The Team House - Green Beret Javier Mackey: fierce firefights in Afghanistan and MOH recipient Robbie Miller, Ep. 41

Episode Date: May 9, 2020

Javier Mackey served in 3rd Special Forces Group as a Green Beret and dog handler where he saw combat in Afghanistan. Mackey was present when Medal of Honor recipient Robert Miller was killed in action during a fierce firefight. On this episode he talks to us about his journey from Mormon missionary to Green Beret. From war in Afghanistan, to battling depression back home and emerging on the other side. We are also excited to announce our second sponsor, HighSpeedDaddy.com. Use the discount code "JACK" at checkout to claim 10% off your purchase. Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five,

with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Hello everyone. Good evening. Happy Friday. I'm Jack Murphy here with co-host Dave Park. This is the Team House, episode 41. Our guests this evening is Have a Yard. Javier, Mackey, make sure I get your name right.

I'm sorry, man. Javier was a 18 Charlie, a special forces engineer and third special forces group. He was also a canine handler. So he did some additional training and deployed with a canine later on in his career. He deployed every year for how many years, Javier? Yeah, from 2005 to 2015. Every year he was deployed to Afghanistan, places like Kunar, places like Cop Keening, Anaconda, you know, just places where there is insane firefights going on,

and places that some of you are probably already familiar with from books and movies and things like that, but Aviar is going to share his own experiences and maybe some things that you're probably not aware of and some stories you haven't heard before. In particular, Javier served alongside Staff Sergeant Robbie Miller, who is a Medal of Honor recipient. He was awarded the medal after he was killed in action in a firefight that Javier was present for. So we're going to talk about how Javier got into special forces,

started off as a Mormon missionary, and then joined the Army, and then everything that happened afterwards. So I've been looking forward to this episode for a long time. Javier, thank you for. very much for joining us tonight. And thanks for having me on, Jack. It's been a, this is going to be, this is going to be fun. And it would be a little bit somber at the same time.

Yeah, absolutely. These things go hand in hand, as you know. And I mean, I don't know how you feel or how you think back, reflect back on your military service and special forces. But I think for so many of us, it is like bittersweet in the sense, you probably have some great experiences and some funny experiences and just terrific camaraderie, but then at the same time, some really heavy things that stick with you and weigh on you. Yeah, you know, it's funny because I was that kid that wanted to, when I was in, you know,

people who knew me growing up, if I, if it was Halloween, guess what Javier is going to dress ass, you know, a G.I. Joe. I was the same. You know, you know, I was roadblock, you know. I can never pull off a snow job, though. But I was always geared pointing towards the military. In high school, I was in the marching band. I played baseball and basketball.

But marching band was my thing, man. I don't know there was something about it that, I don't know. I liked music. I played the tuba. And then during that time, period. I was a drum major, so I was a guy that was either twirling a baton in front of the, in front of the band as we're marching down the street, or I was, if we're doing field competitions, I was sitting there waving my arms like an idiot, conducting the band through some

maneuvers. Did you come from a military family? Were you surrounded? Like, where did that come from for you? So my, my step, my uncles, all were all, they served in the vehicle. Vietnam. My stepfather who was a big influence on me, he served in Vietnam as well. And he served clear, he served, I think he retired in like 2000, 2005-ish after 30 years of service in the reserves. He spent most of his time after Vietnam in the reserves. So, but he did his time and and he just instilled that. that mill like you know just the you know I went through a lot as a kid and he when he came into our life he was like an answer to a prayer and um like he you know I remember getting down on my knees hey I want my mom to meet a man who loves her check the block you know I want to meet a man I want my mom to meet a man who loves us check the block and oh yeah by the way he had to be in the military and so um then that was a check the block and uh he was a good father he was you know he was really good to us and still is. And I always looked up to him.

And I would say he's the main reason why John ended up doing in the military. But, you know, he was kind of trying to steer me towards being like a cook or a mechanic. I was like, no, dude. No. What did he do in the military? He started off as a combat engineer. Okay. And then he ended up doing some.

miscellaneous job, like, you know, in your reserves, you can get tagged, task for any MOS. So, um, I think he ended up being like what they call it at the time. It was a 31 Lima, which is a, uh, a cable alignsman. Okay. Basically run in line, uh, fiber optic lines. And back in the day, it was telephone lines. And that's what he was trying to stare at me toward. So when I finally did join the military, um, I told him, I wanted to be a ranger because as a, as a Mormon missionary, I guess I can dive into that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So after high school, I was really, I already found some spirituality.

And I found it in a Mormon church. And so I was baptized in 1993, July of 93 by my best friend. And I already knew I was like, you know, I'm going to go serve a mission. because if I'm going to be as successful in life, I got to give the Lord his time first, and that was two years. And so I put everything, I put everything on hold, and I threw on my shirt, my suit and tie, and I got my calling to making Georgia. And the way it works is they assign you to a mission,

and a mission covers a geographical territory, and then when you get there, they pair you up with a senior guy who's been there for a few months, and he kind of walks you through the ropes of everything. And you just kind of bounce around from one area to another. The first area I served in was in Augusta, Georgia, which I ended up going to AIT for as a 31 Sierra. But I bounce, I think I hit every military,

most of the military bases in Georgia. I was at Warner Robbins for a little bit, but then I spent most of my, I spent a good portion of time at Fort Benny. And when you say missionary work, I mean, that's like literally going door to door. You know, you're trying to bring people to the faith. Right. Proselying.

Yeah. That's what we do. We did that. And it was a scary time because it was 1993. Black kid from California moving to the south for the first time. And everything you heard about the South was, you know, bad, you know. And I land in Atlanta and it was everything to, you know, everything. the op you know everybody was friendly uh and i ended up having a really good time i got to meet a lot of

really good people and i got a chance to serve you know think about others before thinking about myself and i was able to put the lord first and everything that i did and so when i was at fort benning this is when i bit the like i got i got i was all in you know i i was around uh guys who were in the military of the same faith in ranger battalion And at the time, the regimental Sergeant Major, Sergeant Major, Command Sergeant Major, Rockow was a member of my congregation. And he was like he was your stereotypical of the time,

of the period Ranger, you know, chisel jaw line high and tight, like, when I say high and tight, you can like see the, it might as well have been like his scout. He had been scouted and the only thing was like a little buzz on top. But we would go over to his house for dinner and his boys, like if they were in trouble, they'll be outside. They'll be right in the threshold of the door in a stack, you know, at parade rest because they were in trouble.

And they would stay there while we have dinner and it was kind of awkward. You know, we're kind of looking at his kids. He was like, hey, dude, are they going to eat? And they're not moving a muscle because they messed up that day. But then I met it to my mom. other guys who were, some other, you know, a couple other rangers that were talking about going SF and I had no clue what Special Forces was. I had even no clue what a ranger did at the time, you know. And so I had a good time hanging out there at Fort Benning. Fast forward, I get home

from my mission and I'm like, I'm working for Sony. I'm not really sure what I want to. to do in life and a recruiter walks in where I was working in Sacramento and he was there to buy a bunch of televisions for his for his recruiting station. I was like, hey man, what's the fastest you can get me in the army? He goes, what do you want to do? I go, I want to be an airborne ranger. He goes like, well, you know, he started hymn and and and humming and, you know, because that wasn't in his in his quota at the time, you know. And he goes, well, let's come and talk. So on my lunch break, I went and talked. And then I went and talked to my dad afterwards.

And I said, yeah, I think I'm going to go to basic training to be, you know, Airborne Ranger. And he was like, well, let's talk about this, son. You know, my dad comes from a different time period, you know. And, you know, the rumors of Ranger Battalion back in the day. And he was just like, no, man. You might want to talk with breaks. And he talks some sense. You know, like he start to make sense.

He goes, look, at least get a trade. Start off get a trade. So if you get hurt, you walk out of the Army with something under your belt. I'm like, all right. And then if you don't like it, go to infantry school and be a ranger. I'm like, all right, cool, you know. So I signed up as a 31 Sierra, which is a satellite communication specialist. And I did that.

You know, my AIT was, I was super stoked about it because I was going to go to Fort Gordon. And like I said, I was in Augusta, Georgia, where Fort Gordon is on my mission. So I was going to go into a familiar place where I knew people. So I was pretty excited. And at AIT was, the advanced individual training was nine months. So I was like, I'm going to be in heaven, you know. And so that was fun. I was like, it was an MLS of nerds.

Let me put it to you that way. There are a bunch of nerds. There are LARPers. The guy imprinted or where's the glasses and carries the radio. Yeah. I don't know if you were following like one of the, on a Twitter feed, one of the guys who go, hey, we went to AIT together. And I was like, yeah, I remember you.

And yeah, these guys were LARPers, man. They were like, I didn't even know what, like, a hacker is. I didn't even know where LARPing was, man. and we would go to the mall and these guys were like, they were dressed up like werewolves and empires. For our,

for our viewers you don't know, LARPR, and we're not talking about like the, us play girls. Yeah, or like the Airsoft guys. We're talking about actual LARPers, which is live action,

wallplay, which are people who dress up in medieval garb or they were playing, I know when I went to DLI, I was a little bit older when I went. but the young kids were playing vampire, which was a live action role-playing game where they would dress up like vampires and play this game.

And I don't know what the rules were. Yeah, I was on a date. I was on a date once, man. And, you know, it was like a four-day weekend. And these guys show up. I'm at, like, at the eatery with this girl, you know, from church. And then we were sitting there eating. And there, I see, like, the vampire group show up.

And then I see the werewolf guys show up. And they're, like, standing. Like they got the Django jeans and, you know, the chains, the trench coats, the whole nine yards. And they start rolling dice and saying stuff. I was like, all right, whatever, man. But you're right. But, I mean, fields like, you know, interpreters or satellite, you know, comp, you know, things like that, they bring in very intelligent, but also, you know, I mean, I'm not going to say anything.

Jack and I play Dunes' Dragons. So, I mean, it's not like we have too much to talk. But you're not dressing up like a necromancer, right? Not yet. Yeah. I mean, I don't wear elf ears. Yeah. Maybe we'll get there.

One year, Jack, three months. Yeah, so I signed up with the airborne contract, right? So I was pretty stoked about it. But then when my orders came, got cut, I was, they were going to, send me to Fort Campbell. And I was like, huh. And I started war gaming it in my head. Well, it's my contract to send me to airborne school. But I can probably squeeze air assault out of this. If I go to Campbell, I'll probably lose my airborne slot. So what I did was I didn't say anything. And I went straight to Campbell with the idea of going to air assault school and then throw out my

trump card. Here's my airborne slot. And it ended up working in my favor. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, played it pretty good. So I ended up, I was like the only private with both airborne wings and airstalt wings, which, right? Yeah. So I'm in 101st. I've wanted, in basic training, I bit the bug of, I went to Fort Jackson for basic training, but I bit the, I bit in on the infantry, um, all the infantry stuff that we were taught teaching us. And I was like, man, I hope my MOS is better than this. And it wasn't, man. I would never be out in the woods. I can't. I'm not, it's just not me. So, uh, I did everything. Anytime we volunteer, I volunteered, got an opportunity to volunteer to roll with the rock asons or roll with the pathfinders to support them with communications I did.

Then I met my wife. You got married in St. Louis. And then I, uh, we moved to Fort Bragg. And I was in the 82nd. And I really missed the 101st when I got to the 82nd. I really liked the 101st. I hated the 80 seconds so much. Why? The leadership, I was more of a tactical leader. And when I was in the 101st, meaning when we hit the ground, I had that, I can set up

my little team of Como guys. I can be like, all right, let's get it. We can get off the helicopter that we knew to go pull security. And then once the infantry guys went out and, you know, set up all the security outwardly, we can start setting up comms to start supporting the infantry in their movements. I get to the 82nd. We're not carrying any radios when we do jumps. There's no, like we do a mass tactical exercise, you know, where you have half the division in the air jumping. and we get to the ground and, you know, you move out as a squad to your, to your, to wherever your Steiner aid is, and you get there, you take a knee and then they say,

get on the truck. That's it. And I'm like, this sucks. And then, you know, you're doing this three or four times a week. And it's like you're just doing it just to do it. So, and I spend a lot of time in the motor pool. So 9-11, I was in my, I was in my Joe's room. We were shining boots. You know, I was in the BDU Army at first. And so we're sitting here spit shining our boots on 9-11. And I remember, you know, we turned it on the news after PT and we're looking. It was like, man, that's weird. You know, plane crashes into the World Trade Center. and then Specialist Barry and I were sitting there

just BS and talking about politics and then the second plane hit and that's when we were like, holy crap. So I drank the Kool-Aid in the 80-second thinking 18-hour response, we're going to go somewhere.

And that ended up not being the case. It sucked three years. days later or a week or two later we see, you know, 10th Mountain rolling deep in Afghanistan with the Rangers. And here we are, you know, offloading our trucks, you know, wondering what we're going to do. So I looked at my platoon sergeant and I said, hey, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm going to try out for, I'm going to go to selection. Now, what, what, how long had you been in and what rank were you at this point? I had been in at this point. I enlisted in the Army in 1990. January of 1998.

And in so 9-11, I was a promotable I was just waiting for points. I was a promotable specialist waiting to pin on sergeant. And so yeah, so I dropped my packet and then in November

I spent Thanksgiving, that Thanksgiving and selection where I met a lot of you know, I was really intimidated. I went there thinking, you know, I'm going to be everybody who's here is the best, the best of the best. And I just didn't see myself.

I didn't have that confidence. But while I was out on a, you know, I was more, I went through selection too when you didn't, we didn't do team week. It was, it was 28 days in total. And instead of team week, we had this long, this, to 48-hour Death Star. I think they ended up being like 60 miles.

You couldn't... And this is where I came... This is where I came up with the YouTube channel name of Looking Over Strange Doreen. I found myself lost quite a bit. And while I was there, I was doing really good. You know, I think I only missed like one point. I had to two...

I had a, you mean, they had to tape me. And I'm a big dude. So they, you know, they had to weigh me several times. I took the PT test twice. It just, I was confident that I was going to make it through. But there was a lot of little things that, you know, they play a lot of mind games, you know. And my roster number was 181. And there was another Mackey.

His was one, one, 180. No, I was 180. He was 181. and he when he didn't get selected he was like you must be talking about the elder macky because we were both black guys right you know so he was like you must be talking about the other macky i was like dude shut up i'm like i'm going to do this again you know but i made all my points uh in good time but while i was out there on that deaf star you know i i was making good time on all my points i think i finished it in like under 30 hours but I got down on my knees and I was like, you know, God, I really want to be a green beret. I'll pay the price, whatever price that is. I just want to live long enough to be a great grandfather.

And I want to stay married to the woman that I'm with now. And I want to walk away with no physical damage. And so the promise I made was my butt will be in church. I try to do what's right all the time, you know. And then, you know, a couple days, you know, a couple hours later, you know, they were calling out my, calling out my name or my roster number as being a 28-day select. And so that was the beginning of my special operations career. This was year three for me.

Open come up. I hate you saying this, but just all full disclosure. I pretty much recycled every phase of the Q course. So, but it was, you know, and I talked to the cadre since then. You know, a lot of them came to third group. And, you know, they were like, hey, you know what? I saw something in you. I always saw something in you.

You were always motivated. When you didn't know something, you let it be known. You know, one of the things about being a Mormon is to try to be humble. But don't be a pushover. So I, you know, that's how my time in the Q course went. I was, my biggest fear was all those recycles were going to get to group. You know, people were going to, like, when I got to group, people are going to be like, here we go.

You know, this guy got recycled through. Plus, he didn't go through Team League and, oh, the standards are dropping and look what we're getting. But really cool things that happened during that time in the Q course was, you know, they started the 18 X-ray program. So I was able to go through with the first. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise. raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those

with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. They say to truly understand someone, you must walk a mile in their shoes. Well, at Lexus, we designed the ES with you and mind. every step of the way. From class leading legroom

to positioning the touchscreen four inches closer. Everything in the Lexus ES, a direct reflection of you. Click the banner to discover more. Experience amazing at your Lexus dealer. 2022 ES versus 2021-2020 competitors. Information for manufacturers' websites

as a 5-3-2020-1. Since I recycled a lot, the first three classes of 18 x-rays. So what was the 18 x-ray program? 18 x-ray program is a program where you can join the Army on an 18 x-ray contract, meaning you get an opportunity. You'll be trained as an infantryman, but you'll get the opportunity to go to selection and be selected to try out for special forces.

And if you're selected, you get to enter the pipeline, which is a, called the CFQ, SFQC. And then once you complete that, then you go to group to one of the five groups. Which was different than it had been, because before that, it was only like eligible E5 or E6s could go. It was dudes like Javier. What's that? It was dudes like Javier before the 18 X-ray program. Yeah.

You had to be a promotable specialist to be able to go to selection. and then or you can be a PFC but you had to be promotable by the time you got to the Q course. Okay. If you were selected. But it wasn't the first time they did the X-ray or the SF baby program, what they called. You know, they did it a couple of times before. Back in the 80s. Yeah.

So I ended up going reporting. I went, you know, I got French as a language and I ended up reporting to third, Special Forces group. I originally was supposed to go to 10th group, but I didn't, my, my logic was, if I take 10th group, I'll either go to, you know, Colorado Springs or Germany. Right. And I'll, you know, or I'll flip-flop during that time period. And I'll, oh, yeah, and by the way, I might end up back at Fort Bragg. So I was like, you know what? I'm just going to stay here at Bragg. I want my, I don't want my daughters jumping around. I want them to grow up with the same people. And I'll, and by the same people. So I traded out, I'm glad I did. I traded out a third group for 10th.

Did most people think you were insane for doing that? No. I mean, no, everybody had their reasons, man, you know. Yeah. So 10th group was covered Europe for the people who don't know. 10th group covered Europe and third group covered Africa. And a lot of times the third group guys would complain that they'd get stuck someplace with a pallet full of MREs while the 10th group guys were staying in a 10th group guys would be skiing and drinking casks of German beer. Exactly. But, you know, the joke was the joke was on them because 10th group spent a lot of time in Africa.

And third group spent a hell of a lot of time in war in Afghanistan. Yeah. So I got to, so about, so in 2005, January 2005, I reported the third group, third battalion, alpha company. And I was on operational detachment 372. And I get there. And one of the, I had been up to battalion. Because you know, you got a report to a group, then you got to report to battalion and then you go to your company. So I was up at. battalion. He got these big posters of guys from the previous deployment, like these huge posters, like cool guy posters, but there were actual deployment posters, you know.

And I was, I remember sitting there looking at him like, man, I love to be on that team. And so, you know, the sergeant major gave my assignment at the battalion, and then he sent me down to the company. And I talked to the company Sergeant Major, and he

sent me to 3-7-2. And all those posters I saw these big from that deployment were of that team. And so I walk in and immediately I was greeted by the senior bravo, one of the senior bravos because at the time we had like, I was the seventh person on the team. The teams were small. The worst time to come to an ODA is right after a deployment. And these guys have just gotten back from Afghanistan, from their second deployment as a team together. And I was an outsider and I did not feel welcome at all.

The team sergeant told me the only two people I was allowed to talk to was the team, was him or three people, him, my senior, who was by the way getting ready to leave to go to Sedan. and the team leader. Those are only three people I can talk to. And I thought it was like, all right, I'm the new guy. I'm a buck sergeant.

You know, I'm going to do, you know, I'm going to do new guy stuff, you know. And that lasted for a little bit. And then finally, we got a new, like our real team sergeant. And he came in and Pat Rottzer, he was a good. good dude, really good dude. He, we got a new team sergeant and a new team leader at the same time. So we had like a whole new team leadership. And that was great because they were really family oriented. And everybody on the team was family oriented. Everything we did together was a family. If we had a team party, it was together as a family. So my team, my team got to know my

family. I got to know the other team, teammates family. And slowly during that time period, our team began to grow to where we actually had two echoes. We actually had two bravos, two Charlie's, sort of, because my senior, like I said, had taken off to Sudan to go do a mission. We actually had a functioning fox. Personally, I think you just need 1118 bravos and one delta and you should be good to go. understand why we have all these other MOSs. But one man's opinion, take it for what it's worth. Hey, what was the motivation behind you being told to only talk to three people? Like, did he not want you, like, asking like the other guys, what was, like, what was

his motivation behind that? I think he wanted to, you know, to earn my way, not take it, take it for granted. You know, earn my spot on the team. I think there were some other aspects involved, like some insecurities on his part, because he'd been around. Now, this guy's been around since 1975, went to Vietnam, lied about his age, Marine. He later left the Marines to join the Navy. Then he went back to the Marines, then he went back to the Navy. then he tried out for special forces

and he had like this really crazy career and um sounds like an asshole I'm just kidding I only say that because I was in three branches no he was a good at the end of the day

you know he meant well he was my entertainment actually um this guy like my first deployment was in Jordan and this guy I mean he he

he was our inner because we didn't have a hard drive with movies on it so he was our entertainment and this is 2005 so there even if you did you had a bunch of DVDs and you know you're watching the same DVDs yeah and then you're also watching people walking fun the screens on those DVDs so right so you know there we are in Jordan he's keeping us entertained and that's when, you know, that was my first deployment. It was in the Jordan. We were out there doing a training mission with the Jordanians, the Italians, the Yemenis,

and the Kuwaitis, the Kuwaiti commanders. And it was a good time. We had a really good time. I started off, oh, I didn't tell you guys this. I started off as an 18 Echo. And like I said, I felled out of the echo course over some BS, but I ended up, they ended up reclassed me because the reason why they were recycling me was stupid. And I wasn't, and keeping me in the 18 Charlie, or the 18 Echo program wouldn't have been good for me. So they sent me to the 18 Charlie program, and that's how I became an 18 Charlie.

but we didn't have a, we needed all the, we didn't have a lot of 18 echoes in our company on that mission. And so I had, you know, I was able to take the training. I got from an 18 Echo and do a lot of 18 Echo type activities to help out with that. An 18 Echo being the comma, which was your background. Right. And then, but you, you cross-trained into engineer. Right. But we did a lot of cross-training anyway. So, So some of the things we don't do cross training in is like HF. And I was able to do, you know, help out with the HF aspect of it and stuff like that. But yeah, it was a good trip.

I got T-boned by Assadi. And, you know, we thought we were under attack during that time period, you know, at that time. So me and my senior bravo are, you know, we're dazed and confused. and we got this this this this this uh this uh this uh saudi coming up and you know he's just sitting there yelling at us like he's he's actually at wondering to know if we were all right but we thought he was just you know because we were in a we're in the middle of the invasion in Iraq right you know so I don't we don't know what the threat level is at this base and um we ended up drawing down on this guy.

And then because it happened in front of the military base there, the guard is drawing down on us. And then we all were able to like calm down. And but I walked away with a cracked rib and my bravo walked away with the, with a concussion. Later on, when we were leaving that trip and we ended up, we were, our plane ended up breaking down in Amman. and so while we were there, we were staying at all these different hotels and we were bouncing around.

And, you know, I'm being, I'm not really being, I'm not, I'm not being mindful of my, my space and time. You know, I'm walking around town like there's nobody's business. And next thing you know, bro, I'm, you know, we're here, like, we're, we're, we're bouncing from one hotel to another hotel. And the reason of what they're doing is because, you know, we're actually getting. targeted. And so a day or two after we actually left country, all the hotels were at got bombed. Holy shit. And you remember that ISIS, that pilot that got capped, that Jordanian pilot got shot down? Well, you remember with the Kings, how he reacted, he executed that lady? I don't know. Yeah.

She was, the hotel I was staying at was the hotel she didn't. Her husband popped his vest, but she didn't. And so she's the one who got executed, you know, in retaliation for what happened to that pilot. So I saw, you know, that's where I saw my first pimp, pimp slap. So that was pretty funny. But yeah, so we get back. Wait, you have to explain that. What happened?

The hotel we were staying at, that hotel that blew and blown up, there was a Irish pub, probably the only Irish pub and I'm on. And my team sergeant was in there. I went to go get him, you know, it was a bar. It wasn't like a strip club or anything. Yeah. And he had been talking to. he had been talking to this

Russian girl for about two hours. And because he had, you know, he had no intentions and taking it any further. And when she didn't close a deal, this Arab dude, you know, pull, you know, comes behind the little beady curtain and says something to her and smacks her. And she goes,

oh, I got to leave. So, you know, his, the pimp came out and, you know, did a little laying up on a hand. Damn. Yeah. So. He was not meeting his standard, apparently. Yeah, yeah. So we started getting plused up.

The team, after that trip, we were starting getting plused up with the Bravo we had during that time period was leaving the team. And, or no, he was going to Sephardic and then we got Robbie. So this whole time, man, nobody's talking to me, you know, well, I take that back. my social standing on the team has gotten up, you know, have... But you're still a little bit of the outsider? Just a little bit, not much. I still get a little bit of haze, you know, verbal hazing, you know. It was all good, you know.

It was really all in fun. And this one we get Robbie. And I wasn't the only one on a team that was getting treated like this. Our Delta, you know, was getting treated the same way. But the two of us were doing stupid things. things on purpose, you know, just to get a rise out of the senior guys. And then Robbie walks in. And they all like, you know, he walks in, you know, the, the op sergeant was like, hey, this is Rob Miller. He's your x-ray. And we all knew we were getting the x-ray. And I thought, you know,

me and my delta are looking at him. We're like, yep, here it comes. What's an x-ray? Yeah, Robbie was an 18 x-ray. What is an 18x ray? Well, we already went through all that. Oh, the, okay, sorry. So Robbie walks in, and instead of giving them the cold shoulder and whatnot, I mean, the same guy who was giving me a hard time was like, what's up, man, welcome to the team.

slapping him all the back. And so me and my Delta are looking at each other. We were like, like, what's going on here? And the whole, the whole dynamic change. And I think it had a lot to do with him being an X-ray.

And they wanted, they wanted the experience of being on a team. And so I was a little bit, I was a little bit jealous, just a little bit. And that quickly went away because once we got to know Robbie within the next couple days,

I mean, we all fell in love with the guy. And so shortly after that, we go to have Ace down in Florida, down here in Florida, and we do some call for fires with him. And, you know, he gets drunk one night. in Jacksonville and runs through a water fountain. Then he's put on restriction. He can't, you know, the team sergeant, you're not going to drink for the rest of the trip.

And then because he was a good boy, about two, about a week into that TDI, they were like, go out. And so he went out and got drunk and hooked up with some stripper. And, yeah, you know, it was just, it was just all fun. And we get back from there and, you know, he decides, you know, we're getting, we're getting rolled up for our first trip to Afghanistan. And everything is all fun in games, you know. Right now it's we, we feel really good about our training.

We did some really creative training. We feel really good about the team. The team is jelling. There's no, like, the dynamics are really smooth. Yeah, no melodrama. Everybody doing their job. Yeah, you know, and we all got, our Delta ended up getting married during that time period. And we all bought some bowling shirts and we went down to the courthouse with them.

And, you know, it was like we were a family. And so we went through that first trip. You know, we go to Afghanistan. We were up in the Kunar province. And this is where, you know, we're all our SOPs and everything are, you know, we're training. We're going out the first three days in Afghanistan, you know, you land, you know, you do an accountability of your equipment and stuff. And then our team sergeant is like, hey, we're moving out to J-BAD.

So we get to J-BAT. And while we're there, we team up with a seventh group team. You know, we just start doing missions back-to-back. So for for like three or four days, man, we're just back-to-back missions. You know, what I mean is we're going out, coming back, sleep for an hour, op order, back out. And this went on for about three, three, four days. No firefights or anything, really tame.

You know, a lot of dry holes. We found a couple IEDs, some IED making materials. things like fertilizer and stuff like that. And then we finally pushed out to Norei, North, northern Afghanistan. We get there, you know, we get settled in and everything. And we start going out on missions. We start, you know, we rip out with the team.

And it's like normal, normal day in the life. And so Robbie is like trying to get like familiar with some of the weapons systems. We got some, a couple of ZSUs. We got a spig nine. So ZSU, what, 23s? Not really sure. But anti-aircraft guns.

And the SPG recoilus rifle. Yeah, SDG, recoil this rifle. We got a couple double discus, you know. And so the bravos are, they're in heaven, you know. They're sitting around, you know, playing with bang-bangs. and Robbie is doing some weapons familiarization with the SPG 9. And he decides he's going to shoot at this mountain. So we had this whole mountain where nobody lived that we can shoot at.

And there's across the river. And so Robbie's over there. And, you know, he's, they're running drills. They're running drills and drills. And so they get it down because the SPG 9 is on the back of a truck. So they're shooting at the mountain, shooting at the mountain, shooting at the. the mountain and then it was like index for a little bit and about two hours later you know we're sitting back watching some movies or whatever and I get a I get a call to the front gate and um

so I roll up on the ATV and I'm like and I got this old man and he has a cowhead and a leg in a hoof and a tail and a hunch and I'm like what the heck is this he goes you guys shot my shot my cow like are you kidding me? So we ended up paying like $500 for a stupid cow. Does somebody hit more with an SPG 9? Yeah, that somebody hit with the SBG 9. But yeah.

And then he bought a monkey. He wanted a monkey. You know, it was like. Robbie wanted a monkey. Yeah, he wanted the monkey. And so we got a monkey. And, you know, he played around with the monkey until the, you know, team sergeant's like, you got to get rid of the monkey.

And so, you know, next. and you know, we're playing monkey launch operations over a river, you know, with a parachute. And the monkey, you know, scurries away. So, yeah, we put a parachute on the monkey. Like a pop-flare parachute? The pilot shoot for a pilot shoot for the, for a cargo. Where did he get the monkey? Was there a souk that you guys went to?

Was it a traveling monkey sales thing? How did this happen? Robbie had this gift of, he can speak. He came to the team speaking Spanish, French, and German already. He learned French in the Q course. While he was in country, he started to learn Dari and Pashton. And he spent all his time with the local security forces that we worked with. And so month two and a half.

you know, Robbie is gone native and, you know, he's brokering deals for gyms and rocks and stuff. And he's brokering deals for monkeys. And next thing, you know, he has a monkey because that's just what Robbie wants, you know. And we even built a cage for him, you know, and so. But, you know, the Delta's booth. and you're like hey you know that's a disease that's a vector you know you're going to get us all sick and so the monkey's had to go and so you know we sent them to that pair you know that airborne sold in the sky it was a good time um during this time period we went out on the mission with uh with a with another group of guys that we were working that were working in the ao in this place got called gyradesh and um gowardash so the afghan mountain the terrain in this area. Let me see if I won't pull up that.

Hey, Jack, can you pull up that PowerPoint or whoever has it? Yes, I can. You want me to share it on the screen? Yeah, would you? Yeah. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five

with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit Child and Family Resource Network. Okay. So this is our firebase. You can't really tell here how narrow this valley is. Can you click go to the fourth slide? This is, you know, this from left to right, that's a pretty tight, it's a pretty tight valley. And this is what we call ambush, ambush alley. And this, this ambush alley goes from the very, from the border of pack. back into Afghanistan about 100 miles. And the mountain range in this area is like a maze.

So getting off the MSR and going into the valley systems, you can easily get lost. And you're in some really tight, steep terrain. And we got into, we went to this place just north of this location. of this location called Gowardesh. It was our very big, big operation. It was about 50 vehicles, about maybe 120 dudes. And we were just, we're up there to do a humanitarian assistance operation

where we brought food and clothing to the local villagers to try to win hearts and minds. And on the way back, we were expected to get into an ambush. just south of this location on this road. Prior to the, prior to the ambush, we were kind of like meandering in this area right here before we continued on. And as we started our convoy back, we get into a firefight.

I don't know. It was probably maybe like eight or nine guys at most. It was my first firefight. It was our first firefight as a team. and Robbie, this is where Robbie, he came to shine. This is where I didn't see what he did, but at the end of the day, he was awarded the Army Commendation Medal with Aller. But apparently, you know, he did some really good work.

He was coordinating fires. I do know he was coordinating fires with the local Afghans, security forces. He was taking charge of the maneuver element. We couldn't maneuver across the river, but he was getting Afghans to move on high ground so they can at least be shooting, shooting that guys. Rather being plunging fire, we can get some direct fire going back and forth.

The whole firefight maybe lasted. like the whole gunfight itself maybe lasted 10 minutes, right? I had a total of 16 magazines. I think I shot everyone except for the one. My Bravo, my senior Bravo was like, Mac, you need to get some, keep shooting, keep shooting. So I'm just sitting there like, ah, you know. And I had like maybe eight, 2004, 204,

two or eight rounds. And I shot all eight of those. And then my senior, you know, my team sergeant was like, hey, go get control of your junior. And so he comes up to me. He's like, hey, man, how many magazines you have left? And I go, one, you go, the one in your gun? I'm like, yeah, you're a dummy. And he just walked away, you know. And so it was a pretty humble and experience. experience. But after that, I realized, you know, shoot at what you can see, take control, you know, control fire, you know, control aims. You know, I was just praying and sprain, not really looking at what I was doing. But I was also getting egg done by my senior bravo. Yeah, we can go. You can close this out. Okay. So Robbie was like a natural, it sounds like.

I mean, he came to you guys speaking a whole bunch of languages. He knew the guns. He integrated with the locals very easily. I was taking charge in a firefight. This guy, it sounds like he was just born to be a green beret. Yeah, yeah, he was. His, you know, and I would say a lot has to do with our leadership at the time. Our leadership was really, I wouldn't say hands off, but they maxed them.

They took, they maximized our talent. You know, they managed our talent really well. Instead of, you know, he, hey, hey, team dad, I got an idea. You be like, yeah, what are you got? I'll tell them whatever it is I had an idea for. He goes, all right, it makes sense. Run with it, you know. Or if one of us, you know, part of our SOP was, is one of us see something that the others

didn't see we take charge you know hey we need you guys you know no questions asked we need to get we need five guys to move over here now do it and so um that's how the way our team functioned and um it was we were a we were very very fluid with it we did some more we did some more operations with that that same element and um we didn't get it we didn't get to they got into you know, we got to support some of the fighting. We went to Cop Keating. So you know Cop Keating was overran, right? Right, right.

We talked about Cop Keating on one of our episodes with Ron Mueller, who was an air branch guy for the CIA. And he told some pretty harrowing stories about Keating. Yeah, those guys were flying out there all the time. They were flying out there quite a bit. And we went out there to do an assessment. Tenth Mountain, they did, you know, Tenth Mountain did a really good job in that area. I'm going to tell you that right now.

Hands down. 173rd came in and they were, they were doing really good. But the colonel, the battalion commander, the guy was a, he was hard to work with. You know, he was really hard to work with. He, you know, he bought in the corner. but didn't understand what he bought into. And, you know, he had his intent. He had his own intentions, and he ran with it, the way he knew how.

But he ended up giving up the MSR at the end of the day. 10th Mountain, on the other hand, they owned it. They had a National Guard element that ran that road at least once a day, getting into a firefight once a day. and I felt sorry for them because the biggest weapon they had on any of their trucks was a 249, not a 249, a 240 Bravo. And I was like, are you kidding me? They were like, yeah, you know, they didn't trust them with a Mark 19 or a or a 50 cow or anything, you know. Yeah, and just for people who are listening, M240 Bravo is just like a general purpose machine gun, fire 762 rounds.

It's in a firefight over long range in Afghanistan, you really want a 50 caliber machine gun. Yeah. And so. And you say 173 gave up the MSR. You're talking about the main service route, right? Or the main service road. Yeah. The main way that everybody travels, once you lost that, lost the ability of control,

and 10th Mountain came back in and reestablished it. No, no, no. So 2006, 10th Mountain, that was. their a. That's 2006, 2007. 2007, 2008, they ripped out with 173rd. Okay.

And so, 10,000 had it in 1,730, lost it. They gave it up. They gave it up. They gave it up because there was this transition of Afghan governance. So we're going to have the Afghan security forces patrol those roads.

Okay. That was like the dumbest thing they can do in that area. But the insurgents didn't want to IED that road because all the locals were going to be on it. So, but that opened up a big gap where you can get anything you wanted across the border because we're right there next to the Afghan Paki border. And all sorts of stuff can be facilitated from the Pakistan side into Afghanistan. So that's what that's some of the challenges that we were faced with.

with the road giving up, it made it really hard for us to move around beyond the open valley into ambush, the ambush alley. We couldn't do it as an ODA because that's not our job to just run roads. you know so in 2006 we're working with the same uh group of guys we uh and this is kind of leading up to 2008 when we get into the firefight with uh where Robbie passes we go into the same we're just south of where we go into the same valley system and there's about 200 of us and we're we're going through some pretty gnarly terrain. Like you're talking about rocks, bowling ball size at the riverbed bottom,

and a dry riverbed. And you got under nods, limited vis, like no vis whatsoever. And we got, the only thing we have above our head is a gunship, you know, doing rotations. So we're walking through this,

this maze of a valley on the low ground at night dark and rob myself the lead we're in the lead element with the guys we're partnered up with and we're going up through and we get like maybe 200 meters from the objective and we're just like setting up this huge ORP and getting guys moving and the and the guy who's leading the element looks over at us and just like he's like you gotta be fucking kidding me and like he's on a radio

and he's like are you he's like now he's getting loud you know and it's dark in a valley and he's pissed and you know generally 200 people we were pretty quiet we were moving pretty quiet and then you can hear this guy just

talking the gunship was like hey we got to check out if you guys don't if you guys don't if you guys don't punch the button now guess what we're not going to be here in 45 minutes so

we had an abort mission turn around and get everyone back just because they were bingo on fuel and had to turn around no the daylight okay so so you know they had this they had this restriction at the time

got you So when you say 200 people, 200 guys, you're, you have your ODA, you know, your Green Beret, you have another small American element with you. And then are the bulk of this then indigenous or Afghani? Is that what your 200 people are? Yeah, the rest. So it was probably 30 U.S. personnel total. Probably less than that. And then the rest was made up our Afghan force.

okay um and so you know we had to turn around um it sucked but that's just the way way things worked out for us during that time period um the rest of that trip man it was really quiet really tame um we went back got new leadership and we returned about eight months later we were back at the same phob conducting operations um and Javier when you say operations at this time frame, were these high-value target strikes, were you doing village stability operations? I wonder if you could just get a little bit into what you're...

So we were doing a lot of it was key, like in the beginning, it was a lot of key leader engagements because which... Trying to build a relationship with a lot of us. Yeah, we're building the relationships, but there's other things going on at the same time. and kind of like

target developing an area, things like that nature. And we were also, I was meeting up with me, Robbie and our bravos were meeting up with our security forces and we're going over SOPs, getting inventory of gear, stuff like that, making schedules to training schedules

so they can come down and get trained in everything. thing. But there's a bunch of stuff going on target development wise. And, you know, every now and then we will get like a HVT will pop up. And then we were like, all right, we're going to get, you know, we're standing by ready to go. And then we punch out. And an HVT is a high value target. So it's like information, intelligence on somebody who you want to capture or kill, the U.S. government wants capture kill, and you guys need to roll. Right. And so things kind of got slowed down because we went from a, we went from one, like a five-paragraph

op order to a 42-page con-off. And that just kind of like, you know, that kind of pumped the brakes on getting out of the wire. But they eventually worked it out. So we were in the middle of planning. So the target we just went after was the HVT facilitator in the area that controlled the cash. So all this money was flowing because through this little network of valleys from Pakistan into Afghanistan, and we were trying to put a cabash to it.

So in 2008, we went after the same target. I'm a fast forward because there's a bunch of things that really don't matter. But we fast forward and we're going after the same target. We go through the same Valley system. Only this time, the guys that we normally played with aren't playing. They're like, hey, man, this is on you. You guys, it wasn't like a damage in, there wasn't a, like there was a loss of rapport between us and them. there was something else going on that I wasn't privy to.

You mean the other Americans that you guys normally engaged with? Yeah. They didn't come out to play that day. And so we went out to the same, to conduct the same hit. But everything about this mission was different. We have been training the Afghan force. They were infantry guys that we were training with. with the Afghan army.

Nothing special about them, just regular Joe's. And we left. And so they would come to us to our base and train with us and then go back to wherever they came from. Well, when this mission popped off, the Afghans just sent us whoever they had on hand. You know, a bunch of admin guys, cooks, whatever. You know, they was like, hey, you know,

you guys are going to go out and do a mission with the American. Americans tonight. And you know, so we meet up this at this place called checkpoint Delta. And checkpoint Delta, in the Coonar Valley, there's a river that runs north and south. Checkpoint Delta, as you're looking at the map, splits into one arm of the river splits into Pakistan and the other splits into northern Afghanistan. And right off to the left there is Check Point Delta. And it goes, that's the mouth of Ambush Alley. So we get there in this daylight. We already did our mission planning for everything. All of us, except for our team leadership, have been in this valley system before. We knew what to expect, except for the Afghans.

The only guys, we're going in with a much. Javier, could you just take a moment to describe the geography? Because for everything I've heard about Kunaar is that it's like straight vertical slopes. Right. Yeah. So when you go in the ambush alley, you're looking at straight vertical slopes. From the left, from the east wall of the bottom of the valley to the west wall, the bottom of the valley, in some spots can be as narrow as 20 to 40 meters. That's including the river. There's a road, the MSR, the main supply route, main service route runs north and south,

and it's wide enough for a vehicle and a half without falling into the river. If you get out, the hills, it's about a 70% grade going up to the east. In the mountains from the ceiling up to the tip-top range from, you're at it, like, so the elevation to start off with is like 9,000. between 7 and 9,000. And then you add another 8, you know, 800 to 1,200 feet on either side of the river. You had this big rocky terrain. No trees, very few trees.

We were always, you know, this time, both times we were in Kunar. It was wintertime. So it was what, you know, it gets about the lowest. We got about 15 degrees. Fahrenheit and the hottest I can remember getting is about 70. And you must have a lot of snow at that altitude. Yeah. So what?

You must have a lot of snow at that altitude also. When it snowed, we got it pretty good. But it didn't snow too often. And you didn't have big snow drifts. So in this area, like, you know, I mean, tactically, you're always taught, you know, take a different, weight out than you go in on a raid or something like that. Was that a possibility in this area or because of the train you were channeled to go one way in and one way out and that's it.

One way in, one way out. And they took advantage of this during this particular. I'm not really sure if there was something different about this, about this mission from the outset. So once we got there and we started moving into Ambush Alley at night, it was a full. full moon, it was January 24th, full moon. And once you get past checkpoint Delta, the next major terrain featured out, familiar to us on the ground was Six Fingers House. There's a guy, it was an Afghan that he's kind of like the troll.

You know, you had to pay the toll to get past the troll, you know, and Six Fingers was that guy that the Afghans would get, you know, swindled by. and he actually had six fingers on one of his hands. So we passed six fingers house and about maybe 600 meters past his house was a boulder, a good size boulder, big enough that the lead truck, which was we also got partnered up with the National Guard unit for this mission.

And they were going to end up being our left and right security. so they're leading and they you know we get over the radio was like hey uh our call sign at the time was gremlin they're like hey gremlin uh we got a boulder in the road and i'm like all right cool and team sergeant comes up to me he goes you got it yep so he comes up there with me and by this point i have a junior charlie we're doing some assessments of the boulder we look at it and like we can We can blow this. This, no problem. So, you know, I take, I think it was like four, four blocks of C4,

Tia Yuli knot. I already had it all prepped anyway. I just taped it up, shoved it underneath the space of the boulder, backed the convoy up about 200 meters below it, and we continued on. So this was about 10 o'clock, maybe close to 11 o'clock at night, 21, 2300. And then we continued forward. So at this point, we got about 800 meters where we're going to go to our original drop-off point. And we really had no choice to go to this mouth because that's the only place we could.

If we could turn around, that's the only place we can do it. We can get all our vehicles to turn around and go back head south. So we head up to this point, to this point. We dismount. And J-TAC, Rob Gutierrez, is on the radio. talking to the to the predator. I think it was a predator on station and you know they got some intercepts that the target that we were looking for wasn't in the location that we were heading to but he's rather across the river and in a different location. So we continue so you know the

leadership gets together. It's like, all right, let's go, let's go take care of this. So mind you, this is at night. I just blew up a boulder. We're in a narrow valley. You would imagine that who we should have, we should have spooked anybody that was in the area away, but, you know, the Afghans are kind of, they're different. It didn't phase them one bit. So we continue on and we, the valley. So now this is of one point. an ambush, um, ambush alley where the valley opens up just a bit. And we get some switchbacks. So we're the, the convoys negotiating these switchbacks. And right when the switchbacks in, there's another boulder. Now that at this point, we're about 600 meters away from the

target where we're, where we're going. Team sergeant's like, all right, hey, blow it. So we blow the boulder. again, no change in behavior from the guys on the other side. They're still doing what they're doing, and we continue on. And so we get to this like plateau. And a, can you share that screen again? Yeah, yeah. So the switchbacks are back here, or wait, you can't even see my mouse. So switchbacks are where it says screenshot.

And our ambush is along this line here. So we have to say what up this white line here. Yeah. So that's the road that low falls a line. The lead element is our left side. As you're looking at it, would be our right side security to the north. Or our left side security to the north and our right side security is going to be to the south. And everything in between our vehicles.

are all kind of like parked on this level ground over where it says screenshot. And our left side security identifies, identifies, you know, people with some guns. With, you know, they positively identify targets for us to interdict. And they take a couple shots at us. And that's when our left side security at that point opened up. It took us a minute because this whole ambush that we have set up kind of took us off guard because we really didn't expect, at least I didn't really expect anything at this point. I thought this was going to be a dry hole and at some point we're just going to go,

we're going to RTB back to return to base with out there being anything going on. Did you guys have air support at this point in time? Did you have an AC130 or anything like that above? No. No. Okay. No, we didn't, yeah, the guys we had all the toys didn't come out to play, and so we didn't have a lot of assets. Okay. So, so we're set up. The left side security opens up to, up, and there's a gap.

So the second arrow from the top where that bends. Right here. Yep. Where it terminates at the end. the other side. Down to the right, Jack? Down to the right. Oh, down here. No, go to the middle of the screen and down a little bit, right?

Yep. Is that where you're talking out? Yeah. So that's here. Yeah, this is the area where we start, everybody starts to open up. And there's a video, one of the guys on the left side security took a video. He actually has it posted on YouTube. And it's titled, a U.S. Army Special. Special Forces Kick Ass, Part 1 through 5. And they're the ones who initially opened up the ambush.

Yeah, if you're watching, you can go ahead and go to part one and then watch them all in sequence. I'll put these in chat so people can take a look when they're ready. So they end up opening up, and then we followed up. And for about, it seemed like it was forever, man. We, you know, like in the, you know, doctrine, you know, according to, you know, 7-8, Ranger Handbook, you know, your media contact is usually like, what, 30 seconds or a minute. We kept shooting. We had to change barrels. That's how long we shot. I jumped on the Carl Gustav. Part of our SOP was to shoot all our, you know, the fight from our trucks first before we start fighting from our kit. So one of my

jobs as a Charlie was I shot, I love, I made it my job to shoot all the big guns. So I was the Carl Gustav Gunner on the team. And I was on that. Robbie was on the, he was on truck two, which on our team

was our, where we had the Mark 19. And then I was in truck one with our senior Bravo. and he was on a 50 cow. We had three 240s on that truck. So all the 240s to 50 cows, all the big guns from the truck are firing into this area.

And the Mark 19 is a 40 millimeter like automatic grenade launcher. Automatic grenade launcher, yeah. I believe my senior, my senior, my senior Charlie, he's, you know, he's using direct lay on the 60 millimeter, mortar. And so he's just, you know, he's triggered, you know, he's in the trigger fire mode dropping, you know, with the mortar on safe. He's just dropping rounds on charge, you know, zero or charge one and squeezing off rounds. And so we're laying some scunnion down. And this is like the first time, I never thought in my military career that I would actually

do an ambush. And here we are doing it right now. So this goes on for a bit. And Robbie the whole time, he's doing well. You know, he's, oh, as when he's, you know, when our AG on the Mark 19 is, you know, reloading him, you know, he's with the, you know, he's yelling commands at the Afghans. Hey, you know, shift fire here because they had a Dishka. And so he was trying to maintain control of that Dishka while they're shooting it. But it went, the Dishkas were so unreliable.

that we probably got like a good five-round burst out of that thing before it just, you know, before it went to crap. So this goes on and then finally the captain, you know, you hear over the radio, ceasefire. And there was like a lull and Rob Gutierrez, you know, they got they positively ID some, some guys still meandering around. So he was he was clear to engage. So he sent the cleared hot to by this time we got aircraft on station. I believe we had like an A10 in the stack. And I think we had a couple flights in the stack.

So we had a couple 500 pound j dams get dropped into A.O. And because we dropped those jams, the you know after talking to hire the commander was given a directive to go conduct a BDA and the BDA is a battle damage assessment yeah battle damage assessment so it was seven members of my operational detachment and that's that included Robbie my team sergeant my warrant my captain and two others. And then the rest, in the Marine, we had a Marine embedded with us.

He was actually embedded with the Afghans that we were working with. And Robbie. And so we, you know, we get our little truckside brief. The commander, you know, Bob Cusick at the time was like, hey, you know, this is what we got to do. We're going to go do it. Go over there, come back. you know, we're going to be smart about this. Don't do anything, though.

So we just dropped the whole crap load of ordinance. We just shot a bunch. I don't know how anybody lived through this. I don't know how we, you know, it was, it was, if you watch the video, we, we put a hurting on this mountain side to say the least. But, so we walk, so we walk along the road. we have to go north about another 500 meters and there's a bridge and we cross the bridge and then we're coming down and we're coming down and we're right in a tree line when and so let me just kind of give you

an idea who's leading the element so we have the afghans up front it's their country they're leading it um they're up front robbie's with them and his this so this is our second deployment now. And his language, his Pashtun is spot on. So he's able to talk to the Afghans in their language and, you know, control them along with the Marine. They're up front. And then follow behind them as me, the Bravo, the J-TAC, Rob Gutierrez, and the rest of the team, the team sergeant, team leader. in our Fox.

And so we're in like basically a file at this point because it's dark and the team at least has, we have our SOP for traveling at night and limited visibility. We still have the predator on station and we still have the A10s. I believe there are still on station. Hey, is there a way I can, how can I gain control of this? Jack, go go down to share her screen and or whatever you have to do to stop sharing it. I got it.

And then, Hav, you need to share, you need to pull it up on your computer and share a screen. All right. You got it, Javier? Yeah, I got it. Okay. All right. So we just came down from, we're on the northwest side of the river here. And we're coming around this area.

And we get about here. Now, this is where I'm at. Where I'm pointing at right now, this is where I'm at. ahead of me, I have Robbie in the Afghans in the file. What you see right here, this is a thing. Hold on one second. Hey, Jack, are you still screen share? It says, waiting for Javier to control my screen.

I see somebody's cursor on there. Is that you, Javier? That's me, yeah. Okay, all right, all right, we're good. All right, sorry about that. Go ahead. Can you see my mouse? Are we good?

Yeah, I see it. I see it on the screen, Javier. All right, cool. So we're like in this area right here. What you don't see, there's a wall. There's a wall like right here that runs north and south. There's a building right here and these trees right here. But this finger right here is where this is our,

this is where we end up taking contact from. that contact. So this is a little draw that goes back into the mountain. This is high ground here. This is all high ground. This is low ground here. All right. So Robbie is up front with the Afghans,

and they take contact from here. There's a boulder right here. And they had an ambush line set up all in this wood line. and all right here. Some estimates, you know, some say there was like anywhere from 50 to 80 guys. I've heard is highest 115.

Either way, you know, we start, we received a ton of fire. And so since we're in a file and Robbie is just ahead of me, you know, we break apart left and right. So Robbie's off to my right, so that means I'm to the left.

And there's like a little gap in between us. And we're spread out about maybe 20 meters. And we all start, those of us that are in the ambush here, I'm really sorry, but I do not see your cursor. It's coming on and off. I'm not sure what it is. I Hey

Jaff can you Jack can you stop sharing your screen real quick Okay Hobb can you pull up can you pull this slide up on your computer? Yeah can you go down to the bottom and where it says share a screen

would not allow you to share a screen hold on a second yeah I will I just got to find the PowerPoint slide Sorry guys, I apologize for interrupting, but. Yeah, well, Javier is doing that. Only just take the moment right now to say, hey, thank you, everyone who's joining us live right now.

Really appreciate it. Please give the video a thumbs up, you know, share the video, comment on it, etc., etc., all that stuff really helps spread the word. Please subscribe to the channel. If you haven't already, there's a little button down there. You can subscribe to this bad boy. And welcome to all of our new subscribers because we have a whole bunch after last episode. You guys really enjoyed Sergeant Major Mike Vining's video.

So we got a bunch of new subscribers. Thank you for joining us tonight. And when you subscribe, also make sure you hit that bell icon. And that will make sure you get notified the next time we go live. Oh, sorry, Jack. Go for it, Dave. I just want to do some quick shout-outs here. Andrew, thank you very much.

Andrew said Dave knows about the reserves and random MOSs. Yeah. Also, this is kind of a random question. What is the fastest possible time frame someone can make sergeant? What kind of person winds up pouring that off? I would say about two years. About two years? And that's probably like an 18xray program,

like going from a recruit to a sergeant through SFAS and the queue. Right. Lots of years. J.P. Thanks for service. Keep bringing in these heroes. Thanks, J.P. And I think that's it. So can you pull that screen up, huh? Yeah, just give me a second. I just got to take your time. We just really, I just want to see it because I just want to, as you're illustrating this and talking about it, I think that we would all love to kind of be able to visualize it. Yeah. And Javier, I just emailed to you. you back the PowerPoint if you need it.

Oh. There we go. Yeah, there we go. All right. Hold on. Oh, come on. Open up. There we go.

Okay, cool. All right. So this is ambush out. This is the opening is Ambush Alley. Okay. All right. This is checkpoint Delta right here. Mm-hmm.

This is where it goes into Pakistan. And this is Afghanistan. Stan. Sixth Ginger's house would be right here. All right. Let me go to the next image. All right, here we go. See that?

Yep. All right. So yeah, we had the ambush set up right along here in this area, all our vehicles. Less side security opened up into this area right here, where that Boulder is. and now we're conducting the BDA and we're coming down here. So Rob in his element, they're taking, they start taking fire from right here. The guy jumps up from behind this boulder right here with the PKM and he's like, Al-Wal Akbar, and he just starts shooting.

At this point, the Afghans just, they bail, they bounce and they run down to this area right here. the Marine is trying to herd cats and get them stay keep them in the fight and Rob is kind of Rob is kind of left floundering kind of out in the open by himself at this point. I'm about 20 meters beat to his left back into this left with the Bravo with our with my 18 Bravo and weapon sergeant. and the J-TAC, Air Force J-TAC. So we're kind of clustered right here. At this time, Robbie's engaging everything in this area right here. And we are engaging because we're in a nearby,

we're in a close ambush right here. And so me, the J-TAC and the Bravo, we're engaging, you know, four Dukes that keep popping up in this little cluster right here. during this time period, Robbie's like, he throws his first hand grenade and it goes back up into this area. I'm shooting by this time the spotlight from the ISR, the, it was, we had this area lit up that we can see under knots. The ISR is the intelligence surveillance reconnaissance. It's some sort of platform, aerial platform.

It has an IR spotlight illuminating the area for anybody who's wearing night vision. Right. So we can see now it has this whole area light up, but we can only see what's in this area right here. And these is these two, four guys playing whack-a-mole and they're just kind of like, and so I get ready to throw a grenade, but my Bravo stops me because he's like, hey, man, we're too close. And so I put my grenade away and we start engaging them. And we eventually neutralize this area. And we started engaging targets in here.

And then the whole time, Robbie is just doing nothing. He's on his saw, and he's just engaging targets all up in this area. Because he's taking a lot of fire. We were, the reason why we weren't taking as much fire is because we had our, he was, he was shooting a M249 squad automatic weapon. And he, in that, you can't put a, nowadays, you can put a suppressor on it, but he didn't have a suppressor on his. He was also was shooting a saw with a 10-inch barrel. And I think they're normally, what, 16 inches?

So the blowback on that is even bigger than normal. Bigger flash. Yeah, it's a bigger flash. So, but the rest of us were, we're shooting M-4s with, with suppressors, you know, surefire suppressors. And we're engaged in all our targets. So we're not, we're not, we're taking fire, but we're not taking this much fire. At some point, the captain, he's back here and he gets hit.

So here's the first one that says, hey, you know, I'm hit. And so we knew the, the team back. here can take care of him but it was we were in the X we were in the kill zone so when the kill zone is the area where everybody where all the volume of fire is going to be centered on so we're taking a huge volume of fire in this area we were at or Robbie's taking a huge volley of fire in this area it's not so much impacting us but at some point i get hit the first time here and my uh hit my magazine it hit my uh my magazine square on on my uh chest rig i stay in the fight robbie at this time uh calls for a break contact and so i get down in the prone position

and i'm engaging targets off into this area laying down suppress a fire to this area and i hear the saw sing its last note, and I didn't hear moving. So I stopped for a second, I see Robbie on the ground. I go, hey, Robbie's hit. So I run up to him, and I run up to Robbie, and I need, I'm sitting out in the open just like he is. So I run back and I say, hey, we need to go get Robbie. So my Bravo said, all right, hey, I'm going to hold down

and do you give you some suppressing fire. So he stays in this area and the JTAC and I run to where Robbie is over here in this area. At the time we were there, there was a wall right here. But we're right here in the open. And, you know, T-T-T-T-C was fairly, it was fairly new to us. And so we had gotten tactical combat care training. prior to the deployment, but that went out the window when I just, and that basically what you're supposed to do in that scenario,

if you're hit, you fight, you know, you fight in place and take care of your moon and wait for somebody to come to you. But I immediately ran to my buddy, and we started, I started rendering first aid. He was, he was laying on his back, and, the saw was like off to his left and the worst part about it was I can see his face but I went right into training you know I started from the head and worked my way down there was no there weren't any head wounds and so I went back to his neck, you know, did a sweep, looked at my hands, no blood. And then I was like, all right, I bust

open his kit, and he's taking really shallow breaths at this time. I'm looking for a bullet and I do a sweep down his sides. I do a sweep down his back, no blood. And I continue down to his legs. And I sit up and I hear it. to my right and off to me. I'm not another M. And this time I'm sorry. All right. We're losing.

Are we getting lost? Are we good? Yeah. We get it. Hold on a second, guys. What's up? It's unstable. Could just be that there's a lot of people on Zoom this time tonight.

Yeah. Close that screen and see if that. Well, how's the sound? You cut out there again. See if not sharing the story. See if done the screen and close that out and see if that helps. I'm so busy up to in that moment. We were just really choppy.

All right, Javier. I'm sorry. Do you want to try to pick it back up? Yeah, so I'm, I'm a little bit now. I just start checking in wounds, and I couldn't find them to save my life. So I pulled a shirt and cold. It's like maybe 10 degrees out.

And I finally triple blood. on his left arm and that's where I looked immediately and I was like so I went to look for a check though I pulled it out and throw it on and it wouldn't stick and so I pulled out my chest seal it on and I got the seal but by this point he expired in between that I got a second time. This time he hit push to talk to radio. So I'm sitting there on a radio and Rob Gutierrez is talking on the radio time and gunfire has kind of died down at this point. And Rob Deeris, he says to me, I said to him, I go, hey man, Rob's dead. We got to get him back. And Rob, Rob Gutierrez is like, hey, I got a, I have a gun run coming.

Dang close. So we passed on the, the first, you know, dash one came in, cleared hot and about 75 meters in away from us, the strafing run. So a dash two comes in and go back into the overhead. And so, well, that's, after second, volley comes through, me and Rob our first attempt, grabbed me and bringing CCP, Chops, which is. Because of the train and the, the, the, the, we just couldn't get a good grip on, on,

on Robbie. So we put them back down and I can't remember if Gutierrez called in another gun run. I believe he did. And I looked at him and I was like, hey, man, we got to leave Robbie here and then turn around. Can you still hear me? Yeah, yeah, I got you. Javier. You've got you now. Your screen is frozen. I'm, uh, okay. As long as we're all right. But the audio sounds okay. Yeah. That's definitely more worried about. Yeah. So, Rob, So Robbie is, so we're trying to move Robbie and we couldn't move him. And by this time, the Marine, who was with the Afghans, he kind of sees what's going on.

And he runs to our location. I'm like, hey, grab the Saul. And I look at Rob Gutierrez and I was like, hey, man, we got to leave him. Because at this point, we started taking fire, a lot of fire. And he's like, no, ride or die, dude. We're going to sit this one. I go, look, man. I weigh 200 feet.

I'm like, dude, I'm too big. I'm not going to risk the lives of the team to try to come get me and you and this Marine. We're going to get over the wall. You're going to get back to the CCP. So, you know, Rob Gutierrez being a, you know, he's a stud, man. He was like Roger. And he was laser focused on the job. If it wasn't for him, you know, those gun runs, I'd probably be dead.

but we hop over that wall I was telling you about with the Marine and we laid down we took a couple RP you know a couple RPGs at this point and it really sucked because I felt like a lot of guilt you know leaving my buddy I can see him still you know and and there's a lot of guilt you know that that tears me up to this day but anyway we we make so we get to a point where Gutierrez is like, hey, bro, I got to get to a better position. I got to drop some bombs. I'm like, all right, Roger. So I go, hey, and the Marine said, hey, I'm going to go with him.

I go, all right, I'm going to go back to the CCP, let them know. You guys get the guns. You know, we basically came up with a plan. And at this point, I was still in the fight mentally. So I make it back to the CCP. Rob Gutierrez is now. He's closer to the river. He's closer to the river and he's taking gunfire.

And at this point, his, I believe he lost, he's doing everything analog now as far as calling in, you know, grids and everything. He's doing it. He's got a protractor, paper, compass, rather than having a dagger and the plurf there to, you know, the laser range finders to do all, you know, come up with all the solutions. He's doing it all analog. And at the same time, oh, yeah, by the way, he's getting shot at. You know, he's an awesome J-TAC.

Anyway, so I make it back to the CCP. And, you know, I get there and I see Rob or Bob, Bob Cusick, my captain, and he's blue. He's got like a sucking chest wound. and tension nemo thorax. And we're just in a bad place, man. And I say to him, I go, hey, Robbie, you know, Robbie's dead. And everything just kind of stopped for a second.

And the team sergeant was like, hey, what happened to your magazine? Hey, you got shot. And after that, man, I was done. I just, I had, it was hard to stay in the fight at that. point. And then on top of that, I'm looking 100 meters away from me. And there's Robbie. And I'm like, I got to go get him. And my Bravo at this point, he had made it back to the CCP. And he saw me, ready to get up. And he stopped me. He goes, dude, what are you doing? I go, I got to get Robbie. And they're like, no, stop. And so our warrant,

he started assessing a situation and he was like all right hov I mean he's gonna pull security you know I'm gonna take care of the captain who you know hey we need you know Jim or my team sergeant start that nine line you know he started calling the shots and everything's just we went right back to SOP and things started to happen um about an hour or so later the uh medevac came and picked, and I was told to get on the bird with the captain, take him back, and the team still had to go back and get Robbie. The rest of the team performed, you know, awesomely. They went out, and by this point, our partner forces that we had been working with a while back,

became QRF, our, you know, had a QRF sent to our location. and they were able to meet up with the ODA sometime after that. And it was like a period of time went. Getting Robbie wasn't like a, you know, last time, like, you know, when I started this story, I was telling you, it was like 11 o'clock at night. By this time, the sun was up. It was still overcast. It's like four in the afternoon.

And it seemed like it was only 30 minutes. really feel like only 30 minutes had passed. And I can't even tell you when the sun came up at what point because there's just so much that happened that day. But they recovered Robbie's body.

The captain was sent to the what is it called? The field surgical tip FST and the field surgical team started working on him. He ended up getting a

chest tube and they shipped him out to Bogram to get him to Longstool and then from Longstool back to Walter Reed and then Walter Reed back home. We didn't see Rob, Bob Cusick for the rest of the trip. Rob, they recovered the body and there was a firefight broke back out and a couple of guys got injured from the team and they were medevacked out and then it was index everybody you know end of mission returned back to their respective places came back to the firebase and um i had to go i went to the bird i was i went out to the medevac bird to pick up robbie when he came in and um that was that was the i was able to least we were able to least get him back And we took them to our med shed.

And, you know, we immediately went into accountability. You know, we had to, you know, get the trucks filled up. I tried to get my, I did all that stuff just to keep my mind off of what just happened. You know, I was still processing it from, you know, all this stuff. You know, we got the trucks fueled up, you know, or we at least attempted to get things. operational ready to roll back out if you have to yeah and um it was rough you know it wasn't it wasn't really easy uh to do but um about another two hours passed and um our senior medic was like hey let's come say our last goodby's to robbie and um yeah and we carried them out

to the to the helicopter and that was the last time i saw So, Javier, this story, you know, it really sheds light on the fact that I think a lot of people out there think that combat is you make nice, clean headshots on the bad guys. Everybody goes home in time for, you know, sandwiches and it's all good. It's nice and clean. It's static. It's sterile, right? But in real life, you know, these things happen and you have to make really difficult decisions under-com. combat under fire. And in this case, one of the worst things that probably could have happened

where, you know, you had to, at least for temporarily, you had to leave one of your teammates behind so that you could, you know, re-kit, reconfigure your forces and then go and recover his remains. So that you could live. I mean. Right. You know, other teammates could live. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, I was interviewed by Stars and Stripes, and I, you know, that whole leaving Robbie behind was the hardest thing. The hardest decision I can make as an NCO leader placed in that situation at that time. I don't regret leaving them behind.

I just don't like the fact that I did. Yeah. And Robbie would want you guys to live. Yeah. Well, you know, he laid his life down for it. you. There's no question that he would have wanted that for you. And the thing about it was he was straight gangster about it too, you know. He there was no just like his shots were like it was like we were on a range. He was like everything was sharp. It was a flash. That's where

his muzzle was going. Same with us, you know. And I want to really attribute to the team, especially the element I was with. The, you know, the Bravo, the J-TAC, Robbie, myself, we did things the way we were trained to do. You know, I let emotion and attachment get the best of me and when Robbie was initially hit. But I think any guy would have done that. It's hard. It's something that's hard to fight against. But, yeah.

Yeah, it was a tough scenario to be in. And you're right, you know, he gave his life for us so that we can make it back. But that event would go on to haunt me for years. And I ended up doing things I should have done. Like, instead of taking a break, I ended up deploying again. I shouldn't end up deployed. You know, I had no business deploy. You know, I went to go be a dog handler, thinking that I'll get that break.

Being around a dog would help me out with this. And it didn't. You know, I feel like I failed myself on that. I wouldn't necessarily blame my leadership because it was my choice to redeploy. It was my choice to become a dog handler. And I'm the type of person that takes responsibility for decisions I make. but that was the attitude at the time you know stay in the fight you know

and we should mention here also that Robbie was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions that day right yeah yeah yeah he was the team I feel like the team was able to move on a lot better than I was able to

I think Gutierre is I can't speak for Gutierrez, but some of the things we've talked about since that that period has really kind of honked both of us and kind of helped shape the rest of our career, you know. So, you know, after that event, like four months later, so that was January. in April, my team minus me in a handful. So half my team, I was on the QRF, and the other half was on the assaulting element with ODA 3336 with in shock the battle, shock valley.

And that's where Ron, Ron Schur and Matt Williams both were awarded at the Medal of Honor, as well as the majority, almost everybody on the team receiving silver stars, being awarded silver stars and Purple Hearts. I think there was only like two guys, two guys at the time who didn't get a silver star. But that, for, you know, for a couple of the new guys in the company, that was their first mission. You know, so imagine that, you know, you just, you know, going to going into that battle in it itself as your first, you know, welcome to group, welcome to Afghanistan.

Oh, yeah, by the way. Here's a narrow, here's another narrow valley that will fight in. And, oh, yeah, you're shooting uphill. You know, you're fighting uphill. So. But can. Do you mind if I ask you? And if we, if you want to bypass us, we can and it's fine.

We can talk more about, you know, the history that, you know, your experience. But what, Robbie, he passed, what, where does the guilt come from? You didn't leave a, you didn't leave a teammate, you know, who was in the fight. You didn't, like, abandon him. you you you you made it made a tactical decision made a tactical decision after he passed where does where do you have you explored like where does that guilt come from or what do you feel guilty about even though his remains were recovered and everything so the guilt the guilt comes from the fact that when I got back to the CCP and the moment I realized like it

it took the team sergeant saying, hey, you were shot. There was something that clicked to me like, I'm done. And the fact that I was done at that point, I felt like I was one less gun in a fight. And I became combat ineffective to the point where I was not able to stay to recover Robbie's body. And yet, but at the same time, they had to stop you from going back to, to attempt to get his body at that same time, correct? Yeah, that was, that was an irrational reaction on my part. And I would have could have, I could have potentially put the lives of my, my teammates in danger because of that. And so, this is the first time, you know, I've talked about this in, uh, in other settings before, uh, more private.

settings. This is the first time I've ever said it out loud in the public setting. And since that point, you know, I've mentioned, you know, I've talked to teammates about that. And at the time, rightfully so, they weren't comfortable with that reaction from me. And that's understandable. And I, but there was some, because of that, there were some, there some bitterness in me because we were all reacting to Robbie's death and that's the way we all ended up coping with it, you know? Right. And so at the time it sucked.

At the time I was pissed. At the time I was embarrassed. But, you know, now we're looking back at it 20 years, you know, 10 years, 12 years later. and I see it differently. They see it differently. They understand like, hey, dude, you just found out, you just saw your buddy died.

And then, oh, yeah, on top of that, you were blocking out the fact that you got shot. Yeah. And by mistake, just by, you know, he didn't mean it intentionally.

It was just like, hey, you got shot too. And it was like, oh, shit. And then it was like, I'm done. So, you know, It was a good call.

I'm really grateful for my warrant officer who took charge. You know, I was grateful for my team sergeant for getting that nine line in. And but that, you know, a lot of that, that whole, that whole event, that, that little event I just told you about just kind of drove a wedge with me mentally with the team. Because I felt like now I'm on the outs because I was doing. really good up into this point per se and because of the where we're at emotionally dealing with Robbie's death I felt like I just got recycled over an AD you know or kicked out of the Q-course over an AD right and I think to be fair there's yes everybody's dealing with Robbie's death, there's a significant difference between being, you know, being in one position and saying,

hey, one of our teammates is down, is dead over there. And having been the person there trying to save him and watching him pass, you know, even though to the outside world, everybody's sharing this experience, our teammate passed, there's a significant difference between being, 100 yards from it and being right there, right there when it happens. You know, there's a significant difference and there's a significant difference in how people are going to process that, you know, so. And so this is where, like, having some spirituality behind me ended up at least getting me through the rest of that deployment.

I wish I had listened to the premonitions I was having of, you know, taking a year off, you know, to get to get squirted away, take a knee. But instead, you know, what I thought was going to be a year, the need, the need for that capability of being a dog handler happened just like that. I want to talk about that next, but I just want to say thank you for sharing that story with everyone, you know, not just Dave and I, but with all the people who watch this, because I think people need to know about Robbie and what he sacrificed. And I think people need to know about your team. You know, your story, the way, in the story you just told and the way you told it, it doesn't really make it into the war movies.

You know, that's the part of it that the public doesn't really get to. but it's what they need to be aware of and it's what people need to know these are the sorts of things our soldiers have to deal with overseas. That's real life. Yeah, because it's easy for me to sit here and say I'm embarrassed.

That I was emotionally, that I got mentally shut down. But I can also say that, you know, I put 100% into that effort of trying to save his life into trying to get him back. So at the end of the day, that effort is worth more than an embarrassment.

You should never feel embarrassed about what you did over there, Javier. You know, you do the right thing. Your teammates did the right thing. But it really shaped the way I approached everything after that, you know. So tell us about that. What happened after, you know, you decided to go and become a dog handler, and you thought maybe this would be a little bit of a lighter duty assignment, but it ended up sort of not being that at all.

Right. So I got lucky the dog program, I think third group was like third and seventh group was the last of the groups to start using the multipurpose canines. But I was in the first batch of guys at third group to volunteer for. for that duty. And so the team sergeant was my, was my cadre, my team sergeant while I was going through Robin Sage in the Q course, our culminating exercise before we were awarded our green berets. And he was my cadre and he, I really liked him. You know, he was a former task force guy. and he was a team sergeant at one point in my company and they gave him an opportunity to take on the dog program

and he took he like he he took it and ran with it and because of his background you know, having been, you know, a guy working behind the fence he he brought that that training mentality in mind with him to the dog program. So it wasn't about just training and going every day was a training day, literally. You know, and so our trainups were pretty rough and they were fun. And it was a good time.

And I thought, hey, you know, I'm in a group of good dudes that are in group. they weren't like the they you know they weren't the supposed ash and trash of the of the teams you know they were actually you know stand up guys who who love doing the you know they love the program just as much

and I was hoping to go into that and be like all right get a year figure things out get to know my dog polish my skills and nope you know I got

my dog and the next thing you know man i'm on a c-130 going to afghanistan you know flying into kandahar who who who is your dog and what was your relationship with this dog like i mean that this this you know furry creature is your new teammate and uh what was that like so right my my dog was ran uh was andy he was a belgian malaw and um he he looked kind of like wily coyote in the muzzle. And he was squirrely, man. He was just like a, like he, he was that dog that his tongue hung out the side of his face. And, but he was like a hard worker.

He loved, he loved to detect for bombs. He loved to, he loved doing patrolling or bite work, you know, biting. He was a good, you know, he was awesome at tracking. And he and I, we, we had a. a we had a really strenuous relationship because it was hard for me to get to know him because he was such a, all the other dogs were

you know, you tell him to sit, they sit. You tell him to lay, they lay. And he did it, but he was goofy about it. He, there was like, that was just the way he was. That was his characteristics. And so, but we grew, we grew into a pretty good team. not as good as a team as I wanted to be, but we were, we were, we did some really good things together.

We deployed in 2009 to Faba Anaconda in the Arugan province, and we're out in the middle of nowhere. A week prior to me getting there, Dave, operational detachment, three, one, two, three, they lost their team sergeant and three other members of their team and their, I believe, they're J-TAC all in one week. One was, I believe, a sniper, was from sniper fire, and the other, the other four deaths were from an IED blasts, hit Dave Hurst truck.

So the National Guard team was moved out to their location, and I joined that National Guard team shortly after they got there. And then we were teamed up with the Czechoslovakian Special Forces. And we had a small detachment of Afghan National Army guys that we went on patrols with. but for the most part, anything that we did was almost unilateral because of the scope of our relationship with the National Army guys. They weren't too trustworthy to work with. And it was an interesting dynamic. But that National Guard team, I was there with them for about three months. And then I went to go work with Dave Hertz team, or the Dave Hurts team.

or the Dave Hertz team, Blaine was Captain Blaine, or that was his first name, Blaine Smith, I think is his name. I forget his name. Anyway, I ended up working with their team and they weren't doing much of anything. And so that was nice. We did a couple of missions with the Navy SEALs. I got kind of like tasked out to go work with another team.

and you know that's where Andy and I we hit three IEDs in one night on a route red dog and that sucked and I think that was part of the PTSD that you know got because Andy wasn't injured he ended up the IEDs were offset so offset meaning that the pressure plate was it was on the right side of the road, so in the direction of travel, but the pressure plate was so that the front tire would hit it and it would go off underneath the passenger compartment. Gotcha, yeah. And so we found the IEDs going in the opposite direction, so they were on the left side of the road, so the pressure plate was closest to us. And so there was usually like a distance from that. So Andy indicated, and he went to go sit, sit,

but instead of sitting where the IED is, he took a couple steps and he actually hit the pressure plate. And it was a, these IADs didn't, like, it went off, but it didn't like, it wasn't like a, it was a very small explosion. I mean, it was like the equivalent of those R.E. Sims. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it wasn't that big. And we hit three of those.

And I think that's, so it not only rattled my nerves, but, you know, he, it rattled his quite a bit. So I was trying to work that issue out in between missions. And I thought I had it worked out. And we did, we did, we did fine. We went out, we went out a couple missions with the Navy Seals, with Seal Team 3 that year. and then a couple other guys, in a couple other agencies we were working with at the time. And then our TV back home.

And so because, you know, Andy has, you know, because of this, I went, I ended up going, I ended up doing my train up, and the next thing you know, they were like, hey, we need a dog handler, Mackie, you're on a board. So this is like three months. I've been home for three months and now I'm back in Afghanistan in January. My wife is pissed at me.

But I'm getting a I'm I got teamed up with ODA 38336. They were doing the commando mission. So that meant I wasn't going to be on the road as much. I was going to be flying quite a bit. Andy and I, you know, we, I felt we were ready. We landed in Bogram. We were walking down the ramp. And Andy, you know, he takes a nice big sniff.

And he looks left and right. He's like, nope, I ain't getting off this bird. Sorry, buddy. You're doing this by yourself. I'm like, what the heck? And, you know, my master trainer and my team sergeant, they're looking at the dog. And I'm like, so I go and I'm like, oh, come on, buddy. Try to give him a treat or his ball.

He's like, nope, I don't want my ball. I'm not getting off this airplane. So I'm in a crate and we're like, what the, you know, my dog just literally broke on the aircraft. So after some discussion, they asked me if I wanted to stay and I was like, yeah, I want to stay. So he shipped out another dog.

And then I got Marco and Marco was a Dutch Shepherd, awesome dog. and working with ODA-3-6 was very awesome because we were kinetic a lot. And this time I was, I was, I was mentally, I was on, I was in the game. I was in the zone. And I was able to provide the support we needed throughout that mission. We were, you know, we got surrounded, we were surrounded, we were surrounded, a bit throughout that deployment.

We returned back from that from the 2010 deployment. That was the surgeon to Marja. And then we went to 36. We got some low-vis missions in Central Asia. So we ended up in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan for 2011 and 2012. And then 2013, I went over to work for the headquarters support company. And I was running the FLEATAC mission with all our support Bubba's in the 6th. And that was a good, that was a really good time.

It was my first time I was given an opportunity to be in a leadership position and plan my missions and run my own missions with another officer. So that was cool. The 2010 trip was the last trip I did with the K-9, and I went back to, you know, regular ODA stuff. 2014, I was anticipating on getting a team. So it was anticipated that if I made the eight list, I would get a team. That didn't happen.

And so I was a senior Charlie on a, on ODA 333, three one and we we were operating up in condues that year we lost uh in our company we lost or in our battalion we lost Mike Cathcart that was a rough that was a that was a tough loss right there and so who was who was Mike I mean can you tell us a little bit about him and yeah Mike Mike Cathcart he was on ODA operational detachment one for our Halo team and I believe he was an echo. He was married. He loved hockey. I didn't know my, I went through unit level, advanced marksmanship training with him. I didn't get a chance of knowing him much because we weren't, we weren't shooting partners. But he was a good dude, awesome dude. Everybody loved him.

I happened to have a pitcher, happened to have a pitcher of his weapon. He was killed. We were conducting operations on conduce and he was with my junior bravo um with a element from a special afghan special forces team an actual afghan and they were kicking indoors and um yeah he he came in through he got shot going through the uh the breach point so um that was a tough law We ended up loot. You know, that was just a, that whole trip was just a, it was a painful, it was a painful trip. I got an opportunity to work with the, the German special forces, whatever they call themselves. Yeah.

Yeah, they were, they were a good, a good bunch of guys. And, you know, it was a, I really enjoyed it, you know, And that time was short, you know, I did that for a bit. And then I ended up going to the B team for a little bit. And that's when I started executing my bailout plan for getting out of the Army. Was that the first time that you thought about getting out of the Army? Had you considered it like after losing it? Like what kept you in the Army?

the army? What kept you going? What kept you going on all these trips? I was trying to make up for the fact that I didn't stay in the game when Robbie died. That was, if anything, I was trying to prove to, I was trying to prove to myself that I can still do. I can still stay in the game. In 2011 and 2012, when I was in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, those were, those were, those were well well those deployments um even though we didn't go we didn't go kinetic in those deployments those they were a break for me you know i was able to um to reset uh to the 2010 trip i was able to reset 2011 2012s kind of solidified it but there was still uh i was still struggling

um i was you know Robbie and I were talking quite a bit. I would literally see Robbie and we would have full-on conversations. I guess it was my way of coping with his loss. I felt like he was with me during that time period. It was a very lonely time period. My deployments, I felt extremely lonely. I missed my wife.

I miss my kids. So I try to hang out with the guys on the team as much as possible. I went through depression, you know, battling ghost, hating on myself. But I never felt like, you know, I never tried to let it get in the way of my, the way I performed on the team with it on the deployments. I feel like I always had something to prove. I feel like everybody knew what happened. You know, and I felt like I was, you know,

no way would never outrightly say anything. But I always felt like there was like, well, yeah, he choked up on a mission, you know. Javier, you read my book, so you must understand that I had a lot of the same feelings and that, you know, probably had an impact on why I did some of the things I have in life. That I'm feeling the kind of embarrassment and shame and feeling that you have to prove something to yourself. Like, you're trying to make up for something. Yeah, most definitely, man. And my wife took the brunt in and of it.

You know, I never, you know, I did, like, I never, like, I never, like, yelled at her or hit her or cheated owner or anything like that. It was always like I was emotionally distant. Right. Right. You know, like a week, like the week of me leaving, there was no physical interaction with my wife, very little talking. My mind was totally focused on Afghanistan. And, you know, she was lucky if she got like a phone call once a week. When you were deployed.

Yeah, when I was deployed. Did you ever, I mean, you're a man of faith. Was that ever a refuge for you? Were you ever able to talk to your stepfather, your father about it? Were there any resources that you turned to, or did you just feel kind of completely isolated at that point in time? I was angry, man. I was angry. Everybody that I, you know, the people I, my, my church tribe back in Fayetteville, I didn't think they understood.

They didn't, you know, a lot of them were SF guys, but a lot of them were officers. And, you know, I didn't think that I didn't, and when I did try talking about it, I, I didn't, I didn't feel like they, they understood me. You know, even though they were probably going through the same thing, I didn't feel like they understood me. Trying to talk about it with teammates. That's like preaching to the choir. You know, they're busy self-medicating, whether to do alcohol, you know.

Yeah, you know. Yeah, you know, not, you know, just doing the things that we do. Yeah. And so I really didn't feel like I had. anybody to talk to, you know. I was my own island, you know, and my wife, she, I couldn't talk to her, you know, because I just, I was afraid I was going to scare the crap out of her.

You know, the nightmares. She had to live through the nightmares, you know, the, uh, me talking through my sleep, um, the emotional distance, distancing, you know, and I try to make it up in other ways like, hey, I'm going to buy her an expensive, you know, piece of jewelry or, hey, I'm going to take her on a, nice vacation, going to cruise, you know, you know, I always try to make it up, but I just didn't

feel like that was the thing. And so I ran into, so in 2015, I got back from my last deployment and I already knew I was going, I know it was 2014. I was sitting in a gym. And I hadn't executed my exit strategy yet. I had about three years, four years left. in the Army at this time. And I was like, you know, I got to figure out what I was going to do. And so I ran into Sergeant Major Charlie Thorpe. If anybody's in the 82nd, you were in 82nd back in the day, everybody knew who Charlie Thorpe was. And Charlie Thorpe was the division sergeant major at the time. And I saw, and he's since been retired. He's been retired for about 10 years at this point. And I see him in the, in the, in the, in the, sitting on a bench. And he's

kind of like I was we were in a sauna together and he stepped out and I was getting dressed taking the shower and stuff and he was just sitting on a bench kind of just zoned out and I said hey you know oh sorry major you know why are you still here I thought you would probably just retire and just move somewhere else and he was like man I just can't leave this place I you know I I need to be near the soldiers and I there's nothing wrong with that but that's not where I wanted to be when I retired. I didn't want to be stuck in Fayetteville. Amongst everybody else who's just as dysfunctional as I am.

And hasn't been able to build a life for themselves outside of the military. Right. And I'm not, you know, that's very, that varies from one person to another. But, and, you know, I'm not trying to down anybody who's, who stayed in the Bragg area, but I needed to leave. Yeah. I needed to leave. I think different people, like, different people handle different.

Like, some people cling to it and some people, like, jettison. Right. Try to distance themselves as much as possible from it, not out of any animosity or anything. It's just to create, just to get away, right? Right. I didn't see myself growing. You know, I felt like. I feel like I was stuck. So I came home from my 2015 trip,

and I told my wife, we're going to Florida to go, and I'm going to be teaching ROTC at the University of Central Florida. And that was all part of my plan anyway. I wanted to be, you know, part of that plan was to get away from a military installation, year-round civilians, give my education, and retire, you know, graduated and adjusted to being a civilian. And the plan was executed well. And then when I got to Orlando, everything just something happened to me. emotionally.

There was a string of events that occurred, and I told my wife that I wanted a divorce, and we were going through that for a little bit, because I had some suicidal ideations that was fighting, and the whole, you know, there wasn't another woman or anything like that. I was just like I needed a, I needed her, I wanted her to be away from me. So when it happened, she was, you know, it didn't affect her. Yeah, you didn't put her through that. Right. So then my buddy, Tom, or Tim Hinkins,

he called me up on he called me up and he was like hey man I'm moving from Texas I'm done with this assignment I'm being reassigned to Tampa just bought a house I'm closing on it hey let's get together and let's do some catching up and I was like yeah man cool you know I was excited to have another SF brother in the vicinity you know even though Tampa is like a two hour drive from here. So I'm all excited. And then Thursday, Thursday evening, I get home and I'm on Facebook. And my buddy is like, dang, you know, Tim, why did you do it? Why did you do it? So I call my buddy up. And I'm like, hey, what happened to Tim? He's like, hey, man, he committed suicide. And I was like, holy crap

another big event occurred and then I felt like the world was just like kind of crashing on my shoulders right and I decided I needed help

you know I was like I don't want to leave my wife if I commit suicide those little bastards I was fighting in Afghanistan would win and so that was the mentality. I can't let them win because if I commit suicide, they got me. You know, so

um, between, uh, my wife, my, you know, I told my wife, look, hey, I'm going through some stuff. I need to get help. And we started making those steps to get in help. And she stood by my side. And she was, you know, she's, you know, she went, you know, she, she, she held my hand through it all. And, um, you know, if, If I had, you know, she, she was like my battle buddy through the whole thing and faithfully. You know, I'm truly grateful for that. And then I started, I tried to start reconciling myself with God. Because at this point, I have just pretty much said, you know, I'm just going through the motions. I go to church.

I sit in a pew. I don't care. I'm angry. I lash out of people. You know, don't talk to me type thing. And I started, I was like, you know, I need to, I need to strengthen my foundation, so to speak. And go back to my roots, you know. And with that, I had to start thinking about why am I here in Orlando?

I'm here to make train officers. training students to be officers. So I need to have a purpose. So I threw my heart and soul into training these kids, these cadets to be officers. And the more involved I got into that, the more involved I got into church. I started going back to school,

working on my degree. But the whole time I'm still fighting these demons. I'm still having these conversations with Robbie. He's visiting me just as often as he's. ever has at least once or twice a day. And I, you know, I've shared this with my wife. I really had never shared the fact that I've talked to Robbie on a regular basis with anybody else. But once I opened up that to, it stopped.

And then I figured there's a lot of stuff I have to get off my chest. and this permanent, I got this feeling in my gut that if I talk about these things, I can start letting go. I can start forgiving myself. I can start forgiving people that I felt wronged me. I can start building that relationship with my wife and my daughter, my daughters. I can start, you know, taking my, you know, taking my talents and giving, you know, maximizing what I can do for the cadets that I'm working with.

And we got, there's a couple people that are instrumental, you know. I was, so I taught the juniors. Before I became the NCOIC, I was doing, playing both hats, but I taught the juniors. and the juniors, it's important in the junior year, this is when they're getting assessed, but they're going to find out what they're assessing for the branch they're going to get. They're assessing for national placement so they can get the branch they want. There's a number of things that they're competing for.

And so I wanted to be that guy who brought, you know, who got them to. where they needed to be. And it was, it was awesome. And I got to develop these relationships. And the, the highlight of every graduate, every semester is these, these kids would commission. And the, what's awesome is they, they choose a NCO in their life to give their first salute. And I was able to give like, like 10 first salutes during that time period.

and these kids to this day call me up. I've been retired for two years. Some of them have been their second lieutenants or first lieutenants now and they're calling me up for advice. You know, I flew out to, I flew out to Idaho a couple years ago. my high school band director son PJ he commissioned into the Navy and he wanted me to give him his first salute so I was able to give him a given his I flew out there to do that my band teacher my band teacher in high school who was a big influence on me and we still you know 27 years later still keep in touch

with one another. So I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't let the Taliban win, you know, because I would have let all these people down. I could, you know, because that suicide could have affected one of those cadets, you know, so. You're, you know, maybe not even halfway through your life, Javier. I mean, your kids are still young. I mean, you got, you got a lot of miles left on you.

Nope. I'm 45 years old. I got a 19 year old and a 16 year old, you know. You're the young guy. I mean, you're not. When you were, you said that you got a lot of stuff off your chest. Was that primarily your wife? Was it through the church? Was it through, did you find a therapist you trusted? Was it through teammates? I started with the VA. started with the VA? Yep, the VA here in Orlando is, if you saw this hospital, it's a university campus, man, it's awesome. My doctor, we were doing this, what they call cognitive behavior therapy is where you identify, they call them stuck points. Like, what are your stuck point? What is a stuck point?

You had to write about it, right? Yeah, you write about it. And then you you rate it. And then you start asking questions. Like, is this a, is this an assumption? Is this a fact? You know, and then you start breaking down these little stuck points. And then you come up with a solution at the end.

Like, so what do you think about that stuck point now? What would you say? And then you, you know, your feelings change towards it. And you're like, huh, you know, like let me let me let me let me I felt like for even though the team had no indicated made no indication or never said a word or never did anything in this in remotely close to this in my head um I thought the team before I left on the team left the team I thought they it was a race issue. I thought I had convinced

myself that the guys on my team wanted me off the team because I was a black guy. I was black. They, like, this is stuff that was going through my head. And it was there was nothing to substantiated.

So I'm sitting there with my therapist and I say, hey, I felt like this. I felt like Brace could have played a thing in this. And I'd start working it out through this cognitive therapy. And at the end of the day, I was like, dude, that was all on my head. I made it all up in my head for no reason.

You know, and those guys love me. You know, those, you know, they, I still keep in touch the, you know, ODA 331-2 slash 372, we are still a family, you know, to this day, you know, my, my senior Charlie, I have gone to both his, you know, he has three daughters. I went, I've been to both of, I've been involved in both of their weddings. My team sergeant, you know, I was, you know, Pat Rotzer, he remembers my daughter, you know, he was like, hey, how's Poo Bear doing? You know, like, oh, she's doing good. You know, you know, we, we're a family. That team is a family and we've been, it's been

14 years since we were a team. and or 12 years since we were 18 and but we still keep in contact and we still have this love from one another. Through this cognitive therapy, I was able to, you know, tell, you know, the Bravo, but I had some animosity to them, you know, I was like, I, dude, I, I, I, I resented you, you know, and, and then, you know, the things I resented, it was. it's all in my head, you know. And so I was able to work through that.

And then, you know, as I'm going through this forgiveness and reconciliation with my feelings and my thoughts, my relationship with God became stronger. And the light, the love I feel that God has for me grew stronger. And the things that I remembered. you know, that I am a child of God. I am a son of God. And he does love me. And he, he has me.

I am here and I'm alive because he's not, I still have a mission. You know, and so, and now that I'm done with school, I'm trying to figure out of this. all out. And every day I learn something new. You know, my part of that spirituality is every day my wife and my daughters and I, we sit down at the table right before we eat breakfast and we start work and we read our scriptures. Every night before we go to bed, we say a prayer together as a family. These are things that I can't live without now. These are things. And I'm not saying that. I think

being spiritual is a step towards recovery. You don't have to believe, but I think spirituality, you know, understanding your nothingness, suppressing your ego, being humble, these are things that can definitely help with the path of recovery out of, you know, out of this mire that we find ourselves emotionally. There's nothing, you know, Jesus turned water into one, right? So there's nothing, you know, I don't see nothing really too wrong with drinking, but when you, when it becomes a priority over other things, when you're using it to numb the pain, you know, that's where you've got to start, you know, do a self-assil, a needs assessment and start looking at your priorities

of life. So there's a number of things I started doing. I had to, one of the big key things is when you get out, you need a man tribe, right? Yeah, I can, you know, so I got a group of friends at church. I got my church friends, my church guy tribe, I got my fraternity guy tribe, I got my, I got my team, like my senior, he lives up in Gainesville, and we get together. We used to get together every weekend, but since this COVID thing, you know, we haven't seen any, you know, been social distancing. So there are some good, healthy options versus partying and drinking. And there's nothing wrong with any of that.

It's just, you know, at some point, we've got to grow up. Yeah. with with the the church man tribe and the fraternity man tribe have you have you felt a difficulty integrating due to your military experience or or do you focus on different areas where you're still able to sort of integrate with them you know where you're still able to kind of mess with them regardless of your individual backgrounds right so like my fraternity tribe and my tribe, they're separate. And I compartmentalize my my relationships because my fraternity tribe, they're, they, I can say and do things around them, like nothing bad or anything.

It just means I can say. I feel more comfortable having, joking around with. I can get spiritual with them. I can. And at the same time, you know, I, you know, we can, we can, you know, they can tell a dirty joke and I sit there and laugh at it, you know. Whereas my church, my church tribe, that's a little more special to me. But those guys, when I have something where I'm hurting inside, I can rely upon both tribes for dealing with the pain, but they help me deal with it different ways. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's my, you know, my senior, who's happened to be, you know, I like to call him my best friend, my best guy friend.

We didn't always get along as, like, we got along as team members, but we didn't. It was kind of like a, it was like a brother relationship, you know, like, F you, you know, I hate you, shut up, you know, you know how it is. Javier, I think we should probably get to some questions before we roll out. but before we lose track at the time again, I just wanted to make sure that I get you to talk to us about this new endeavor that you're starting called Lost. And you know, you want to start doing some videos. I mean, tell us what you want to do with it. All right.

So the audience I'm trying to look at here is the college student think about going into the Army. Okay. The high school student who's, trying to, who's going out of high school and thinking about joining the Army. And what I want to do is present leadership, military leadership, you know, pamphlets, little stuff that I took from the RLTC that we work with the, with the cadets. And then I also wanted to like teach them skill sets like land, you know, map reading, land navigation. I want to conduct some interviews with, you know,

Guys like yourself, you know, talking about, you know, hey, I got some kids who were thinking about going to arrange your battalion or, you know, hit like, hey, what do I need to do to do to prepare for that? Where I need to do to prepare for basic training if I want to do one thing or another. So I really want to like really focused on because I feel like the most dangerous age group is the 14, the fighting age males, you know, 14 to 32, you know. and if we can get, if we can, if we can get out there and, you know, reach that target audience, I think it would be fun. Florida is really hard down here, you know, everything is flat. In land navigation, it was like one of my favorite things to do. It still is to this day.

I love hiking. I love getting outdoors. I like being able to have a map in my hand and, like, say to my daughter, hey, this is a range line. Yeah, you see that this is what that terrain feature is. Here you can't do, you know, we used to be able to do that North Carolina, but not so much here in Florida.

You know, everything's flat. But I think it's going to be a lot of fun with it. The first the first couple episodes are going to be like a little introductory, but then it's going to be like one's going to be a tribute to

the use of sock fall. Okay. Yeah. So And what's that YouTube channel called or what it will be called? It would be called Looking Over Strange Terrain, Lost. Nice. Yeah. I got it from a cadre in when I was in PLDC, primary leadership course. And he would always say when he was teaching Landnav, you know, you don't want to get lost.

you don't want to find yourself looking over strange terrain. It's just like for whatever reason that just stuck. I like the way it sounded. Well, we'll link to it when you get it up. And we'll let me back on the show sometime. Once you get it going, get it rolling, and we'll talk more about it. Yeah, most definitely. So I actually got a text from an old teammate of mine who was a dog handler.

And he wanted me to ask you about your VLK experience. Oh. Well, it depends on which time. I don't even know what that is. I'm in the line. So when the dog program for special forces was initially contracted, he was through Von Lick Kennels, who's a retired Air Force,

special or security forces military dog handler. Back in the 80s, the 70s and 80s. And that Von Lick experience was pretty interesting. It was fun, you know. I went twice because I had two dogs. Initially I had two dogs. I had one, Bart, which was a, but he wasn't, you know, there were some quirky things about him.

So they sent me back and I went and got Andy. And one of those times that I went, back, I was with the first time I went, I was, it was a bunch of us third group guys with a bunch of Navy Seals and a bunch of first group guys. And one of my teammates decides there's this bar called the Whiskey River. And it's not far from the team house where we, where we stayed. And it was the middle of winter and it was snowing in Indiana. We're in Peru, Indiana. And then in Peru, Indiana is a, that's where all the carnies go. It's a circus capital of the world.

So all the circus folk live in this town. And in a wintertime, they kind of come back. And then in the summertime, they go out and work to carnivals and circuses. Anyway, the guys go to the whiskey river that one night. And one of my teammates who said, you know, you know what? I'm just going to stay in the house and get drunk and watch some TV. We're like, all right, whatever. Next thing, you know, he's coming in my room with the first group with,

I was bunked in with the first group guy. And I forget the guy's name. He goes, hey, man, I'm going on the whiskey river. You want to go? I'm like, no, you go ahead. And so the first group guy was like, yeah, I'll go. So they take off. and like this really bad snowstorm comes in, right?

Horrible snowstorm comes in. And they stay at the bar until closing. They close it down and they're walking back. They're both drunk. And my teammate says to the first group guys, let's fight. He's like, no, man, it's cold out. We only got another block to go. Let's go mess around at the team house.

And he's like, no, let's do it now. So my teammate takes off his clothes. and he's in his like skivvies. And he's like, hey, he goes, hey, dude, just sit down, put it up in your clothes. And so, oh, boy. So they sit down on some random person's porch and the first group guy falls asleep. And it's snowing outside. Dude, like when I woke up that morning, there was at least a foot and a half of snow.

But he falls asleep for a couple minutes and he wakes up in all his left is Kenny's. or yeah that's his name Kenny Wilson he uh all his left is his jeans his shirt in his jacket that's it we don't like there's nothing else so he I get back so he gets back so instead of coming back and telling me that hey Kenny's missing

he goes to sleep so I wake up about 9 o'clock that morning and um so I've been up all night like watching movies. I wake up and I have to do a, I have to do a head count, you know, all the seals are in. And the first guy comes to me, he goes, yeah, man, so something strange happened last night. We get drunk and Kenny wants to fight. And next thing you know, you know, we're tussling in the snow.

I sit, you know, I sit down on the sky's porch. I fall asleep for a few minutes, wake up. And all I see is is close. I'm like, are you kidding me? And I'm looking outside and it's like, it's cold outside. So I'm like, crap. So I'm calling the, I called every hotel in the area. I called all the hospitals.

Police departments. And I'm like, he has to be in the drunk tank. And so next thing you know, I get a phone call. And it's the sheriff's deputy who's like, hey, are you missing somebody you're like yeah because everybody knew that when we're in town they knew it's a small enough town when we show right over there and he goes like come get your guy so I'll go bail him out of jail

and um he's pissed man he's like he's like he's pissed at himself and I was like hey man this shouldn't show up the guys the police officer said it's not going to show up on the blotter they're not going to call brag so let's just continue on And he's a good dude. He's a dude of integrity.

He's like, no, you know, I'm going to call team sergeant, let him know. And team sergeant's like, yeah, why don't you come back? Let's talk about it. So, you know, he ended up his, he had to turn in his dog and go back to brag. And he ended up going back again anyway to get a dog. But yeah, that was, that was a pretty funny experience there. I really thought this story was going to end with a contortionist. Oh, I wish.

Dave, do we have any viewer questions? We do. So Alex, thank you, Alex. Alex, what was your favorite meal when you're in the Army? Maybe like when you're in Afghanistan or even maybe you said Kurdistan and Tajikistan. Was there ever anything you ate out there that you just loved? So when I was in Russian, where I was in Kurdistan, we ate a lot of Russian food. Uh-huh.

There's this noodle called, this fried noodle thing called fried, uh, fried, uh, logmon. Uh-huh. And it was really good. It was like all the food I had in Kurdistan was the best food I ever had. It was, you know, but it was the same, but you can get the same food in Afghanistan. Yeah. I love Afghan food. Um, to pin it down on one thing, uh, would be, I would be lying to you.

Yeah. But yeah, I did have a goat face. Goat face. Goat face, yeah. And if you guys find yourselves in Afghanistan and the Afghan gives you food and it's dark, don't eat it. You don't know what you're getting. Don't eat it, I mean, did you know it was goat face? Did they pull it off the score?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we were, yeah, so in, so the tradition goes in Kurdistan. this is a big deal, you know, for them to make the goat, the cook the goat heads a huge deal. So minus the fur, everything is on the goat. Eyeballs, brain, ears, you know, the whole nine yards. So they bring it out. And the tradition in the Russian military is that the youngest gets the best parts,

which is the I might be wrong I think it's the eyeball and the brain I could be but the young guy on our team he was like you gotta be kidding me

no but and so I just went ahead and did it because you know the type of mission we were doing you know there was no room for there was no room for guys being

and, you know, picky eaters, you know. Yeah, you're trying to build that bond. Yeah, so it was like, you know, hey, young guy, let me show you how to do this, you know, let me show you what it's all about. Gustavo, thank you. He just said thanks for the content and thank you for the very generous donation. Philip, thank you very much. Brendan Greenhill, thank you.

You said happy to contribute. Max, thank you for sharing, Javier. You and Robbie are inspiration. Thank you. I appreciate. Robbie, let me tell you what, the team, the team did what is supposed to do. And it's nice to, when you're working with a team like a special forces ODA, it's awesome to see guys put into action SOPs the way they trained.

And one of the things, at the end of the day, I remember during that firefight, everything was going so well. during that little bit. Because one of the things that you, like, this is one thing I hate about training. If it's not realistic, then it's everything's like going to JRTC, the Joint Readiness Training Center, where you're shooting with lasers. It's like a finger drill. You know what I mean? And so you lose, there's so much loss in that type of training. And let me tell you what, all the missions I went on, prior to the, this was like going to a J.RTC, you know, like a joint training where you're doing these laser laser tag type missions. And it sucked because now I'm in a real thing and you can't replicate

your heart racing a thousand miles per minute as you're trying to literally save your best, when your best friend's lives. You can't replicate the anguish. You can't replicate. There's a lot of of things you just can't replicate and um those are a lot of things that were i wasn't ready to to deal with afterwards um when like during a training exercise at one of those events when someone dies no there's no there's nobody's there you know checking out mentally you know what i mean everybody's it's a training exercise and everybody knows it's not real right but um and uh i happen to work in the simulations arena now. And so they're, they're definitely trying to work on, I believe there's programs out there really trying to fix that. Yeah, it's very hard to simulate

that. I mean, you know, using some munitions, you know, there are ways to elevate and, and get things going, but at the end of the day, it's, it's very hard to, you know, to prepare somebody for that, to get them ready for that type of resilience training or, or, I mean, And it's there's also like this this divergent sort of this is really happening. Is this really happening? This is really happening. This sort of conscious battle going on sometimes, particularly in a casualty situation where you're trying to mesh reality with your idea of what's supposed to be.

be happening. You know, we're the good guys. We don't, we don't lose, you know, like this isn't happening to somebody that I care about, you know, and, you know, so it, I totally understand. Yeah, it's, it's really, it's a really weird thing when, because the, the feelings that you have during the euphoric, the euphoric feelings you have when you're actually, oh crap, this is actually working. Right. And then, oh, crap, what just happened? Right.

You know, it was awesome seeing Robbie transition, target transition. It was awesome, you know, watching Rob Gutierrez with both push to talks, looking up in the sky and doing this core, this, this choreography and, you know, this choreography of aircraft, you know, in this stack, you know. and it's I didn't because I didn't realize how how difficult that was until you know I went through the SOTAC training I was like holy crap this sucks yeah so but yeah Javier this has been incredible this has probably been you know the heaviest episode we've done but also at the same time one of the funniest too with some of these stories you've told so I mean it really runs the gamut of all of the emotions that, you know, come, uh, come, come to the surface when we start talking about these sorts of things. I've got just a couple more. I'm so sorry, Jack. I'm so sorry, Hobb. I just, I want to get to these people. I got all the time in the world. DJ, thank you very much. She said, thank you for sharing the story, Javier. 576, 575. Sierra said, uh, uh, our partner force is disciplined for their fuckups.

Say what? are partner forces disciplined for their fuck-ups? Like when the Indians kind of bailed on that situation, are there ramifications for them or not really? Not really, no. No, no.

It depends on the unit. If that was a commandal unit, yeah, somebody would have probably got their, you know, their poop pushed in on that one. But you said those were kind of cooks and admin and whoever was around.

You know, partner forces are very sensitive things that you got to massage right if you can massage the partner force relationship the trip will be good and that's them actually being empowered you got to empower them if they don't feel empowered guess what it's you're the whole point of the foreign internal defense is done. You know, there's, if you're going there, if you're going there, F these dudes, you know, they're just going to run out on this anyway.

No, dude, that's the wrong. No, you got to be there with them side by side. You're got to eat their food. You got to dress like they do. You got to, you know, you got to engage. Hey, man, you have a family. Hey, how many kids you have? You know, hey, here's a picture.

Even if you have a fake family, Hey, here's a picture of my family. You know, because the Afghans, they're no different than us. Right. They have families, you know. They hurt. They, you know, they cry. And sometimes we think, you know, there's like a deed.

There's some people that can have this, and leaders can have this attitude that they're not even human. You know, like people that we partner with not even human. Right. And just the way they talk about them. I can always tell like a guy who doesn't talk crap about his partner force when they're not around is a guy I like to be around with. You know, if they're talking crap about them when we're not around, then you know what? I don't want I don't want I'm not going to hang out with you because I need that partnership with them. Right.

And not and not talking like oh my God, you sure it. But more like like these idiots or these savages. The guys who use like racial epithets and all that kind of stuff. Well, I've never seen, I've, I've, I've never seen that in SF, racial affectets, but I've seen the F these dudes. I don't care. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I mean, in fairness, I felt that way a few times. I'm frustrated with them, but I absolutely agree with everything you said, Javier. I'm sorry, guys, a couple more. Thank you, DJ. Thank you again, Javier for sharing. your story in Robbie's. Your endeavor lost sounds badass and I hope it gains traction. Andrew, Gregori Rasputin's daughter was mauled by a bear in Peru, Indiana. And then Keith, thank you very much. When I was younger, I wrote a book titled Equal or Greater

Forest by Kit Cessna. The book was life-changing. Do any of you know Kit? If not, can we get team house interview him i've never heard of kit cussina no yeah so we'll look into that keith maybe i'm looking up uh hi thank you so thank you so much man yeah um let you just give a a real quick shout out to our sponsor for this podcast it's high speed daddy dot com they are a local veteran owned business over in new jersey and these guys make uh every day kind of gear for dads, lunch pails, diaper bags, things like that, sewn out of tactical nylon. So go over and take a look at their shop. It's high speed daddy.com. And there's a discount code. It's actually my name, Jack, J-A-C-K. If you use that discount code, you'll get 15% off on your

purchase. If you have kids, demicordem with high-speed daddy.com. Exactly. So thank you, everyone who tuned into this show. Thank you for sticking with us here in Javier's story. And, you know, again, just please subscribe to the channel if you haven't. Check out our link to our Patreon down in the description if you haven't already. And Javier, thank you so much, man. You were awesome, really. All right. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Thanks, everybody. And Javier, if you're going to stay on real quick. But thanks, thanks, already, have a great night. Yep. Oh, hold on. Sorry.