The Team House - From Navy SEAL to Army SMU Operator | Drew Mullins (throwback episode)

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

original airdate 7-22-22Drew served as a Navy SEAL before assessing for an Army Special Mission Unit. He was deployed as a part of the Advanced Force Operations to Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion.TrueWerk ⬇️https://truewerk.com/houseuse code "HOUSE" for 15% off!For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured__________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial 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/RemixSample"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"[00:24] - Host Introduction and Welcome of Guest Drew Mullins[02:47] - Drew Mullins' Early Life, Childhood, and Motivation to Join the Navy[05:03] - The Process of Joining the Navy (at an older age)[09:54] - Assignment to SEAL Team Eight, the Move to Virginia Beach, and Team Culture[14:35] - Discussion on Deployments in the 1990s and Early SEAL Team Kit/Culture[27:32] - Drew's Involvement in Consulting on the Movie Navy SEALs (1990)[31:10] - The Story of the Navy SEALs Film Beach Party with Demi Moore[50:00] - Discussion of the Transition to the JSOC Special Mission Unit (SMU)[01:45:00] - Detailed Discussion of the AFO Mission in Iraq (2003)[02:56:48] - Transition to Discussing Domestic Counterinsurgency (COIN) and the "Information War"[02:58:34] - Thoughts on American Political Polarization and the Need for CivilityBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Special operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 156 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park.

We got deproducing. And we have a special guest tonight, Drew Mullins. And I want to apologize, first off, to Drew, for wasting some of his time. last night and also everyone else who tuned in. We take a lot of pride in doing a consistent, well-produced show every Friday, 8 p.m. We're there. And last night we screwed up. It's not Drew's fault. It was totally us. We moved into a new studio. We have some technical issues to iron out. But I'm really glad that we did. We did a lot of work today. Got a lot of things accomplished. And I'm just glad we're all here. And I'm really glad that Drew is here with us.

Drew is a former Navy SEAL. He went through Buns Class 156, which coincides with this episode. You can see that back there, his helmet back there in his office. And Drew went on to serve in a J-Soc special mission unit. Did some of the AFO mission over in Iraq in 2003 with some other previous guests of the show. So we're really excited to have you here today. Drew, thank you so much for taking some time out of your sense. Saturday. Hey, hey guys. Thanks. Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it. Absolutely, man. And thank you for

joining us even after we consistently blamed you for all of our problems last night. It turned out to be us. I thought it was me. I did. I thought, you know, what a shit show. I was, you know, representing. Like he said, repeatedly, this has never happened before. So I felt good. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah. Sorry, man. No, it has. We've never had to, uh, research. schedule a show like that before, but hey, shit happens. We made Drew jump through. It was so many hoops last night. It was definitely not on Drew's end. So, Drew, to kick off the show, I'm going to ask you, kick to you the same question we ask, really most of our guests is about your origin story. If you can tell us a little bit about

your upbringing, how you grew up, and sort of what that path was that took you towards military service. Okay, so having listened to some of your other guests, I won't go through the whole retirement speech type version of what got me here. But we grew up in California, on the beach in California, and I was born and raised there. My dad was in the Navy in the 60s for about eight years. So I was born on a Navy base, as were three of my other brothers and sister. And I just had kind of a normal childhood, I guess. But then my parents got divorced.

and so there was four of us. And just as, you know, life would have it, we kind of had to just fend for ourselves. But great upbringing, played a lot of sports and worked in the oil fields for a while. And in the mid-80s, I was a young man and kind of drifting. I was playing rugby with, I started playing rugby after college. and had a lot of fun. I met some of the guys on our team just happened to be Vietnam-era seals.

So, and I didn't really know what a frogman was. I mean, back then you didn't know anything about it. UD.T or any of that stuff unless you knew someone. And except for that book, Men with Green Faces or whatever it was. And I was kind of, I had gotten into an early marriage. I had a son kind of out of wedlock. I was feeling pretty much like a deadbeat dad kind of thing. and was trying to figure out how to navigate the waters as a young man.

And one of the games we had, we were down in San Diego and this, my mentor, the guy who saved my life, basically, Eddie Farmer. Shout out to Eddie Farmer. He'd get together when we play the other team and there'd be other guys he knew from Vietnam and they start telling these stories. And I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? you know like crashed heloes with OGA stuff in it that they had to get out and ambushes and all those kind of things and you know they tell these stories I thought wow tell me more about that well it was what it was and I and I thought that's that's pretty cool

and then one day Ed pulled me aside and he kind of had the father talk with me because I didn't really have a strong father figure at the time and I didn't want to repeat some of the same mistakes my that happened to me when my parents broke up so I figured at least if I joined the Navy I could take care of my son you know a a child support and all that kind of stuff so I went to the recruiter and I was a little bit older it was 24 I think and he starts you know going down the list hey so tell me about you know what education you have what you do what kind of jobs you have and he gets to the part where it's just like did you ever do any drugs and I'm like I looked at

I'm like be serious and I and he said yeah I mean you know did you just I had to choose a rate at the time you know it wasn't the pipeline is now so before that I'd asked him well what do the what do the seals need and he said they need cormon really bad and they need radio me right now um so I said oh I'll be a Corman. I get hurt. I can take care of myself. But then when he got to the drug screening parties, he's like, he asked me that question. And I said, and then he said, wait, wait, stop before you answer that. If you've experimented with anything more than five times, you might not be eligible for a program. Ah, okay, thanks. Yeah, I experimented with pot, five times, whatever. And anything else, I'm like, come on, dude, really?

And I said, okay, no. Anyway, I joined. I made it through that. But I was, let me just say that, you know, it was the 80s. And I was kind of sweating the piss test when I went through MEPs. But I made it. And I made a deal with myself, a self, you're not going to do that shit anymore. Yeah. Your career. Yeah. For that kind of stuff. And it wasn't a big deal. It was just. kind of like the usual West Coast stuff. But I went to Buds, or actually I went to Coronet School and then went to Buds. Classed up in winter of 88 with class 153.

That was my Hellweek class. You know, the typical numbers, 160 something, 66, I think guys and I think 40 made it through Hell Week or something like that. And talk more about it. about like, you know, some of the bud stuff. But made it through Hell Week. I got rolled back because I got hurt, but ended up graduating with class 156. And then, you know, start the pipeline, went to airborne school. And I had a funny story is I was the only corpsman to graduate from my class.

And when orders came out, you know, you probably do the same thing in the Army. you feel out of a dream sheet like where do you want to go right and i had this girlfriend at the time i was trying to you know put distance between and uh nice person i just just wanted to be free um so i put down every east coast seal team i could on my dream sheet and of course i didn't get orders to the east coast i got orders to the west coast but um uh the orders were weird because it wasn't like Siltine 3, Siltim 1, Siltim 5. It was like some weird name. And, you know, the instructors are looking at me like, hmm, how'd you get those orders?

I'm like, dude, I don't even know what this is. And so I went and talked to the Faze Master Chief, and he said, hey, that's the cover name for Red Cell. Right. So I don't know if you know what Red Cell is, but that was the second Marsenko. command that he created. And they were basically the real world kind of a red team for security for defenses and things like that for bases. And that kind of went sideways a little bit right after that.

But so they, they sent me down. They said, hey, these are pretty awesome orders. But if you want my advice, I mean, you'll, you'll have a lot of fun. You'll get a lot of really high speed schools. and you'll get a lot of qualls and a bunch of things that you'll really enjoy, but you won't get the opportunity to learn how to be a good frogman. Ah. Okay, good seal.

Because, you know, the pipeline was STT, which is now that SQT. I mean, back then, most of us, as you probably know, would go to our team. We'd be on probation for six months or a year, or a year, sometimes longer depending. And you went through advanced training, seal tactical training. And you're evaluated by your peers, basically. So it was one of those kind of things, which I think is a really good way of doing it. But anyways, they said, yeah, if you do that, you know, you're not going to get the opportunity to really cut your teeth in the traditional way. And back then the teams were kind of geographically specialized.

So I said, okay, sounds like good advice. But then when I talked to the detailer, he's like, yeah, you're going to Steel Team 5. and I'm like, it's like right next door, right? You know, in Coronado. And Seal teammate had just come on board. They had just commissioned it and they needed a cormant. So I swapped with a guy and went out to Seal teammate, drove my Volkswagen bus all the way across the United States with everything I owned, straight to airborne school and subsequently to Virginia Beach.

And did that create the distance with the girlfriend that you needed at the time? Yeah, yeah, I think it did. I don't know how much further I could have went. And to be to be quite honestly, that she was a great person. I just wasn't, you know how women. Sure. You were young. You were a frog man.

Yeah. And hot. Right. Muscular. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. You're like a lot of women deserve all this.

Like I can't be selfish and just. Yeah. deprive them with this little slice of heaven. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There was a lot to conquer still. So, but it was, it was good. Yeah, along the way, I had some pretty cool adventures, just Airbus school was one,

getting from, getting from there to Virginia Beach was another and et cetera. So that's, that's, that's it, nothing real outstanding, I guess. Well, that's, that's okay. I mean, let's, let's hear a little bit more about what it was like at, team eight. I mean, you said you were one of the plank owners of that team since they were just standing it up when you got there. Yeah, and that's something I didn't really realize at the time, because I always thought plank owners were like the people that were on the roster when they actually broke the champagne bottle of ship, right? But technically, if you're one of the first people

to go there within a, I guess it's within a year, first year or whatever, you know, where they're filling out the roster, the billets, your plank owner. So I haven't really perceived. sued that. Like, I'd like to get, you know, some certificate, a piece of wood or something. But, yeah, so I show up at Virginia Beach. And, you know, back then, I don't know if you've ever been to Naval Amphibious Space, Little Creek, but it's changed a lot, of course. But it was just SEAL Team 4, Team 2, and SDB2 were there. Team 8 was brand new. And I remember going through the gate and asking someone, hey, where's Seal Team 8 and got Garvey? said you go down here make a left the end make another right you'll be right there turn the corner

and i see the signs and i see the compound on the left and it's the right it's the teams but on the right is a bunch of like a chain link fence and a bunch of trailers trailer park and that was teammate went in and um checked in and it was it was an interesting time back in 89 90 because a bunch of the guys who were there were had just come back from uh persian gulf so they did the iranajar and and you know those ops that that uh certain guy named malcolm says he did but uh he didn't uh yeah so we had this really kind of a unique mix of folks there some basically it was known as dump eight at the time right so that's where you kind of like cast off all your you know uh free agents that you want to get rid of your problem kids at the same time there was a bunch of guys

who were really solid who volunteered to go because they wanted to be part of creating the new team so we had this really eclectic mix of folks and to give you an example of what I mean by eclectic we're in ranks for quarters one morning exos up there doing giving them the plan of the day and all of a sudden you hear some of these guys like you yelling and all of a sudden, whack, I look down the line. These guys are in a fist fight, right? You know, like at the end of the line. Just beating each other up.

And, you know, it's over a woman, of course. You know, that's how it works. And I'm like, oh, wow, this is awesome. What do I get myself into? But, you know, over time, you know, being in the first platoons, it was fun. You know, it was really cool to learn from some really great talented guys and started deploying. Yeah. What were the deployments like back then? I mean, like some of the, I mean, you're talking about 1990s now, late 80s, early 90s. That's when Charlie Sheen was the seal,

1990s. Some of the guys a little bit before that would say that, you know, back in those days, the seal teams were basically, you know, a mask, a pair of fins, a snorkel, a weight belt, and a K-bar knife, and not a whole lot else. But what was your experience like when you started deploying with SEAL Team 8? Yeah. Actually, my first platoon was uh was a marg so we actually got spun up to go to desert storm desert shield desert storm so that was uh what 90 91 right 90 was desert shield yeah and meanwhile um at the same time was the invasion of panama so some of the other teams were you know something four was was doing that and we had some some guys get killed down there uh my room

mate at the time was a 60 gunner and one of the squads that took Patea Airfield. He took a round. Luckyest guy in the world. I mean, he took around, like, imagine you're running and your legs hot up in the air. And the round went underneath his thigh,

missed his balls by an inch, and came out the other end of his ass. And when he came back, of course, I like telling him a story because I had to, like, changes dressings all the time so i can stick my hand in his ass the whole time um changing it uh but yeah so we were we thought oh god we missed our chance to go to war because that's what the mindset was back then it's like dang are we ever going to go you know that kind of thing like everyone um and we scrambled we deployed to go to turkey and the they started the shock and hall i guess it was

you know the air war part uh-huh and by the time we get to Inserlick, it was over. Right. So it was like we handing out MREs to Kurds and not trying to step on mines and stuff like that. Pretty uneventful. But we had a fun time in the med for the rest of the six months. So you're basically on a morgue. You're with a Mew, marine expeditionary unit. And we got off the ship a lot because we had things, pilots and Jsets and training set up. So we had a lot fun. We trained a lot with other counterparts, the French, Spanish, Turks. We did Bright Star in Egypt.

What a shit show that is, man. On the Sinai. Yeah, yeah, it's funny. We did a jump. You know, one of the things you do is that kind of combined thing where you do parachute jumps, static line jumps in the desert. And this might have been in another platoon, but I remember we were in a C-130 and the Egyptians must have just like said to on their base and hey go get a parachute

you're going to jump with these guys right and so we get up there everybody snaps in because it wasn't freeball it was just a regular static line and you can tell none of them had ever jumped before oh boy and they were literally kicking them out the back of the plane right it was hilarious right and then course we went out too and yeah so we had you know those kind of shenanigans but it was It was good. That's when you, back then you felt like a sailor, which I think is kind of cool. Yeah. It's a lot of start these days.

You know, we didn't have internet. You know, mail call was a big deal. Yeah. Perfume and other things inside packages. And selling Copenhagen for $20 a can to ships before. Stuff like that. Getting a big package of rum cake. You know, it's like doused in rum.

Yeah. Or like my sister would send me Listerine. Yeah. But it had Jim Beam in it. Yeah. So it was Listerbeam, right? You know, that kind of stuff. So, I mean, you know, typical shenanigans, but got it got to experience part of the part of the world.

And maybe a story of two pop into my head from then. But I just felt, you know, it was. Yeah, you're living the life. Yeah, it was my first deployment. So. And then spun right back around. and got ready to do another one. And so the second platoon was a strike platoon.

At the time, it was, which was based on a carrier instead of with the Marines. And so we all got free fall, qualled. I was a bunch of high-speed guys. I mean, it was a stacked platoon of, you know, that already had two, three, four. And we were on the John F. Kennedy deployed on that. And you probably don't remember this, but the Saratoga was the carrier we were leaving. And they were off station off of Insulik, I believe.

No. Yeah, they were off Turkey. And they were doing some kind of exercise. And this is when someone on the Saratoga, like fire control guys shot a missile and hit a Turkish ship. You know, killed some dudes. And so when we get there to do turnover, we hung this big sign off the side of the Kennedy saying, you know, don't shoot us kind of thing, made out of sheets. And just had a blast doing that.

We ended up doing some fun stuff in Africa and just tooling around. But living on a carrier was pretty good life, actually, considered compared to living on a ship that, you know, a bard. Yeah. And finish you. Hey, guys, I want to tell you about the sponsor for tonight's show, which is True Work. They make performance workware that's built like it matters because it does. In the fall, the weather changes real fast.

It can be hot, cold, wet, windy, sometimes all during one shift. So you want performance workwear that will carry you through the entire day, like these pants that I'm wearing here today. True Work was founded by a trade professional who is tired of wet, heavy gear weighing him down. True Work set out. to make workwear that keeps professionals comfortable, capable, and ready for whatever the day throws at them. They're designed with advanced performance fabrics for lasting comfort, all-day mobility, and year-round job site protection. Every piece is tested on job sites with trade professionals,

so in conditions change, you're still ready. This product right now has over 50,000 five-star reviews from professionals in every trade and every climate. So I really enjoy wearing these pants. I think you will too. I hope you'll go check them out. This is the T2 work pant. It's durable, flexible, water resistant. The thing I really like is that they're stretchy. Like, this is something like you could even like actually work out in if you really wanted to, but certainly during the workday when you're bending over and crouching over and picking things up. These are very comfortable. It also has like some like a lining inside so it's comfortable, you know, around your hips and like where your belt would go. They also,

make the M-3 Wobby hoodie, which is wind-resistant, insulated, and very comfortable. And they make the Tower Parker, which is a fully weatherproof and insulated jacket designed for cold, wet job sites. And they also have a line of flannel shirts that I hope you guys will go and take a look at. So upgrade your day with workwear built like it matters. Get 15% off your first order at TrueWork.com with the code house. That's T-R-U-E-W-R-K.com. And the promotion code to get 15% off his house, H-O-U-S-E. Thanks, guys. Drew, kick it back over to you.

Like, somewhere around this time frame, there was, well, we already mentioned Navy SEALs with Charlie Sheen and Michael Bean, but there was another Navy SEAL movie coming out with Demi Moore called G.I. Jane. And you said that you had a G.I. Jane story to lay on us. Oh, you're muted. How about that? There you go. I got you.

Yeah. Getting to use of this board here. Well, first, maybe I should tell you my Navy SEALs story first. Okay. Okay. Go for it. Because that was, you know, let's be chronologically accurate. So I'm a new guy, McCormon.

A lot to learn and paid for it dearly. A lot of the things I did wrong during STT. I don't know if you're allowed to say hazing, but that was, writes a passage maybe, you know. Physical correction. Yes, exactly. So I was cocky

to say the least. I had a Jeep, CJ7, you know, lifted and everything. And I thought, I'd be cool to like get a personalized license. You know, real smart move. It was a E5. And that's E4, I think.

So I got this plate that said, sealed dock right and I go driving and work one day didn't last long I said

guys said I can't me were like hey mums let's have a talk right so about an hour

and a half after being in the dip tank rigors taped up breathing through a snorkel kind of thing got the message I don't know

if you've ever seen that or not but yeah you know you can dip your rig in a dip tank and see if it's, see if it's leaking air. It also works. You can put a guy under there and you just rigor tape a snorkel to his mouth so you can breathe.

Yeah, so I got rid of that. But so it's, this would be in, I'm going back a little bit. This would be 89. This was, I was in this bar watching the World Series as the A's and the Yankees. And I'm sitting at the bar, just paying attention to the game. And I looked down at the end and I'm like, I know that guy from some place, right? And it turns out it was trying to rack my brain

who he was at the time, but it was Michael Bean. I don't know if you know him or not. Yeah, he was. He played a seal in like eight different moves. He was Corporal Hicks and Billy. Yeah, exactly. Come on. The guy's a legend.

Yeah. Yeah. So Michael Bean's down there and we're only like two stools away. And we're talking about the game and whatnot. And he says, hey, so what do you do? And I go, I'm in the Navy. You go, really, what do you do? Yeah, I'm in the teams.

Oh, really? And I said, yeah, what are you doing? I said, I'm a corpsman. And he goes, really? I'm, he introduced himself. And he said, you know, we're talking more. And I just finished like the short course 18 Delta at the time, right? So I knew how to stick things and, you know, the goal, the go lab portion.

Yeah. Because back then we didn't have the pipeline. So it was like. The trauma medicine. Yeah. It was the trauma medicine. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so, you know, you're carrying around this awesome, you know, med bag and just hoping people have car crashes in front of you. Right, right. So you can crank them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Interosseus. Oh, you're getting two interrosis. Do a cut down.

Yeah. Yeah. Two large bor varieties. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he says, you know, after we talk for a while, he says, hey, would you mind like, like, meeting us over at our hotel the coming days? you to look at this script we're doing we're doing a film a movie and it's just they had lost their

director or changed their writers or something like that so it was said sure you know to do local you know real reality kind of check on because uh what's his name Rick Rossovich was played the Corman remember Rick was from Top Gun right yeah yeah and uh he was ice man's yeah he was iceman's yeah yeah so I go there I remember reading the script and I'm like it was just cheesy like This is when the chief gets shot or somebody gets shot and they, you know, they do some bullshit stuff. And then they close his eyes. He's going and all the kind of stuff.

Like, well, that's not exactly how we do it, right? We do this and this and this. And I kind of demonstrated, you know, full sweep and airway and all that kind of stuff. And they made some script changes. And, you know, that kind of comes out later on in the film to a degree. I mean, some of it got cut. But prior to that, back to the bar, incomes Charlie Sheen.

That's right. I forgot this part. Incomes Charlie Sheen with his freaking entourage of people. And they're women and stuff. And I'm like, yeah, hey, what's up? You know, you know, typical. Like, yeah, who are you? I don't care. Right? You know.

And it was, I think, because I didn't like care. I mean, I knew who he was. But, you know, you kind of hit it off. And one thing led to another. Then I went the next couple of days. went over to their thing and rewrote, helping rewrite some of the scenes in the script. And so that's, that's, that's my contribution to Navy SEALs. I didn't, you know, when there's a gun, running gun battle and a couple of guys get killed,

you know, Rick at least tries to do the right thing, right? You use the right verbiage and all that kind of stuff. So, so there's that. And I never told anybody about that because I was already kind of on the, on the fence anyways with. The seal dock vanity. My own, yeah. Yeah, I was getting enough trouble. You know,

right. It's a 60 ammo home on accident. Right. Roommates like, what the fuck is this? Sorry for the language. Yeah, so. It's an adult show, so don't hold back. Okay.

I just got to let my lips. What are you drinking tonight there, Drew? Well, I didn't plan on drinking Sazarek, but. Okay. I was going to do one of those other ones back there. Looks good.

Oh, you have a nice collection back there. That's a tip of the iceberg bro. I mean, this is, this is, this is my wife's office. Okay, I had to like throw shit in props in here, like to, so you wouldn't see all the World Bank development. All the new world order stuff. Yeah. Throw up some pinups.

Right. Actually, to be honest. with you, she's, she's a rock star at the World Bank. And I probably shouldn't say that because now she's, whatever, kill you. But she's an expert in fraud and corruption. Anti-money laundering. Lives an exciting life. I bet. Yeah, so back to,

that actually happened before second deployment, I think. And then coming back from the second deployment, G.I.J. That movie came out. I think it was early 90s. Yeah. And we knew that they were shooting some scenes in Virginia Beach, a couple of them. And so every year the SEAL community, Naval Special Warfare, including SWIC and everybody who supports them, they do a reunion on both coasts, different times.

It's at, and it's like starts on the meeting house on Friday. You know, it's a chiefs club. That's where everybody meets. And, you know, there's a whole lot of good times there drinking. And then Saturday is, you know, various events like there's a demonstration. There's a run. There's a swim. You know, we're kids and everybody can run in that, different classes.

And then categories. Saturday night is a, oh, and we do a KPEX kind of demonstration, you know, where we did a bunch of those. We're fast rope in and snipers come out of the water and, you know, things like that for the families. And then in the evening on Saturday is the, the beach. beach party. So it's at the officer's beach, I think. I don't know if it still is anymore. I think it's a fort story now, so it might be different. But, and we'd heard rumors that that she was going to come. What's her name? Demi. Demi. Demi. Demi Moore. To me. To me. Oh, to me. It's like Kamala. I can't say it right. Right. I can't. Whatever. Demi Moore was coming. And so, sure enough,

you know, at midnight or 1130 or whatever, and we're all kind of like hammered anyways. She ends up showing up and she's got like four older frogmen, retired dudes who were escorting her around, kind of their bodyguard escort kind of thing. So she can navigate the, you know, the environment. And let's just say it wasn't real popular, right? I mean, people weren't real excited to see her.

And, you know, so. I remember looking at her I was with some guys and I said, I'm going to go get her a beer. So I went over and got a beer, red solo cup, brought it over to her. I said, hey, to me. And I was smoking cigars. If you're going to be a, if you're going to be a seal here, have a beer, you know, drink a beer with me. And she's like, oh, I don't, I don't drink. and oh really so i just had it and i wanted it at her and i just turned it upside down and dumped it

on her feet and just dropped the solar cup and walked away right now i mean i don't think i meant to drop it off here i meant to just pour it out there but i was kind of wobbly um and uh walked back to my guys and uh you know that was it um and then later on you know i kind of came back years like later a couple years ago where other guys were talking about that and he said, you know, yeah, I heard about that. I didn't know if it was true. Yeah, it was true. But, you know, nothing happening.

I didn't get in trouble or anything. But I just feel like that's, you know, you're going to be, you want to be a team guy or team gal or what it is. You got to, you got to play the part, man. Right. Yeah. So. So, you know, that like her not drinking was, was more, was more unbelievable. It was more unbelievable than her being.

woman frogman. Herbing a not drinking frogman. I wish I could remember more. There was more to it, but I think I might have even been, I'm probably being kinder now in retelling the story. Kind of, yeah. Kind of yourself, you mean? To her.

Oh, to her. Yeah, yeah. Because there was more dialogue, but, you know. Some sort of language going back and forth. Well, I mean, it was respectful, but, you know, still. you know, what it was. What did you think of the feature film, Drew? You know, I don't remember if I watched the whole thing or not.

Because it was so, I mean, at least Sheen and Beans, Navy Seal, there was things that were accurate. Right, right, right. The thing about that movie that's generally accurate is we pride ourselves on the East Coast. Let's just put it this one. The West Coast Seals, right? and there's a lot of they're all great everybody's the same but they like to surf you talk about hair gel you know that's them crokeys yeah yeah yeah they're you know they're they like to do all

that kind of stuff and they even put out a calendar this was hilarious back in the like early 90s this calendar and it had all these beefcake shots of these guys right and we just never let them live live it down right because it was like a fundraiser a deal and a bunch of guys I went through Buds with, and, and of course, we made fun like, hey, if you're on the East Coast, our calendar would be a picture of a guy jumping out of a second-story bedroom window

because the, you know, the boyfriend came home or, you know, up against the wall, getting arrested by the cops or pulled over for DUI or something like that. That would be like more of the East Coast stuff. And, yeah, so that, I forgot what I was going to say about that. You know, you're your question.

That the Navy Seals film. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, Seal team are the Navy SEAL movie. So, you know, they do a fairly, because that was written by Chuck Farrar, I think. You know, so who used to be in the teens. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.

Because he also did, he also did Dark Manor. No. He wrote a bunch of books. Yeah. He did. Yeah. And it's not his fault that the movie turned the way it did because you know it's always budget it's always director it's always you know a bunch

of other people can can influence things but there was some things that were you know i don't think and a little little you know clip clavin worthless bit of information um the scene where charlie jumps out of the back of the cj 7 going across the bridge to porzmouth into the water if you if you watch that again you can see it the stunt man kind of didn't enter the water the right way and ended up getting hurt pretty good. Oh, really? Yeah, or his back or something like that. But, you know, it's just kind of like,

and then the golf course stuff is classic and all that. But G.I. Jane just seemed to be just way too contrived. I mean, they couldn't even simulate Buds, right? Yeah. You know, absolutely. It was terrible. Crazy Vigo Mordinson in that movie. Yeah.

Confronting Dummy in the showers. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, yeah. So you've seen the movie, Jack? I have seen the feature film, yes. There's a whole your school scene in there. But I digress. I digress.

Let's get back to... No one wants to hear this stuff. Let's get back to Drew. Drew, what was deployment number three like? Are we getting towards a point where the Balkans are starting to come up on your radar? Yeah, so let's see. Second platoon, the Balkans. Yeah, so it was early 90s.

So that was a full-scale war going on. We actually did the G&C, the carrier, did sorties into the wars on at the time, right, into the Balkans while they were still fighting. And we did, you know, a couple of little vanilla kind of recon things, but they were just, they were nothing to speak of thinking. But mostly we were there for trap, you know, like if a plane. went down. We were supposedly going to be the crew to go help get the pilot. And there was a pilot shot down, but the Marines did that mission from us. Oh, what's it called there? Right? The Air Force Base. Was that, was that, was that, was that when Scott O'Grady got shot down? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so we didn't get to do that. But that was like, as your partner can attest to you, that was a,

suitcase full of cash kind of exchange it you know it the movies say you know do have one version but the oh really yeah i mean i did know that yeah there's more of a more of a greed kind of thing but um prior to that actually taking place there was some you know real world stuff going on people looking for them and everything so that second deployment on the carrier we didn't uh We did a lot of that. But so Balkans was on my radar. Uh, Yugoslavia came back.

Then that was still teammate. Um, I screened for Damneck at the time. And, uh, got selected, but I was also, let's see how last. Make sure we get this right. Um, yeah. So I didn't know what I was going to get. And the orders came out to go to gray green, which would have been, uh, the boats, but I was on deployment. So it was on the carrier and they have a policy at the command

not to take guys off mid-deployment to come. You know, so that, you know, just luck of the draw at that point. So I got back, re-screened, and got a positive screening, but at the time I was at E6, Corman, they had just kind of retooled the whole pipeline for becoming a chief. You know, I'd have 18 Delta qualification or Navy IDC school, independent duty of Corman school. So I went out to, actually I went out to DLI first. That's right. And I came back and screened.

But I went out to DLI. I learned French-ish. How amazing is DLI when you're an enlisted Speck-Ops guy? Dude. I tried every way to extend out there I could, right? You know, I was like, can I take intermediate French or no, can I take advanced or whatever? Can I break my foot or whatever? But I learned a golf out there and it's just, it's so beautiful.

Yeah. You know, it's Monterey and Carmel are just Pacific Grover, just awesome. Yeah. That came back and that's when I guess that's when Haiti happened. 94. Yeah, 94. Went to Seal Team 5. I'm sorry, Siltim 2.

So I went from teammate. In the process, in the meantime, teammate had, they had a proper compound built. You know, we, we were normal by then, you know, by the end of our deployments. My deployments there had proper compound, established in a reputation. It was all good.

checked into team two and that was like I'm really in the teams now you know it was awesome um the uh just Rudy Bosch was the command master chief you know and it was like you know you'd walk around and be like uh check the watch bill

you know because if your hair wasn't cut right you're you're on weekend duty and stuff like that I mean it didn't matter where you came from even a regular team guy. I mean, they were gentler in welcoming you than a brand new guy, you know, with that was always fun at quarters to see a new guy check in and trust blues. And it's like the command master chief and the XO would be like say, hey, so-and-so walk up here and introduce yourself. And they'd say, I'm seeing him in there, shut up, you know, that kind of thing.

And then they'd walk away. And it was a scheme welcoming them to the command. But, yeah, Team 2 was, to this day, it was the lore and, you know, one of the original two teams. They have a great Vietnam history. And I was just, just stellar performers. It was like the AAA club for Damneck, basically, you know, so they recruited out of there heavily. And they had like a pipeline going. So guys would rotate from Damneck.

You know, to training and platoons and then pass the knowledge on. But my first platoon there, let's see. In between that platoon and after DLI, I did a JCO mission in the Balkans. I don't know if you know what that is, Jack. Way it on us. Joint Commission Observer. So they had just declared the ceasefire. okay in Yugoslavia Serbska and all that so NATO or S-4 was going into you know carve it up and they had

that British sector Italian sector. Oh yeah. I think Giaconia did one of these. Yeah. So it was true. It was really an SF 18 mission, right? But they didn't have enough guys. So they, they would, you know, let us play.

So one or two of us per house would pair up and go living up in a house in a house in the different sectors, Boniluca, everywhere, Tuzla, you know, all the different places. And the SF guys did their SF, you know, IW stuff. And what was cool about it, while everybody else in the whole AO was

in full battle rattle and Kevlar and helmets and body armor and all that. We were driving around, thin skin vehicles with terps, just wearing camis with no idea on them. and maybe a pistol thing. And we go anywhere we want.

We blew past every checkpoint in, in that country, just did whatever we wanted to do. And they did their collection and stuff. And it was basically the mission was, you know, collect information that might be intel and establish relationships, you know, kind of figure out stuff. And then, you know, a precursor to some stuff that our cousins were already doing. And we kind of in the open helped them out with that. But it was a great time. 10th group, again, that was my first exposure to those guys. I wish I could remember their names.

But we were in the Sarajevo house, which was actually on the Serbska side. So I don't know how familiar you are with that conflict or not, but what was telling what was really amazing about Sarajevo, when I went there is they still had snipers and they still had the occasional stuff. going on. But you could really tell who had the most arms by the condition of what side of town you were in because it was just destroyed. And being on the Serbian side, you know, they did what the, what the Serbs did is they displaced a lot of people. They just basically came and said, hey, we're taking your house. You can go live in Croatia. Beat it. You know, that kind of thing.

And some family would take it over. But it was, it was, uh, a really interesting time, you know, just driving around with those guys and working with them. And at the same time, we, you know, got to move around doing other things. So that was a fun time, the JCO mission. Sometimes I forget about that. But that really kind of opened me, open my eyes to kind of what was really going on. The ethnic cleansing and, you know, the post-Tito world and, you know, the, you know, the influence this, you know, the Soviet Union, the ones the Soviet Union had fallen,

just how all that affected different parts of the world. So, let's see. So back to Team 2, did a deployment there. We actually left early for that. This is when Moboto Sesei Seiko, okay, he was the leader of what used to be called Zaire. There was a civil war going on. and the embassy in Sierra Leone no in capital of Zaire here oh gosh yeah why can I think of that I think of a Sazerac moment right now anyway we had to go early because there was that going on

it was unstable they were thinking about doing the Neo and then also Sierra Leone was a shit show too So, I mean, that's just like everybody who's been an SF guy or team guy in the 90s has been to either Sierra Leone or Liberia, right? You know, because they kept collapsing. So we went early. We got on the USS Kyrsarge, my squad with six, eight other, seven other guys and the LT. So the way they broke up, a seal platoon is 16 guys. You have an AOI, OIC, who was usually a tenant. 03 and then an AOIC is going to be an O2 or you know usually or a hard charge in O1 and then you have a chief

and leading petty officer so I was leading petty officer which is E6 LPO so I pair up with the lieutenant my squad alpha squad and then Bravo squad it was you know they paired up with the chief the chief and the AOCC So my squad leaves two weeks early. We get on the Kyrsarge and steam full speed over to West Africa to Zaire. And we wait for, you know, what we're going to do. We did an intel mission, which is kind of training. But no one knew where the guy was, right?

He had left the country because he was wanted by the Hague and everybody else. but the things were going south. The Marines were planning a non-combatant evacuation operation across the river in Brazzaville in Cote d'Avore. And we were wondering what we were going to do. So remember Divitz for Divets, the satcom thing where you could go take photos and then blast them back over. It was like a very early form of. Yeah. Yeah.

So we just had to get off the ship. So we just convinced, we convinced the ops officer, hey, look, you know, let's go do this thing in, in Point Noir. It's just like this little town right on the Atlantic to this airfield. And we go there and land, you know, we get some, some Marine heloes bring us to this place and drop us off. We're taking pictures, all these old migs, like Meg 15s, Meg 17s or, you know, just rotting away on this airfield. Um, they're bored. Bored frogman's a dangerous thing. Um, so we,

my leatherman, I broke into one of those cockpits and took a bunch of gyroscopes and instruments out of there, um, souvenirs. But while we're sitting there, you know, okay, we're going to do our training. We take some pictures or Intel specialists.

Guy on the team has got his big camera out and this 707, I think, or 760s. I don't know what it was. Some big plane lands on the other side of the airfield. And he's looking through his camera and he sees they open the door and it's like all this gold stuff's inside there. Like gold handles and, you know, really ornate. Well, it just turns out that that was the president of the country, the dictator of Boatio's his case was plane. And we accidentally found where he was because he, you know, he's leaving the country and they were getting fuel.

or whatever. We sent it back and so it's happenstance. But that was the extent of what we did there. Marines actually did more. But in the meantime, stuff started going sideways and I was going mixed up. I apologize. Liberia or Sierra Leone. So we had to zoom up there and evacuate the embassy and brought a bunch of people off to the Neo there. But the fun part, the interesting part of this whole thing is, right? So the Magtaf, the Mew commander is a Marine, he's 06. And the Navy guy who's running the ship is, you know, obviously in 06 too, as well. So in the Navy, if you're at sea for more than 30 days, you get a beer ration, right? And we were at sea for 65 days.

Only people to get off the ship by the time we did get off were before that was our squad and the Marines that actually went to the embassy. And we cross the, if you cross the equator in the Navy, you're what's known as a shellback. Have you heard of that ceremony? Yeah. Okay. Well, we cross the equator at the prime meridian.

So we crossed at zero zero zero, zero, which makes you the most unique shellback in the world, right? So you have a special Neptune. You have a special ceremony. And that's another fun time. But for whatever reason, they didn't want to give us a beer ration. So now we're like, hey, we're going to two and a half. What the F?

You know, we do all our work. Ship cruises north. The first place we're going to pull into port is the Canary Islands. So it's like the way they do it in the Navy, right? They set, I don't know if you guys ever been on a ship, but they set what's called C& Anchor detail. So that's, you know, you have the crews divided it up into two or three ships. And C&An anchor, those are the guys who man the ship and take care of when it comes

to port, getting it all tied up. And then they do, you know, they have to have certain manning on the ship. And then embarked company, they get Liberty College. And I thought, ah, you know, my squad was like, yeah, we're going to go out. I'm like, I'm going to stick around me and a couple of guys are just going to stick around. We'll go, we're going to next liberty. So the canaries are just like sick. You know, that's where everybody goes.

You know, that's where all the reality kind of shows are filmed from England, you know, all that stuff. Real destination place. And so I thought, I'm going to go down to the sick bay. work with the junior corpsman down there because i'd already finished independent duty corpsman school which is a year long basically your pa so speak um yeah it's a course that people don't know about that much but it's they don't like it's it's um it's like the 18 delta course only it's geared more for like civilized medicine and not so much like what you might encounter in a village but it's

very comprehensive yeah to that point it's um so it had i done the at the at the time we didn't know in the teams we didn't know you know it's all it's all fixed now you go to jfk you know you go to the schoolhouse you know get the same training but we went they sent us to 91 bravo right early because they didn't know it and it was like basically going to kormone's school all over right so i'm in san antonio for that as a young guy with three other two other frogmen junior guys in fact i don't even know if i had my trident at that time or not yet um maybe i did anyway, San Antonio is the wrong place to send you young seals who, you know, who already know this stuff. Right.

It's a medical campus. Right. Oh, my gosh. Right. But it's also just the most target rich environment in the world because it's like. That's what I meant. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like everything from med school to every MOS that teaches any kind of medicine in the Air Force and the Army is there. Right. And while we're there, it's, I remember, you know, first couple formations, you know, how they have that, you know how they have that formation for a formation in the morning. It's like you, like you wake up and you're there and they're like, what's what's going on? They're like, they're just going to tell us when the next formation is and we'll go to child. What the fuck do we get up for? You know, just tell us the time to be ready to go, that kind of thing. And then one day, it's like, we look outside and it's rain.

And so we put on our Gortex jackets, go outside and it's raining. And everybody else is like, doesn't have anything on. Why don't you have rain gear on there? Like, because no one told us to put our ponchos on. And I'm like, what do you mean? No one told you to put your poncho on? It's raining. You know, it's like, did people have to tell you that?

You know, it's a lot of junior guys. So it was just kind of like our introduction to it. So essentially it was like at that point, we figured out, okay, this is how we get around this. We went to the first sergeant of our company, I guess it is. Dave. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, probably. Trading company. Yeah. Because it was basically, you were going, you were already a corpsman. Yeah. So you were going to basically the AIT or a school of the army for their medics. And you're like, what, what is going on here? Like you're not teaching me anything. Right. Right. Right. So they had this pool. It's outdoor pool there.

And it was at the wintertime, so it wasn't open. So we convinced that for Sergeant, hey, we have to maintain our swim calls. And he's like, well, okay. So, well, we're just, what we're going to do is, you know, every morning or we're going to go swim in the pool. And then we'll just meet the company at the Chowall. right which meant we would just

could stay out later and then just you know take a shower and go to chow hall like that you know normal

civilized hour we actually tried we actually tried to do it actually for real but it was so damn cold like he had to water

went we were like yeah now we're just going to just milk this thing and yeah

um the other thing I remember that that I can speak about openly um is the one thing about the army back then

is there's a lot of smokers, right? And so whenever we take a break, you know, all these guys would rush outside and start smoking. And we're like, bored. You know, what are we going to do? Push-ups, you know, whatever. So one weekend, we're like,

let's go build some pull-up bars outside the place, right? So we went to Home Depot and bought four-by-fours and some cement and some, or some pipe dug holes and put two different height bullet ball bars right outside

and it was like remember that scene in Planet of the Apes when when the monkeys see the the apes see the monolith oh that's 2001 2001 2001 yeah yeah sorry 2001 where they're like

looking at like what the you know they touch it and it was like Monday and people were like looking at these pull-up bars like they weren't those come. And so we, you know, on breaks, we'd go out and do pull-ups. You know, young, young guys.

Still, like, in the best shape of our lives, just out of buds and everything. But, yeah, that was, that was a fun time. Ended up getting out of there. And then, anyway, getting back to, back to the story. I'm in the Canaries. And I'm an IDC and I'm in these quad zeros. You know, that's just a corpsman in the Navy who doesn't have

any particular specialty. like radiology tech or respiratory therapists or whatever and i swear to god we set seeing anchor we were at uh the the brow the gangway went down at like two o'clock between two and three by six o'clock short patrol was bringing drunk marines and sailors back okay because we've been at sea for 65 days right and people just were like i'm getting hammered right so people were coming back and they were passing out. So we just were like, yeah, bring him in a sick bag. And I was teaching, teaching these young guys, okay, what's the unconscious protocol?

I don't know what that is, right? Because you don't know what's wrong with this guy. Right. He could be a diabetic. You could, you know, he could be on drugs, whatever. So I'm going to teach you the unconscious protocol, which basically was, I'm going to teach a patient not to do that again. Right.

Right. So two large borer IVs, nasal, barangiol, ureth, catheter, you know, ureth catheter. Well, it starts with that sternal rub, right? Oh, yeah, snow rub. Yeah. Right, right. You do that, you know, assess, whatnot.

And, you know, of course, they're going to throw up or whatever. Right. So the captain, the surgeon comes in, this 06 naval medical, or Navy officer, his doctor comes in. He's like, hey, what are you doing? I go, hey, we're just doing some training, sir. What do you mean training? Yeah, well, you know, these guys are coming back in their unconscious and, you know, they're drunk and whatever.

I'm teaching the young guys how to do IVs and, you know, how to do catheters and nasal firing airways and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And he goes, you can't do that. You can't, you can't do invasive. You know, this is what you do in the teams, right? You do it to each other, right? Right. All the time. But, I mean, I didn't get in trouble or anything, but he was like, yeah, good, good initiative, bad.

Maybe not quite the best. Yeah. So, anyway, that story goes to where, like, okay, it's saying you had to be back, depending on your rank at a certain time on the ship. You know, if you're a chief, the chiefs went out, those E-7s, they went out and rented hotel room. So, you know, they had a base of operation out there. They did it right.

Chiefs' mess always did it right. Everybody else had to be, like, if you were E6, you had to be back by two or something like. And the next day, of course, you have to. submit a muster, muster report for your guys. So, you know, I wake up and like four of the racks, four or five of the racks were empty. Like my guys didn't come back. And I'm like, fuck. You know, but I ran into some chiefs and at breakfast and they're like, hey, man, we ran into your guys. You know, they're awesome. We party with them all night. You know, they're blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, okay, you know, so I knew they were alive, but I had this dilemma, right?

Do I fill out the, the muster report? Right. That, you know, the guys are here present or not, right? Right. Yeah, all present and accounted for, handed it in, you know, because they, you know, otherwise, balloons start going up and everything. And this guy, this is a friend of mine, Paul, who ended up going to the command, doing like 15 years there.

Paul, let's go, dude, we're gonna find those guys. And, uh, went out in town and, um, found them. You know, they were still drinking and everything. And they could see me coming from, from a way down the street. And they're like,

oh, and he's pissed. Um, and, I'm like, motherfuckers, man, I had to falsify muscle report. And you, you're, you're lucky you're alive.

Right. be if I you know and I said here's the deal you're my bitches for the rest of the deployment right that's how it's going to work and uh you know it was all good um after that and they were I mean these guys you know they paid the man I mean to to get some context it puts you in a predicament because you know you don't you don't want to rat your dudes out for just being out drinking all night but if one if one of got seriously hurt or had gone missing And you say, yeah, he's present and accounted for. And then all of a sudden he ends up, like, dead in some alley.

You know, then it comes back on you. So let's, Drew, I want to ask you, you're making a way through the SEAL teams here. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm rambling. You kind of, I don't want to say it got screwed over. But, I mean, as far as like where you were at in your career, it was very difficult for you to make that transition over to dance. damn neck without really getting kind of screwed over. So you kind of missed that opportunity. When did this thought come into your mind or this realization that like, hey, there's this

entire other endeavor out there in special operations that I could potentially go and assess for. Yeah, I'm glad you reeled me in. Jack, that's a good point. Because I don't want to sound like how some of the guy is making people jump off your channel right now. But when that happened, I had some good, good senior guys at the command, at the team who had been over to, to, uh, or to Damnik. And they said, hey, you know, there's other places you can go. So just to give context and then I'll move, I'll jump into that. Sure. My second time after this deployment I'm talking about right now, this is my, uh, fourth deployment. Uh, fifth, actually, um, when I got back, it was like, hey, I went back to the command and they're like,

Yeah, you're an E6, you're a corpsman. But here's the thing. If you go through Green Team, we're not going to cut you loose to go to 18 Delta. Because even though I was an IDC to get advanced, you know, you had to check other blocks because you're competing against every other corpsman in this in this shield team. They said, we're going to need our two years of use before we can, you know, and they might put you off cycle for chief.

Right. And that's kind of like when I'm like, ah, you know, and they were, you know, they were like, you know, it's one thing to, and, and you know how it is. They, they like to grow their own, uh, enlisted dudes before they become chief, because then you're a boat crew leader, you know, and if you've not cut your teeth on, you know, a bunch of deployments as, as a, a team, guy, a team member, you know, a unit or squadron member, or troop, troop member, then, you know, you're kind of like not, you don't have the, corporate knowledge to be troop chief.

So just out of curiosity, I don't mean to derail you, but I'm curious. How did Damnet deal with Corman then at that time? Because it's really hard to grow your own corpsman, especially since you can't really, it's tough to make E7 as a Corman without IDC or whatever. Like, so how did they do that? How did they manage that? That's a good question. You know, and a lot of guys didn't care.

You know, some guys are like, hey, I want to be a sultan, you know, so it didn't, it didn't matter. So they wouldn't compete for promotion in order to go Damnack, basically? Well, I think, I think you definitely got looked at differently by the, because Navy-wide back then, it was, it was the Navy chiefs, senior master chiefs, whatnot, who picked people and for advancement to chief. it still is but but now we have our own special operations special operator MOS so but so those guys some of them would be like yeah I'm just going to be a salter I don't care and then at some point

someone would say hey you're you know you've been in E6 too long you need to go to punch this ticket and get it and you can you know because we want you to be a chief we want you to be a leader but back then it was just kind of it was in between the scene kind of seems of advancement so So it was, you know, you had to kind of make your own decision on that. And yeah, I talked to some guys who told me about this unit back that time. It was called Torn Victor. That was its digraph name or whatever you call it. And, you know, they go back.

The unit goes back to the, you call it. Not 1980 Operation Eagle Claw. Eagle Claw. Exactly. Right. And even, you know, some make the case back to the OSS. So they told me about that. And up into that point, they said, yeah, if you go, because these were guys who were at Damnick and they knew about it because they worked with them.

They said, you'd be a good fit up there, blah, blah, blah. So I've made chief that year, 98, went to Socon or to Sokier as a J33, chief, the C liaison up there. And then found out. And then I applied, I applied before, filled out a package for that. for that smoo and thought I was going to come back to the team and be a platoon chief, whatever, and they selected me to go to assessment selection. So I went in 99, early 99, so March went out to went out to Nevada and did the long walk and stuff. had a real good assessment selection got picked up. At that time, there'd only been one other seal who was there before me.

There'd been a couple other guys, but they were like liaison guys or, you know, whatnot. So, yeah, so 99 went to the unit and did a year worth of what we call CQ2, CQT, you know. It's been called a bunch of different acronyms, but it's basically the, you know, a year-long trade craft slash stuff. So you, it was a really, I must say to this day, I love buds.

I loved everything about it. It was the hardest thing ever did at the time. But the assessment selection aspect of screening for the unit was the most, rewarding thing I've ever done. Because you don't get any feedback on any decision you make. You know, and a lot of people try to G2 it, and you can tell the G2. Because years later, I ended up being cadre. Right.

So you're that wizard debaS guy behind the screen, right? You know how it all works, right? And then you're able to see, you know, how people try to game it. You know when they're when they are or not. But yeah, it was awesome. Now, did you say that you were the first or the second seal? Because I also know around that time that they started taking like Rangers and they hadn't in the past.

It was at the time had been sort of kind of an SF pipe. or whatever pipeline. Do you know, did you ever get any insight into why this particular SMU decided to like broaden the, the recruiting pool? That's a good question. As to why they did, I think they realized that,

you know, the 10th group mafia was strong in, in that unit for good reason. But they also realized that they were having a hard time finding the right. candidates just in the army. So they opened it up to the sister services. And, and, you know, of course, it leaps and bounds after Desert Storm took off.

I mean, after 9-11, just a lot of Marines and, but Rangers, yeah. And some of the best guys I worked with were former Rangers or Rangers still, you know, at the unit, but not. you can see the pedigree in the senior NCO guys were rangers. So yeah, I'm going to speculate on that. But I believe it was just kind of like a manning issue. They wanted to grow more troops in the squadron. They have, you know, they have various levels of capability, you know. You know, and it's interesting because we've also heard of another Army SMU that, you know,

used to recruit, or like RRD, for instance, or RRC that used to only recruit Rangers and then started, then made it like Armywide in the sense of, you know, sometimes the best people can come from places that we don't necessarily expect them to come from. Yeah, I think so. Especially when you, you know, you're dealing with Frogman. because we're pretty nonplussed about a lot of things sometimes. You know what I mean? Like, eh, whatever, you know, that kind of attitude.

And that could be misread. You know, like, you don't care. And, uh, right. I wanted, I wanted to ask you about that, Drew, like, what was it like for you coming from being a frog man to suddenly learn all this different types of tradecraft? I mean, it sounds like you had a little bit of exposure to clandestine operations. But moving into that and also. moving from seal culture to J-SOT culture,

was that sort of difficult or interesting to try to navigate that? Yeah, so that's a great question. I felt like, you know, I was always, this is the story of my life. I'm always the older guy, the guy who comes in late, the guy who learns things differently, but I've also have a different level of life experience. So, you know, that is a plus than a minus a lot of times from a perception point of view,

it can be negative because people think you'd just come across and know it all. But I was also a criminal at heart, right? I mean, a lot of the things I did before I joined the Navy were survival mode stuff, right? You know, just getting by. So when I got to the unit, it was still, it wasn't a J-Soc. unit or J-Soc smooth then it became one shortly thereafter for a number of reasons but definitely had to adapt to a strong army culture but this is a very unique army culture right at a long history of things that the country doesn't even know about that they did and they you know great men and

women I mean I'm not talking about just men there's some awesome stellar operator women who've gone through that whole pipeline who've done amazing things. But to your question, I guess I did have to adapt to that. And then when you realize that suddenly you were an asset and everybody wanted your opinion, except for the fact it was an army manned unit. Right. When it came to advancement, like I many times was the de facto troop chief or troop, Sergeant Major

for whatever reason. But I'm never going to get selected to be the troop sergeant major because it's an 18 series billet. It's an 18 x-ray billet. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Yeah.

Now that might have changed over the years. And I imagine it has. But, you know, that's kind of one of the things you have to wrestle with. But the good side of the, the upside of it was to go there, you go to, you're actually covered under a different place in the Navy.

So when it came to advancement, I was one of one all the time. And all my OERs or fit reps were signed by CNO. I mean, I almost busted them out because it's hilarious to read them, you know, Admiral Mullen, Admiral this, Admiral that, you know, promote this guy, you know, blah, blah, blah, make him an officer, all this kind of stuff.

So, you know, as a time, I was a chief, then I made senior chief there, E8. So on the inside baseball part, I didn't have any problem for advancement. It's just, you know, you kind of discount that because it doesn't really matter. When you're, when you're at a tier one element, a tier one organization, it's about performing. Right. You know, it's not like I need to bank rank, too, so I can, you know, teach people how to blouse their freaking pants or something like. that. It's you just want to operate. Right. Okay. And the thing is, is it honestly, like getting getting promoted is almost like a detriment to that because it has the possibility

taking you out of that operational status. Absolutely. And the, the Army guys in particular had to deal with that. Right. Because of the upper out type of stuff and everything else. Yeah. Now, what, you know, they fixed that for those guys because they would rotate out on their ticket as a fifth group, you know, Sergeant Major, come back, you know, be the S3 or, I mean, the whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So, you're, you know, you're cycling that.

You're taking care of troops. Well, yeah, so the Army guys, you know, they had to deal with that. But once you're in, you're in, you know, you just come back. And interestingly, if I were to name names in the Army right now. All the key leader GOs are a big handful of them are guys that I worked with, right? I went through CTQC with or deployed with, you know, and there's a reason why those guys are leading, you know, they're two stars and three stars. So you assessed in 99. I go through your training pipeline for a year plus.

and I would like to ask you the question that, I mean, I think so many people went through, I assume you were probably focused on the Balkans again, even though you were in J-Soc. You'd correct me if I'm wrong. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and then how things changed when 9-11 happened. How that changed the, as far as what you can say about operations and also the culture, the orientation of the unit and how that changed after. September 11th. You know, first of all, I want to say, Jack, you're awesome. You recognize I've got ADD and OCD at the same time. So I appreciate you. But doing this for a while. It's okay. On track here. But yeah, okay, great question. And so again, to be fair, to be accurate,

prior to 9-11 we were we were still an army smoo okay um sap i mean i it's i'm not going to say any more than that sure um but the writing was on the wall okay um and i'm trying to remember the the the order whether the other commands created their own counterpart to what we were doing you know I'm talking to the other squadrons. Yeah, yeah. Each particular tier one unit created their own. Everybody said that they could do that. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's the thing. Everybody said they could do it. And I remember going down to Damnack, me and the other guy who's, you know, senior to me, there's a seal. And we're like, hey, and Mike, you know, the master chief for that squadron, you know, he was my honor man in my Bud's class. and we said look dude we can tell you how to do this so you don't make the same mistakes

you know when it comes to all these other things you got to do approvals do docs covers all that kind of stuff you know in typical fashion like yeah we got it we don't need your help yeah even though they were receptive it was what it was but um so it was an army unit manned by jointly manned and as far as the Balkans go so I get out of our advanced our pipeline training and this is this is an interesting little side note so we started out with 22 dudes 202 people because they weren't all dudes and at the end there's 10 we go to the board I'd had a really good final exercise I thought and you probably know what I'm talking about we do real world stuff. I mean, just the best training in the world, the best exercises, the most

realistic stuff. And I went to the board and they caught, they murdered five people right there at the board. Yikes. And I would have been number six because I go into the room and they're all like, yeah, they run down the list of stuff. And we just don't think, and you did this and that good and blah, blah, blah. And see, right before that, my fact was telling me like, too, hey, just keep doing what you're doing. You're great. fine, everything's gonna be fine. So I'm like, okay, I got one little exercise left. You know, chill.

Go to the board and you're like, yeah, but we're just not sure that you're suitable for the. I'm like, okay. Got it and walked out. And so I would have been number six. But then the command sergeant major comes out and he goes, after a bit and he said, they just don't, they think you, you know, they don't understand your mental you know, you're affect. They think you're like...

Like you don't give a fuck. Like, I don't give a fuck. Exactly. In fact, at one point, they said, at some point, during the actual course, it's like, hey, man,

if you don't like it here, we can just send you back to the seal teams. I'm like, dude, send me the fuck back to the seal teams. I did that for 14 years. I loved every fucking day I went to work. It didn't matter how hungover I was.

I love my job. Okay. Go right ahead. You feel, joggy jump, send me back. I don't care. But, you know, you know, it was a little more frank than that. But, yeah, so it was like, oh, threatened me with sending me back to something I like to do, right? Right. Right. But, you know, he said, hey, you know, I'm going to, you know, anyway, long story short, you know, he basically had the overriding the vote. And I'm glad he did. You know, if I said his name, you probably know who it was. I just don't want to do it.

Sure. He ended up being Jason. I'm sorry, major. But that's interesting that he kind of saw through that. Like this is just a super laid back guy, but he has his shit under control. Yeah, there's this one exercise they do all the time when you're out, out west. And you're, you know, they bring you into this room. You sit in a chair. And then, you know, they got a, you shoe, what do you call it, horseshoe shaped layout of everybody. And they ask you, hey, go rank these five priorities.

You know, family, God, country, unit, whatever. Right. you do it and they tear into you about what your priorities were and it's there's no right answer right it's like right how much do you believe what you're what you believe you know and uh that was the same kind of carried over to the end you know the board um the final thing but but but i but i but i knew my work was good so anyway uh i don't want to sound like a ragging but fortunately for me he was there uh and and and it and it all worked out um now that's 99 and we're full bore going looking for you know jaysock blue and green are and

oGA or are over in the Balkans hunting war persons indicted for war crimes you know carotich and lelsovic and all their minions and so we immediately started deploying over there and i did like i think i did four deployments over there and from varying degrees of 60 days 90 days, you know, um, 99, 2000. And, uh, that was awesome. I mean, that was just like, the most fun stuff, you know, you're running around doing tech stuff, doing surveillance. Just I'm, I'm sure your partner can talk more about that. You know, is more about that. Well, I mean, we've had a number of people on the show who've been over to the Balkans, uh, hunting war criminals at this point.

And yeah, it's fascinating. It sounds like you were living the life, Drew. Yeah, it was, it was cool. I mean, I wish I could go into like kind of details. I mean, I will say this one, this one day. So some of the guys that I were at my team and team two that were my counterparts went over to Damneck. And one of them was Neil Roberts.

You know, Roberts Ridge. Yeah. And anaconda. and I'm over there with the unit doing stuff and a bunch of guys from Red Squadron came over and they had just come back from there and they were the the unit the team that was going to like do the hits you know go round up dudes and one of them was Goody you know goody you know goody Dave yeah I mean I know you know about yeah okay

anyway those guys you know were awesome um so I was getting ready time for me to rotate out and um we had a bunch of cars and we just got this new Audi A8 in right um and I was like oh I wanted to drive that thing so I said hey I'm gonna I'm gonna take the AA out

I'm gonna see if I can set the record to whatever that town was in Serbska and I did zoom you know full speed blowing through checkpoints and everything get there in like 55 minutes which it's normally an hour and 45 minute drive or whatever it was right um and i remember driving through town cruising through town past the Italians or the Dutch or wherever they were and I look over to the right and I see this car it's BMW a red BMW sitting in a driveway and there's someone out there barbecue and um I call back I say hey you know you know texting is uh you know what kind of card is

Joe drive. He drives a red. I said, you know, I'm, oh, okay. Is it, you know, license plate, blah, blah, blah. It turns out I accidentally found this one

guy that was, they were looking for. And, passed it on PID them. They came, we came back, I came back, and then it turned out that those guys

ended up going and getting them. And it's kind of one of those. Oh, wow. Yeah, they set up with, you know, how to set up a place and it's a classic story where they wait for it because he washed his car every Sunday right in his driveway and and so they just rolled up one day and with a van and did the did the thing you know punch him on some on some mouth through in the van black hood over the

head yeah I don't know if there's a black hood I don't think they even gave them you know they didn't even give you know like this disrupted this family barbecue and took this guy off the street and I always thought that was pretty satisfying yeah um Just like, again, luck, total, total luck, right? But we did a lot of really fun, cool things that, that, you know, we performed instead of having surrogates to it or whatever. Very satisfying. I went out after that, I went out to the bundle course, tandem bundle course out west in Tucson and Marana. And while that must have been a guess of a time.

I mean, it's like a 600 pound bundle, right? Yeah. Yeah, we were jumping, they were doing everything. Motorcycles, cruise boxes, you know, sonobes, you know, those things full of, like you see, full of kit. You know, they've got to, they made it, you know, you see your tandem bundomaster when you get out. But here's, here's the cool thing about 9-11, if you want to know. So me and a buddy back up to 90, this is going to be the year 2000. we go down to this course we got invited by our cousins to say hey if you want to go to this

course where we got where you can learn all these boats different kind of boats and different kinds of diving and you can come down here and and take this course it was a month long so we learned all kinds of different dissimilar vessel driving and and whatnot and then you mix trade crafting with that so you're using, you know, you're learning how to do that. And then we did mix gas diving, get our little certificate, you know, I made our little diver card. So we, you know, we could do any kind of mixed gas diving and whatnot. And so I made friends with these guys that were down there.

And later on there, they invite me up to this barbecue up in, up in Arlington. And we're sitting outside, you know, you know, if I said their names, I mean, I know you know them. but one thing led to another and Mick who was there at the time Mulroy yeah Mick Moore as well as Thomas was the last thing anyway they're like hey we're getting ready to go do this thing this thing called the Nile right in Iraq and we're going we're taking these 10th group guys and pilot team dudes and we got we got extra sluts you know what do you think you want to come you want to do it for this i'm like i'm like yeah sounds good you know what's his name who's the famous CIA guy who

wrote the books uh before that about that um they made serpico not serpico anyway um you're taught about like like like bob bear bob bear yeah okay okay so bob bear was like one of the legacy guys who rotated in and did that stuff prior to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. But it kind of, I don't know the actual, you know, timeline of whatnot, but, but by this time, it was after 9-11,

it was game on, you know, things were going to happen. So, you know, I kind of skipped past 9-11 because I don't need to talk about there. Everybody knows about that. Sure. The, just realized I need to plug it. in power here. Can we take a real short break? Absolutely.

Hey everybody. Please check out our Patreon. It's listed in the link or underneath the thing. We just moved into New Studio. We still drink a lot and we could really use your money to pay the rent and to buy booth. And I'll just take that segue to say that we really appreciate all of you who support the channel in various different ways. And we have to, like Dave said, we just moved in.

of this new studio. We got really big plans for it. We're in a much better place here. And it's because of you guys, literally. It's a safe space. It's a safe space for bros to drink some scotch and tell war stories. And even if, you know, you don't contribute to our Patreon, please subscribe to our YouTube channel, like the video and get the alerts and share our videos when you can. It really helps us out. We have just hit 50,000 subscribers. We have, which is really a milestone for us. And if you subscribe to the Patreon, you get access to bonus episodes that we do. And also you'll get access to all these episodes ad-free.

So, like, if you listen to the podcast or you watch this on YouTube, you will see some ads. If you're subscribing to the Patreon, you'll get the episodes completely ad-free. So when we're at 10,000 subscribers, we actually shaved Jack's head during an episode. We said at 50,000 subscribers. My COVID mullet. We would do cosplays. Now, we realize at this point that doing cosplay during an episode would kind of be insulting to our actual guest. But I don't know, man.

I mean, maybe we can be talked into, like, getting done up for a bonus episode on the Patreon. And only if your Patreon subscriber can you see Jack and I in cosplay. Maybe that'll happen. I don't know. Well, ComicCon is coming up in October, right? It is. Comic-Con every year in October. Yeah, we, I took Jack to his first Comic-Con.

Yeah, you did. Yeah, my first New York Comic-Con. Yeah, first New York Comic-Con. That was a fun time. So, anyway, and welcome back. Next, next, I'll also tease next episode. If you want to grab that book behind you there, Dave, Chris Cox, Fire Force. Chris served in the Rhodesian Light Infantry, and he wrote this book, Fire Force.

He's going to be on next week's episode. I've read a lot of war memoirs. This is one of the better ones. It's incredibly well written and just a horrific and terrifying account of war. If you haven't read this book, I highly suggest you guys go and check it out.

So we'll have Chris on next week's episode. So Chris Cox Fire Force, One Man's War and the Rhodesian Light Infantry. I highly suggest you guys go and check this book out. Drew, how are we looking? Can you guys hear me? Yeah, yeah, we hear you.

Okay. Technical difficulty on my end, can you see me? Yeah, yeah. We got you loud and clear. Okay. Lima Charlie. All good. Durr, before we go any further, I just want to say that I was a Navy corpsman.

I was a dive med tech. So I was a corpsman in the dive community. I feel your pain when it came to promotions in a specialized field when you had to compete against Corman Worldwide. I feel your pain. Well, that makes you feel a lot better, to be honest with you. So I think I'm having an issue with Zoom on my end. We see you like, yeah, it's all good on our end.

Dee, did you do something? Break yourself. Hang on. A little attractive, isn't it? Well, yeah, what's the issue? Because it all looks good on our end here. Yeah, it's it's a I plugged into power and and I think I'm okay. Okay.

I think we can continue. I might not just see the split screen anymore because I might have disconnected from my version of the zone. Okay. Oh, well, we see you, we hear you. Yeah. So let's, well, if you could if you could jump back into it and pick up, pick up, pick up, pick up, pick up, pick up, pick up a story. Yay, I fixed it. Okay.

Great. I'm not all effed up. Okay. Thanks for, thanks for carbon for me. Yeah, no worries. All right. Where were we? What am I telling me?

You were talking about, after 9-11, you were talking to Mick Mulroy. He was saying that there's this thing popping off. Do you want to get in on that? Well, because we had a really good relationship with our cousins, are unit. We were real tight. He told me about it. They gave me the details.

They told me who talked to and everything. So I ended up scribbling it down on a few. like a piece of paper, some numbers and names. And I remember I went back to the command, to the unit. And a friend of mine who's now in charge of the Death Star, he was one of my teammates, but he was also the squadron commander at the time. And I said, hey, sir, here, what do you think of this? Want to do this?

They're asking us if we want to do. we want to be part of this. Going in before the war, we went in 2002, right? And long story short, phone calls were made, relationship, you know, things were bedded, and that's the reason why our unit got into the AFO mission. Into the deal before, you know, we are part of the Nile team. We went in in October of, 2002 and it started doing OPE, AFO, whatever I want to call it.

And it was just, again, you know, God loves freaking prognment and lucky, right place, right time. The rest is kind of history is. So that's how we actually got into the whole war beforehand. And your story intersects with some of our previous guests. You brought up Mick, Mark Giaconia with 10th group was out there. Who else have we interviewed? Sam Faddis was out there. I think we've interviewed a number of people who are out on that initial OPE mission into northern Iraq.

Could you tell us about how that went from your point of view as far as like infiltration and then what the operation, what the mission was like? Yeah, sorry, I'm getting myself on fuck here. Yeah, no worries. Yeah, so we had a really interesting journey over there to Turkey and then into the, and our whole thought process was we were going to be the gateway for the northern front. We were going to set the conditions to the collection, AFO OPE for Fourth ID. I was going to come in through the north. And, of course, we know that we got the Heism, they got the Heisman from Turkey.

That didn't happen. So it ended up being that it was us, us and the Kurds, and Tenths, which had a role in the initial invasion anyways, but they ended up taking a bigger piece of the pie because that was it. And then, of course, we all know about Viking Hammer, which what those guys did, we did. Actually, we planned it. It was Uncle McClandy and some other Nick and some other guys along with, you know, and then the Tenth Group guys. came in and fine-tuned it to their order of battle. But it just, it was a good time because for three months, we were, let's see, November, December, October and November of 2002, we were in there by herself, running around doing recons.

I mean, I ended up lasing 62 dimpies for that. Wow. Not just myself, but, you know. Sure. But it was, you know. But like, like, lacing to get grids or laysing for air strikes? For Tomahawks. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, so when they fired those cruise missiles, Mark talked about that when we had him on here. It was like, what, they fired like 120 Tomahawks that night? Yeah, so the 28th or whatever it was. Yeah, so there was 62 Tomahawks fired at least 60 something, like two, three, four, whatever. they were launched from subs, ships, and whatnot. And it was just, it was just most awesome because we were at this 40 place that Mark probably talks about too. I can't remember the near of it. And it was like this lightship.

You could hear jets flying over, but they weren't jets. They were, you know, Tomahawks. And then we just watched them hit, wow, lamb, and just whey laid all these targets. And then within a day or two after that, we, let's see, 10th group might have already been in. Yeah, they were. They were already in. And we had planned the four prongs for Viking Hammer. And then we launched that assault afterwards.

But prior to that, we also had this CCTV guy, the true hero of the whole Viking Hammer thing was the Air Force CCT. slash combat controller guys. They just were like composers of an orchestra. It was amazing. Like when we did our assault on Vikinghammer,

I will call this guy Jack. He had aircraft stacked up like LAX. Yeah. You probably heard the story. And it was poetry in motion.

We have talked about the talent of JTax and CCT guys before and how they are operating at a level that most of us can't possibly understand controlling so many different assets at a time and being able to guide them on like calmly, coolly, collectively just like rolling in asset. Like it's just amazing to see them in action. So for folks out there who haven't watched those previous episodes we've done, I hope they will. But Viking Hammer was an operation between U.S. Special Ops and the Kurdish Peshmerga to go and fight Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq in 2003. They're an Islamic terrorist organization. The fear was that this terrorist organization could kind of bog down our invasion of Iraq. So we had to have kind of a northern front in that conflict during the invasion. Drew, could you tell us a little bit about what you did?

You sent me some pretty cool pictures, actually, of you out there in the field with the Peshmerga. Can you tell us a little bit about what your role was and what you were helping facilitate at that time? Yeah, so it was broken up by, I wish I knew the actual order of battle for 10th group, so I don't want to misrepresent that, but it was evenly divided amongst the FF, was it 103 or 102, Tov's. battalion and the s f guys and then various levels of peshmerga and myself like a counterpart of mine and a combat controller and i was paired up with with baffle no no with jalal no uh uh Uh, there, there, there was a, a Pilat Talibani, La Chor Talabani.

Lahore, La Jor, yeah. Lahore, yeah. He, he, he became the intelligence chief, I believe. Yeah, yeah. So I spread up with him, uh, and Jack and I, and we were on the, uh, yellow or green prong, I forgot. But, but we ended up being with the guys, the snipers from 10th group that were taking out. Uh, they did some great stuff.

With the Barrett's. What's that? With the 50 cows? Yeah, with the parents. In fact, I think one of the pictures I sent you, that was taken from that day. In fact, both those were. But, yeah, so we fought our way uphill through,

you know, we had pulverized a bunch of positions with AC130s a night before, fought our way up hill. We're taking effective fire. And the thing that struck me about that whole thing, was these Ansar Islam were clearly not just some

forgive my terminology raghead, you know, just amateurs. These people were, they were trained, right? Yeah, yeah. They actually had defense in depth, so so as they knew you know, graduate, you know, obviously

we're going to fire our way uphill, so they would just leapfrog back to fortified positions where they had weapons and... And it was suspected they had a chemical weapons facility in that that valley, right? Yeah, exactly. So Kermal was a suspected weapons, chemical weapons facility, and that just, we just pummeled that with 20 or 30 frigging tomlocks. But I'll leave that up to historians to decide what there was interesting things found. Let's put it down. Yeah, as we fought

our way uphill, these guys leave rock back and then they rained down scunnion on us. And we had to call in close air support. And I distinctly remember this one episode where we had Navy pilots off of Roosevelt or something. There's a female. And Jack's talking to her. And she dropped her bombs. And then he's like, hey, I need you to do some strafing runs along this ridge line. And so the ridge line, essentially on the other side of it was Iran.

Right. So she came in and just fucking late scundon on him, took out some machine gum. positions and we were able to advance forward. Yeah, but it was interesting to get shot at all day long. What was it like working amongst, like not everybody had the same, you work with different elements and not everybody had the same sort of actions on type of maneuver, right? Not everybody had this some sort of TTPs when it came to maneuver and fire.

What was it like working with a disparate group in an actual firefight when you're moving towards target and trying to like coordinate that. Yeah, I got this great picture of Lahore. I know I'm butchering his name. Yeah, I'm sorry. I probably did too. We were sure. Balf is a brother, basically.

And so it's like, hey, you know, it was a bomb rush with the Kurds, but the SF guys. And I don't know how it worked out, but it just worked. You know, we just, you know, we passed the, past the, you know, we leapfrog up to, you know, some, some cover and, and, you know, those guys were, were charged up. The Kurds were charged up and commands were passed. But the game changers were the air cover and the Tetris guys. I mean, I was, I was so frustrated that day because I decided, because I had brought my SR-25, with me and I was like do I want to hump this fucking app

and all these magazines and whatnot or I'll just take my M4 right and I regretted it to this day it's like because I'm I was like lobbing shots at these guys 400 500 meters away right having it like

you know yeah Kentucky yeah yeah and and of course we're fighting uphill so it's like at some point I was like carrying a bunch of shit so I took my rear played out and just you know toss it on the ground I'll get it later so um but yeah to this day I was like never go anywhere without a 760 rifle in the open you know it's funny because we were just talking about the SR lunch today we were just talking about it today and

like my experience of it in the late 90s it didn't have a Ford assist at the time I don't know if that changed and I fucking hated it because of that um you know yeah i'll be honest with you i you know like everybody else i knew was a sniper i wasn't but i was i'm a real good shot um or was back then and i uh let me put this i got jerry barnhart shirt uh hat oh nice which jerry barnhart was like one of the you know he's an amazing shooter and one of the principal teachers for a lot of the soft units and you had to shoot first in his class to do you have to out shoot him or you just had to now you just had to be the best of the group. You have to be in the best of the group to get the hat, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I probably should be worn in that shit right now. So from what you experienced out there that day, I mean, I reflect back on what J.R. Seeger said when we had him on, thought the combination of U.S. Special Forces, CIA paramilitary and American Air power was just a very deadly combination. Absolutely. It was. I just remember, like I said, you know, it was like I was a spectator half the time, right, other than rounds, you know, and the thing that the interesting part, I want to sound like there I was, you know, maybe even grenade pins, but, you know, they were shooting at us and the rounds were hidden,

but they were also shooting from far away too. So, you know, it wasn't like, you know, it wasn't like Lujia or Ramadi or anything like that. But I remember this one occurred, taken around the chest, right by the high. right next to me, kind of in between me and Jack. And I went to him and pulled open all of his, you know, because they had layers of clothes on, right? Because it's like March, right? I had a rack of snow on the mountains, right? It was cold.

And I pulled all these layers of clothes out. And the round, the 760 round was like sticking out of his chest. It wasn't even like, it hardly even penetrated. Because it so, it bled off so much velocity. do. Yeah, exactly, right? You know, I should have made it more dramatic, you know. It was just kind of funny. But yeah, it's, you know, we did that. I ended up clearing some caves and and getting some guys that were hiding some caves, you know, a couple of curds. And, and I, and I remember leaving that at the end of that day, I'm like, gosh, am I going to, I need to write a

report on this? Am I going to get, you know, it was like the dilemma. now I'm not going to talk about. Because I don't want to do the paperwork. Right. You know, so I'm going to like, you know, back then it was like, you're going to get in trouble. Why were you put yourself in harm's way kind of thing? Well, it wasn't that. It was more like you just didn't know.

I mean, everything was new, right? Right. Right. You were, you know, Afghanistan was, you were, you know, Afghanistan was ahead of us by year, right? Right. Happy year. So, um, for a year or more. yeah yeah so that was that was a really good time that was that was only the beginning too because

then we did other things cook cook we know we had to take cook with the Kurds um it just kept going and uh it was a real good time with uh with 10 group um and I'm looking forward to the reunion you know I think I'd do a 20 year uh anniversary of that Viking Hammer coming up here next year, early early next 23 in 23. Were there, you know, you said that Afghanistan was a year ahead of you at this point in time. Have there been, were there visible changes at your particular unit as a result of 9-11? Did things change? Did they morph evolve?

Yeah. I mean, they did, of course. You know, 9-11 changed everyone's life. I mean, for me, example, I was on a, on a, my, this one trip I did after doing a bunch of Balkan trips was to a country to Georgia, actually. And I remember taking off, I just, I, my, I'd just gotten married at the time to, to, to, I just got married, just leave that way. a few weeks before and was getting ready to leave on September 9th.

And so September 9th, I get on the plane, fly to fly out there to the caucuses. And land, you know, because you lose a day when you're flying that way, right? So check into our place, turn on the TV. I'm with another teammate. and they were watching CNN and he's like hey man check out the TV there's like a plane just crashed one of the towers and like oh okay I'm thinking of you know war war two when that B-25 hit the Empire State Building and whatever and then we like everybody in America has the story same story we watch the second plane hit the towers so at that point it was like holy shit

we're at war with someone right so you know we're on the horn we're talking to the chief at the base at the station and next thing you know we're doing so from that point on it was everything was like laser focused it was awesome great times to be alive you know we just got everything we needed we did a lot of great stuff um i just feel like it was a you know a blessed time to to be an American. So. What came for you then after after Viking Hammer that whole 2003

invasion? What was the next step for you in the now in your Army career so to speak? Yeah, so Viking Hammer happened and it was kind of like the, you know, you didn't really think of it as Viking Hammer. It was like, it was like, okay, it does work. Yeah, another

deployment. Right. We did a bunch of SSE. You know, we went to all these different places and and the stuff we pulled off of all these different little villages and I mean he took this this one particular I should have sent you the picture man it's a it's a kind of famous picture actually

it's sitting in sitting in a conference room up at another office it's with myself Mick all the guys from our team after we just took this little town and me and Mick are holding the American flag up Oh, I think I have seen that one.

Yeah, you probably have. It's actually in all the Viking. If you go to Wikipedia and all that kind of stuff, you can see it. You know, all the Vikings. And you're wearing Oakley's in most of them. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, you're a seal.

So, you know, we understand. I'm just kidding. I said you're a seal, so we understand. But I'm honestly, I'm just kidding. Yeah. You got to come about cool, dude. Always look cool. Right.

And for our viewers you don't know, SSC is sensitive site exploitation. and it's the phase after an assault where you basically search for evidence search for evidence but like search like the FBI looking for like you search like I would I wouldn't quite call it what the FBI does on a crime scene it's more like it's what a range room does on a crime scene well I mean it's not like you're not wearing gloves and dusting for prints but you're ripping yeah ripping everything you can yeah you're looking for everything you can yeah and you find yeah and you find out of it yeah and you find out of find all their porn, you know, all the, uh, all the, uh, all the Mola. Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Um, yeah. So we did that SSE staff. I went to, to the, uh, Kermal place and it was just devastated. Um, you know, and then some other folks came in. And we just shifted focus to, to the, uh, the Iraqi Republican Guard, uh, in Kirkuk. Um, and taking that place with 10th group was again, again. Um, so.

I ended up getting the third Republican Iraqi Republican Guard division flag took it down from whatever that base was there. And what's funny is like you could see these guys as they left their base. They were like literally taking their clothes off and throwing them off, you know, in the street. Their uniforms and put them on, you know, civilian clothes. And this flag was, it had to be 20 feet long or something like that. I think it's given it to someone in some general. But, yeah, we found a bunch of really interesting things. There are missiles and things that were interesting.

To put it mildly, it's just it's too bad that the political narrative is what it is as far as the level of evidence. But, you know, there's cases to be made on both sides of WMD, you know, finding Sarin. is one thing, finding effective certain rounds is another. Right. Right. I would say there's, you know. Right. And, you know, sort of, and again, you know, if the premise is yellow cake, then WMDs may not fit that definition.

But finding, you know, uh, UXO. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Finding, finding toxic gases or finding what, you know, chemical weapons. does get downplayed in, you know, in certain narratives for sure. Yeah. I mean, there's enough evidence prior to that of, you know,

Miggs being buried in the desert. And, you know, we were played too by a lot of shakes. Right, right. So regardless, that's out of my pay grade. Yeah, what came after that deployment, though? What was the next step? Okay, so it came back from. that, well, before I left, I had to go down. So we were, we were also planning how we're

going to get into Bayette first, just conditions for the guys who were, you know, first ID, or no, one MEP and third ID. And I ended up going down there with a group of guys that Mark was running um and um linking up at bagdad international stuff was seeing airport or it was called um and doing a little bit of stuff in in bagdad before i got shipped up by that point i'd been there like six plus months um so i left um came back home that's 2003 and at what point in your career How many years did you have in the military at 2003? I see. That would have been a list in 87.

So do the math, maybe 15, right? Right. 16, 16 years. So I ended up coming back to the unit and taken. Oh, okay, so I'm a senior chief, right? So here's the, here's the, the interesting part of Iraq. I'll opt for Master Chief. And at the same time, I was married, so I'm thinking about, yeah, Master Chief E9 retirement

after 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, as opposed to like putting in a commissioning package. Right. It's a big pay difference for retirement. Yeah, any difference, right? So I put in this, I put in a package for commission, a Mustang commission. And you can check a block for Warren officer or just line officer, right? I'm like, fuck, I'm going to be a warrant officer. Nothing wrong with foreign officers.

They're awesome, right? But they didn't want to run a training stuff. Right. So I just thought, yeah, I'll just roll the dice, line officer. So the message comes out. I'm on an objective overnight. It's, you know, December of 2002. And I'm selected for Master Chief.

Right. Pretty night. Then I might have the order backwards, but I also got selected for LDO for, for commission. So I come back and I have to make a decision. And I went to the boss to the CEO and I said, hey, man, if I, sir, I didn't say, man,

sir, if I take this commission, can I stay at the unit? And you're like, I don't see why not, right? Because typically if you get commissioned, they send you off to freaking northern side of the world. Right. Right. So I know who you are. So you show up as this boot and send their officer.

And so one day I'm selected, so everybody thinks that you know, I'm going to be at E9. And then next thing I'm like, well, I'm going to be in O1, right? You know, we do this ceremony. And I get, you know, go from E9 to, or E8, promotable to 2001. And it was like, people are looking like, well, what do we call you now? I mean, you know, you call me Drew, right? So I stayed there for another five years. Ended up taking one of the other troops,

a different kind of troop that did different, atypical stuff. Did some stuff in some places? Say again. Did some stuff in some places? Yeah, it just said it had different flavor to it. And I was the XO for that for a while. And then I did the pro-deb kind of, you know, stuff where, you know, I had like punch tickets

03, I mean, S3 and I was an L&O for whatnot. But that wasn't the end of my, you know, utility. I actually did some other stuff that was with other folks, other agencies. So, but you're still deploying in support of the war on terror, doing your, thing there. And you said eventually you became caddray for the selection course, right? You kind of came full circle. Yeah. So, I mean, what happens is, you know, whether it's once a year or twice a year, it depends on, you know, the year and the time. Typically it's twice a year. They'll do an assessment selection. They bring in candidates from the military. They do, you know, you do screening,

they assess them, and then you put them through a pipeline of tasks. and, you know, they pull from whoever's available within the squadrons, squadrons to be coderent. And so, yeah, actually, it was very rewarding, you know, to do that, to teach people tasks and assess them. Now you're one of the guys in that horseshoe formation around the candidates that come in. Yeah, actually, I never got to that point. Okay.

Thank you, miss. I don't think I was, you know, I'm not that. It was senior, senior folks who did that. But yeah, yeah, I had feedback. Green sheets, pink sheets are really a call. I had to fill out. But in this time frame, after I came back from Iraq, that's when I went down to this special finishing school that Dave probably knows about.

And I became a certified operation. officer. So that, after that, that's when I started doing, you know, CEO stuff in Somalia and other places. So that's when I got to, you know, really do the things that I thought was really worked my spot. Like strategic intelligence. Yeah.

Run sources. Yeah. And, you know, that was a dicey, I'm sorry, dicey time. in the history of Somalia and the Horn of Africa, but very rewarding. And Somalia, you mentioned Goodyearly, and that was Somalia, right? Yes. Yeah. That's regrettably, that's, yeah.

I mean, I just got to tell you, there are very, I love my brothers, but of all the people in the world that I know who are just true superstar, rock star heroes who've been everywhere at the right time, that's just one. guy that the nation owes him. Was he, was he the Bancroft guy that was killed over there? Yeah, he was. Okay, I'm thinking of someone different. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, but just. Yeah. Yeah, he, you know, he, you know, he was one of the OPs in Anaconda and everything, everything, everywhere he went, things happened. So. And regrettable, I don't think he had any family or any in children, but him and his wife were very involved in other, you know, mentoring just, you know, just children that had, didn't have parents. Oh, wow.

Yeah. That's incredible. Well, I hope his story can be told in further detail someday. sounds like a pretty amazing dude. Yeah, yeah, he was. I mean, I feel like I had like an average career. You know, I mean, you know, you kind of rack yourself, you kind of compare yourself to your peers.

And that's just the wrong thing to do because it ends up setting you up for problems that you're on to get out. Right. You question, could you have done things differently or whatnot? Right. Yeah, that's a trap because you are comparing your, you know it's sort of like the whole groucho marks thing i would never be a member of any club that would have me as a member right like like we see ourselves in a different light than we see everybody around us and so many times you're like how am i here because of what you know and it's even like

on this show we have people who come on who have done incredible phenomenal things and they say i don't know if i can be on your show because like you've had some just a guy and it's like I'm just a guy. You're a legend too. Yeah. Like, you know, it's, it's, you know, and I think especially and special operations, which is an area of, you know, high achievers, people who set goals and achieve those goals. And if you're consistently comparing yourself to the people around you, we tend to diminish our achievements and see and go, oh, man, that I could have.

Like, like, look at what they did. I, I want to ask Drew about his, about post-retirement and, yeah, or post-army or, geez, post-military and some of the things you did. Let's get into the viewer questions. Okay. Absolutely. Let me jump over. People actually care. People are watching. People very much care.

Actually, not only they care. They actually give us money to ask you questions. So, you know. How do I get on that? How do I get in tap into that stream, man? Actually, we'll talk. Yeah. And you're going to, you're going to tell us about your upcoming stuff.

Yeah, your upcoming podcast. Tap into that. That's right. Let's talk about, let's see what your group wants to know. Yeah, let's see what they got. Yeah. So, let me do my broadcast voice here. There you go.

John Pierre, who just donated. Thank you very much. Darren Jones, donated also. Both very generous. We really appreciate it. Jacob Wall, Drew is like the mirror image of Dale Kamsat, yet equally, if not more imposing. So what? He said that you are like the mirror image of Dale Kamsstock, another guest of ours, yet equally, if not more imposing.

And I think what he is saying is it, like, Dale is very much a large in life figure and, you know, in the way he carries himself and deservedly so. Like he's, you know, been there, done that. And while, and you are humble and yet you are also equally, if not more imposing is what our, what are. Well, that's very flattering. And thank you for, you know. I feel like, and this is going to sound corny, but I really do believe that I was blessed the fact that I came in when I did and had the fortune to walk amongst folks that were just like me

who did amazing things. You know, it's sometimes you just wake up one day and you realize I belong here. Yeah. Whether you're a major league baseball player or an actor or pro football player, whatever it is, you just wake up and go, I belong here. This is, this is where I live. I can do this. I can't perform.

I can, and it doesn't mean I'm any more Superman. I'm not a Marvel character. It's just that you just realize, you know, your craftsman. You know what you're doing. Right. And there's, you know, when you get to that point where you trust your inner self, I think that's what I learned going to the unit. It's like, I've made this decision because I think it's the right decision.

And here's why I think it's the right decision. This is why I set the LZ up this one. This is why I aborted this mission. This is why I did this thing. And you're right because it turns out right. And so when you're fortunate enough to be in that position to repeatedly over years, make good decisions or decisions that are productive or sometimes a decision where you walk away.

You know, you're not afraid to say, you know what? Right. I don't have a good feeling about this one. And it takes a mature military unit, which isn't always there to support you. Like some units will make your decision, a zero or hero decision.

But if the unit trusts you, then they give you the leeway to make a decision and don't like like hammer you afterwards. Yeah, to that point, I remember being in Somalia and, you know, we had this certain type of mission. We were working with with proxies, whatever. And I had this certain 06, who I love, love them to death. He's like, where the fuck is my, you know, commando force? oh, I need it now because he's answering to GOs and whatnot. I'm like, sir, you can't make Somalis in, this doesn't happen open up.

Right. Yeah, right. They don't even know how to read a map. Right. You know, and, and so you, you have that, those kinds of challenges to deal with. But at the end of the day, they trust you and they let you kind of drive the, Trying to train. Yeah.

No, that's important. Hey, just to add to what Dee said, we're at 493 likes. Hey, if you haven't liked this video, please get us to 500. Yeah. You're wrong. Yeah, you're wrong. You're wrong. It's straight up.

And then Adam White, one of our beloved guests. Thank you for the donation. He said, great interview. We're all very lucky to have you, Drew. We. And keep making it funky and keeping it spicy. see y'all go team go yeah drew we are very lucky to have you we deeply appreciate you coming on well it's been my pleasure i i wish i could have been more captivating and told you some better

stories next time you come here in studio in new york and we'll sit down we'll have some stogies and some whiskey you told us some great stories and look like thank god for jack because jack because you and i are we're both like sort of the ADD like we go off and i would have talked to you about like naval sea stories for fucking you know two hours you're having a really bad day if you need me to keep you on the rails i have a bad day every friday jack thank you i'll just yeah or saturday yeah see how bad my day is um is there is there is there does anybody have a pointed question they want to ask yeah uh so anatoly uh vascovitch thank you very much did you guys spend a lot of time on shooting and weapons and cqt was it a good shooting program

shooting weapons when? During CQT, like during your training for the SMU. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, yes. But part of the selection criteria was like what you brought to the table, right? So they're not going to teach you what you already know how to do. You're going to get plenty of opportunity to work with guys like

Jerry Barnhart or Pat McNamara or other folks. But that's just so you can just tweak and fine-tune your skills, right? Mostly, yeah. So we did a lot of foreign weapons stuff. But maintaining our qualls was never an issue. We wanted to set up a shooting course with some expert we did it whenever we needed to. How was it different? We also wanted to maintain, what I've left out is we worked oftentimes integrated as part of a combined team with our brothers and sisters in blue and green.

So, you know, we needed to be able to not be a live building used. Right. And out of curiosity, like, how was that different? Because in the SEAL teams, just like in the Rangers or most spec ops units, you were learning to do things as. a team. And while you need to be able to do things as a team and integrate, there are also times when you have to do something as a singleton or as a pair, and that's not really something that is so often focused on in these other units. So how did you train up for that? Yeah. So that kind of depth tails into one of my last jobs where we had a special group that did kind of those types of

things. We had travel around and be by yourself. And notably, for example, we had a particular rock star who went on a trip. And as soon as he landed, he, he, his spotty senses went off and he realized that, hey, he thinks he might have coverage. And sure enough, you know, it could have been criminal. I mean, that's one of the things you neglect. We always want to look at things to, from the standpoint of it, you know, as a hoist. Right. Or foreign intelligence.

Like espionage. Right, right. Right. Right. But a lot of times it's just criminal. Right. Because you're an American in a country that's not. Yeah.

the likes tourists yeah and regardless of what it was you know he had the awareness situation awareness to recognize the situation and sure enough van pulls up guys jump out someone puts sticks a gun in his chest and he does the freaking swim move takes the gun away takes around you right it takes the gun away shoots back at the guys right kiss you know hits a couple of them and they speed off then he's got to do the jason born shit right right Right. You know. And he, right. And he can have, he could have, like the embassy ex-fill him, but then he would blow everything. So instead he decides to make his own way.

He just, he does, he does, goes to the, you know, gets his supplies from, you know, some pharmacy, whatever takes care of himself. Does the right thing, notifies, you know, we got a procedure. And, and to that, to your point, you know, that's what happened. So, but it was completely below the radar, did the right thing. Yeah. Well, but that's the level of stuff that really does happen. Yeah. And you're proud of when your guys, your gal's, that's, that's super hardcore.

Like, the way that accounts published in the books is that that guy was, you know, mugged in a gas station essentially by crooks. But what you're laying out is like a kind of a pretty different situation. No, it wasn't a gas station. It was, you know, he was on his way too, from the airport to his return. And these are not criminals. These are people who know who this dude is and they want to bag him up. Yeah.

One can one could definitely make that assumption. Yeah. Yeah. Like no shit, it gets off an airplane. At that moment, he doesn't know that he's just responding to the situation. Exactly. Right. And that's the, that's where the crucible and Kelly McCann and all that training, all the combat is every freaking day of the week, three times a week, whatever it was.

you know, pays off. Yeah. It's muscle memory. It's, it's, it's, it's,

it's, you know, you fight like you train and, uh, questions. Becomes part of who you are. And then,

you know, the downside of that is it affects you later on. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Post, post, uh,

retirement, you know, you, you got to face your, face your demons or face your realties. Right. Right.

And we've talked to, you know, we've talked to a number of other people who have, you know, talked about, you know, that challenge of what comes up after. Because it's easy to sort of subsume or push down or ignore that stuff when you're still going, you know, 100 miles an hour. But then when it all stops, all of it, then what are you left with? and what comes up. And did you, that's kind of it with the question. Did you, did you have to deal, like, were there things for you, like, working through afterwards? Yeah.

I mean, honestly, where I'm at in my life right now, these are the things that are really feel are important. And it surprised me, but yes, I did. because when I got out, PTSD was a stigma. It was something you didn't. Of course, you thought, oh, only. Other people have it. Conventional soldiers have it.

Right, right. Yeah. Exactly. And, but, you know, the assimilation part of society, you know, everybody has to go through some sort of, well, I shouldn't say a point, but many of us, high performers, I want to say, you know, like we always joke about,

it's a performance league, right? You, you, you know, you either have a good batting average, you drive and runs, or you don't, you know, so, and you constantly measure yourself

based on your peers. You get out and you have to struggle with, you struggle with, relevancy. Like I used to always joke about my, my, uh, fresh,

my cell, by date. My, you know, when you get out and you've cut away, you've got an amount of relevancy in the community that unless you strap, hang on to another organization that's going to keep you relevant, you're going to, you know, things are going to move past you. And fortunately for me, I was able to do that. I ended up working with Mick and some other guys for a little while. And although it wasn't a real long time, I made a personal decision not to, it did keep me relevant.

I did get to go do some things that I didn't get to do in the military that were just awesome. You know, I got more trigger time afterwards than I did cumulatively, you know, later. But it's just what it was, what it was. But once you leave your. gone, right? Like the gates closed and you might still have friends, but you're closed off. Yeah. And you know what it is? You think it's, you don't know how to make, you don't know how to navigate to watch or you find yourself. Yeah. For many of us, we wall ourself all because we, we feel like, I don't want to call. I don't talk my buddies. I want, you know, I don't sound like I'm going to say

something that sounds dated. Yeah. I don't want to bother them. And you stay, you try to stay in touch, but at the same time, you recognize they're still running 100 miles an hour and you're not. So, you know, it can take a toll. And for me, it did. It snuck up on me. And they're, when I made the decision to kind of come off the, you know, come off the field and focus on a new marriage and having kids um it was a deliberate decision and uh but it also forced me to face some things that you know what was going to happen in the future and at some point you're real for i feel

fortunate that i recognized that i couldn't fix it myself and i reached out it just turned out it was this weird thing i um i i got to say i was walking into weggmans one day and i hadn't seen Rod comzo this one guy he's an I S guy an intel guy in a few years

and he said hey what's up Drew and we shooting the shit in the parking lot and maybe you can just see it must have been

written all over my face and he's like hey you're her headstrong I'm like no he goes yeah they got a lot of money they're helping helping guys

and just give him a call and I looked them up and they're calling having this inject with someone, you know, and just kind of explaining things that I just didn't understand what was going through my head. I never thought about it doing anything, you know, drastic. Some people, right, with 22 and suicide and the like that kind of stuff. But, but I realized I just, after 25 years or 27 years of doing whatever I was doing, suddenly I found myself in waters I couldn't control. Right.

Somebody else, you know, and so I reached out. talk to this guy. Did an inject next guy now I'm like talking to a psychiatrist. Next thing I know I'm talking to you know, getting help. And Headstrong was started by Marine captain or major who a bunch of his major a bunch of his platoon members after Ramadi and Fallujah young guys were killing themselves suicide because they came back to the world and and they were, you know, they had issues and they were young young kids but you know the VA just hand a bag of pills. Right. And so the stigma of PTSD was this, you know, before NICO was formed for the guys

that the tier one units now where you actually, you know, get the proper treatment, proper trend, uh, uh, transition, an assessment. like Mark talks about. Anyway, that was before that. I was worried about my TSSEI, TK gamma, all that kind of stuff, right? You know, I was worried about like, well, somebody finds out I got, you know, issues. I won't be a case officer or whatever. So this was completely anonymous.

They kept, you know, it was all done by big, big, deep pocket donors. You got the help you needed without any kind of stigma. And has strong savings, basically. and that's why, you know, I'm where I'm at today. Not that not the things would have necessarily been, you know, negative, but. Right. I can't do it. Right, right.

And again, I get what you're saying. You're not saying that maybe there were thoughts of self-harm, but it becomes sort of an isolation and sort of a downward spiral inside of that isolation that just that just like it's not necessarily leading to a path that is physically detrimental but it's a path where you just sort of isolate and keep you know push away family friends whatever yeah when you when you're when your spouse says something innocent and you cook off right long as fucking tirade right And you're like, you know, you're just like, you have this out of body experience where like, you don't get it.

And then you realize they don't get it. Right. Why should they get it? Right. Yeah. And thank God they don't get it, right? I mean, yeah. You realize, wow.

Okay, I'm going to try all these different things. Alcohol. I'll try this. Yeah. You know, you do, you go down down all the different rabbit holes. and you realize, okay, you know, this is just an area where I need a subject matter expert. You know, I need somebody else who, you know, I need you, I need, I don't know what I need, but I need something else, right?

And it's good. You know, I mean, there's, there's a lot more, we've really progressed a lot since I went through that. So, Drew, I, um, I, yeah, I want to ask you something. And maybe this is somewhat selfish of me, but I'll go ahead and ask anyway. And I don't want to say more than you maybe want to talk about publicly, but you have told something to me that like it kind of resonated and I can relate to it on a personal level. Like there's a time in your life, like you decide to set aside this life as an operator or a soldier or a sailor or a badass or whatever it is and like choose to be a father and a husband and like play this sort of other role in life. And I was wondering if you would be willing to talk a little bit about that very kind of conscious decision you made to move from one life to another.

Because that's something that just, it really clicked with me at least. Yeah. Great question. It's like, and we all have these preconceived ideas of what our life's going to be like, I'm going to get out. I want to work with CIA. I'm going to be a paramilitary contractor. I'm going to buy land in Montana. I'm going to do this, this and this.

I'm going to get my Possil license, blah, blah, blah, blah. you know, whatever. And then, you know, life throws you a softball. You think it's a curve, but it's softball. And you swing and miss. And if you just like paid attention to it and hit it the right way, it would have been the best thing. So you have it.

Like for me, I felt like I met my wife. And at the time. And we were going to go down this path from Dave's old place. And I realized that wasn't the right fit for me because the organization was saying your spouse has to basically stop her career. I'm going to be blunt about it because it needs to be said. Yeah, I think so. she's you know i i look at my you know she's a rising rock star in her field right global right and you know within the the organization was saying yeah i you know but but she has contacts

all of them anyway right all these foreign contacts and i thought i put myself in her she was like what if somebody said that to me when i was in the beginning of my suicidal career yeah you know what i what i have how i today if i had given all that all of what i've experienced up right right right? And I felt like that's not fair. I got to live my career. I got to do exactly what I chose to do. And I had a great career. And I wouldn't want to put that on anybody else. So I decided, hey, you know what? I'm going to I'm going to decouple. Yeah. I'm not going to impose that restriction on my significant other and be a support element. meantime so I started doing you know I see work training people doing whatever and it was hard

it was really hard yeah it was real hard because you know we're talking things were still very kinetic very going on and we'd be an a coin advisor in Afghanistan for a year and that was very rewarding working with Marines uh working from McChryas we didn't even talk about that that's another podcast probably but um you know you have to like some at some point you just got to make the decision to pull the cutaway pillow. Yeah. And hope your reserve opens. You pull that reserve pillow and thank God the rigor packed it right.

I saved my life, right? And then you have to deal with everything after that. And the transition was with a challenge, but I've embraced it. And now I have two wonderful children that I just adore. and my wife is a rock star and I'm just glad to be her exo and support structure. And, you know, we've kind of talked about that before that, you know, especially for special operations, right? It's a volunteer service. Nobody gets strapped. Then inspect ops. Like, then you're volunteering two times or three times. And people can say thank you for your service. But at the end of the day,

we are all doing what we love and we are living in a way a pretty selfish life we are the dream we are living our dream and you know and what gets left behind are the wives and the children when we're doing that and you know they're the ones who you know the spouses are the ones who wonder like what's going on when we haven't been able to contact them for two or three weeks at a time right or whatever one more question Okay. And for you to make such a, I don't want to say mature because obviously you're a grown man, but it's a mature decision to say, it's a mature decision to say, like, I've been living my dream. And now if I, like, if I want to keep living this thing that I've been living, then I have to sort of ask my wife to stop living her dream. Right. And yeah, that was a non-starter. But that, it's, it's a, it's a complex thing, right? I don't think I made it with a clarity I'm relaying it to you.

Okay. It was a lot of unknowns. Sure. Right. It was intuition. It was more like instinct. It's like, I need help. Right.

And I didn't even know why because I was like, I know guys who did 300 hits, lost guys in their arms. you know, people died in their arms. I mean, I didn't have that kind of experience. I had a lot of very interesting experiences. I mean, stuff I can't talk about right now, but, but they weren't traumatic. So, so when it came time for me to deal with traumatic, the aspect of like, I don't know, I mean, you know, when I'm asking people, when the Sykes asked me the question. So what happened? You know, what was a traumatic episode? I don't know. How many people did you kill? Well, I'd give them a number, right yeah but that doesn't bother me right it's like i i guess i don't have you know but at the end of

the day it's like how many people did i have disappeared because of what i did or how many people you know and that's the thing i don't even i don't even care about right that aspect the point is we end up at a point at a crossroads and whether we understand how we got there or not is important is not important what's important is what you do when you get to that why in the road to the crossroads. And you recognize I'm lost. Okay. Right. And and I need, you know, this is the point where, you know, I got to ask for directions or I got to ask for out. Right. And you don't know what that help is. Right. You got to at least ask. And yeah. No, we get that. I mean, I think that, and that's been a comment there, too, that like, people want to think that like, whether it's

post-traumatic stress or whatever it is that there's so. supposed to be this big moment when your best friend died in your arms or whatever and there's not always that moment like it can be a cumulative effect it can be exactly you know it can be going from a hundred miles an hour always on the go always like living on the edge to nothing and all of a sudden like there are these like shockwaves and reverberations that follow that that there's there's not a singular event what's yeah so to that point what happened what happens? happens is this. This is why I'm a big fan of Andrew Hube and some other folks on podcasts. There's a chemical change that happens in your body. When you're constantly used to being in a high

stress environment and performing at a high level, your body changes. Your body chemistry changes. Okay. Your cortisol level changes. You know, your, your, your heart rate all. There's so many things. I mean, you used to fight. night and sleeping during the day you're about part of your and you're doing amphetamines to do whatever or whatever on occasion but at the end of the day you're just used to a different body chemistry your body chemistry physically actually changes and then you come back to to a normal life so to speak um and you're challenged by that because now all of a sudden everything about you You know, you look across street, different activity, you walk into a grocery store, you're checking your corners, you know, where's the exits, okay, what's this driver going to do?

You know, all these things that happen that it's part of a chemistry thing. And, you know, we all have to deal with that in some way or another, to some degree or another. And you don't, you think that you're in complete control or command of yourself. And then you're faced with these, then you realize one day that, you know, you're barking at your wife. You're, you know,

you're doing all this weird shit. You're hypervigilant. Whatever it is. Uh-huh. Alcohol. Pulling people out of their cars on the road. You know. Yeah.

Whatever happens. I mean, you know, you're getting angry at folks or you're just thinking, you know, if I can go on. But, but the point is, it's not you're fucked up.

It's that you've also been, if, you know, over 25 years, you've been conditioned. Your body. chemistry has changed. Your neurological aspect of your

life, you know, you can't one, you know, the guys you took on took down, you know, rescued Captain Phillips, you know, 48 hours later, they're driving through you know, the drive through it at Taco Bell. Right, right. It's like, right, you just shot some guy

in the face and 40 hours later you're right. Right. In a world that doesn't I mean, thankfully, I'm not like putting Sillings down for that, but have no concept of that sort of thing. You went from Baghdad to your living room. Right. 24 hours. Or the hooters or the, you know, you know, sizzler, whatever. Yeah, exactly. What's the last question here? The last question. Thank you for Lawrence says for both the donations. Is there any credibility to the rumors of the Kandahar giant? And the Taliban fighters needing eight to nine bullets to go down due to Capagon or other substances?

Beets. Yeah. I didn't even know how to answer that. I will tell you this, that as far as Afghanistan goes, when a year ago, when things were going sideways in Afghanistan, I felt very betrayed as a U.S. service member who was a lot of people. who knows of I mean I've been to too many Funnels right? Yeah.

And when that happened I jumped on the the vet bro bandwagon to help get folks out. And to speak to the issues of PTSD, I feel like betrayal is

something that people need to need to check out. you know, when you're, when you sign up, you're, you're defend the constitution, carry out the orders of the day, you know, blah, blah, blah. And you want to do your job. You kind of don't care, but you don't want what you do to be completely meaningless. Right. You know, it's worthless. And as far as that, you know, mean type question goes, um, people. should recognize that when young Americans, I mean, the 13 Marines and all, I share something in common with the 15 Marines that died in K.I. H-Kha. They did that because they're looking at,

they believe in what they're doing, they believe in their brotherhood, they believe in, you know, and represent in the United States as a true. true beacon of hope. And every now then we need to take a reset and recognize

that. If we don't have those values anymore, you know, what's going to fill that void? Right. And,

you know, it's interesting because our veterans have always sort of led the charge in that from Vietnam,

like bringing home to Vietnamese, when I say bringing home. Jim Morris Yeah. The Vietnamese,

the Montan yards, nuns that sacrifice so much to work with us. You know, Afghanistan, Iraq, like the Kurds during the first Gulf War, we completely left them to their own devices after they trusted us so much. It, you know, it's easy to blame a politician for those issues, but it seems to be a trend of the American government, like, and generally it takes the veterans that worked with with those indigenous forces to, to like lead the charge on getting them the sanctuary. Drew, could you talk to us a little bit about what you're doing now, some of the things

we have planned for the future? What's the next step? What's the next move for you? Yeah. Thanks, Jack, for again, just being a maestro. Yeah, so I've kind of like tried to, I said, I got out as an imposter, a lieutenant. To be a commissioned officer in the Navy as a Mustang, to retire as an officer, you have to do 10 years in service, right? now I was I was I was pretty banged up by the time I got out I'd had like four shoulder surgeries a couple of knee surgeries

ankle plates a bunch of other stuff and when it came time to retire I was like I was all thinking about hey I'm going to go and work for Wexford worked for AWG do this and that you know you gotta make money and when it came time to retire I was doing my out of physical and And I was pretty effed up. And my squadron surgeon, to his credit, said, hey, you know, you ever thought about a medical retirement? I'm like, well, that's for guys that got blown up or whatever. That's not for me.

He goes, no, you're, you know, the definition is, can you do your job? Right. So anyway, one thing led to another. So he helped me do a med board, medical retirement board. And it just didn't turn out that I was pretty, epped up. I was. Yeah. I mean, granted, yeah.

Yeah. Steroids and Motron and PRP injections. Yeah. Let me look to another. A little vitamin M, right? What's that? A little vitamin M to get you through your day.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was living on. So I did a med board and I, you know, the medical board said, yeah, you're pretty fucked up, dude. we're going to medically retire. I got 22 plus years of servicing. How's that going to work?

So what I thought was going to happen is because I wasn't going to do the 10 years as an officer, I was going to have to revert back to Master Chief. So the poor unit, they're like thinking they're planning my retirement as a Master Chief. I had to buy the uniform, the whole thing. And then, you know, Bumet comes back and says, oh, no, we're going to retire.

When you get medically retired, you retire at the highest. pay grade or the highest rank yet pay grid so for like nine months i was a e9 and then all of a sudden it was back to o three right wow so i retired as an o three um that was the best thing that could happen so i retire um with 100 percent disability for a number of reasons um not the least of which was the things we've been talking about amongst the fiscal stuff but i went back to school Got to use my GI Bill. Got my degree in history, a bachelor's into history, and then I got a master's in

international affairs. And, you know, turn my life around. So I'm not sure if I'm on track for answering your question. Jack, refresh my memory, but. You're on track. And taking care of your kids, being a family, man. And you told me that you want to start a pie. podcast yourself. Yeah. So, so the next step was like, what am I going to do with myself? How do I

reinvent myself? And I struggled with the whole, you know, I see world, paramilitary world, case officer world, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, meanwhile, I have these two great kids, you know, I'm blessed by God to, you know, meet this woman who's just so intelligent. I mean, and we have two wonderful children. And then suddenly I realized I had this wonderful opportunity to raise kids and be present. I know so many friends on both sides, Army and Navy and Navy who in their weren't present, weren't able to be present because they had career conflicts. and then their families were challenged by that. And if it wasn't for their real strong spouse or whatnot,

you know, that determined the success. But back to, you know, now I've got this opportunity. And very recently I've realized that I think what I would like to pursue is, you know, the kind of the VET TV version of what we've all learned from being in special operations and having families. How the lessons learned, the pros and cons, the funny stuff. And so I'm going to do some what I call Combat Dad, basically, you know, podcast.

And it's to talk to vets. You don't have to be a combat veteran necessarily, but what did you, you know, how did you deal with family, issues. How do you do with, you know, the challenges of raising children? Like, my kids don't know know nothing about my past. Like, they're, they're eight and six years old, right? I'm an old man, but, you know, and, and they, I might as well be a World War II veteran. Right, right. Yeah. But, but now they're asking questions, you know. Yeah. And, and I realize all the mistakes I made, all the things I learned, all the things that had I been a good dad before or in the military,

I would have been a better leader, right? Right. And how does it feel as a dad when your kids just won't follow the chain of command? Oh, geez. When you realize this is part of the back, back story to headstrong and getting help, right? When you get in the grill, you get your kids grill and you're like, blah, blah, blah. Right? And they're like crime.

Can you realize it? Did I not lay out my task conditions and standards for this task? What is the problem? Yeah, here's the commander's intent. Here you're left and right limits. Get the fuck done. And you try everything, right? Like, okay, if you make your bed, you get to put the green checkmark on the magnetic board.

If you do this, you get to put the, at the end of the week, we tally all that shit up. And you get to have, you know, if you met the standard, you get to have a movie night. Well, that sounds great, right? But it doesn't work, right? And then you realize, all the shit going on is a matter of me not trying to overanalyze it, but just sitting there, grabbing my kid and putting my arm around him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, Drew, have you tried the dunk test?

I mean, have you tried the hundred mile out and the stork? The drought proof. The dog test with the hundred mile an hour tape and the storkle. Like, maybe that'll get them in line. The problem is, it's not them. It's me. Right. I know.

Yeah. It's, it's, you realize it's like, you know, garbage and garbage out. And when you think you're, they're not paying attention, they are. You know, so. I just I just wanted to say I'm blessed to have the opportunity to be present. So the fact that I can I get to be Mr. Mom. Yeah. I'm blessed.

And I just I can't tell you. I learn more for my kids than than anything. So I have no complaints. I'm a dad. It's coming. The podcast. Do you do you have a channel for that? because we want to like we want to like hook you up like like we want to we want our viewers to raid your very first podcast in and make you a like you know unlike us with our first with our 10 viewers on our first podcast us getting drunken and whatnot like how can we help you make it happen um i i wish i'd had the um combat dads is coming uh you know maybe we can do a like a shorthy in the future

Okay. And I'll give you the links. Also, Ajax shrugged on locals is going to be a link you can post. And that's where I'm going to talk about more serious stuff. Okay. Yeah, let us know when the podcast comes at and I would love to direct people towards that. We will plug the hell out of you. We love you and we, you know, we wish you all the success.

And it's an important topic. Drew, I know we kind of just sort of like hit like the waif tops of your career. here and there's so much more to talk about. But we've kept you for like three hours here at this point. And I really appreciate you being so patient with us and coming back on a Saturday to do this show. It's been great. It's been a great conversation, man. My pleasure, dude.

We have one last question that came in. And it's from Love Star and thank you very much. And guys, please, we're not accepting anymore. Like, we don't want you to like give us, we'll take you money. but we won't be able to ask you more questions for this. Many new school labor unions are using UW unconventional warfare tactics to conduct collective bargaining. How do you feel about homegrown subversives challenge authority

with an asymmetrical mindset? Sorry, late questions. And that could be like any, from any angle, and homegrown subverses but also challenging authority which you know so go ahead please okay so one of the

things I learned you know we all come into the military we all have our preconceived ideas of of what we want to accomplish and then reality sets in over time

I did 14 deployments right not everyone One of them was combat, but at least, you know, many of them, 10 of them were, you know, high threat slash, you know, whatever. What you learn from that kind of repetition is to recognize not what you think, but what you see, you know, to give the ground truth. And sometimes the ground truth doesn't dovetail with the commander's intent. So I would say maybe to answer this question, you've got to dig deeper than the surface level of, you know,

how that applies to domestic aspects. I'm inferring, I'm assuming that's what we're talking about, right? I don't even know what that guy's talking about. I'm assuming that because it's homegrown subversive. Yeah. So I'm assuming we're speaking domestically. Yeah. So having seen what an insurgency is, having seen what counter, you know, what terrorist

cells look like, having seen all that stuff, we're not seeing any of that level of stuff in the United States. Confidently, I can tell you, there is not that level of concern in the United States. There are people that are disgruntled. they're upset and you know they're making their their note but but the actual scale or scope of folks that need to be dealt with on the on you know that are being compared to you know other other elements is is incorrect right it's it's unfortunate that that narrative is being in my opinion being promoted it's it

It's a propaganda slash political type disinformation as far as I'm concerned. Now, are there people that that have those intents or those thoughts? Absolutely. Right. But is it a wide scale enough to be considered prevalent to be considered, you know, an insurgency or something to be concerned about? Yeah, it's not like a QI in America. Right.

And I mean, I was a coin advisor. Afghanistan. Right. And in the day, it's like, I know counterinsurgency stuff like, you know, as well as I know how to kill bad guys. Right. And coin and coin is counterinsurgency for our people who may not know. And so like what people may see whether their, you know, whether their viewpoint is from the left or the right, like they see the far right or they see the far left and they see sort of this propaganda and this information that is sort of being, put out there. But what you're saying is that that's more of an information war that it's not,

that the effort or the ground gained is not similar to what you would actually see in a counterinsurgency from either side. Yeah. Is that fair? I'm asked, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, there's just, we could do a whole podcast on counter uncertainty aspects. but at the end of the day, this is garbage in garbage up.

If someone's telling you something and you choose to believe it without challenging the source or doing your own due diligence, then you're just, you're just, you know, a sheep at the end, you know, in my opinion. Are we at a difficult time in our country? Absolutely. We're polarized. we need to go back to civility. We need to work hard on, you know, taking care of our neighbors,

our neighborhood, our cities, right, or counties. Right. And finding common ground, because we all share 90% of the same common ground. Right. So most people are just trying to put in their table and make sure their kids are safe in schools.

Like, like they're trying to live a normal life while a small minority on each side of disorder. controlling the dialogue in a way. Right. Yeah. I want to, you know,

be fair to your audience too. So, you know, I could tell war stories all day. Right. You know, there I was. And maybe that's,

maybe that's better. But, but, uh, we're all Americans and, and we need to, like, look for common ground.

I mean, take care of your neighbors. You know, pay attention to who lives next door to you. You know, you know, you know, know,

you know, what's going on and just be a good person. Yeah. Drew, I really appreciate your time tonight, man. And I hope we can do this again sometime. I hope we can talk you into joining us in Brooklyn sometime. If you care to join the evil empire at some point.

My wife, my wife just took my son. She's taking my daughter and my son up to New York twice now. She does these getaways, right? Yeah, yeah. It was a one-on-one. Let us know, Drew. We'll talk.

Yeah. And I could say, I don't fucking want to go to Manhattan again. You don't have to. You don't have to. That's the beauty of it. Yeah, you know. I don't want my car broken into. No, you know.

Yeah. Well, we'll get you an Uber. Yeah, yeah. Leave your car in a secure garage. We'll get you an Uber. And, yeah. So, folks, next Friday, Chris Cox, author of Fire Force, served the Rhodesian Light Infantry. We'll have them on the show.

Drew, thank you so much. Thank you, everyone for being patient with us. We deeply, deeply appreciate you coming on. Everybody will keep in the lookout for combat dads and Atlas, not shrug. Ajax shrug. Ajax shrug. All right. I'll give you the example.

Hey, thanks, guys. It's been my pleasure. And we'll see you next Friday. All right, brother. Thanks, everybody.