The Team House - From SOT-A to the 160th to Special Forces | Dan Runyon | Ep. 257

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

Daniel Runyon grew up running around in the backwoods of Illinois. He had a successful high school and Division III college football career. His real passion, however, turned out to be the U.S. Army; a passion he turned into a distinguished career as a Special Forces Commander.Dan’s moving from the enlisted ranks into the officer corps, at a relatively old age was considered a bold choice and set him apart from other leaders. He would go on to command Special Forces assault teams in Afghanistan and Iraq after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 – 9/11. He ultimately rose in the ranks to command his own Special Forces Company in Iraq.After his service was complete, Dan moved to Colorado and established Runyon Training Concepts, a high mountain training camp he built from scratch. His programs conditioned professional and non-pro athletes and extreme outdoorsmen and women to conquer the elements and exceed their limits.He currently lives in Florida with his dogs, spending time with his three grown children and training for his next adventure.https://danrunyon.com/------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#specialforces #greenberetsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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Covert Ops. Espionage, the Team House, with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. So 257 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park, and we have tonight in studio our guest, Dan Runyon. Dan is the author of Disciple of Chaos. He served in military intelligence and then went and served in special forces. had two team leader positions, an ODA 555 and ODA 551, participating in both the invasion of Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq. Dan, thank you for joining us tonight. My opportunity, I appreciate it. Thank you.

Yeah. So let's start at the beginning, man. Tell us a little bit about what your upbringing was like and how that kind of brought you towards the military. So watching a bunch of your previous episodes, kind of the same way. You know, I grew up running around the hills, East Peoria. I've had three acres behind the house.

Next door neighbor, Craig Garber was born about five months before I was. And for about the first 10 years of my life, I was outside. Mom said, go outside. And so playing out in the woods and all that and just being active. You know, we had a trampoline, so we're jumping until dark and you can't see each other. And, you know, mom calls in. And my dad was on the road a lot. So really just running around.

And being pretty hyper. You know, mama said I had ants in my pants. And so always doing sports, always running around. You know, I went out for every sport in high school. And if it was a team sport, some of them I made, some I didn't, didn't make basketball, did football, couldn't catch. So they put me on defense. Fastest guy on the team, so I just knocked the ball down. Didn't make baseball.

So I went out for track. And, you know, just did all the things that I like to do, subjects that I like. I did well in subjects that didn't make any sense. I didn't do so well. So, you know, I, you know, by the time it came time to graduate high school, I had this audacious plan. I'm gonna go to, you know, go to college, I'm gonna be in the 1984 Olympics,

and then I realized that being the fast white guy in Illinois doesn't mean you're the fastest in the world. And realize, not gonna be it. And besides that, my academic advisor sitting me down and saying, hey, you're doing really well in these classes, and you're not doing really well in those classes. Do you see yourself being a metallurgical engineer in a room with no windows? And I'm like, no. So that I transferred. And, you know, went to college and went through ROTC. Dad said I should take a map reading course. And so it's about February of

in 1982 and the professor of military science says, hey, we're going to airborne school, we're gonna send people, and afterwards I raised my hand, I go, I wanna go to airborne school. I'd learn my sister went to airborne school, my dad went to airborne school, my brother-in-law went to airborne school, and he's like, oh, you gotta take this PT test,

and long story short, I went to airborne school. It was fine, July and Fort Benning, hotter than bloody blue blazes. Yeah, you know, so he finished up college didn't know what I was going to do. I had a Bachelor of Science and Psychology, and I did not want to listen to people whine at me. So I went down on the recruiter and joined up,

wanted to be a 98 golf, a radio interceptor, didn't really know what that was, and that started it. So if you were an ROTC in college, how do you make that switch? Why do you end up going enlisted? So ROTC kind of has that totem pole thing. So when I was at Iowa State, and then I transferred to Knox College, you go back to the bottom of the totem pole

and really wasn't up for the rankings of, you know, to get an active duty commission and they were talking about reserve this and infantry and I was like, I don't want to do that. So they gave me my little discharge from the army of ROTC and when I finished college and then I went straight and took that and went straight to the recruiter and said,

hey, I want to go in. Interesting. And did, you know, you didn't know what 98 golf was or voice signal intercept. Like did the recruits? her to sell you on that? Oh, no. So I did well on my GT score and well on my ASFAB,

and I did well on the defense language after two battery. And he said, well, you can be an interrogator, an interceptor, and these other two things. And I didn't even know what the other, I don't even remember what the other two things was. And I'm like, well, I don't even know what the interrogator does, but it sounds like only wartime, and I don't want to do that. Right.

So I want to be a radio intercept. He's like, okay, you're the first one this year. And this is December. Yeah. So, yeah, so I just picked it by happenstance and went from there. And then did you agree on your language at that point? Was that baked into your contract? So it's funny to point that out.

I'm in basic training. And, you know, when you're towards the end, they give you your orders. And might say, I might say Korean. And I was the undergrad at basic training. Thank goodness. Colonel Brayboy comes up and says, you know, great on PT test. I scored, I don't know, 365 or something like that. He goes, where are you going?

I go, well, I'm going to DLI. He's like, what language? I said, well, I've got Korean. He goes, well, what do you want? I go, I want Russian. He goes, why? And I said, I took two years in college. He looked to Sar major and he said,

Sarre Major, and he said, see what we can do. Jill started telling me there ain't a chance in hell, takes an act of Congress all the other lies they tell you. Tuesday, that next Tuesday? My language has changed to Russian. That's awesome. It was. Yeah.

And so now you're off for a government-funded vacation at DLI. D-L-I, Monterey, California. When we got there, they had just opened what they called the Russian Village was on the other side. Brand new barracks, high school schedule, college workload, being paid. It was awesome. Yeah. Because I had taken Russian in college, yeah, the first six months were easy. I got straight hundred.

Yeah. DLI is everything that's great about school and nothing that's bad about school. There's no homework really. There's, you know, it's, you know, if you study in your spare time, that's on you. But there's no homework. There are no like research papers, but class is very interactive, it's very active. So it keeps you engaged. Yeah. In fact, you're right. Because in the evenings, I got bored. And so Pacific Grove High School was just on the other side of the fence. And I went over and talked to a guy named Steve Saznob. who was their varsity football coach and asked him if I could be an assistant. So I was coaching receivers and defensive backs in the fall. So yeah, it was a great time. Yeah. And after you finish your language training, what's the next stop for you? So then you go to San Angelo, Texas, middle of West Texas. And that's where you do all the classified stuff, all the radio traffic of what you're going to hear,

depending on what part of the world and what the Russians are doing or the Soviets at the time, what they're doing, whether it's artillery traffic. Because as a basic interceptor, first you wanted to determine what the traffic is, armor, artillery, infantry, fording, all that other stuff, whether they're doing admin stuff, then as you get better, then you do the actual transcription. So that's what that school was for, and it was, I don't know, like four or five months. and then from there, because I was going to Germany, we went to a tactical course

how to actually operate the tactical equipment, whether they were the man-packables or the vehicles up at Fort Devons, my first time at Fort Devons, and then I went over to C's, and I was in at 108-a-mabitaine, which was on the East German border. How did they... So for people who might not understand,

like the signal intercept goes from tactical or strategic where you're sitting in an air-conditioned room listening to intercepted traffic to tactical where you're actually out there with the troops you're on the ground do is that a volunteer position because a lot of people who go in for that no at the time well and the other thing now it's so much different now because of digital technology so everything is more remote now so they just put up an antenna just like you have a cell tower or a cell tower transmits and receives so that's basically what they do now almost nobody does it tactically except in a combat operation or a very specific mission that is tailored to right now at this place at that location so back then it's just what they had so we would

go you know to the border i mean i lived seven kilometers from the border you know and then i'd go to base and we'd get our equipment then we'd go set up um sometimes we went to hard stands like Woback and everything else that was north of Fulda or stuff like that but I think the only place there was Augsburg Germany and they were doing some of the remote stuff at that time and that was the big strategic thing did you get to listen into the Ruski's plotting and planning on the other side of the iron curtain because you'd listen to them and they more they were more jacking around than we were you know they were bored or they were drunk or they were doing whatever and up north they had what was called the Gotha training area.

The Soviets literally filled in in between two mountains to block the radio transmissions from their training area so that we couldn't intercept it. It didn't work because we just went over to hear so we could still, because everything's lying aside. Right. So, but you would hear them, you know, the same level that we are jacking around. We, one time we were at a hard stand and we're doing intercept and it's New Year's. And this guy's drunk.

he starts singing happy birthday in English because it's his birthday I wish we could have transmitted because we were going to set it right back to happy birthday but yeah you just do stuff like that you know it's not it would be rare that you caught something like the short third shock army

coming through right even back in the 80s we would have had some type of satellite because you can't move 180 tanks without something final right so and how long did you spend in that unit over in Germany. So I got there 8788 and then that was the end of my first in the list. And I was planning on getting out. I was married at the time. Married my college sweetheart.

We had a boy. Zach was born in August and I went to, I said, hey, I'm getting out and I'm like, well, you got to talk to Reed, Lisbonencio. I'm like, okay. The only reason, so I went up there and talked to him and he goes, what can I do to get you to stay in? I go, well, I want to, $16,000 list of bonus and I want to go to Key West or Hawaii. He goes,

okay, let me see what I can do. That's Friday and on Monday morning they said reenlistman, Encio, you're supposed to call him. He goes, you got three years in Key West

before a cell phone so I get back on the phone and I call my wife and I'm like, we got three years in Key West. She's like, okay. Yeah, that's not a hard sell. It was not a hard sell.

We moved to Key West Florida. And, you know, it's 90 miles from Cuba. Yep. And you have the Lord Sigant site in another training area over there. And for some reason, there was a Soviet mechanized infantry brigade teaching them mechanized infantry tactics. Weird. Yeah. It's Cuba.

And so that's all we did. Well, we didn't do it 24-7. But we did 2, 8, so 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, we did military intercept. Air Force was on other times and stuff like that. And I was in Key West and then the wall fell and they were pulling all Russian linguists and I'm like, okay, this job is going to end. Right. And I put in a 4187 request to go to 10th group and they're like, you're crazy, you're leaving Key West, but okay. And all those guys that stayed around ended up going to Fort Drum.

So specifically were you trying to get into special forces as an MI guy? Yeah. Yeah. So I'd heard about the Saudi. I'd heard about the Intercept and, you know, you get to go to Ranger School and you get to go do all the cool stuff and you're deploying in small units and stuff like that. And that's what I wanted to do. Yeah. Because Key West was good. I mean, it was four days on, two days off. And like I say in the book, it was good until it wasn't. Yeah. When you can, you know, I laughed because my wife at the time was like, you know, I never know when you're going to work. I'm like, are you kidding me? I know when I'm going to work three years from now. It's four two, four, two, four, two. You know when you're going to work. Yeah. And you worked four days, four swings, four days, four swings, four days, four swings.

So seven to fifteen hundred, fifteen to twenty three. How were you, do you remember how like sod A's came on your radar? Was it because you were in Key West or were they whispered about guys in the 98 golf community in the Sagan community? So I actually had, as a platoon sergeant, I had two guys go to selection. So that was the first thing that kind of sparked my head of special forces. And they both came back and they weren't selected. Later on we know they quit.

But the scuba school was over there. And another friend of mine who was another team sergeant, her husband was an instructor over at the course. So they needed some extra bodies to do helicasting and stuff like that. So I went and started talking to them. And that's when I got the idea, hey, you need to go do tactical stuff. And I've always wanted to be in 10th group, you know, up at Fort Devons and going over to Germany and stuff like that. And so that's what I did.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, like a lot more people know about Green Beret or Special Forces than they do about the SOTA units inside of them. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and it's funny because the MI guys would say they're special operations team out. Alpha, it's support operations, Team Alpha, that's what the book says. Because you've got to remember, you're not selected

to go there. You're just an MI guy. Right. You weren't qualified. You didn't pass a selection or anything else. You're just assigned there. So once you get there, you've got to show your battle. Right. And there were teams, there were go teams, and there were no-go teams.

And, you know, so going to Ranger's school is one thing. You know, trying to, because General Frank Tony was my second, group commander, and he wanted the Saudis to be scuba qualified. Because that's when Bosnia was starting to spin up, you know, President Clinton. And he's wanting to, you know, send us over and like, okay, yeah, but we're going to infill by scuba probably. So you've got to get scuba qualified.

So every six months, we're doing a physical and we're going through pre-scuba and just getting our butt smoked. Yeah. Finally, he just sent us to the paddy course. I'm like, I don't care. We're going to send you in anyway. so that's where you start learning about all that stuff and you know and actually when we at and so 1992 when I signed in the group they handed your green beret because that was the unit headgear right and within six months they were pulling general shack now and that whole story they

were pulling the green berets if you weren't you know Q-course qualified right unless you deployed overseas and then you had we were like pulling up a maroon beret and then we're pulling up a green beret and then it's like okay whatever it's just to happen whatever but it's not just that how would they like administrative how would they work that because like you said that the sod a guy is these you know these tactical siginers they didn't have to go through a selection but but in in the right setting they could be called upon to do very arduous missions correct so would they try to and also like ranger school is a big thing for them like you're supposed to be ranger qualified and all this

stuff. It's a victor slot. Yeah. So how would they, how would they manage those teams? Would they try to spread the wealth, like put like the qualified guys with the unqualified guys to make a weak team stronger? Or would they make like the strong teams really strong and leave the weak teams to like do their own thing? It depends on which battalion you were in. I was in third battalion and we had three strong team leaders. Steve, Joe and I were team. leaders and on the Saades and we were just strong that's the way it was um second time was a little different they actually had better linguists but they were tactically unsound uh-huh so it it just it was weird you know you would think they would do that and they would get and they didn't push

ranger school as much and they should have uh-huh and it just became an availability and one time somebody said hey do you want to ranger school i'm like yeah they're like pack your baggage you're leaving tomorrow. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not leaving tomorrow. You know, think about if you showed up to Ranger's school with 12 hours notice. Yeah, yeah. It wouldn't be so good. So, but yeah, it, you know, and we deployed quite a bit. To Scotland, we did an exercise with the SAS, Third Ranger Battalion, and we were with the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment, and we were infiltrators, and they were trying to find it. Yeah, you learned a lot of stuff real fast.

Yeah. Went through the Burgessier School. I don't recommend it. And then how did you guys manage? Because, like, the sod days, the Ciganders have a higher clearance than most of the team guys do. You have specialized gear from the NSA, specialized gear. Like, when you're traveling, when you're working with these teams, like, how do you manage that personally to say, hey, like, this is, like, this stuff is sort of off limits. I know you're cooler than I am or whatever else, but this stuff's off limit.

So we would talk, and we ran into that problem, even on a JRTC rotation. We jumped into Camp David. We did in-flight rigging and jumped in. And I had talked with a team leader and said, hey, this is what happens when we start doing the analysis. It becomes SCI. And he goes, I don't have that. I got just anybody on your team have that. He goes, yeah, whatever echoes does.

Why he had, it helped us out a lot. So then we were allowed to train, but then we had to try it. transmit through an SCI channel. Otherwise, I would have had to carry extra gear. I mean, it's already bad enough. We're carrying a parity 12, which is the size of that refrigerator. Now I'm going to have to carry my own PSC5 and get my own crypto. Luckily, he had it. So you just work it out. You know, you don't want to be standoffish and you don't, and you want them to be integrated. And then also, you explain to, hey, if you're going split team, there's three of us. Right. So two guys are going with that team. I'm going with this team. It's just me doing 24-hour ops. So we're in

JRTC, we're trying to intercept, and I'm intercepting until I fall asleep, and then I'm intercepting more. So you just had to work it out. And that's how you build that rapport with them. And that's why when that team, 8-5, got assigned to go to Bosnia, they did their decision matrix and said, we're taking them. Yeah. And what was that like when you got the Bosnia? We never went. Oh, really? Went to Brindisi. Italy. That's a good. Yes.

And then didn't do anything. Because all we were going to do was they were going to put them on a PR mission. So this is very early. Brindisi is the airfield in Bari, isn't it? Yeah. So it just... That's a beautiful place. We were going to, you know, the...

And at the very beginning, because remember, this is 93. You know, this is when, hey, we're going to be out by Christmas. They didn't say which Christmas. because we're still there. So it's got what's kind of one of the running jokes. But, yeah, we didn't do anything. We didn't do anything, you know, and I think the only true PR mission was the,

what's his name, Grady mission? Yeah, when Tom O'Grady got shot down. Yeah, Bat 2-1 or whatever, anywhere, whatever that one was. The one you literally at Sears School, that everything went wrong. So, yeah. But, yeah, we actually never did anything. Never did anything operational laws in 10th group.

And then how did you find your way over to fifth group? How did that come about? So... And we should mention you went to OCS too. Yeah. So because DeWal had fallen, they weren't going to do... I weren't going to do any Russian, more Russians. They weren't going to...

I wasn't going to get promoted, and they wouldn't let me change languages. Because there was only two airborne ranger or 98 Gulfs. So I put in an OCS packet. Actually, what was really good was Colonel Philbert was my battalion commander. He was an OCS grad. The S3 was an OCS grad. And the MI Detachment Commander from the other battalion was OCS grad. And they were like, you run it and you run it through now because we're about to leave to go somewhere.

And so I did. In a 10-day time, I did my entire packet and walked it straight to Colonel Tony. And I said, we sign this? And, yeah. So then I went to Austin Canada School, graduated in January of 94, went to the basic course, and then went to Fort Campbell and did a full gamut there.

You know, I have in the book, My First Battalion commander was Colonel Rodriguez, David M. Rodriguez, who ended up being, what, the Africom commander, I think, is one of his last jobs. Great, just great commanders I had the whole time while I was there. And so when you came out of OCS, I mean, was it, did they automate, Because you had been military intelligence, did they automatically branch you, am I?

I was one of the lucky ones they did. There were some guys out of OCS that were given artillery. It's called branched detail because of that reverse pyramid. You know, they need some second lieutenants, but they don't need artillery captains. Right. They need artillery lieutenants. So, no, I was given military intelligence. And when I got to Fort Campbell, you know, I was lucky.

I was a little bit older. this would be 93 so you know I'm 30 I've got my senior wings I've got Ranger Tab and I'm a lieutenant walking into an infantry battalion So I got some credibility right and that helped a lot Right And you know Chris my uh the battalion two fed me to the lions With John Lair the battalion three and you know Colonel Ariis

And they just let me have it but it was good But it's like, hey, no, no pat answers. I don't want to hear doctrine. How long it's it going to take to reduce this obstacle? How long is it going to take for the enemy to get there? How can I do this? Where's their weak points? Their HPT, their HVT, and knowing all those acronyms and what they mean and then how to execute them.

So I, yeah, my success is based on my commanders in the past. So you were doing a lot of mission planning, contingency planning, things like that for the group. Yeah. So I went, so, and that's actually in the second battalion and second. brigade of the 101st and then I did a one year as a MI battalion or MI platoon leader XO for one JRTC rotation and then I went through the 160th I assessed for the 160th somewhat like you know some of the 160th guys Al Mackin they talk about you know you go through an assessment you go through green platoon green platoon for an MI guy is really easy like you

show it to work but the assessment's pretty rough for an MI guy because they're giving you a mission and planning, and it's all unclassified because you're doing it from home. Right. And then they're calling you about every six hour changing it, about 92 degrees. And so what you were planning to do, now you're having to change. Planted to do, now you're having to change. And I went in and did my briefing.

I made a 3D model, which later on said they'd never seen anybody do it because we were supposed to go into a compound and land, and I had to do all the, you know, point of entries and everything else. And, yeah, the assessment, like it says in the book, Colonel Lund Frelli looks right at me and says, what the fuck do you think I want a lieutenant for? I said, well, if you're looking for a rank, I ain't it. Yeah. But you're looking for experience.

I'm at. Yeah. And, yeah, I made it, and I stayed, I was the S2 for 26 months. Wow. And we did Desert Thunder, Desert Foll. A couple other deployments. Deployed down to Gabon for what used to be, you know, Zaire, Democrat, Republic of Congo, doing Neo that didn't happen.

We got to do some great courses and went to the seal, you know, Intel course and a bunch of other things and just kept learning more and more joint stuff. I want to take just two seconds to tell the viewers out there to please check out our Patreon. The link is down in the description. And for $5 a month, you get access to. to all these episodes ad-free, and we really appreciate all of you who support the channel. I also want to tell people about an article I just wrote about the Greenlight Program. This is the Special Forces Program where they jumped in backpack nukes from the 1960s to the late 1980s.

And the article is titled Red Menace, Black Ops, Green Light. And you can find it out there now. Go check it out. Let me know what you think of it. That's a good title. That was Sean Nailor. Yeah. came up with that title yeah yeah yeah it's a good title um jumping in a nuke yeah not really sure

i'd want to do that yeah and uh next this coming friday we're going to have one of the sources for that article bill flavon who was on a green light team he let a green light team and he'll be on the show on friday so we'll be able to talk to him about that that's got to be just crazy yeah i i mean i wonder how fast you'd have to run to get the minimum safe distance from that right That's a whole thing. Yeah. Okay, so you're, now by this time you're at group as a MI officer. And my detachment, right.

So I went over and talked to Colonel Higgins and I said, hey, you know, this is my chance to get an MI command, which is very hard to get. And I'd really like to do it. So were you a captain at this point in time? Yeah. Okay. I've been a, so let's see, I got commissioned in 94. So, yeah, I made captain in 97. Because I remember we were getting ready for Desert Thunder.

And we were going to go, we weren't going to go. And I was trying to get my dad down for the promotion. I remember talking to Kurtzell-Frelia, and I'm like, let's just pin it on. He goes, we don't do that. Promotions are for everyone else, not for you. Again, great commander. So, yeah, we ended up. So I, sorry, transition back to, good to fifth.

group I'm a captain probably up three years. My detachment got great sauday. I actually have a couple tap long tab soddies. They let them do it for a while they did phase 13 didn't do the MOS phase. And then MI and SF didn't get along so they quit that. Oh so they did so for a while they could would they have to go through SFAS and then no okay they kind of did their own kind of like a pre-ranger self-unit uh-huh once they sent it then you what did the phase one, the phase three, and then that was it. Very interesting. So that's, let's see.

So we did MI Detachment, and we went over for Desert Fox, and that's where one of the incidents in the book, you know, the SF team leader is talking about laying down the 50 Cal and the entire team is going to lay down in front of it. I was just like, you've got to be kidding me. and I kind of blurted it out and got pulled aside

and not really reprimanded but General Tony was like let's try to give him some slack I go that's nuts he goes yeah so we had a talk and then that's what he said he goes

you need to go to the Q course and I was like okay and my branch said no but I hadn't been in the advanced course yet so I went to selection in September of 99 and December I went to Fort Knox.

So now you're... In the pipeline. Yeah, you're rebranching also. Yeah, so... Yeah, because SF doesn't have an officer branch. Schools. So you're going to go to one of the combat arms. Oh, got you.

Infantry, armor, or artillery. Okay, so in 19... So 2000, I'm 37. I am not going to the infantry officer advance. course because everybody said it was just ranger school all over again you're doing mat ponchos and running around i'm like no so i went to the armor course and i'm really glad i did because the logistics planning for that helped me so much in over the next five years and yeah so i went to the advance course uh at fort knox you did cast cube for a couple weeks and then uh went to fort brag

and when did you graduate the q course So because I was already language qualified, we finished, I think, in May. I did Sears School, took two weeks leave, and I signed in to group in July of 2001. Funny story. So I sign in, they're like, hey, you're in Bravo Company. Bravo Company's commanded my major Dave Niro. Major Dave Nero was Captain Dave Nero when I was in MI Detachment Commander. So he's now my company commander twice.

Love the guy. So, yeah, I mean, you get to fifth group, the summer of 2001, having no idea what's coming. Where were you when 9-11 happened? So gate four is the main gate to Fort Campbell, and I'm at the cleaners picking up my uniforms, and I am driving into the gate, and the radio says a plane is hit,

like everybody else like sessna yeah some dumb pilot out there yeah and so pulled in um dropped my stuff off in team room went over to the chow hall everybody's sitting in there and we saw the second plane hit we're like oh shit okay and sat around what's going to happen what's going to happen nobody really knows, you know, it's the echelon's above nose bleeder talking what they're going to do. Base commander is actually General Cody. Former 160

regimental commander, now he, and an A.H.64 pilot. He's now the division commander. First time they've had an aviator. And he's got Apaches in the air loaded, armed, because nobody knows what's going on.

And they're like, go home. We'll let you know. So the next day we came back, so now it's Wednesday. Had you taken your team leader position yet? Yeah, I'm sorry, yeah. Probably within the first day. Okay. So, came in, you know, met everybody. Hey, yeah, great, you know. A little bit of background. There were eight of us. And, yeah, they should just go home. Next day it took forever to get on post.

And then they said, don't come back. Just stay home. until Monday. And Saturday I got a call saying, hey, you need to come into the group conference room. I'm like, what happened to come in Monday? I'm tearing apart my deck and everything else. But yeah, we come into the group conference room and they're like, gentlemen, you are leading your teams into Afghanistan. And Major Niro walks in and says, hey, you're now on 5'5. because your warrant has elected to have knee surgery and you're now below the number line so you and one of your weapons guys is going to 5-5

3 of your guys are going to 5-3 they went into baymion and my team sardin and the fox went to the B-team. And when you say below the number line you're saying there's a there was a minimum 3 threshold for the team size. Right. So they basically looked at the team across the board,

and Colonel Mulholland stated that all teams going in would be full at 12. So if you were below, eight below, you got parted out. So went over to 5'5. That put us at 11, and then we got an SDS guy. And then, you know, so that put us at 12. So that's how the teams all got filled up. Nobody had 12. They always joke around if you see a 12-man team take a picture.

And it's still like that. So this is how you ended up on triple nickel. Correct. But you walked on there still on a team leader position? Yeah. So 5-5. I'm a captain. You know, kind of a little bit of jocularity going on.

You know, brand new captain out of the Q course. Except for I'd been in 19 years and I'm 39 years old. you know, I'm older than the team sergeant. But, you know, you train up, you went through, we tried to figure out how to do, you know, your basic tactical drills, what's going to happen, you start

getting fed what the mission was, and we start parting it out, just like you normally do. This is still at Fort Campbell. You guys go in the isolation facilities. Second, but now, our battalion is actually deployed to Jordan doing early victor. But it was only a couple, it was the other

two companies and the battalion staff. So the first battalion staff is working with us, doesn't know us from Adam, and we're trying to figure out what's going on. Nobody's been put into isolation like that in decades. So we just start planning. And it was an open planning at the beginning. We could go home and then we got to, I don't know, three or four days prior to deploying and then we were locked down. What was that? What was that? process like I mean because you guys deployed to use Bekistan right? Correct yeah we land at K2 and they're just building as fast as they can and they're like go lay down over there and there was a pile of dirt over there and they're like when the sun comes up we'll figure out what to do

just about sunrise and somebody comes over yelling like what are you doing like we were told to lay over here they're like no that's all the depleted uranium you guys aren't supposed to be near it. That's awesome. Part of the chaos. Yeah. That's my book. So the whole team's over there now.

Walk us through a little bit. Are you guys jocking up to go on this mission and the infiltration? So you're just a sponge because you're pulling it every single time you're pulling in information because there's not a lot of information. You know, you're getting fed from other agencies. They don't even know what the weather is going to be. We're getting 60 degrees. We're getting 6 degrees.

We're getting snow hot. So I'm either going in full snivel gear and going to be a heat casually, or I'm going to have it packed and I'm going to have a frostbite. Right. So we don't know what's going on. We don't know. It's just, it's fluid. And, you know, and I talked to Colonel Mulholland last September about it.

That man had the hardest job in the world. because he's got four stars telling him what he's doing wrong. He's got team leaders, team sergeants going, why do I not know anything? Right. You know, and it was really good to talk to him about that because I don't envy that man at all. And he was operating under pressure,

but also in a vacuum, just like everybody else. And, you know, it's like you're in Ranger school and you got your leadership role, PL time. You're trying to get it out as fast as possible, but you're head swimming and people are feeding you stuff. Right. It's just, it's time. Yeah. So, yeah, we were planning the best we could. And then we're getting, we're getting, hey, you're going in civilian clothes. We don't have any civilian clothes. Hey, you're going in green BDUs. You're going in ACUs. You're going in, you know, chocolate chips. You're going, you're like, they're sending a guy down to Uzbek, you know,

the Karshi Kana Bad, and he's coming back with Fubu wear. And I'm not joking. You know, I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. I mean, there's a picture. I don't know. I'm going to put it online because it's got other guys' faces in it, but we looked like the French resistance from World War II. Yeah.

You know, we got chappos, and I'm like, we're going to die. Right, right. So how did the infiltration finally take place? And, like, what was your conception of the mission by the time you deployed? So this was the first time that I really realized the value of being. being the S-2 and the 160th. Because now I'm talking to the flight lead, and he was a BMQ pilot,

basic mission qualified when he first came in when I was the S-2. So we had grown together, and we had learned, as I was learning about the aircraft, that aircraft don't have flares, chas, and pods. Pods are on submarines, so I don't brief that anymore. You know, that was one of my briefings, one of JRTC as an S-2. They're like, that's a submarine.

I'm like, okay. So I'm learning all about the 47. and the factors and its capabilities and everything else. And he's briefing me and I already know that. And so we're working on, okay, how am I, we're going to get in there. We've got to go across the Hindu Kush Mountains. Hindu Kush Mountains have actually stop weather patterns. They're so tall.

Well, 47 can only go up so tall. You go above 10,000 feet, you start losing oxygen. And they only have enough oxygen for the crew chief and the pilots. So now we're talking about going in, and my team isn't going to have any oxygen, and we're going to be up there for a good 45 minutes with little to no oxygen. And so when we're pushing up there, and I remember Joe telling me, he's like, I don't think we're going to make it. Do you want to be put down on the mountain?

Or do you want to be put down on this side of the mountain? And I'm going through all my intel briefings and remembering, this is on the north side of the Salon Pass. There was one tunnel that goes through there that gets the Bogum, and that comes up to Condus. Or Gardez. It's one of the one that's up in the north. I think it's condues. Yeah, yeah.

But still, there was a unit there. There was a Taliban, you know, at the north side because they were, they thought we were going to have to go through the slum pass. So I'm like, don't put us down there. And luckily he didn't because that's exactly what I remember. But we could not punch through, so we went back. Right. Was it the weather, why couldn't you guys make it?

Was there not enough, like, could they not get enough lift? Or was it the weather? No, no. No, no. The Shooks can go up to, you know, 20,000 plus feet. But the problem is, if you, the weather, the clouds, you can't see. They were just starting out with a multi-mode radar, but you don't fly when you can't see in a helicopter. It's not like you can punch up to 35,000 feet and just go across.

Right. You're in a helicopter. And these are the best pilots in the world. And so when they're saying, hey, we can't do this. I'm trying to figure out how we're going to do it. So I'm going back through my S2 time. and I'm talking to him and I'm trying to work it out and we're starting to get pretty lightheaded

because I'm not on on the oxygen. I'm like, we need to go back. We just, we cannot do this. And so we did. And then they came down under the clouds. They had an engagement with one of the mini guns and just high-tailed it out of there. And so it was about, it was a couple days later

that we finally were successfully to go in. That's why we'll always say, we're arguably the first team in because we actually went in but we didn't land right that's a fun jocularity between teams so when uh you guys finally got on the ground i mean what was like the mission statement that the group commander gave to you guys what were you you know it's funny because it's three quarters of a page that's it purpose key tasks and state to defeat the Taliban and remove, you know, al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. The key tasks are link up with the Northern Alliance, train them up when the snow melts, start an offensive,

capture Kabul. End state is, Kabul is captured. That's it. Which we did very quickly. You guys did very quickly. We didn't wait for the snow to melt. We didn't even wait for it to snow. Right.

We were so successful. going in that nobody had the patience, as again talking to Colonel Moholland, the pressure from above was just too much. You've got to go. Yeah, yeah. Your teams are in. Why are they going to wait six months? So, you know, we're, so we do.

We link up and, you know, you got to do your bona fides. And, you know, remember, they're tribes. We've learned a lot about the Afghans. You know, they are tribal and they want to know, you know, they don't, they do the small talk. They drink tea. And they figure out what you are and are you trustworthy and everything else. So that's

what had to be built. And then all the other ancillary stuff that motivated them to actually move and want to do it. So you guys get on the ground, link up with the Northern Alliance. And then...

Who were you guys assigned to? So Masoud was the big guy. Right. And Fahim Kham. was his security guy. Didn't do so well. Massoud was killed on the 10th. Yeah.

So that's who we had to link up with. So we had to link up with Baham Khan and his generals. And everything was in, again, layers, peeling back the layers of security and the bona fides, I would say. Because we linked up with these guys, and we linked up with this guy, and we slowly moved down the Hindu Kush mountains,

the mountain range, until we got to the point where we were. Because at the time, the Northern Alliance had the northern part of Bogram Air Base, the airfield, and the Taliban had the southern part. So really the airfield was split in half. That was kind of the flaw, so to speak. Because the first time we went down, a couple days later, we finally have gotten down to our safe house, the final safe house.

And we would get into Pajeros, covered up in a blank, and we would go down to air base where the tower was. And we would actually crawl up there and start identifying where the Taliban was. And that's when we started the cast from there. And figuring out who was Taliban and other things that went on and realizing that there were Arab Taliban and Afghan Taliban, which was a big difference.

Yeah. Did they know at the time, were they planning on using Boghrens? as what it eventually became. And did they want to minimize, like, battle damage to it, the Americans? I don't know. Okay. I know because the flot was there, they weren't cratering it. Yeah.

As much as they did Kabul Airport. Uh-huh. That level was not down to us, but it was start calling Cass. Uh-huh. Start figuring out where the Taliban is and start calling Cass. And we did. Every time we found groups in pockets and we just started laying waste. And so how long, I mean, how long were you out there at Bagram?

I think by 45 days later, we had captured Kabul. That was, correct me if I'm wrong, that was kind of the end point for your ODA's mission, right? When you got to Kabul. We were done. And, you know, other areas were faster. Some areas were not. There were more squirmishes. And then as time came down and more of the, you know,

IPB, the intel preparation of the battlefield was done, more teams were going in. Because I think by the time we had stopped populating the country, we probably had 45 ODAs throughout. Wow, wow. That's significant, really. Yeah, it was probably the largest in quite a while, not ever. And we were postured for success.

And how was, I mean, with that many ODAs, or even the buildup to that many, ODAs over that time. How were the logistics and support for you guys from the American side? Just like an SF is supposed to be. You're going to have an SFOB. You're going to have Aobs and everything comes down to log points. Log points turn to distribution points, distributions to teams. So you guys didn't outrun your Hibites because you were advancing so quickly? No, not, no, because it really, it wasn't, you weren't advancing. You were just pushing out. We had the nodes. Uh-huh. So we had Bogram.

Missouri, Sharif, Harat, and Kandahar, and then you just started pushing out. Interesting. And then, you know, the guys that went into Baymian, which was into the mountains, the other direction from Bogram, and then condues and Gardez and all those other... Jalalabad and Jacobabad and all those other...

You just started populating out. So, yeah, you just... You never outran it? But you also did a lot of local procurement too. All your rice and your goats and water, almost all those places have some type of natural water source so they don't live there. Right. You know, they don't have a Phoenix. Right.

If there's no river there, they don't put people there. Right. So, you know, it was pretty good. I mean, we did it good. Yeah. I mean, what did that feel like when you guys got down? Because it's that picture of triple nickel, that at least in my mind it's fairly famous

if it's not famous to everyone watching, you guys standing in front of the embassy, the American embassy in Kabul. It's just another team picture. You know, there were caretakers. I still have some of the business cards that the ambassador left. You know, I still got a stationary.

It's just kind of surreal. You know, there were certain areas the initial push scared the crap out of the Taliban and they ran. There were fights. There were firefights. And there were some teams that got into hell of firefights. But then there are some teams that just didn't. So the initial collapse

was a false success. Is it accurate to say that for your team? Most of the action was calling in casts and acting as a coordinator for the Northern Alliance? Yeah, I mean, the guys did the fights going down, but it wasn't trench warfare. Sure, sure. And, you know, the guys did great. All them did from the warrant, the team sergeant, all that, you know, they did what they were supposed to do.

You know, but then idle mines in the city and it's not so good. And how long were you guys down in Kabul before they finally said, like, okay, triple nickels out, like you've done enough, if you did your mission. Well, I got pulled back up to Bogram and where Major Neh was, the AOB, and then started working with Task Force Bowie when General Harold came in, which was part of Anaconda. Okay. And then the team went back to K2,

and then the first, it's either the third or the 13th of January, first group guy was killed. He was an 18-Echo commo sergeant that was supporting another agency. Are you talking about Chapman? Yeah. Yeah. He was killed by,

I wouldn't say it's an errant bullet, but ambushed. And was shot and instantly killed. And they needed somebody to outrank him and escort his body back. And so I was told, grab your stuff, you're going now. So we left Bogram, went to K2.

I had to shave, get a haircut, take a shower, change clothes. And then we went to Launch Tool. And there I met his team sardin and passed him on that way. And then I went back, but I went to K2 and I did land decomfliction. Because we had so many problems with ground for infertion. air to ground verification and stuff like that. That's what I do. And now it's getting so built up.

I mean, everyone wants to get in on the war, right? Well, okay, so when I left Bogram Air Base, there was 135 people there. I think at its height there was 15,000, 20,000? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's a little different. Yeah.

So getting back to the United States, I mean, it sounds like you didn't really have a whole lot of time to process what you had just been through before you get sucked into the next adventure. We got back Everybody just kind of went on leave You know, you did your sensitive items, accountability, all that Everybody went on leave

And then All the people started coming back Major Nero came back And he said, hey, you know, do you want to stay on 5-5? Do you want to go back to 5-1? And I wanted to go back to 5-1 Because those were my original guys. Those were the team sergeant that I wanted to work with.

And we were going to get plused up. So we got plused up to like 11 with new guys out of Bragg, out of the Q course. But we got a little bit of leave, and then we started needing to do desert train-up. So we packed up our Humvees and we went to El Paso, Texas to practice how to suck. Right, right. Digging hide sites and everything else. We knew vaguely what our missions were, like, hey, you're going to do a reconnaissance. And, you know, pretty much that's what everybody.

you was going to do some former reconnaissance. Didn't know how you were going to infiltrate. Didn't know how you were going to put eyes on target. It wasn't until October, November that I actually got the first inkling of our mission. So were they already, because Iraq was March of 2003, when did you first, like, get, were you pre? So we're 2002. Yeah, so are you prepping for Iraq or do you think you're going back to Afghanistan? No, we know we're going to Iraq. Okay. So you're prepping for it then okay we are prepping and figuring out stuff everything from you know how to do vehicle recut self-recovery the new vehicles they just come out with the GMVs which is the ambulance frame heftier hydraulic winch you know

when it's empty it bounces around like a dune buggy and when it gets about 10,000 pounds it is an awesome maneuver vehicle so yeah we need know we're going and we just don't know what and nobody knows what and what's funny is now coming back from Afghanistan all the new team leaders are guys that I went through the Q course with because I didn't take you have to go to language school I went to Afghanistan so now they're all talking about how they lost you know I missed out in the war and I said you've got it coming yeah and they did so we prep for Iraq like said we all went out to El Paso did all the desert train up, trying to figure out that self-recovery, putting in, you know, logistics requests.

I didn't just wait for the... At what time did you guys receive, you know, an op-order to conduct a strategic reconnaissance mission? I think it was October, November. I actually got that I was going to do, my team was going to do a special reconnaissance in the Karbala Gap. and the reason why. Because third ID was going to have to go through that little narrow piece of land between the Bar Al-A-Mill, see a salt. There's a lake.

And the date fields in the Euphrates River, or they're going to have to go all the way around. So they want somebody in there to figure out what's in there, identify up to the last minute, and they say it's going to take third ID maximum of three days. So you've got to get in there before the war starts because they're going to be right there. which if you studied Desert Storm, you knew that wasn't going to happen.

And having gone to the officer advanced course, knowing tanks and logistics, you knew it wasn't going to happen. I'm telling you, all this stuff just plays right into a story. Just out of your curiosity, before we move on in Iraq, because you mentioned all these new captains showing up saying, we missed Afghanistan, like we missed the war. And, you know, now you're prepping for Iraq. But in your mind, like knowing what the key tasks of the Afghan mission were and then, you know, knowing how fast you guys got there, what had happened, did you have, like, how long did you expect us at that point in time to stay in Afghanistan?

When we're in our kids. No, I do. I mean, I thought, I had one vision that they were going to say, find a safe house. you're going to be here for a couple years until you build out until you do what ended up being VSO Village Stability Operations building your tribe

making sure everything's safe but powers it be you're like yep okay we're good I was home by Memorial Day but what I mean though is like how like the war effort was very successful from you guys did you expect the large conventional follow on

Did you expect to be there for the next 20 years? Or did you expect that it would be over shortly after you left? Well, the thing you find out, and I'm sure you guys are the same way, what happens in your bubble is all you know. Yeah. And over time, you start hearing more and more stories. I'm like, why did this happen? Why did that?

And one of the greatest statements I've heard and I use is we weren't in Afghanistan for 20 years. we were in Afghanistan one year at a time 20 times because when I listen to stories of everybody it is the same thing every time

we don't hear the histories we don't know what it's it we didn't take that team and put them right back into Gardez every single time we didn't just rotate two guys out at a time keeping that team in our Gardez so you're building that tribe's trust

and just keep it going Nope. New team leader. New team sergeant. New team this. New civil affairs team. You know, it just,

and we know, it wasn't the right way. Yeah, it's interesting. So let's walk us through the infiltration piece for OIF. So,

take it as, you know, again, the advanced course at Fort Knox, I'm figuring out how the tanks are going to go through. How am I, first of all,

how am I going to get there? Right. And nobody can tell me. Am I going, you know, am I doing a C-130? I'm going to do air land and a dust landing. And then I remember back when I was in the 160, the Air Force doesn't do that. They say that a C-5 and a C-17 can do dust landings and C-130s. They won't. Right.

So I'm like, okay, that's out. So am I going to go on a rat line? Am I going to dress up like a bedouin? I stopped, they said no beards, but I started growing my Navy SEAL mustache. I mean, I'm like from the 70s. I'm all the way down here. I'm not cutting my hair. And I'm getting harassed by Sar Major.

I go, Sar Major, do you know how I'm getting infilled? He's like, no. I go, I can cut my hair, but I can't grow it. Right. And my guys are going to do the same thing. You don't know. Right. So I don't know whether we're going to rat line.

I don't know whether I'm going to camels, horses, goats, or by foot. And so we're just prepping. And I know that here's where I'm going to hide. and I want to go there about midnight. So I'm going to go this far back and put my remain over day site and then do sequencing all the way back until I can infiltrate far enough away.

So I started planning that. And it was funny, one of the guys, I don't know, 160th guy was talking about this software. It's called Falcon View. It's open source. It's not Georgia Tech. It is an unbelievable playing software.

I planned my infiltration route while I was on staff duty. From a laptop, I took from the S2 shop that I had purchased when I was the MID commander. Yeah. And I am literally going through then on a Zaksport, just going through trying to figure out all the layers in how to do an infiltration

and figuring out where the main lines of communication, staying away from the main lines of communication. Where are the wadis? Where are the riverbeds? Where are the sources of water that I've got to avoid? Where are the, you know, look at, Because there's a certain image that you can see where cattle or some type of animal has probably walked for the last thousand years, if not 10,000 years. This is Mesopotamia.

Yeah. Your Garden of Eden's right over here. Right. You know, so you can see where these things walk. So you're going to have to avoid this. So I'm going through all that stuff. And finally, so I don't know whether I'm taking Toyota, Tacoma's in. You know, we talk to Toyota and like, hey, if we take all the doors.

are like don't take all the doors off because you lose the integrity of the cabin you got to keep at least two doors on because of this is i'm like okay and then you know or a toyota highlux am i getting 53s a lot of 53 i can't take any of this stuff i can take that stuff and i get a 47 i can put anything on there you know c130 i can put even more stuff on so we're just going through all the possibilities and while we were in isolation in Kuwait that's what we're going through and i remember being told like okay hey hey we got the orders you're going and I go up to the S3 shop and that's when General

Granger, whatever briefs about where he'd put an SF team, yeah, third ID's going to have to go right here and he puts his finger right exactly at my recon site. I'd put an SF team right here. He's on CNN. Yeah. CNN. The night before I'm going in.

Thank you very much. Yeah. I'm like, whatever. But yeah, so they're like, hey, you're going to take a C-130 over to this point. You're going to link up with 3rd Battalion 160th. I go, well, who's the commander? Bob Welch. Bob Welch is a brother of another guy, another Welch, a great friend of mine, the S3 in our

battalion when I was the S2. And so we're going to grab the 47s and we're going down to RR to refuel and then we're going to punch in. And so yeah, we land. I go over and talk to Colonel Welch. I've been to his wedding. So again, it starts clicking. and we start doing all the planning and I find the flight lead and we're trying to figure it out.

You know, and I've got to do your what's called the helicopter factor. If you need three, you make four, but something's going to happen. We were so heavy. Every single one of our home vs was 14,000 pounds. Wow. And they had done some maneuver and broke a landing gear. So one of the teams had one of my vehicles had to come off that V, off that helicopter and go on another one. And we went down into RR to do the refueling, and that's when we were, you know that point in Top Gun Maverick, where those T-Lands are going?

We were flying under that. Under the Tomahawk cruise missiles. Under the Tomahawk. I mean, if I saw that movie, that would have been exactly what I saw. I could see those under my nods. Wow. And sitting on the tailgate of a 47. Like several hundred of them going overhead. Yeah.

That's fucking insane. It's amazing. Yeah. And it's actually one of the crew chiefs that I knew from before. The whole thing is just, you know, you're like, this is awesome. Sure, in that moment, yeah. So just to lay out sort of like the table of organization and equipment a little bit. So 12 million ODA going behind enemy lines to do this SR mission.

350 miles behind enemy lines. And you have three, is it three GMVs? I got three gun trucks. Taking how many birds over the board? border? Three? So three plus two daps. Okay. Okay. And I don't know if the little birds cleared the trenches first, or they did. But you heard a lot of, fhr! Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so the daps were leading. And we flew in, and by the way it worked out, we were just going to do one remain over day site. And so they got us up and they let us go.

One of the DAPs said they saw enemy 400 meters this direction, and I never heard anything anymore. You did it to me again because they did that in Afghanistan. Oh, you got an enemy over here. Anyway, we went down to just like in Ranger's School. You conduct seals? Yeah. You sit around, hear nothing, see nothing, smell nothing. All right, let's go.

Start them up and let's go. And so we started moving over the rain over day site, and everything in the desert looks like the enemy. behind any line. Yeah. Contact, 30 o'clock! Like, okay, it's not contact unless they're shooting. Right. You can say the enemy.

Right. Or a car. Let's just say the enemy. Let's not say contact unless they're shooting. Because we were a Pucker Factor 4 the entire time. Yeah. You don't know who you're going to run into. And there was no way anybody was going to save us.

Yeah. Did you guys have any air stacked at the time, or were you? No, because everything was going on at that time. Right. You've got the border crossing way down south. I know they're doing some attack runs. The Tomahawks just hit. Yeah.

And that's always preparatory strike. Right. So you got infiltrated the same night that they were pushing across the berm. I honestly don't remember. Yeah. I know it was the same night as the shock and all. Yeah. Yeah.

It must have been right around there. Right around. A couple days before, right around. So that first night, you guys, maneuver your vehicles you get to your first run site? We go to Remain Over Day site. It is basically a depression. There's a picture in your book, right?

Yeah. Yeah, there's a depression, and if you walk out there, the only thing you could see is if a guy was standing up out of the turret, which was perfect. We're Remain Over Day site, and I've got deja vu, just like Colonel Connor. My battalion commander at the time was a team leader, did an SR mission during Desert Storm. Okay.

And they were the ones that had the Bedouins. And I popped my head up. Actually, I don't. Shane, one of my bravos says, we got people. Now, they're far enough away. They're about a half mile away. But they're also upwind. Right.

So we're not downwind. So if they've got a dog, they're not going to smell us and everything else. So we're upwind, which is very blessed. And we just, I was like, just keep an eye out for them. So we wait till it's dark again, and we start rolling up all the camo, and we start, we do seals again, and we start them all up, and we take off for the gap. Yeah. And how about how long do you think that movement took that second night? Forever.

Yeah. Because in your book, I mean, you're worrying that the sun's coming up, right? Well, for the rain over day side, we're worrying the sun's coming up, was that one. Okay. But one of our trucks got stuck. And behind us are headlights. Somebody is following us. Whether they heard it, they saw the tire marks or whatever, somebody's heard us.

So I've got the rear gun focused on them, and we're figuring out how to pull them out. Remember, I told you we have hydraulic winches. When the engine overheats, the hydraulic winch shuts down. That was an after-action review right there. Oh, hydraulic winches. Yeah. So what we ended up doing was turning a truck around, using a hydraulic wrench from a working vehicle,

and pulled them out, and then they were able to pull, and then we just kept on moving. You know, got into Parker Factor and everything else. But, yeah, hydraulic winch, overheating engine, not good. It's tough for those desert environments like Afghanistan and Iraq also, because, you know, here in the States, it would be rare. Like, we have roads everywhere, right? And people drive on those roads where in these other countries, it's not uncommon for civilians to like drive across a non-road area or whatever else, like out in a rural area.

So it's very hard sometimes to identify like if people are out there just doing a river crossing because it's the quickest way between villages, you know, or if it's a military element that's like following you or looking for you or whatever else. But you have so you as a former as too you always think like the enemy. Yeah. Where are they? Where are they moving? Yeah. Who are your threats? And a lot of times it's just civilians.

Yeah. You've got Bedouins everywhere. Yeah. So then you're looking for animal tracks. Yeah. Water sources. Shade, the date palm forest and stuff like that. So you're trying.

You can't avoid everything. Right. But you can bypass. Right. You can dog leg a lot of things. and that's what we did. So one of the reasons it took you so long, not just because the truck got stuff,

but because you're not just going from A to B. You're making this circuitous. We are on a very circuitous route. I mean, I think it was 54 points in the E-TREX, I put it. Wow. Because I wanted to avoid all of that stuff. You don't need any high ground, which is where they're going to be lazy

and they're going to sit up on. Right. And whether they've got their Theriah phone, and it's just a better one. He's like, hey, I want my 100 dinar. I just saw a truck come by at 1 a.m. You know, so you're avoiding all of that stuff. So tell us about maneuvering the vehicles into your LPOP.

Like, it sounds like you actually identified a pretty effective place from the Map or Constance. Again, by luck, by luck. So a couple funny things when you're doing translations and having been a former linguist, the gap we were told is heavily mined well when you're a defensive guy that means they're putting landmines everywhere what we later find out it was heavily mined for gypsen okay right great and it's an old gypson mind so now it's an artillery impact area so yeah so i i'd seen the divvets seen the depressions and everything else. I'm like, okay, that's probably a place we're going to play. We're going to avoid this power plant, cement plant over here. There's this road on the southern edge

that in satellite imagery looks like an oil trench. These guys are U.S. analysts. I don't know. Oh, they filled it with oil. What are you talking about? This isn't this. This isn't 1990. They're not filling this with oil. It just can absorb. We find out it was an asphalt road. I'm like, how do you? I mean, it looks like, radial imagery. It looks like oil. Because that's what asphalt's made of.

But I'm like, how do you miss all the construction equipment that it took to make this road? So anyway, we come across the road, we get down. And it's a great height site. I mean, it is, we get down in the river and we did a hard turn. Chris found it and walked in. And I mean, it is probably 10 to 15 feet taller than the video. vehicles and we can come in and we can get all three in a kind of a chicken foot pattern we've got perfect camouflage we've got those camouflage and we just start putting up we do our little perimeter

you know ranger ranger base operations and you know just start putting up eyes on and try and watching the road that goes up to south watching the road that goes from east to west and just looking did you guys like dig spider holes or do hide sites you didn't have to where we were at We started pushing out patrols at night. The problem is we didn't want to get too separated because we're just in the middle of the day. And I had the same faith in Iraq that I had in Afghanistan that we weren't going to get casts for 35 to 40 minutes. That's a long time to be shot at. And I wasn't going through that again.

And because all the vehicles were defilade, we couldn't even use a vehicle to help. Right. You know, the walls are like this. Right. So, yeah, it was on your belly, crawling up at night and then just looking, and then, you know, after what, day four was when the Shemal hit, Jessica Lynch era, you know, that big... We've talked about it on here a few times. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, we were in full mask and everything else and just... It was great. Yeah. We were Christmas dust cookies in that we were covering the guns, just trying to survive. I've got Oakley's with pits in them from the pit from the sand. And there are a few other like, well, maybe in retrospect they're funny.

There's some problems with the FBCB2. So yeah, the Blue Force Tracker. So because we're in the defilade and the takeoff angle, just go to the end, the takeoff angle is like at 9 degrees or 10 degrees. So that first night, we wake, you know, we're sending in our Angus report.

We come back up. they're like hey we've been trying to call you like dude we're right here they're like we thought you were dead because nobody can see a blue force tracker so we had to dismount one and stick it up there because again we were so low and from then on we were getting calls from that attack helicopter regiment that came through british tornadoes everybody else said hey what are you doing down there our jtack is talking to everybody yeah we see a blue first track We thought it was something weird. We didn't know anybody was up here.

And they're just talking. And that's also when third ID was slowed due to the dust storm. That's what I got word afterwards that President Bush in Rumsfeld kept asking. They're like, hey, how's that team? And CENTCOM is like the only good thing that was happening was there was an SF team out in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. And it's still blinking. It's scary that these air units, they were.

passing by you and saying that they didn't know anybody was up there because if they would have it's just from that blue force tracker but the thing is they don't have blue force right right and stinky had his if but he has to be transmitting when it's i a fifth or he has to turn it on because those things don't have batteries for 10 days and our three-day mission ended up being nine and a half days yeah and then the other uh you know maybe humorous only in retrospect is uh the batteries and the vehicle's dying. So, yeah. So,

because you're so far in front of everybody, and diesel engines are not quiet. We didn't run them. We also weren't run. We were only running one radio, and it was a man pack. But there's a trickle drain

on your Humvees. And they were dead. When it came time to come, it was like, click, click, and you know that sound. You're going to get your car. Not good. Click, click, click.

I'm like, okay, what are we going to do? And for some reason, when I left the house of Fort Campbell, I grabbed a spool of wire. And we started doing everything in parallel and series of all the vehicles together. Daisy chained them together. Daisy chained together and started that one. And then moved it over to the second one, started that one, moved it over the third one.

Because you don't have jumper cables. Right. You have slave cables. That was another AAR comment. You can't jump something like that if you don't have jumper cables. Yeah. So, yeah. You were out there flapping.

That's why, you know, the Immaculate Mission is what it's called in John Greshon's book, Beyond Hellenback. Okay. So it's in there, it's like, I don't know, the five, six, or seven greatest SF missions. And that's what he goes, if it wasn't for that, you had to go. greatest mission ever. I go, it was still a good mission. Right. You know, we screwed up on the radios, but it was still a good mission. But you were still able to self-recover, though. Like you didn't, like you didn't have to blow the vehicles in place and hump it out because you couldn't get it. No, well, we weren't going to do that because the next couple of days we went from bad to

worse. Yeah. So, and then tell us about, you know, when Third ID finally does push up to your location, how your mission starts to change. So, you know, you have to do a passage of lines somehow. And I knew that I wasn't going to go with all these young privates driving these 54-ton tanks coming forward and got gunners and everything else. I am not popping my head out and going, we're here. So we're going to do a passage of lines by bypass. We're going to stay underground. Well, we're going to move from where we're at farther south. We're going to stay underground.

And then once the lead element gets passed, they're going to stay. stop and then we're going to do an his lid laser in the one rope them in and rope them in um so we did that we got there early um ended up going through a minefield which we didn't realize a real a minefield a real minefield yeah yeah a real minefield in fact chris the fox uh actually walked us through it yeah and uh so we got there early all the engines were cold and they could see us on thermals. I go, because we're defilade. I said, just look for the islid.

And they saw it, and then they brought up a scout section, and we briefed the lead company commander, then the lead battalion commander, the lead brigade commander, right now all over where we had identified the minefields that we saw. And I told him, I go, this is what we've seen. There may be others, just because I'm not writing, it doesn't mean, because I'm not putting that on myself. I'm not going to say, hey, you know, you said there were no minefields.

No, I said I didn't see one. So they went through pretty successful. They actually were able to plow those minefields through, and they went through the dam and, you know, all the way to Baghdad. Did they have dozer, like construction dozers? They had dozers, but it was really for talk stuff. They had with the tanks, they had the mine clearing plows and rollers and chains. I mean, all the stuff you've ever seen in conventional, they had all that stuff. But the dozers were mainly just to dig burns around talks.

How were you guys able to identify the minefields? What were the telltale signatures? On the way in, we just drove. The luck of God is what that was. And on the way out, you just saw them. Now, the hasty ones, so what we did, they just did hasty. I mean, you saw foreign military mines is what I will just leave it at that. All those countries that signed that, well, we're not going to,

use mines or they traded them for oil. Yeah, yeah. They were all over the place and literally just sat there. Okay. On roads, some semi-buried in the dirt, tickle sticks up top, all over the place. Rarely did we see any except on our Exville that were actually buried. And then after you got reintegrated back in with American forces, you're no longer behind enemy lines.

It sounded like there's a lot of frustration on your part. It's like, what's my next mission? what am I supposed to be doing? So, yeah, it, I mean, we're not even in the fog of war. We're just, we're back into chaos. That's why I, that's why I had to put this in the book. You know, Linda Robinson wrote the book, Masters of Chaos. I'm just a disciple of chaos.

I'm not the master of it. It's just crazy. Yeah, we were, so we'd been around Carbola for so long, and Third ID had basically did a blocking position. And then we found out the 101st was to do a really, leaf in place. But the brigade commander, third ID, has no idea what's going up. So I'm calling and, you know, Fifth Group's like, hey, go talk to the 101st. I'm like, well, you know, you don't want to look up the CEOI or anything, the phone book and I can't find anybody. So literally we bounce around the next

three days trying to find them. And nobody knows or nobody's going to tell us. You know, and the brigade talk and then the division tack and then division talk, which is like four circus tense, you know, I got colonels going, well, who are you? I'm like, well, I'm the team leader. I've been here for two weeks. You know, I'm just trying to help. And we couldn't figure it out. And then went back up, and when I was talking to the brigade commander, that's when the 101st did their air assault inside, and then that was the Battle of Karbala. And I'm trying to recall from the book, it sounded like you guys ended up inside one of the cities, right? So yeah, after

the clearing the surrender of all the people, the fighters in Carbola, we actually went into the city. And that was when they said, okay, you need to basically start up the city. Figure out who the government is. Start

them up. Figure out who the mayor is. Excuse me. Vet them. Figure out, get it standing up because you're not leaving until they can stand on their own. So we went in, saw this one area, double-walled compound, ended up being Carbale University, pulled in there. They were waving us down. We went in and talked to them and we're figuring out why they were waving us because they

were getting looted. People were coming in, breaking stuff, stealing computers, and they're like, will you stay here? So, you know, Alex, Team Sergeant and I were talking about it. It's like, hey, it's a double-walled compound. We just got to figure out how to defend it because we've still got to do Green Bray stuff. you know and the bravos did great setting it up got a couple of the local families to live there were huts in each of the cardinal direction corners so the payment for them was hey we'll give you enough money for food you tell us what's going on and you you fire your gun if anybody comes over the wall don't shoot them just fire the gun and then we'll come running and then we started

working with the school and then the conventional forces as they came through trying to Because, you know, 11 SF guys can either defend themselves or they can do operations. You can't do both. Right. So that's when as teams were going, units were coming through, we had 82nd, we had the Marines, we had, you know, brigades and battalions were coming through in exchange for, you know, getting them chicken dinners or having a place for them to sleep in a protected area, they would pull security for us. So we did that for probably the next three months. Wow. standing up, you know, vetting.

You know, because again, at the beginning, you had, the DIA had somebody who should be in charge of Carbola. And the State Department had an idea who should be in charge of Karbala and the Department of Defense. And I'm like, okay, how about the locals? Right. So that's when we started vetting and, you know, side Yusef. So a little bit of Lawrence of Arabia here.

It was crazy. Yeah. And how were there multiple, like, families, vying for influence? Like, how are you figuring, how are you navigating the social situation to set up the next carball of government? You know the way they do your security clearance?

You pick your friends. Yeah, right. Then they go talk to your friends and say, who is his friends? You don't go talk to them, you talk to the third ring. Right. That's the way you do it.

That's the way we would start doing it. Like, hey, do you know this guy? No, I don't know him. Well, he says he's the mayor. Oh, he's not the mayor. Or I don't know who the mayor was. There's some people that just didn't know. Right.

You know, and then, you know, you had restaurant owners and this, and people had agendas and stuff like that. And you just had to filter through it and figure out. And what we found with Side Yusef was he was basic, I think it was like the assistant mayor. Nobody knows what happened to the mayor. But everybody liked him. And then, you know, the police chief, well, they didn't like the police chief.

Well, everybody doesn't know where he went either. but this guy should be the police chief. Then we would go ask other people, then we'd ask Saidouzaid. We're like, okay, we think this police chief. Like, well, I don't like him. Would he be a good police chief? And he's like, yes.

Okay, okay, then he's a police chief. I don't care if you like him. We're not doing this game again. I'm doing it like I did in Afghanistan. Yeah, it's like, you know, high school student government or something. Yeah. Everybody's your friend. And then if he's not your friend, then he's, you know, a bathist party.

Like, no, just stop. Right. You know, it's like modern day swatting is what people are doing. Oh, I don't like Jack. We're going to swat his house tonight. Oh, my God, there's a lady screaming. She's going to die. You know, no.

That's what they were doing. Yeah. We're doing it all the time. Yeah. So, yeah, for the next 90 days, we were just trying to figure out and let them stand their own government up. And, you know, and I got a hold of Major Nero, or, Major Loman, actually, this is now Major Loman, the new company commander. What was our exit criteria?

Well, he wasn't in Afghanistan. He's like, I don't know what you're talking about. Well, Major Nero, again, my company commander twice, is now the Battalion S3. So I'm like, hey, what's the exit criteria? Right. It goes, you need to do an area assessment. And with all the hierarchy, who's in charge, where they are, pictures of everybody and everything else. And I go, done deal.

Because the civil affairs team had just arrived from 19th group. And so they were doing it. And I said, okay, I get to leave when we've done all this stuff. So I have about seven megabytes. And at the time, that's a lot of information. He goes, I got five. I go, you get to seven and we'll trade and I can leave. How long are you here?

He goes, I'm here for 12 months. I go, okay. I had all the hierarchy. He had all the area assessment stuff. We started sending it back, and it was just shutting. down the PSC 5 and some Major Nero's like, I trust you, come on back. And we were balls in the walls leaving while Fourth ID was coming up Pipeline Road. Because remember, they had come through Turkey.

We're denied, so they had to come all the way around. But, yeah, just, you know, just buy the seizure of pants. You're standing stuff up. It's just by the book. And then heading back home. And then heading back home. And then, so when I went back home, that was my 26th, month as an ODA team leader, which is a lot of team time.

A lot of team time. Yeah. To combat tours, which is pretty lucky. Um, so they made me the battalion S4 for about six months at a battalion budget of $500,000 and I spent $1.2 million because it was GWAT funding and they didn't say no. Right. Um, and that, that's when I started campaigning because I want a Delta company. and when I was in 10th group as a support, you know, support guy, you're under Delta Company,

and I wanted that position. And it was a little controversial for a long tabber to take the support company, right? Not as a team leader, or I shouldn't say not as an 18th series, not for fifth group. It always been, in fact, the first sergeant had always been a long tab. Oh, really? Because there aren't many first sergeant positions for an 18 series. Yeah. Okay.

So I campaigned pretty hard. And, you know, very thankful, Colonel Conner said, yeah. So I got to take that. And I was supposed to, he said, you need to pick your first sergeant. You know, and I was talking to a bunch of 18 series, and I'm like, you know. Oh, this was the controversial part. I got it backwards. Rocky Sorter was a 98.

Him and I were roommates in B-Nock in 1990. He was a 98 golf Arabic. He's a fat redneck from Utah, and he's fluent in Arabic. Fluent. Later on to go work for other agencies, making big bucks, fluent. He was also a former 11 Charlie, Morterman,

and I knew him. And what better first sergeant to have in a support company than a support guy? And Perry, Mayor, group Sergeant Major called me up and he goes, got a question about your first sergeant. I go, okay. He goes, that's normally an 18 series. I go, I got it. Sergeant Major, we're going to war. And he's a fluent Arabic speaker and he's a former 18 Charlie and I need these guys to know to trust him. He goes, okay. Didn't bat an I. And we

trained him up and put them through 9-m-4, M-4. 249, 240, 50-calf? Because they're the ones that ran the convoys. Right. You know, and, you know,

the previous battalion had a problem and they had an actual discharge and they took the guns away from the soldiers. From the support guys? In combat. I don't know if you can even legally do that. I don't know. So were they running convoys

with no, without weapons? No, they gave them the weapons. Okay. Yeah, so they did weapons. But see, they never did live fire test fires. They didn't have straight SOPs. They had a couple old things.

And I'm just like, no, you. So I had my support team leader was a former Marine, came in as now a logistics guy. So he's a support platoon leader. And I had a guy as an 18-ECHO, was in between teams. And I said, you guys are the convoy commanders.

you're the NCO, you're the officer. Every convoy that goes out, you go out. Anybody that comes on your convoy, you're the convoy commander. I don't care whether it's me. I'm now a major. I don't care what it's the colonel. I don't care if it's a general officer. You're the convoy commander.

You're like, Sarah can't do that. I'm like, no, you have to. You know the SOPs. Right. You know the calls. You know the combat. You know what everybody's going to do. You know who to call.

You know the call signs. You know the frequencies. You're going to do it every single time. You will do a pre-brief, you will do a live-fire weapons check, and you'll do an AAR, and you'll recover the vehicles, getting ready to do a convoy for the next day, every single time. And I still have the logs. In fact, we've used the logs, because a couple guys later on were running the combat action badge. But yeah, I still have the logs, every single one of them. How many convoys did they run during that deployment?

They did 73. Wow. 54 contacts. 54 contacts. That's incredible. That's crazy. Running all the logistics to different fifth group teams around Iraq. Not just fifth group, down in the green zone too. Oh, okay.

Yeah. We, you know, I remember a couple of them. Because when I went, I was a 50-cal gutter. Major Smith, the Battalion X-O, 50-calgetter, when he went. because that was the most casually producing weapon, but it's also a lot of the support guys didn't get to that level. Right. You know, I saw an 18 Bravo, a weapon sergeant,

having a misfire on a 50-calf at the enemy because he didn't double charge it. Oh, you know you got a double charge. He didn't. Kachunk. So, like, no. So, yeah, that's probably the most senior ranking gunner, in all of the convict.

But I remember one of them, because we were going, April Uprising, 2004. Sartre Major Stack had not gotten killed yet. We were going to Taji. No, not Taji. Ramadi from Fallujah. We had put the team on the other side, 4-2, and the enemy had basically cut off their power.

And they're like, we need power. Like, okay. So we got 240 KW generators, put them on a semi, put their water, their food, and everything else on that semi, and we're going loaded for bear. So we put, by this time we have double armed most of the Humvees. The picture on the banner, that is a Kevlar seat, because we started putting Kevlar seats in the Humvees. That is actually a Kevlar seat, Mounties.

I put it on a pod, and that is a 240 golf on the front, and I'm in back. So I've got a turret with a 50-call gutter, and I got a 240. We've taken one-inch plywood and draped Kevlar blankets, so I've got some protection in the front, and I've got my seat in the back. And we're going to Fallujah. And both directions were in firefights. Mad Max. Yeah. just because they are you know just like jay was talking about they were back from the windows

shooting you could they were actually the second the second buildings yeah and you know aim small be small yeah yeah yeah it's it's when they're doing stuff like that it's so hard to identify first off where the fires come from and then and then to engage them back because you don't well it's funny because when we pulled up there uh the marines had the highway blocked because it's It's an elevated highway around the east and the north side. So you're at the second floor level. They're like, hey, nobody's going. You know, and Lieutenant Schilling is like, hey, sir, they're not letting us go.

I go send them back to me. I go, how you doing? I made you running. And we're going. Sir, why are you not the convoy commander? Long story. Lieutenant Schilling is, and we're going, okay? And we did.

And, you know, unloaded it, got them all their stuff, and made it back. And it was like driving NASCAR. Because that semi was going as fast as it could. And we had a tire on the back of the lead Humvee, so he would just bump it. It's like, keep going. Keep going.

We had two on the sides and one back. One in front, two on the sides, one in back. Just to protect it. Wow. Just running and gun it. Yeah, it sounds like some post-apocalyptic. Yeah. It is.

It's Mad Max. Yeah. And I laugh at it and I smile about it, and I've got the pictures, and I still talk to the guys as much as I can. it all worked out. That's the thing. Yeah.

Like I said before, you know, before the podcast, I'm the luckiest commander ever to go through Special Forces because I have never issued a Purple Heart. Yeah, yeah. You were in the thick of it three times at least, yeah. I shot more of the enemy by a direct fire weapon as a major than I did as a captain of a Special Forces team. Yeah.

I mean, I think to give perspective for the people who may not know, convoys were really the most dangerous sitting ducks you know because you know yeah the thing was you know the track com strategic command put out a great plotter chart so it's got 24 hours in it and then it's got all the all the contacts and what type of contacts and everything else and when you're going down to route tampa and there are iEDs every single morning right between so 7.30 and 8 o'clock. Guess what? Don't go there

between 7.30 and 8 o'clock. Let everybody else, and I feel sorry for it, and let everybody else absorb all the IEDs. They don't have to be me. You know, I remember Sarm Major asking, it's like, how come you guys aren't leaving the first thing in the morning? I go, Sarmeda, and I told him, he goes, okay.

But the other thing was, you get stuck someplace at night, stop, and you stay there. Yeah. You always prepare for overnights. Yeah. Because we had an incident. We had a, I don't remember what it was. We had a, up at the battalion, we were at the Rodwinea Palace Complex.

Palace on the Hill, southwest of Biap. Okay. Battalion had a bunch of, all the company commanders up and Sar Major's, and they were going back down to Hillah and they got ambushed. And that's when Sarbania Stack was killed. You know, ambushed and in a firefight for their life because it was nighttime and just, you know, That Aob team put up a hell of a fight. They asked us to QRF for them by the time we got organized.

We were ready. But the Marines came in and rescued them and towed them in. That was just like just happenstance. So tell us about coming home and kind of getting into retirement because you already had your whole enlisted career and OCS. So you were a fairly salty major. Well, seasoned. Well, I was, actually, by the end, I was older than my battalion commander. But, you know, it was what it was. So I started looking at it, what else was left.

You know, Battalion S3, Battalion Command, six years away. My wife at the time and I grew up in the same house until we went to college. You know, she lived over here. I was in the same house. I walked over. I was in the same house. I walked over. grade school, I walked the middle school, I walked, and I came back to the same house for 18 years. My son, when he was 15, had moved seven times. And now they're in high school. I think my oldest was a sophomore. My daughter was going to be a freshman. My youngest was like nine.

And that just wasn't fair. And I talked to my branch manager. Actually, Chris Connor, my former battalion commander, and we were trying to work it. You can go to Levinworth for three years, but then you're going to have to move. Okay, then my daughter's going to have to change high schools. We can, you know, take you to brag and you can do this long. Okay, everybody's going to have to move during high school,

and that's going to be hard. Yeah. And I didn't want to do it. So I put in my packet when I retired. I told Colonel Naylor that I was going to retire, and he said, will you stay on and be the rear detachment battalion commander while I'm gone? I go, of course.

You know, so that's what I did. You know, and I supported the unit from the rear and took care of beans and bullets and getting new guys in and then receiving back casualties and, you know, doing all that. And then when they came back, I just saluted and went home. Coach my son for the next two years and baseball. And, yeah, I had a great time. Yeah. So was it at all a difficult transition?

for you or did you feel as though you had done what you set out to do and you were fine with moving into a... Mine was delayed problems. I got a divorce afterwards, which is, you know, like about 50% of green berets, for many reasons. But I had to now figure out how to manage two households. So again, you start going into processes. So I went overseas and took a job. contracting, 2009, so it's still towards the end of GW where you're making pretty nice money. Did that for a year, and my daughter was a senior in high school and said, you need to come home. Didn't want the delay and everything else. And I called the kids every morning on Skype.

I sat outside the USO with my iPod Touch, didn't have the iPhones yet. So I'm literally getting on Skype and I can talk to them. So I would talk to them. I got up about 4.30 in the morning. And I talked to them and then went and worked out and then ran sources and everything else out and worked out again. But I did that every day for a year. You know, I think I talked to my son who was six at the time

more than I do now. And I'm overseas. Yeah. But yeah, and then I came back and then that's where I had to figure out the transition because I'm a contractor. I'm working at SoCon. Right, right.

And figuring out purpose. Listen, I loved it. I did it for 10 years, almost 11 years, because I got to work with the green suitors, you know, with the SF guys and with the seals and all that replicating soft. And that helped a lot in the transition because I didn't lose touch. Right. But I wasn't one of them, you know, so we had good times. And so, yeah, the transition was more delayed from me, you know, and it wasn't so much. because I was at so calm, I still had that touch.

Guys that go straight back and don't have any touch, that's hard. And I've talked to guys about it. You know, it's like, look, you've got to connect somehow. Whether you do Team Rubicon or somebody like that, just do it. Yeah. You know, give a quick plug. Do you know Team Rubicon? I've heard of them.

So disaster response, disaster recovery. You sign up, it's free. You deploy. They pay for everything, whether it's a hurricane or, tornado you can deploy for four days you can deploy for up to two weeks um be careful because as a former sf guy they're going to make you the ops though whether it's your first deployment or not i became the assistant opso on my second on my second day you know but it's fun because you're back with the guys right that's a way to connect right there's just a quick plug for them but

it's a great thing because they cover everything but you have to stay connected otherwise you're Like Jay was saying, idle hands. Yeah. You don't need idle hands, idle minds. Because it's going to get crazy. And so I picked up doing Iron Man Triathlons, extreme triathlons. I did a 29029, which is a high level of Everest, you know, at Mount Stratton, 17 times up a mountain. And it rained.

It was 40 degrees. You know, challenge your brain somehow. Right. Right. You know, so that's what I do. Yeah. You know, this year I'm going to back off a little bit. I think I'm only going to do one Iron Man.

But I'm challenged my girlfriend or daughter. We're going to do a 15K. And then we're doing climb for lungs, climb for life. She's a former lung cancer survivor and non-smoker. And so I was like, okay, hey, listen to that. Do things that challenge your body. Do things that challenge your body. Just do something.

Yeah. And how did the idea of writing a book come to mind? It's my mom's fault. So my mom passed away in 2018, but when I came back from Afghanistan and then Iraq and showed her some of the award write-ups and stuff like that, she was like, you need to write a book. I mean, yeah, yeah, I know to write a book. And like, I just, I didn't think it was important. I'm still not sure how important it is, but because that's something my mom wanted me to do,

I finally decided, hey, all right, I'm going to write a book. So a friend of mine that I went to college with actually a fraternity buddy. We were talking and he was like, I'll have to copyright it. I go, dude, I don't know anything about it. So we talked about it. He kind of just, you know, help me massage it. Because, you know, some of the paragraphs or chapters are five pages long. Some are 22.

Right. He goes, just do them by subject. Don't try to make 22-page chapters. all the way through because nobody all understands it. Right. So we did it. And, you know, Amazon's got the KDP publishing, and it's such a great way to put it out there.

You know, sold a couple hundred copies, giving away a bunch, did something for a vets group up in Fredericksburg. You know, there's a wonderful lady that does her version of Salvation Army. Mm-hmm. And I wish I knew the name of it. I'll have to send it to you later, but she does that, and all the money goes towards local veterans. Her and a couple other people, they paid for a house, somebody's mortgage every year, and a car for somebody every year.

Wow. So, you know, somebody's selling used clothes that can do that, that's amazing. Yeah. So we did, I did something, you know, great friend of mine, Mike Bosco, he was one of my NCOs when I was in the 160th, went on to be the J2 over at Sock Pack, and, you know, he wanted to do it. did that thing for them. And so I just keep doing stuff like that. Yeah. And like said, the book, it's really not cathartic or anything.

It just is. Yeah. Because for me, like I said, I had a great career. You know, I don't have, you know, you have your lulls and your disappointments, but, you know, all in all, it's a great time. Yeah. And definitely, like, you know, one, it's a refresh of your confidence. And two, it's also just.

Right place, right time, like you just, like you nailed it, you know. Always. Always. Always. Do we have questions for Dan? I believe we have one. Actually is from Corbyn. Greetings.

Thank you, Corbyn. Greetings from Ford Assembly, Chicago. So a hard work ethic, humility in the face of one's ego, and humility with one's success. How can we instill these in each other and ourselves going back to work? So, yeah, he wants to ask how to instill those. Well, the thing is, you, everybody has been taught. You know, one of the things that when I went through OCS was I had paid attention to PLDC and then BNock.

And OCS, I made Distinguished Military Grad. And it wasn't because I studied hard. It's because I had studied when I went through PLDC and I studied when I went through BNAC. The Army has taught you what you should be doing. you have your troop leading procedures. A great example was, when we were in isolation, getting ready for Afghanistan, everybody was floundering for a format.

Like, what are you talking about? Right. There's no format for what you're about to do. No, of course there is. You did it in a Q course. It was ODA 095 or something like that. That's the format. I had printed out 20 copies of that ODA format for Robin Sage

and was handing it out, and that was our briefing. And it worked. Yeah. Use what you have. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel. Right. You have what did you have.

You have all the tools. Five paragraph operation order. You go to Ranger School. Right. That's not silly stuff. Right. You know, use it. I mean, when you think about how many people have made careers out of taking the MDMP

or, you know, Ranger School, Handbook or whatever, and translating it into civilian speak and going to corporations, there's a reason that works. It is solid structure. Yeah. And that's what always cracks me up. Again, going back to Colonel Mahal. No one has done what he has done in probably 50 years. And he gave me three quarters of a page of paper.

Purpose, key tasks, and end state. Now you get 65 pages. of crap. Right. You don't need it. What you got was very clear. It got the point across, and it was all you really needed. That's all you need.

Yeah. We have one other very important question from Alexander Runyon. Who is your favorite daughter? And why? Alexandra. Did I say Alexandra? Okay. I only have one.

I can't believe she's on there. We have a couple pages. Okay. But you know what? You know what's funny with Alex. people ask me if my kids join the army and no when Osama bin Laden was killed she was the first one to tell me because he made me leave home right so it affects your kids yeah for sure but I will say I'm also one of the luckiest dads on earth because all three of my kids are high

or college graduates and doing professional work, which is unbelievable. What do we got for? All right, we got. Thanks, Alex. Give me one sec.

Sean asked, any tricky C-Star missions you could talk about? Also, do 18 bravos get taught gunsmithing slash improvised firearms like 18 Charlie's do improvised explosives? So 18 bravos, yes. But it's also a lot of

their own desire to go deeper into it. Yeah, it's like a medic. I don't think in the Bravo course, at least when I went through, they certainly weren't teaching like improvised weapons, like how to make zip guns or anything like that. No, you can, you know, again, it's kind of like when they, you can make your own 45 out of spare parts, except for the lower receiver.

Yeah. Well, you're not supposed to. The C-SAR, not really. When I was the S-2 at the 160th, so there's a difference between C-SAR and PR. Comed Search and Rescue is what the conventional units do, the Jolly Greens. Even though they do in-flight refueling, they're not allowed to go past the green zone. They're not allowed to go where there are going to be surf stair missiles, even though they have the ASEC. It doesn't really make a lot of sense.

because they're pretty much like the DAPs, except they're not loaded, or the Lima models, the Kilo models, I'm sorry. But, you know, you have to figure out how you're going to do it. You know, the great story of O'Grady, it's in Beyond Hell and Back when they talk about how the Marines went and did it. Because O'Grady did. He ran at the Marines with a gun in his hand. Yeah, yeah.

You know, you're supposed to turn your back, you're supposed to do stuff. So, you know, some of the things, actually, that are not classified, and I'll tell you about one, the 160th went into Libya and stole a hind helicopter. The Russians that were doing it, it fell, it did a hard landing, they left it there, and we went in and stole it. Literally slow-loaded out underneath a Chinook. Pictures are awesome. I think they're still classified, but I know the mission's not anymore. but yeah that would be actually the most the best um one that i would talk about um told you about a former

delta guy then became a 160th pilot you know he did the rescue of muse you know that's for him to tell or books or whatever but there's a lot of stuff out there but any secretive stuff not really yeah and then the what was oh yeah we talked about Cesar right okay what else he one more question from Isaac. I saw a bit of the film Breadwinner about a girl living in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban before 9-11.

Life was brutal for everyone and especially girls and women. So what is life like for them now compared to before the invasion and during U.S. involvement and after they left? Ooh, that's a roller coaster. And honestly, it's a roller coaster

because it got really a little too free and then a little too hard and then a little too free. And it's all based on where they live. You know, one of the most touching things to me was probably the second day we're coming down through the Hindu Kush. And a little girl about the age of my daughter at the time, little jellies on, little dress on, flowing blonde hair, chewing bubble gum. In a dirt road, just waving, people going by. Yeah.

You know, so it's all wear. Yeah. You know, the Taliban, you know, it's like a sexy, a sexist white male in the 50s when we were telling women they can't run marathons because their uterus and fall out. I'm sorry, what? Yeah. You know, just let's bring it into reality. Yeah. You know, stuff like that.

You just, it. Yeah. Yeah. So when people talk about, they're like, it's all based on where you live. And one of the crazy things with the Taliban, you know, they had their vice and virtue police, and a lot of them were Arabs who didn't speak the local languages. And so I remember an Afghan telling me a story about when he was walking down the street with his mom, right, and holding her hand.

And the vice and virtue police came out and started being both of them because they were unmarried, and they were holding hands in public. And he's like, it's my mom, but they were still like, but they were Arabic, so they didn't understand. what he was saying, and they were just beating them. So, I put this out in the message, and I was told never to say it again, but I'm not in the army anymore. The Afghans don't like the Arabs. No, not at all.

They're tribal. Yeah. And they're a peaceful people, but they're tribal. We keep trying to make it like whatever we are. Right. First World country, whatever we're supposed to be. Leave it alone. Yeah.

it's it's not one time zone I mean for God's sake it's Zulu plus four and a half Right right Really yeah it's like half an hour yeah it's really weird It's not Zulu plus four and a half It should be like I don't know probably three or four different time zone Yeah but we do it for our own sake

You know and and it should be I mean Harad is more Persian than it is Afghan So Let them figure it out Yeah Yeah it's not going to become a Jeffersonian demon Exactly. No, and it shouldn't be.

Exactly. You know, I always laughed when we were going in there, like, we should bomb it into the Stone Age. Like, it already is. They're in a Stoney, yeah. They don't have, running water. There were houses that have one room and had a hole in it, and that's when you did your stuff. Yeah.

And, oh, by the way, that box full of dirt right there, that's your toilet paper. You know, that's one of the first things telling the S.F. Like, dude, you can't take your baby wipes and use them and put them down there because it gives us a away. So either put it in your bag or use the dirt. Right. And then our poop doesn't smell like their poop and you want to get into that stuff. So people can find the book on Amazon. On Amazon, I'm working on the audio book. Okay. I got, I wouldn't say diverted. I had to take a break. But again, I get it done by one March because my daughter said so. Okay. I'll get it on audio book but yeah and do reach out you know go to dan runyon.com email me i've already had two guys

former green berets out of fifth group um their civilian rOTC instructors i would take 100 books up talk to them hand those out i mean you know pay for my plane dig it i'll do anything yeah you know i i'm not doing it for money i literally did it because my mom asked me to I also, in addition to the book, I wanted to mention this really fine bottle of whiskey that you brought us. It's send me, right? Is that the, or that's just the... Well, it's a special option. I think it's heritage distillery.

You see it on Instagram is where I saw it. And I bought it back in October. It's howitzer proof, and it's... It is. Thank you. I'm looking forward to it. It is a very good one. 105 proof.

Yeah, that's definitely. how it's true. Yeah, and they're talking about coming out with other versions. I think they might have coming out with the 10th Mountain Division, so if you legs out of New York want to get your own whiskey, by all means. Any final thoughts? Anything that you really want to get out there that I didn't ask about or we didn't cover? No, I would see for a lot of people, and you kind of touched on it with Jay, we don't need another nonprofit. We don't need another very very very veterans organization. Find one out there and join it.

You know, decades ago is either American Legion or VFW. And now we've got Catch a Lift, Unbroken Spirit Organization out of Asheville, North Carolina, no barriers USA, irreverent warriors. I mean, there are so many out there. Somebody will pay for you to do something somewhere in the world, type it in there's a guy out of Fredericksburg that wants to start doing gardens

for veterans give you all of the supplies you want to garden there's a program out there teaches veterans how to do beekeeping right more power to you but I mean it's out there and the money is out there

and it's just like you know there's wounded warriors there's all the things we don't need another nonprofit just figure out how to help whatever. Because like I said, I really enjoyed doing Team Rubicon. It was awesome. It helped me a lot. I didn't want to be the OPSO, but it's like, sure, why not? Yeah. You know, um, no Barry's USA.

I, I was organizing and doing hikes for, hikes for disabled veterans out in Fort Collins, Redfeather Lakes area, Unbroken Spirit organization. Um, Peter Champaign and his wife Marlene have got one out of Asheville, look them up, UnbrokenSpirit.org. They pay for everything. and they're doing it right all of them now have this three-phase program because the worst thing to do is go do something with somebody and then go home right right empty right dark apartment right that's where their phase three comes up still keeps you engaged how do you how do you continue on and be an active participant in your community and they hold you to it yeah you know and so find them cool yeah Google it.

Internet search it, whatever the word term is. But yeah, no, I appreciate all this. And I'll tap that in with you guys. And I appreciate all of it. Yeah, thank you, Dan. Thanks for coming in and doing this in studio. You know, I think I want to say that I found you or I found your book maybe on LinkedIn. That might have been.

Might have been LinkedIn. How I found you. I was very appreciative, the Green Beret Foundation put it on there. Awesome. I somehow, and we were talking early about algorithms and hashtags and what put you out there. Yeah. When I posted, I did the book, I got like 7,000 views. That's fantastic. That's cool, man. And so, yeah, maybe that's how it is. But yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn.

I had my own business for a while, so you type my name and it comes up way too much for my comfort. Cool. So people should go check out the book, The Scipal of Chaos. It's on Amazon. You can find it right now. There's a link down in the description. Thank you again, Dan. Yeah. And we will see all you guys on Friday with Bill Flavin. So take care out there.