs, was your Bud's class hard? Yeah, it's hard for everybody. If anybody tells you it's not hard, I think they're lying, too. I mean, I don't think anybody maxes everything. Not that I saw. So you got to your first team in 1991. Can you tell us a little bit about what the culture was like

in the SEAL teams at that time? like what you guys were training for, what you were preparing for? Yeah. So I actually, I went to Buzz in 91, and then I went straight there from the academy, and then we graduated in January of 92. Okay.

And then I had to do some temporary duty out in San Diego for like six weeks. So I think I checked in the SEAL Team 4 in March of 1992. And so this was right after, Desert Storm. It was right after Petya Airfield and the whole Panama invasion. And so me thinking like, hey, what do we want to do? We want to go to combat. I'm going to go to SEAL Team 4 because they were the guys on Petitia Airfield.

And at the time, the SEAL teams were regionally aligned like the SF groups. And SEAL Team 4 was Central and South America. So I put on my wish list, you know, SEAL Team 4, number one, and somehow I got it. And you can never chase conflict, as you probably know, right? So all we did was brain, advised, and assist our partner nations in those regions, really on basic tactics for the counter-narconics mission. But I'll tell you a funny story about the day I checked in. Sure.

So, you know, Ensign Stevens checks in the SEAL Team 4. I'm in my dress uniform. You know, you get to the, we call it the main area where you go is called the quarter deck, even at the SEAL team. And somebody has to stand watch, you know, 24-7 watch. And I check in and there's a petty officer, I think second or third or first class in Blues on the quarter deck. And he had a big frogman mustache.

Half of it was shaved off. And he's got grooves shaved into his eyebrows. And I think I'm not sure if he was bald or not. But like that's the first guy I see. And I'm like, you know, reporting. for duty. He's like, yeah, man, you got to go down to admin and like, well, what the fuck happened to you? And, you know, at the time, hazing was not an uncommon thing. And I think he's getting married or had a birthday. And he got hazed, uh, and they shaved his mustache off.

And to punish him for not ratting out his buddies, the command leadership put him on watch. But didn't like shave his other half of the mustache or look. Any way presentable, it was It was hilarious. And that was my welcome aboard. And a few minutes later, I saw a big bad lieutenant and led a Bronze Star. And he's like, hey, new guy, be it, you know, this bar at 6 o'clock, you're buying beer for the CEO of the XO and the command master chief. Like, okay, I didn't think anything of it. And the dude called me at my home or my apartment like at 602 and goes, where the fuck are you?

We're here. You are showing up at buying beer. So I drove my ass to the bar. and, you know, bought the commanding officer and command mass chief a couple rounds of beer. And that was, that was day one at the team. So the culture was like, it was, it was pretty wide open, work hard, play hard. Yeah. Kind of thing. I mean, they were great tactically, I thought. I learned a ton there. But it was like, it didn't matter who you are and what rank you were, you could not escape the wrath of, you know, the E5 mafia. In fact, a couple weeks later,

later, it was the CO's birthday, and I remember we used to go to a place called J.B.'s gallery of girls. My Virginia Beach compadres will know that. It's like a super low-class, topless bar. And the CEOs, you know, on a Friday afternoon, spread eagle being held down by a bunch of dudes getting smacked on his belly with a big UDT thin. So that was the culture. When, speaking of the culture, like what year did you go through Buds? 91, mostly. I graduated in early 92. So, Navy SEALs had been out for a little while, and it was like kind of like the big introduction, right, of mainstream culture to the Navy SEALs.

What was it like in San Diego as a young frogman to be when you're hanging out at the bars telling girls that you're going to be? telling girls that you're going to be a Navy SEAL. Was that, like, was that a big thing for, you know, because like Top Gun, obviously, pilots would never go out anywhere without their flight jackets after that. Yeah, well, you're assuming I'd go to bars and would help people that. Like, number one, until you're a SEAL, like, it does not be who of you ever say, I'm going to be a Navy SEAL.

Yeah. We used to go to Miramar. You know, after seeing the movie, we'd go to the O'Club. or whatever night they had a ladies night. But, you know, I don't think it was actually that big of a deal. Yeah. I don't think beyond the people like us who thought movies like that were going to be good. Yeah.

Nobody else on the planet watched that movie because it sucked. Now, Rob Lowe's movie, Finest Hour, if you haven't checked that one out, that's a real winner. I don't know if I've seen it. I'll have to check it out. Any, from that like early 90s time frame, any fun story? stories from Central or South America you'd like to share or maybe not? One, you know, one actually interesting thing. When I got to Team 4, we were short officers at the 04 level in the community. So they put a couple extra, you know, junior officers in there to kind of grow the pipeline.

So we had a few too many officers. And some of the teams were putting three officers in a platoon. And the third officer, like guys that went. went to Buzz with would get to go to sniper school and, you know, breacher school. I didn't. They sent my ex-o at the time had just come from DeB Group. And he was like, hey, you know, there's something about something important with this joint operation stuff.

And we're aligned with seventh special forces group. So he made a bunch of us go deploy with seventh group for, you know, I think a three or four month deployment cycle. And they made a couple of. of us, a couple guys went to Ranger school. They actually sent me to the whole Special Forces qualification course. So I had to, you know, I did not want to do it.

And this was 1993. Trust me, it was like, all I want to do is getting a seal platoon after, you know, getting to the team doing seal tactical training and all that stuff. But it was awesome deploying with a seventh group ODA to Ecuador doing high altitude mountaineering. They were awesome guys.

And then the day I got back, You know, of course we got delayed in Panama for a couple days because the aircraft was broken. Literally, I showed up back at Fort Bragg at the time at 0-100 on a Monday morning. I started the Q course at 730 for the next six months, which, you know, again, I was not, I didn't volunteer to go. I didn't want to go. But in retrospect, having gone through with the guys, a lot of guys who were then, you know, senior officer, battalion commanders when I deployed Afghanistan, was like, hey, you remember me and it was just like easy you know handshake yeah whatever you need that's cool

do the same for them so they they had you go through the 18 alpha course yeah yeah that's interesting i didn't know that uh seals ever got to do that um so not my choice yeah yeah well ranger school i knew that they had been sent to ranger school as punishment but uh yeah but i didn't know that either about yeah there were a couple guys before me and i think i was the last one to go through the whole thing. Yeah. And again, great. I mean, we spent a lot of time in the field,

all the things that, you guys did. But it was a great, great learning experience. And then you moved over to Seal Team 8. Yep. Yeah. So I wanted to stay operational as long as possible, right? So I did an AOC at Seal Team 4. I went and asked if I could go to Seal Team 8 and do another AOIC job

to extend my operational career because, you know, a lot of guys would tell us, like, hey, you're going to do two platoons and then you're done. And I was like, well, we'll see what we can do about that. So I went over there. I was single, no responsibility at the time, started another platoon as an AOIC of a strike platoon. We put guys on carriers at the time.

And halfway through the workup, my boss decided to get out. and I just lead it up to be the platoon commander, which in retrospect, like doing a second AOC was probably not the right call. I was ready. You know what I mean? He was a great guy, but it was like, oh, I would have done it this way, but I'm still an AOC. So did a full workup deployed to the med in the Middle East on a carrier

with a carrier air wing. And that was a lot of fun. You know, we didn't really do anything. It was right after. Bosnia, I think that the platoon I took over was on Ready Five with the Marines during the Skateau rescue from Yugoslavia back then. But, you know, really nothing went on. It was just presence and a lot of exercises at the time.

But great, great experience working with the fleet and, you know, learned to stay off as many ships as I could. And so when does the thought process enter? Oh, no, I'm sorry, one more thing to get to. You spent some time with the SDVs also. Yep. Again, to extend my operational career, I wanted to go to SDVs and try the mini-subs and explore the undersea world.

So I went over there as a platoon commander and got a second platoon commander job. and you know we did a full workup a lot of the stuff you do with subs is done off at the time was off of Puerto Rico because they have really deep water but you got to get qualified is you know first go to SDV school which at the time was in San Diego that was three months and back to the team do a full workup with all these exercises with the sub and then we deployed to the med and did you know again just a lot of exercises with our partner nations but gained a real appreciation for what clandestine truly is. I used to think that coming across a beach with like four zodiacs,

you know, from 10 miles out was pretty sexy, but you know, you can hear them five miles out. So, you know, that's not clandestine, but when you can launch off the back of a submarine underwater, go into a harbor or a beach all underwater, and you can go over the beach without even surfacing the SDV, the STV, you know, all you see is four dudes or however many guys you have with zero sound. I mean, that's clandestine.

And it's hard work. Like, don't get me wrong, SDV says they're wet or they were wet at the time. So it could be a eight to ten hour dive. But, yeah. Some of the guys we've had on here have, like, described it as being, like, really hollacious that you're just, like, freezing on the mini-sub. Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, hopefully you're smart enough to dress appropriately.

But you get cold, even the water's 75, 8 degrees. Yeah. The worst thing for me was, you know, when we're diving all the time, my sinuses were pretty jacked up. So I, you know, it was right when camelbacks came out, I'd put a camel back on over my dive gear or under my dive gear. Suck on that on the insert in. And about halfway through a dive, I had a little Ziploc bag with two extra pseudofase. Yeah. And I'd have to take those midway through the dive and try to, you know, open the bag up,

grab them before they disintegrated, put them in my mouth, suck it down with some fresh water, just to keep my ears clear for the, you know, for the next couple hours. Yeah. And that was, guys did it all the time. It was super boring if you weren't driving or navigating, like if you were in the back, show four dues in the back with all your kit, four rucksacks, all your weapons. That was like a death trap. quite like Jacques Cousteau where you're seeing like dolphins and stuff like that. It's probably just pitch dark, right?

Yeah, it's pretty dark. A lot of times we put a chemlight right above us, a green chemlight. And of course, back then, the dudes in the back didn't have good comms. Nobody had good comms, but you'd have that chemlight on a, basically on a wire that went to the front and they had a chemlight on. So if you, like, pulled it twice, it means, hey, we're okay. If you pull it like five times, like you got to get a, to the surface now. That was kind of the extent of how good our comms were. Soup cans, literally. Yeah. Yeah, no, it was hard work, but it was like, again,

appreciation for like the stuff we do and what it takes to succeed in the special ops community. It's like guys nowadays are, I mean, they're doing amazing things from the SDVs. I'll tell you, funny story on that. We were doing our final workup in STVs. We were down in Puerto Rico before we deployed and we had a, my platoon had a super long insert into the harbor and then a super long extract. It was probably like 10 miles each way.

And of course on the way back to the sub, you know, you got to figure out this rendezvous underwater kind of thing, which I won't go into, but put it like this, we were late and we tried to cut a corner. And you don't cut the corner when you're trying to link up with a, you know, nuclear submarine. Yeah. Yeah. He's a periscope depth.

And ostensibly, you can see him on your little sonar. And again, this is like 1997, 98. No, this is it, 98, 99. They just weren't that good. And they get banged up along the way, you know, so they don't always work great. But after like a 10-hour dive, we're coming back. We're hauling ass for us, like 6, 7 knots.

And we hit the side of the submarine because we kept in corners going like six knots, which when you're not expecting it is a lot. It's pretty lausious. Yeah. And of course, we thought like what, you know, we knew we hit the submarine. The question was can we still, like, can we ballast up if we need to? So my swim body, I was in the back with another guy and his door was bent. So he couldn't open his door.

So I opened my door and all I see is the propeller. submarine spinning. It was night, but the visibility was awesome in Puerto Rico. And I could just see this thing, like, getting closer and closer and closer. I'm like, you know, we got about five seconds before we got a bail. Of course, I can't talk to them. But I'm, you know, starting to grab them. And then we eventually surfaced just to check out the boat and see if we were, like,

they've sunk them before out there. And there's some big trenches where you don't want to be. in a sinking SDV, even if you have bag gear on, because once you go below a certain depth, you're screwed up for a long time. So were you able to eventually get that back into the dry dock on the sub? Yeah, we had to do a, uh, basically an emergency crankdown where, um,

the sub comes by and kind of does like the Fulton recovery going like one knot. It's not, not sexy like a C-130 or anything, but, you know, they hook you. and then they get the line down to a winch, and they basically just crank your ass down, because you can't, there's no way to get a broken SDV onto the back of a surfaced submarine. You've got to get it down.

And so, yeah, they winch just down, and then eventually, you know, got us into the shelter. I had heard that, particularly in, like, the mid and late 90s, that the SDV teams didn't get a lot of respect from the regular teams, And, like, being sent to an SDV team was, you know, seen as, oh, you're like, B team. Has that, was that your experience, was that actually going on? And has that changed? I think in some cases it was.

Like, if you were a brand new seal coming out of buds, you generally didn't want to go to SDBs in my estimation. Because they weren't going to war. Right. Even if the very few things that were going on back then. there were a couple high-end things going on that nobody talked about, but you had to have been there for a while. For me, it was a decision of, like, how do I extend my operational career?

Right. So, you know, that was, you know, by choice for me. And a lot of second tour guys, you know, they saw the value of it if you were really into diving. Like, you get all the diving you want there. Nowadays, I don't even think they take enlist the roar officer straight out of buds, and you have to screen to go there,

which is a good thing because, number one, it demonstrates who wants to actually be there and work hard. And number two, they don't have to take everybody. So just because you're a seal doesn't mean you're a good seal. And they're doing some amazing work across the world that we'll never know about. Do you think that technology has sort of made that difference, that it's enabled the SDVs,

or do you think it's just the mission parameters have changed, which has allowed the SDVs to be like more, you know, valued, I'd say. Yeah, I think it's both. But I think over the years, a lot of super hard work. I think our officers and leaders got smarter where like, hey, you know, nobody's going to come and hand us the golden ticket to go on this like super high speed operation. You have to demonstrate capability, earn credibility, and then build trust.

And the decision makers are generally in the Pentagon or other agencies that have the authority. and I think we just got way better at working that system and over time built up the credibility to be asked or if you demonstrate or offer a solution to a tough problem that they may not even know about because not even in the Navy or Special Ops like most guys don't know really what a SDV can do or what an SDV platoon.

So it's a lot of education in different settings with a different audience. And now the guys have the dry sub, too, so increased range and not freezing to death. Yeah, you know, it's always like, I think in the early 2000s, like, you see like an E5 STB guy with a Legion of Merit, and you're like,

how'd you get that? Like, that's normally for 06s and 07s, you know, and super senior enlisted, he's like, I can't talk about it. You're like, oh, that's cool. I want to go there Yeah, it's awesome That's like one of the capabilities

That only you guys can do Nobody else has that And I imagine nowadays I don't want to say it's the main effort But I mean if we're moving into a time Of state conflict I can see a renewed emphasis on it 100%

Yeah, they're busy Well, and what we know about mission creep Is it if any of their success Has ever become public them pretty soon every other every other uniform service special operations unit will have their own underwater delivery vehicles they'll all want to get on the mission yeah well even after after being there just i realize that like most sealed platoons and even other special mission units like diving is a perishable skill and like you're not just going to do a two-week training block and

then like hey you know we got the big mish over wherever you know it's going to be a very focused thing from people that dive all the time. And really the only people that do it all the time are the SDV teams. So that's my opinion. It's not doctrine or anything like that. And now we're getting to about the year 2000. Tell us about when this idea,

I mean, what I'm sensing is you want to stay as operational as you could, as long as you could. Is that how you got the idea to go and screen for development group? Absolutely. Yeah. No, I had always wanted to go. I just had to pick the, you know,

number one, I don't think I was mature enough to even apply after my platoon commander, John, but seal teammate. And I got married right after that. So I wanted to extend it. And, you know, that was the next great step. I think a lot of us want to go there. And I was just super lucky. He worked hard to get there.

And then, yeah, got selected to go through selection assessment training. in 2000, went to the boat side of it, the grade team side, but we did a combined selection and assessment with assaults and boats for most of it until we had to break off and kind of specialized. But yeah, went through that awesome process in the year 2000. Any funny stories from training with Green Team? They're all funny. You know, I mean, it's not funny when you're... Oh, his audio.

cut out. No, I hear him. Can you hear him? Yeah. Oh, then it's just me. Go ahead and... Sorry, Jack's hearing cut out. Okay. You guys can continue. Yeah, my thing. Sorry about that. Go ahead. You want me to wait? No, no, please go. He's not important.

You know, it's a very different environment. Very professional for the most part. Where, you know, It's not a lot of yelling and screaming. It's like the standards of the standards, and I hope you meet them. But if you don't, you know, see you later. Yeah, there are a couple funny things that I don't think I should go into them.

But, you know, it was, it's not funny when, you know, you're. You fuck up and you're, you know, one of the big punishments we had, especially like CQB is a big thing for us. And it was, you're either dragging a tire, big heavy tire, long ways, or you're, or you're climbing a ladder up a tree that isn't fun to do with Kit. That happened, you know, quite a bit. And, you know, I can tell you that, you know, I probably will never be asked back to Gray Team to be a throttleman on an H-Sack. I can tell you, you know, everybody rotates through the three positions on those votes,

or at least back then we did. You know, you got the nav slot in the kind of the port seat, the middle dudes, the wheelman, and then the, The Starboard side guys, the throttleman, because it's so intense. One guy has to concentrate on just keeping it straight. One guy's like throttling. And there's an art and a science to it. I found myself one night, we were going up doing a really easy training exercise,

like going up a river. And I was the throttleman on the number one boat. So I didn't have to navigate. It was awesome. It was just like, like wide open. Pin them down going 50 knots. It's glass. You know, there's a big moon out.

And they told us how to like overtake a ship because there's a big wake. It was like big cargo ship going into Norfolk Harbor. And I couldn't remember exactly what they said. It's like come off the throttles a little bit and then gun it. You know, you get over the lip, but you don't want to like go into the face of the of the wake. So I did it absolutely backwards. And we're again, lead boat. I don't even think I had my nods on.

They were like flipped up and everybody's maps are not even in a waterproof thing because it was so nice. and I came off the throttles, the nose came down, and then I gunned it, and we stuffed right into the back of this wake on a completely calm night. And, you know, if you've been in a boat that stuff, you have this huge green wall of water that comes over you. I almost broke my nose. I had this big hump on my nose from my nods, smashed me in the face. Everything's wet, and all we could hear when we came up was everybody in the other boats laughing at us. Except my boat. They were super pissed.

So, yeah, I have that. So it sounds like it's basically like when you're in a, when you're speeding in a car and going over, like, a bump, like the braking, to put the pressure on the front. So it's basically the same concept for you guys. It's interesting. It is, yeah. And, you know, again, you know, we all rotated through,

but I wasn't ever very good at it. And, like, that's, selection and training for for for the boats like the first couple times you go out it looks really cool when you launch off a wave and you count like one one thousand two one thousand and you're still in the air because when you come down you know it's going to hurt yeah especially if you're you know panted a little bit and everybody gets smashed to the side i've seen guys get really fucked up um not through anybody's fault but just like it's it's a dangerous business yeah yeah and this is all pre-9-11. So your first assignment was over to Bosnia.

Yeah. The first cool thing I got to do was go to Bosnia for a mission we had over there. And it was great, you know, first kind of real thing that we were doing. But, yeah, I had a short tenure in Bosnia. We had some guys who enjoyed the bottle and shit rolls uphill. And I promptly got kicked out of Bosnia with my senior list of leader

after about a month. So it was a low point in my career. I thought I was completely done. This was like May, June of 2001. You know, when a two-star conventional army guy who owns the base tells you to go home, like get on a plane now, you dipshit, it's pretty humbling as a young guy.

who thinks he's pretty hot shit. But that is a pretty good lesson for me to, you know, how we are perceived matters and how we will be employed, right? If you can't earn respect and keep respect and credibility from those that you work for, even if you're just a tenant on their base and not actually working for them, it doesn't go well. Matt, this is a discussion we've had. a lot on our show about about officers and what they are and are not responsible for like you know if

if your Joe goes out and gets drunk and makes an ass to himself on a Friday night you know and then the officers getting relieved it's like it puts a lot of pressure on officers to maybe cover things up or you know or whatever but also officers have a tendency to influence culture a lot of times so there is some responsibility or there should be some responsible for certain things like And you suffered because of what some of your guys did. Where, for you, like, where is that line for what an officer should and shouldn't be held accountable for? And, like, when is it detrimental to hold an officer accountable for everything the guys or people under their command do? Yeah, you're exactly right.

If that hadn't, that wasn't the first incident from our group. And so then it becomes a pattern. and you know I can although I didn't agree with the decision I can I can see where they came from right I'm not a fan of like hey Joe Schmuckettelli goes out and gets a DUI therefore we're going to lock everybody's liberty down not at all but that was kind of an operational role it wasn't back in Conis and it was you know our credibility as the organization was on the line and you know I I I I 100% believe that, you know, if you're the OIC or commander, then you have ultimate responsibility and accountability.

You know, that's why commanding officers of ships in the Navy. Maybe it's a little more draconian in the Navy when you have that kind of autonomy when you're like forward deployed and all that stuff. This wasn't that. But still, as a commander of the small unit, it was my responsibility to influence, if not direct, people to, you know be smart about things and we weren't seatotlers um by any stretch but you know that was what happened had crossed the line and put some things at risk and it was it was not unacceptable so I was like yeah Roger that so so the second part of that question then I guess is you know

you have your big army or your bigger your bigger military like you say like a ship or you know an infantry a battalion or whatever but When you are the officer in a more mature, a smaller and more mature element, how do you influence, you know, like these E6s, E7s, without them just saying, go fuck yourself, we're adults. You know, like, we can handle our own business. Yeah, I mean, that is probably the million-dollar question that everybody wants to know the secret sauce too.

And I think it's number one being tactically, technically proficient and competent, right? You don't have to be the best shooter, diver, everything, but you've got to be pretty good. So you've got to earn respect. And I think most guys, like, honestly, know, like, hey, you're in that position, right? It's, and they're going to do their best to also succeed, not to make you succeed, but they want the unit to succeed, right? So they want you to be good at what you do, which is not generally, being the number one man in a door, right? And so if you respect the expertise around you,

you know, and build camaraderie and in over time earn respect, then it should sort itself out as long as you're not a bumbling idiot. Where, you know, so again, where some guys get sideways is they, I think they try to come in and be GI Joe and take, like, I got to make all the tactical calls. No, you don't. Like, you have these guys who've probably been there for, a decade longer than you.

Like, you got to let certain things flow and then make adjustments to the flow versus being an directive, you know what I mean? Like, the guys are so good at certain units that, you know, you got to let it, you got to trust. And if you don't trust other guys there, then you got to take action and hold them accountable for not performing it, which, which we, you know, we did. So it's, yeah, I mean, my opinion is like at the end of the day, there's got to be one dude in charge, right? Right.

Like this thing called warfare and how to do it's been going on for several thousand years. And generally there's one dude in charge. And, you know, like it or not, that's generally an inexperienced officer. Maybe it's not an officer. Like you got the squadron commander, the troop commander and team leaders. That's kind of chain of command. but you got troop chiefs and squadron and master chiefs in there too. If you're not listening to those guys, you're an idiot.

So it's a fine balance, but yeah, there's no easy answer. It's earned respect. It's not given for sure. And then you were in the unit when 9-11 happened. Can you tell us a little bit if you want about what that experience was like, how things changed in the unit and sort of, where you ended up, you know, where was the next place that you touched down at? Yeah. Yeah, so I was actually briefing the commanding officer at the time of the first plane

strike on a training exercise we had coming on, you know, and the first plane hit, and I think somebody came in and said something, and the second one hit, and like, all right, this is done, you know, let's get on the horn. And so what we thought was that we were, we were potentially going to go, like, something needed to happen, right? Once we figured out, hey, this was a terrorist act by Al-Qaeda, we're going to go find these guys, hung them down, and kill them. And it's going to be over in about a month, so we need to fight to get on the first mission. Like, 100%.

That's like, everybody's like, there were fistlights going on in the locker room. Like, hey, motherfuckers, we're going. You know, it's like, nope, we're going. Like, we're on alert. Yeah, we're not on alert. So we're going to, you know, you got to stay on alert. You know, there's all these, like, angles being. But honestly, we thought we were going to go on this like worldwide hunting spree and just, you know, try to do what we could to root out Al Qaeda.

And it was going to be easy and done quick. Obviously, you know, when I was lucky that I got on the first appointment, but it wasn't done quick, right? in it, you know, the first one was, we were pretty kinetic, but it was, you know, in and out, and mostly we were on the giving end. And then the guys that relieved us, you know, we had a guy step on a land, an anti-panc mine, and then some other guys get hurt and some things happened very quickly. And it became like, okay, this is not going to be an easy fight. This is the longer term slog. You know, and I went back like, within a year, I was, I mean, within nine months,

I was back in theater doing other stuff. And it's like, okay, you know, this is the new normal. Like, three months on, you know, or four months on and six months off. And while you're off, you're, your training. And it elevated the seriousness of like the training trips that we took. And while you were home, really getting, focused on some of the mission profiles that we had signed up for, which were pretty intense, right? I love jumping.

I love pre-falling, or I used to. I never in a million years thought we would, you know, use free fall on an op, and we used the shit out of it. In fact, on our first real op, we had one of our troops at a halo, unmarked unknown DZ at night with nods. you know and we're like holy shit we used to go jump all the time but here we are like yeah we get paid paid for and yeah and you better to fucking pay attention to it because it's it's it can go wrong really quick can you tell us a bit more about that initial push that you guys did into afghanistan what that was like you what you experienced yeah um so you know we were

with some our army sister units and and they actually did the first real operations and I don't know if you guys the the Rangers did the big jump and Noah Omar's house right well they jumped into a dry lake bed hunting grounds but yeah and and we were on a ship at the time and we watched everybody fly away and come back and it was pretty humbling and we were supposed to go recock for our mission the next night and it was canceled we're like all right we need to be creative then and figure out what we can do and we all went to to a land-based location and started conjuring up like how can we affect the situation on the ground right what are the rules of engagement and you know you had the

big ring road and at the time anything coming into connor with fuel or anybody with a gun going in was probably a bad guy and so we said hey we can do an armed reconnaissance to the west of uh Kandahar. So, you know, we didn't have vehicles there. We had boats. You know, again, I thought we were the maritime guys. So we, we brought boats on this operation to Afghanistan on the ship. And like, okay, so we went up and, like, we need some of these desert mobility humbys that are in the war stock up in Kuwait. So we sent some guys up there, got a bunch of vehicles. We had ATVs with us for some reason and figured that we could get in and do an armed reconnaissance for a couple days with, you know, a rat patrol kind of thing. So we did, but, you know, a Dumb Bee, Desert Mobility Humvee, fits on a MH-47 with about

one inch on either side. And they don't really like that, I'm told, like, if there's not more room, which makes me squeeze by. Because you're fucked. If you have a hard landing or something gets cocked, you know, it's just like you don't want to sit on the H-L-Z doing the 10. thousand point turn. So we conjured up in a hop where one troop was going to free fall in, do a survey of a dry lake bed, set up a desert landing site where we bring in two MC130s,

land, and then my troop would roll off to do this armed reconnaissance for as long as it took. Ended up in about 10 days. And so we had a sniper element with us. They were on ATVs, and we had my troop, which was on the four Humvees, and we just found the best location to set up OPs and drop bombs on bad guys, and then, you know, hunt for targets of opportunity if ISR came up with any potential wildgrass sites for bad guys. So we took advantage of that.

And at the time, I thought it would be, this was like late October, early, I think it was November of 2001, you know. I thought it was going to be like, you know, exercises. And, okay, there's bad guys here. I got to send up, you know, con-op. Of course, all we had at the time was, like, really crappy HPW, like, techcom. You can send, like, just words.

And I remember sending up the first one. It's just like, quick five paragraphs, you know, who, where, why, and when. It was like, hey, we want to hit this target at, you know, 2,200. we're going to take four vehicles and this is it. And like he was approved within 30 seconds. We're like, all right, we scratched it out in the dirt. And we went and did a classic, you know, ambush on a target. That was the first real one.

And then the snipers were doing their thing, dropping bombs on bad guys. So it was fulfilling, to say the least. How was that for you guys in terms of, I know that your training covered a lot of things, and you guys tried to remain proficient across a number of fields. But here you're out there doing desert mobility ops in vehicles, like you say, kind of the old Rat Patrol type of stuff. Probably working in larger teams than normal, I imagine, or no?

Slightly larger, but, I mean, honestly, we in the mobility side of it had trained to do exactly that, just like a few weeks prior to 9-11. And it was like, we didn't have to train, but it's like, hey, this is this fire maneuver, fire movement. Yeah, yeah. Bigger platforms, bigger guns, slower than us on ground. It's the same tactics you use on the water, quite frankly.

And it was like, we had just done it. And so that brought some credibility to us. Like, yeah, of course we can do this. And we can, you know, we were being sneaky. And at the time, like we didn't have any, clear systems on on vehicles or anything like that so we took the one we had out from our boat stuck it on to a Humvee and it worked great yeah you know we had 360 rotating gimbal yeah yeah partner unit did the same thing eventually became standard on the vehicles because you guys

did it it was yeah so it was just like creative dudes in the in the troop like hey fly to Kuwait and figure out how to get these vehicles from some armed Army logistics, dude. Like, you know, of course, he had the backing of the task force behind him. But, you know, bring them back here, figure out the air. And then what do we need on this thing? Like we pulled out the windshields, pulled off the doors. You know, we're welding like machine gun turrets to the passenger side, you know.

So I had an M60 in front of my face the whole time. It's like awesome. Yeah. This is cool, you know. Of course, it smacked me in the face a bunch, but they'll talk about it. Talk about that. You know, you mentioned this when you're talking about SDVs about, you know, sort of advocating for yourself and educating people.

Did you find that to be the case here too where you guys wanted to find a way to make yourselves useful? You kind of created these use cases and then sold them? Yeah, well, there's so much work to go around at the time that it wasn't hard. But certainly there were some whisperings like, why are these guys doing this? The water guys. Why are they in this landlocked country? But we were, you know, special mission unit.

And we trained to that. And then the basic task that we trained to for other missions led and allowed themselves to be used 100% for this. So, I mean, for us, it was like, yeah, you know what SEAL stands for? It's an acronym for sea, air, and land. You know what the three lightning bullets on an SF patch are? See air and land, right? And so it goes both ways. And, you know, frankly, it just, it didn't last that long.

There might have been a little more consternation between us and the Rangers. Yeah. You know, because, you know, there's always that kind of, you know, difference of opinion, right? The Rangers are the premier light infantry guys. Right. of the Army. And they're really good. Are they the same as who we were?

Like, no, the different missions, different age groups, right? But everybody has a role. And frankly, I used to get really sick of it. And some other things happened later that I can talk about. But it was, you know, after that, I think when I heard that kind of stuff, it was like, you know, you are a closed, minded dipshit, go over there and, you know, complain to somebody else because we're here to get work done.

Yeah. I mean, what I really took from that, from what you just said, is the SEALs and SF go both ways. It's not gay if you're underway. Everyone knows that. No, but it is interesting because really, obviously, you know, with seals, you have the swimming aspect as part of the selection. You know, with other, with Army units, you have a lot of the land-based movements.

But at the end of the day, they're really the same guys. And their training may be focused in different arenas. And obviously the SMUs do probably get a level of training. Well, they do. They get a level of training and funding that, you know, the Rangers and SF might not get or whatever. But they're the same guys. Couldn't agree with you more. I mean, I, I, we are all cooked up in the same cloth and, you know, you might have a different colored cloth, but, you know, we are, we are the same.

Yeah. That is, it's pretty awesome, actually, when you think about the community that we come from, right? Yeah, we all want to, like, everybody has a little click of, yeah, I'm a seal, right? So if given the choice, I'm probably going to hang out with seals, but you know what, if given the choice for me to hang out with a, you know, Ranger, SF, or somebody else in the Navy, I'm hanging out with like special ops guys, you know. So the circle is concentric and, you know, my much better friends, you know, who are in the Army than some of the teams, right? And I'm sure it's the same way going to the way.

It's about the person, not what you're wearing under your sleeve or anything like that. Go ahead, Dave. No, I was just going to ask, how was it for you guys learning, you know, because Big Army obviously controlled a lot of the battle spaces. this big army, you know, is used to, you know, working, working out that chain of command in their, and I know that you guys probably went to, like, the JRXs and things like that, where you were used to that also. But how was that for you, like, learning to work in, like, with conventional forces in those

battle spaces and things like that? It was, I think it was generally good. You know, as long as you didn't approach it. from a perspective of like, hey, I'm an operator. You're just like guarding the gate kind of thing. Like we all have those guys in our units who are just decks no matter what. They typically didn't get a lot done. But if you respected their mission and where they were coming from, like, hey, you know what?

You just killed the Mua. I know you didn't, like we worked for a different chain of command. We had to coordinate with the battle space owners, but we didn't have to get permission from them. Right. And that was a tough tool for them to swallow. So in some cases. But if you took the time to go visit them, since you got in country and like shake their hand.

And like, hey, here's who I am. This is what we're about. We'll always try to coordinate. Occasionally we might need a QRF from you guys or somebody on standby. And by the way, if you need anything, let me know because it might be able to get something for you. You know, they were generally awesome to work with, in my opinion. And there were a couple guys who were just so conventional that they, They're just like, you know, the assholes stand on both sides of the fence, quite frankly.

Right. And I can understand their perspective. I couldn't agree with sometimes decisions just based on doctrine and, you know, this is the way we do it in the Army or by, you know, infantry doctrine. Where it's like, well, that's not the way we do it. Yeah. Guess what? I'm telling you what we're doing is a courtesy, you know, if that's what it really comes down to. but I'm not asking your permission.

So not stepping on them and not trying to make it a lives harder, but trying to work and come to an understanding. And generally, it worked out really well like that. And after that pumped to Afghanistan, you then got sucked into some of the more like clandestine work that the unit does. So what are you able to say about that? Yeah, I mean, we just had smaller groups arrayed in different places, trying to actually develop the intelligence picture.

You know, this is early 2001, 2002, which, you know, became a bigger thing later, and it was super important work, but, you know, I think we all learned early on, like, hey, the big target intelligence package isn't going to be delivered to your desk with a bow on it and be, like, 100% accurate. You have to actually go figure out what's going on on the ground, working with other agencies.

And so we were doing a lot of that kind of stuff, you know, partnered with very small units, other government agencies, just trying to be the eyes and ears, and then reporting back up what we were seeing. So, you know, that's, it was great, great learning experience. And then that led into working in the J-Sox staff with General Miller. Yeah. You guys seem to okay? Yeah, yeah. You're freezing up a little bit. It's okay. Yeah, your signal's kind of going down a bit. I think my kids are probably on the internet. I'll text them to get off. But yeah, I was sent to the staff. Again, one of those things that I didn't ask to do, but I was told I was going to the staff for a couple of years.

and it was a great learning experience. You know, I was supposed to go to the J3 and just, you know, be one of the main planners. But I got sucked into some stuff general, or at the time, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Miller was doing, you know, kind of on that operational preparation of the battlefield line of effort. And so it worked for him for two years,

he was there I think for a year but stayed in that that entity for about two years until I went back and it was it was great I mean it was hard because I was gone probably more there than I was you know well not more but just as much move the family down to Fort Bragg and and then you know certainly the there were a couple blowouts where, you know, the pager goes off and I didn't come home for three months. You know, that's a real thing. But I learned a ton, gained a huge amount of respect for our partners in the Army, worked with them quite a bit as well, as well as the, like, great people who run the staff.

Like, it is, again, I didn't want to be there. I never went to school. Again, I had not gone to school up until this point. So I'm hitting like 14 years of, you know, I stayed pretty operational. and you know the army officer is just running circles around me in particular about like hey like how do you how do you plan something and then run it up the chain of command and speak the staff language that army majors know how to speak right and then of course the colonels know like that was that was a huge learning curve so going to to the staff at joc actually helped with that like okay

I got to up my game because that's the language everybody speaks. And back to that credibility thing, if I want to have credibility in my next job and continue to get our unit employment, then you need to be able to speak that language. So learn the language and learn how they talk and still kind of work your angle into it. So it was great in that regard, but I also got a lot of good, I mean, operational tools. time even while on the staff working with that crew of guys and the teams we had. Were there any those, you know, counterterrorism alerts or anything that you're able to talk about that were interesting experiences? I'll tell you one funny story.

I mean, during the invasion of Iraq, it wasn't necessarily a blowout, but, you know, I remember going, I was the first guy from our office to go, and it was like it wasn't on the invasion, but it was right after it. And again, our role was to do the OPE. Nobody was interested in OPE. So I remember talking to the J-3 and giving him a brief while I'm over there, a table-side brief at an undisclosed location about what I'm supposed to do. And he's the J-3.

And he's in 06 and I'm a 0-4, I think, maybe in 0-3. Now I was in 2004. But he's just, he's throwing the brief on the floor. And the guy hadn't probably slept in three months. He's got probably a whole can of Copenhagen in his mouth. And he's yelling at me while flexed Copenhagen, getting, you know, hitting me in the eye. He throws the entire brief on the floor.

Get the fuck out of here. You're not doing any of that. You're doing this. And he completely retasked me to do something completely different, which was great. happy to do it, yes, sir. And call my boss back, I'm like, hey, it didn't go so well. I don't think we're doing what you want me to do, at least not for a couple weeks.

Maybe you should give me a call and see you good. I got retask to go do something else, which was, you know, it was fine. But it was just different priorities for different people. And so that whole, it was all pretty new at the time for what we were trying to do. and it was not well understood, not well accepted. And, you know, that was on us to educate people. And we ultimately did. But, yeah, it was a tough learning.

Did you see that capability grow throughout, you know, your career and some of these assignments you had? Because, I mean, I don't know how in-depth you want to get with the OPE stuff, but as I understand it, that has a lot to do with sort of like moving the puzzle pieces or moving the chess pieces into the right place to enable operations. Yeah, I'm no expert at this. Like, trust me, I'm the wrong guy to go deep on this. But it was, I mean, we saw several commands

within Naval Special Warfare stand up to do this. We saw entities within the Ranger units. We saw Fourth Battalions in Special Forces, stood up all to do this kind of stuff. And it was, so I think it was, and there were other units that were way better at it, doing it already on a higher level. But we were trying to kind of, you know,

bridge the gap between, know shit what's going on in the battlefields and what the tactical intel is, not strategic level intel, but how do we affect tomorrow or the next day versus the big strategic piece of China, Russia, and this and that? So it certainly was satisfying in that regard, and I think we played a role probably by what we did wrong and the lessons learned that then kind of, you know, led to the, you know, led to the good thinking and design of what a unit that does this at the top level should really look like.

And yeah, so it was super interesting. Was it challenging for you guys in the beginning as you're developing this capability? It could be because I imagine that in a way, like you're serving many masters, right? You've got J-Soc, you've got NSCOM, you've got state, you've got you've got all these people out there who want to have the final say, I imagine. Was that what you experienced or is that not quite accurate? Not at the level I was at. I mean, I was way lower than, I mean, certainly we had battle space owners that you talked about.

We had foreign partners. We had, you know, white side soft units that we were aligned with other agencies. But, you know, it was generally on the ground. It was like if you were a good dude, you were just trying to do the right thing. It worked out really well. Yeah. There were a couple people that showed up that, you know, we weren't in the main bases with the, you know,

the green bean coffee or whatever that place was. We weren't getting massages from the ladies on, Boggram Air Base were going to that Burger King. We were in austere environments where, you know, if you got like some fresh food once every, so often, it was a great thing. if you could score a goat, you know, so on the ground, you built tight relationships pretty quick by sharing and just being authentic.

Yeah. But occasionally we or the other entities would send the completely wrong person there, you know? Yeah. Maybe somebody who was used to the embassy job in Paris or something like that. Yeah. But there were massages at Bogram? There were massages at one point. I had no idea.

It was pretty early on, I think. Yeah. So I've been told. I've never been there, but I've been told that around that 2004-5 time frame that there was some sort of tie massage parlor, yes. Friends of mine may have gone. Yeah, I've heard about it too. I've never heard that. You must have done a good job, though, with some of these assignments, even if things didn't go the way as they were pulling.

because so your next assignment you got to become a squadron commander in development group. I mean, that must, I mean, that's a huge achievement. Yeah, I mean, I was lucky to have gotten there and certainly honored to do it. But yeah, you know, came back. And in typical fashion, you know, I was, my boss is down at the headquarters. We're going to give me a couple months to do some turnover in my last couple months actually there. So I was actually back at the beach doing a turnover like underway training. I remember I was all jocked up.

It was probably March, so the water was still pretty cold, getting ready to head out and just to like get back into it and get a call from the headquarters. Like, hey, we need you on a plane tomorrow and morning. It's leaving out of hope. You're going to go be our L&O, our first L&O to the first Marine Division. I was like, you guys don't get it. I'm going out here. I'm prepping for, you know, taking this over.

And like, yeah, planes wheels up at, you know, 9 a.m. so be back. It was like 7 o'clock p.m. I'm at the beach. I'm like, okay. So I de-joc, drive home for four hours, pack all my stuff, get to the airplane. And sure enough, like, I get sent over to be the L&O from our headquarters

to the first Marine Division out in Ramadi, which was, you know, again, I didn't want to be there, you know. But again, they're not called. called a request, they called orders. But the cool thing was like it was General Mattis, is the division commander. General Kelly, I think was the deputy and Dunford was the chief staff.

Like that was their leadership lineup. And Eric Smith, who's now the commandant was the current officer. He just been shot in the leg and he's in the jock, you know, with his leg up, oozing blood and he wouldn't go home. So working with those guys for a couple months was actually pretty cool because, you know,

that's, you know it works when you're with guys like that. We're true pros and they're like, hey, we need a QRF. Here's the con op. And like, we don't need to see the con op. Just tell us where and when to be. We got it. You got it. It's like, wow, this is great.

So there was mutual respect there. But yeah, then I, so I did that. And then, of course, I get back to the beach, like on July 1st and we deployed on July 4th. So there was zero turnover and it was straight, straight back into it, which was, which was fine, you know. But it was, at that time, we had, you know, there were multiple theaters now, and we were in Afghanistan. But, yeah, it was, I mean, it was great. And this was the time, you know, you're the squadron commander, you had told me earlier, when Operation Red Wings happened. And you were the ground force commander for the squadron when that happened?

Yeah, and one of the deployment. We were over there. And again, we, you know, in the, as you guys know, but there were multiple chains of command, right? The white side guy has worked for, Siege of Soda for worked for the two-star or three-star Army guy that was, you know, the overall battle space owner. We worked for a different chain of command. So we kind of watched the planning going on for Red Wings and they needed some helicopters. So they came over and, you know, requested permission to use. use the helicopter. So I kind of watched the planning going on, but we weren't directly involved.

So, you know, we had zero skin in the game besides just, you know, giving them advice on where or not to go and what not to do, which is what they did. But like they, so we watched the planning. And I remember, you know, they, like, I didn't think of it, anything of it. And we were working nights so we'd wake up around lunchtime and uh remember the day june 28th 2005 like our beep we're still using pagers the beepers went off you know right before lunch like hey you know we'd work to the jock immediately and we mustering the jock and like what's going on and like hey a bird has just been shot down one of our task force assets like what like not track any of it. Like, holy shit. Like, how does that happen? You know, and come to realize that

they had inserted the night before, they got compromised, big firefight, and this is the four man rec team, which is a pretty light rookie team. And then they had launched the QRF in the middle of the day. And that's when we kind of got notified, because although we were all one task force, you know, the aviators were tracking what was going to. on but the C2 was over at Cs SOTA. And so like we we just weren't tracking. So then it became okay, we need to send a QRF up there and it became a fairly interesting thing

to watch for me because we could have gone right away. But after having a Ced of SOTO of QRF launched middle of the day and get shot down, nobody was really keen on sending anybody else right back in there, especially during the day. Right. And so we waited a long time until the seat in the time, the task force and CES and SOTA for both those sixes. And then you went straight to the, you know, either CETCOM or or the conventional

battle space owner. And so there was a lot of fighting and politics and going on there. waited around for quite a while and finally my boss said hey how long what it take for you guys to get up there and we we have pre-positioned an entity up closer earlier in the day and it's like wait we could be airborne in 45 minutes he's like roger that you're you're now the ground force commander go and so our really what we wanted to do the first night was just get a smaller element of ranger so we had this joint strike force and so we had this joint strike force and And it was most of my squadron and a company minus of Rangers from 275.

And so I had a troop basically plus company commander with most of his company, whatever birds we needed. And, you know, pre-states get closer and get to the crash site. It was pretty cool because, you know, you talk about operating with commander's intent. The mission brief was they rescue any survivors. We cover any remains, fill as many bad guys as you can. Any questions? No, sir, we can work with that.

So, you know, we flew up to Jabad and sent the first guys up, got weathered out, so they had to come back. So now we're on the ground, like, what do we do? We had everybody coming out of the woodwork. We had assets along the border. other guys had some assets. We basically said, hey, can anybody get there on foot? And so, you know, it was, you know, where the crash site was, was in a valley. But to get there, like if we drove north from Jabad to Asad to get to the crash site, you'd have to cross like two ridgelines. So it wasn't an easy traverse and so but we said hey we got to we got to figure this out like hedge our bet so we will send

entities to walk and then we will fly in the next night and so they they started the journey a lot of guys had to turn back because it was so manky they all ran out a bunch of them ran out of water and then we flew in the next day about five clicks south you know kind of back into the same area but not the exact area. And we had, I don't know, we had about 60 guys, 70 guys, combined force of Rangers and Seals. And we had brought a couple of the guys from the troop, the white side troop, with us,

because they were itching to get into the fight, and we needed some more manpower. So we had about a 90-foot fast trope, you know. I think it was high, I think Sierra Nevada's, you know, high, tall pine trees, beautiful country. but probably some people with some nerves. Like it was the highest rope I've ever done in my life. Yeah.

And I just remember like, you know, I was up near the cockpit talking to the pilots. And so I'm the second to last guy to come out of the bird. And I had a dog guy behind me, you know, it was fast open with his dog. And man, it just kept going and going and going and going. It's going faster, faster and faster. I remember hitting like a sack of shit. And just like a little daze remembering, oh, God, the dog guys, right behind me. So I roll it out of the way and he comes fucking plowing in.

And then we had to, you know, walk about, we kind of linked up to everybody, did this monster patrol up to the crash site and sent the PJs and some other guys from the Ranger entity down there to secure the crash site. We set up C2 node and started looking for survivors. And, you know, they did a really good job. And it was really, significant terrain and steep. And so we probably set up our C2 node around probably 9,000 feet

when the crash site was probably 1,000 feet below us because I think the way it happened, the RPG had hit the back of it and it kind of rolled down this hill that didn't look like much on video, but when you get there, you're like, oh my God, like just getting there and back is going to be significant. But the guys got down there to the crash site while we were sending out patrols trying to find the reckey team

because at the time we had no idea where they were you know kind of doing the forensic analysis of like okay a firefight happened here we can see all the shells from both sides which way did they go but couldn't really determine that and a lot of SIG and other things are coming in indicating that maybe they were over in Pakistan at the time because several of the radios had from the had been taken. What I think happened is people are like clicking the mic and things like that and we weren't exactly sure where it was coming from.

But you know, first order business, get the guys. Unfortunately, there were no survivors from the helicopter. You know, all 16 of the, there were eight crewmen and eight seals had perished. We couldn't determine one guy because his remains were pretty burned and mangled. there was a fire down at the crash site, but got all their remains, had to blow an HLZ so they could come in. So we had to get resupplied.

It was another issue. So we fast-robed in with like minimal kit because we thought we were kind of going to get into it. And we were at 9,000 feet. So you weigh mobility versus like security. Right. And if you were kidded down, with body armor and things like that you would you would have been spent before you even got there so we

most of us didn't have body armor on fact some of the guys it was pretty funny uh on the rope thought they were going to do a typical like 10 foot rope onto the you know a roof of a building and when they did a 90 foot rope wearing just like flight gloves or batter's gloves oh yeah i saw a young ranger his entire hand yeah was double the size the next day it was just a blister that That's insane. And, but he pressed on. Another kid had a broken arm. He, you know, hit real hard.

He pressed on. Nobody, nobody asked to get medevac, not that they could have anyways. But we got everybody out, I think, all the remains out the next day and continued looking for, you know, whoever was, you know, still alive. We didn't know if any of them were alive of the four reckey elements.

And we didn't know where they were. So we looked and looked and looked and going on wild goose chases for several days. And then you probably read the story that a guy who was housing, Markle-Suchel, walked to Assadabad and basically said, hey, I have this American in my home in whatever village it was. And so that was like day seven or eight, I forget what exactly. what it was and that lined up with some other intel that we were receiving and so then we had a pretty idea that yeah he's probably there and we need to go rescue him now and again we don't know

what's going on we had seen goat herders and you know and not a lot of enemy contacts some harassing fire things like that that we would just kind of suppress with AC130s or no mortars and so we launched a rescue and it was a little interesting the way it went down is we had a small small team of SF guys and and Afghans had it in the area a couple clicks away like hey this is the grid of where we need to go can you can you go do this and they said no like we have five Americans five Afghanis who are wearing like four Frams and you they'll, you know, pajamas and they have one magazine piece, like, okay. And so we took a pause, sent a Ranger element up there.

They went up, took charge, and led the rescue into the ground, while we kind of set up a suppression of enemy air defense, you know, kind of plan to precede the rescue helicopter that came in there. So they went in there. They secured Marcus. We knew he was there. Then we launched everybody else in to get them and did that whole suppressive fire, which was pretty cool.

And they could only take out like two people, you know, Marcus and like one other because we wanted to bring the guy's family that they were going to get killed. And like, sorry, can't do it, but you can walk out with our elements. So once Marcus got back and, you know, debriefed, then we started figuring out, hey, this is what happened. Here's where we were. And right away we went out and found two of the other guys, Murphy and Danny Deeds, but we couldn't find the last of the recial element, I think it was Matt Axelson. So we actually had been up there for eight or nine days and we're supposed to go home, not that that is going to drive anything, but we did a relief in place because we could

not find the last of that four men recital element. So we did a relief. in place with another squad and some other rangers came in. And by that time, we had some other conventional forces helping us out too. So they found him, I think, two days later, and then Exfield, and we were mission complete. And yeah, it was a, I'll tell you what, a couple of the guys that walked in, like, from the battalion reconnaissance detachment of 275, like those guys were some tough, tough dudes. We had a lot of people quit on that hump, including some of, you know, some, some people from my community. A lot of the Afghans quit, but those guys showed up, I think like two days after we

were there, out of water, out of food, stumbling in. I'm like, oh my God, you guys are the biggest badasses on the planet. It was, it was pretty cool. And I gained a lot of respect for, you know, Again, there was always this stupid kind of rivalry, even when we're working together. Like mutual respect, but, you know, after that, it's like we truly are the same. Like, these guys are awesome. Yeah, yeah. Our guys are awesome. It's also one of those moments where it was all these different units working together,

working together to repatriate Americans, you know, I mean, it's kind of an incredible moment in that sense. It was. You know, there were some things early on that. Like when I got to J-Bet, I had a, I was, you know, I didn't wear any rank at the time, but I was only in 04. And I had some lieutenant colonel SF guy kind of come into my jock and tell me that he was in charge. And it's like, what, like, I don't, why don't we just get this job done? Like, we have guys out there.

Like, we don't need to fight about who's in charge. Right. I told him to get the fuck out of my jock and go talk to his boss. And I would talk to my boss just to make sure I was clear who was. who was in charge. Not that I cared. He came back a little while later. He's like,

okay, you're in charge, but those are my guys up there. I was like, come on, like, things like that happened early on and we had a battle space owner

come up onto the mountain to check on his guys, you know, because we had some 101st guys working with us. And they were really good soldiers. And, you know, he came up there like for a battlefield

circulation visit, you know, in the middle of this operation, because at that point, we're kind of getting resupplied. And he told his dudes to put on like the old style body armor, like the Vietnam stuff. Yeah, black jackets. I mean, it probably weighs 25 pounds. Yeah. You guys are going to be immobile. And sure enough, the next day, like one of the guys got heat exhaustion and wanted a medevac in the middle of the day. I'm like, hey dude, drink water. We're not, we're not metavocing you in the middle of the day. Like, you've got to figure this out. Like, yeah. I don't know why the fuck, you know, you would even put that body armor on.

But, you know, he subsequently wrote some nasty articles about the C2 and, you know, the way we did Rases and things like that. Like, just stuff. I mean, good, good to look at the lessons learned for sure. But, you know, like, again, this is not a conventional fight. So, yeah. Have a little flexibility. Yeah. And so after this, you're, you finally went to school.

You went to Marine Staff College. Yep, I was pretty smoked because I got to stay for a couple extra months and be the the J3 of the task force after this while all my boys went home. And it was kind of a change of command anyways. It was like, and they didn't have anybody. So I got back and, you know, stayed for the J3. And then by that point, I was like, I did one more pump. And then I was, you know, I think that was eight deployments for me. since 9-11, maybe nine.

And I was like, I was completely smoked. Yeah, I bet. Went to the command of staff college for, what is it, 10 months or nine months. And that was great, great school. It's where I learned that the Marine Corps is single-handedly won every battle that the Americans have ever fought. A Marine invented peanut butter, the cotton gin, and the internal combustion engine. I mean, they take credit for almost everything

that's ever happened in American history. But it was a great school. What is the school and what benefit is it to officers to go to it? Yeah, I went to the intermediate level education, you know, for 0-4s. And it's what I should have done probably before I went to the staff. It's where most, like the Army has CGSC, The Navy has the Naval War College, you know, they have two levels, the 041 and then the 0506 one at every school. The Air Force has Maxwell, Air Force Base, where they send guys.

And so what it is, it's where you kind of combine the art and science of theory and planning and warfare. So you do a lot of historical studies. You have small group like 10 people conference groups. Sorry, Siri just took over. But it's a good reset to think about, you know, what you've been doing and how you can do better. And you can get a master's out of it if you do some extra work and write a thesis. And they were very good about allowing us to pick any topic you wanted. Some guys did, you know, the French and Indian Wars.

I did pro-dev, you know, for the SEAL officer community because I had none up to that point. And I was like, I'm like, it was great, but maybe sprinkling. and a little bit of pro-dev would have been good prior to that. Yeah. So that's the theory. And at the time, this was 06 to 07. You know, we had just, I think in Iraq, we had just kind of done the surge. Marines, you know, it was joint, but a lot of Marines in there, a lot of those guys were,

they were beat down and just, they've been getting crushed and tired. So it's a good break as well. Yeah, for sure. And from there, you served on the staff with the SEAL teams, did some time in Bahrain. and then kind of coming full circle, it sounds like boat team commander. Yeah, I came, my final real deal was Naval Special Warfare Group 4, which is the surface maritime mobility component of naval special warfare, the boat teams. So in charge of all the boat teams, and it was an awesome tour working with SWIX,

Special Warfare Combatant Craft Crewman, and doing really, Taking some of the, like getting them into some of the stuff the SDVs were doing previously with some of the platforms they had was a lot of fun and in a long time overdue. It's really cool. Yeah. And then, you know, you're coming up on retirement. Tell us about that experience and it run up to your retirement and then transitioning out of the military. What was that like for you? Yeah, so I was when I was in command, you know, we often had to do stuff.

speaking engagements and I was in Virginia Beach and I think everybody else was out of town so I got pulled to speak at something for the Honor Foundation, which is a transition institute when they started in San Diego but they were coming to Virginia Beach. I didn't know anything about it. I asked them to come come talk to me, like tell me what the deal was, what I was speaking about. And my role was to talk about the state of affairs of the community, not about anything else. So they gave this good brief. I was like, wow, that sounds too good to be true. And, you know, I was in the middle of command,

but shortly thereafter decided that I was going to transition out after my command tour. And so I decided to go through this Honor Foundation program, which was a four-month program at the time. It's now three months, but it's all about transition, right? How do you, what are the tools you need? And my mindset was I'm going to audit this course and see if it's worth a shit.

because again the brief sounded really too good to be true. And I went through it, you know, just with a mindset of learning because I hadn't thought about me or my family really in 25 years at that point. So it was game-changing, right? It was phenomenal program. And I'm happy to tell you about it, what it's morphed into.

But, you know, did a lot of introspective work on who I was as a human, what was going to make me happy, you know, what my purpose on the planet was when I no longer am a seal and then exposed me to a lot of what's out there where I might fit in, gave me tactical tools. And yeah, so went through it. I figured I wanted to be in the tech startup world. My family wanted to stay in Virginia Beach, which was fine because I had two kids in high school at the time. And that doesn't really align super well because I didn't have the million dollars. idea, but found a really cool tech startup up in Boston making drones and worked for them for

about 18 months. I didn't have to move up there. I just commuted a couple times a month and it was great. Meanwhile, I stayed involved with the Honor Foundation, was on the board of directors and about 18 months after I got out, the founder of the Honor Foundation, who'd been at it for a part of five years decided he was going to move on and uh me i threw my name in the hat to see if i could help out and all the good guys were gone so they they chose me well you've been there for five years and it sounds like the program's going really well so you're doing something right tell us about you know what it has morphed into over the last five years what is it changed into what do you guys do how can people get in touch and get involved yeah so we

We exist really because what DOD offers you in any service, whether it's, you know, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, it's, I don't know, call it a week-long transition assistance program, soldier for life, whatever it is. But they all are equally mediocre and frankly doesn't meet the mark for the men and women in the special ops community. And it's kind of kind of intuitive, but you would think that guys who've gone through selection assessment training once or twice, three-time volunteers would have easy transitions. But what happens sometimes is identity and purpose are so tied into what you do, I am a seal, I am a Green Beret, I am a ranger, that it becomes almost harder to transition effectively out.

That's why we exist. And that's what we get after. So when I came in, we had San Diego, it kind of started with Naval Special Warfare, really in San Diego. Then we grew to Virginia Beach, all covering on Naval Special Warfare. Some of the Marine Raiders from Pendleton were coming down to a San Diego class. And the Marine Raider Foundation asked us to stand up a campus in Camp Lejeune.

So we did that. And that's about when I came on. The Navy SEAL Foundation really was helping us out for the Naval Special Warfare community. And they were awesome. But I really wanted to see what we could do to give it to anybody in the special community who wanted it or needed it. And so you think about the joint force and where the predominance of forces, right? It's Fort Bragg, now Liberty, Fort Campbell, JBLM, Tampa, Egglin, for AFSOC, a couple other places. And so we've grown, we started a virtual

program first for anybody not located where one of our physical campuses are. We grew to Fort Bragg. and then the next year we grew to Eglin in Tampa all in one year. Last year we expanded to JBLM and Campbell, and we have a second virtual program running now, so eight total programs. And it's about a three-month executive education program. We encourage folks to come about a year to 18 months before they get out so that they can do the work themselves, right?

Nobody's going to hand you a job. But if they do it that far out, then they could put the tools into practice and have a great transition as long as they want to work at it. And yeah, so it's really grown. We will never degrade quality just to grow numbers. Like, I don't really care about that. But it's been a fun thing to do and really great to give back to the community and continue to serve them, quite frankly. because, you know, everybody's going to have a transition at some point. Yeah.

And so now we have those served about 700 and one people last year through this full thing. Probably do 800 this year. We do one-day seminars all over the planet. And we realize that spouses play a big role in this too. So we actually started a workshop for spouses to come through as well. And, you know, it's all about communications. and so we do spouses by themselves, then we pair them with the service members

and inclusion together. It's pretty cool to see that. So that's kind of where we're at now. A couple more places to go. Probably, you know, you can figure it out where we need to grow to, names I didn't mention locations, but that's the goal,

be able to serve anybody in the special operations umbrella who wants our services. I just want to add also, you guys have 100% rate. rating on Charity Navigator, which if you look at a lot of the veteran organizations or veteran, you know, charities, they don't. You guys get, you've had like 100% transparency rating for like the last three years. Like if you, if anybody listening to this wants to volunteer or if you have a few extra bucks to throw their way, it's, it's, you guys are like a very legit and very worthy

cause. And yeah, thanks. Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah. We work hard to be transparent on how we're spending the money. And yeah, you can call, ask a question. Check out our website, honor.org, if you want to learn more. But we operate. We kind of like the special operations. Guys like me don't teach everything. We'll go out and find the best person to teach X, Y, or Z.

We pay them, we fly them in. And that's kind of the program costs. We feed the guys and gals on class night so they don't have to get a, you know, a gas station burrito, but it also serves the purpose of breaking bread together. Yeah. And we do this over three months intentionally, you know, we don't cram it into a weekend because, you know, we could probably do it in a week, but you wouldn't retain 95% of it. And you need time to marinate on a lot of the things we throw at people.

So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we do what we say we're going to do. Any of the veterans out there who would like to go through your program, where can they find you? What's the process for them to get the ball rolling on enrollment into your program? Yeah, so right now, like, we don't have the capacity to do everybody. So we're focused on the special ops folks, right?

And if you were an operator in special operations, you can come through at any point. If you're combat support, combat service support, while transitioning under the Socom umbrella, then you can come through. But the website is honor.org. And there's, you can apply right online there. You can hit our info line. Like we do look for great Americans to help us coach, to be mentors, to help with some of the other things, you know,

resume reviews and mock interviews and things like that. So we're always looking for great people who have some experience to help us out. So I think we have some viewer questions for you before we let you go here, Matt. We got one question from J.B., he asks, how often did you interact with Delta's squadron commanders? Was there any notable difference between the thought processes, any notable differences between you and them or same old, same old? Yeah, we interacted all the time. And I would say they are phenomenal leaders. I think they do a great job at selecting,

assessing who they're gonna bring in. Like we talked about earlier, cut from the same cloth. And at the time, I was a squadron commander, I was an 04. I was the last 04 squadron commander. We have since, in our community, bumped them up to 05s like most commanders are.

And so maybe, you know, they were a little more experienced than we were at the time. But by and large, you know, it was pretty great relationship. You got anything? Yeah, we've got one. It's from J.B., thank you very much. Just want to say thank you, Jack and Dave, for all you guys do. I guess this is about us. So pat myself on the back.

Give us just a second here, sir. There's nobody that does what you guys do. I finally got some money to splurge on you guys. Can't wait for Dave with the 5 o'clock shadow. Thank you very much, and we'd appreciate it if you split some of that splurging between us and honor.org. If you got something to splurge, like we'll always happily, gladly. For sure.

Support the veteran community. It was going to say, buy some whiskey. The link is in the description. Yeah, link is in the description. honorod.org is the place for that. So yeah, thanks, J.B. We really appreciate your support. And Matt, thank you for coming on the show on a Tuesday evening and sharing your life and your experience with us as well as, you know, letting people know about the Honor Foundation. Any final thoughts? Anything you want to put out there before we get going tonight?

Yeah, well, thank you. I'm sitting here drinking some on your six bourbon, which is a relatively new one. A couple of my buddies are involved with that. We'll have to look for that. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I love that. The dog tag, that's very cool.

Yeah. Anyways, as I kind of finish off with transition, I once heard a very astute senior officer say, hey, you know, your last act in the military is going to be one of rejection

no matter how you leave, whether you get killed in action, whether you decide to leave, your own terms or whether the military tells you to hang up your cleats it's time to go, whether after a couple years or after 40 years. But it's going to be one of rejection, and it's coming for everybody. So, you know, I just encourage people who are transitioning out to do the hard introspective work, figure out what's up here before you just go chase money or a job, because you want to be happy and you deserve to be happy in the next chapter. So

if it's our program, if there's lots of great ones out there that can help people, you know, do the hard work because this is transitioning out. It's probably going to be your biggest transition in life. You know, besides getting in, this is your next biggest one. And you got to do it well, but you got to put it in the work and you've got to treat it like the combat operation and, you know, plan it and work on it. It's not easy, but it's absolutely doable and there's tons of opportunities out there. So, you know, I hope everybody goes out there and crushes it.

And we will be back on Friday with war journalist Robert Young Pelton. So we'll see all you guys then. Matt, again, thank you. Check out the Honor Foundation. There's a link down in the description for you guys who are listening to this podcast or watching it on YouTube. Yeah, Matt, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Yeah, my pleasure. It was fun. All right. Have a nice night, everyone.