The Team House - Infantry Marine Turned Investigative Journalist | James LaPorta | Ep. 166

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

James LaPorta is an investigative reporter for The Associated Press covering national security, the intelligence community and the U.S. military. He is a military advisor to the award-winning television show This is Us on NBC.  His reporting as garnered various journalism awards and accolades with bylines, work, and commentary appearing on and in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek The Daily Beast, Vice News, CBS News, CNN, NBC News, MSNBC, PBS News Hour, BBC News among others in the United States and internationally.  James is a Marine Corps infantry veteran of the Afghanistan war. From 2006 until 2014, he served in multiple leadership billets, working as an infantry squad leader, a combat marksmanship instructor and as an intelligence cell chief. To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month  -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon! 👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch:  https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media:  The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #usmc #jameslaporta #afghanistanBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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and David Park. It's a dramatic time. We'd be working out of fake news out there. Hey, guys. Welcome to episode 166 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park, Steve Producing here. And we have our special guest tonight,

James Gaporta, who's a former Marine and a investigative journalist at the Associated Press. Joining you tonight on a Monday evening instead of our usual Friday, we're trying to mix in some additional shows into the normal cycle, I guess you could say. So we'll still have Tim Weiner on Friday to discuss his books and upcoming books.

Monday, we're here with Jim, and I really appreciate you taking some time out of your Monday evening for us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely, man. So I'm going to hit you up with our classic question about your origin story. I'd like to hear a little bit about where you grew up and kind of what was your pathway into military service. Okay. So I grew up in Orlando, Florida. Going in the military was like getting out of Orlando, Florida.

Like, you know, Mickey Mouse runs that place, and I was ready to get out. And so I went into the military like 10 days after high school. There was also still like, you know, Iraq is going on, like, remind. It just happened in 05, you know, Flusion 04, and I still had memories of 9-11. So there was still a bit of that kind of bravado. But it was really mainly to get out of Florida. So I joined the Marine Corps, went to Parris Island, South Carolina. I was an infantry contract.

Went to three months of boot camp and then two months of, I think it's two months of school of infantry training. and then hit my first unit, which was 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines. And did most of my time in the Marine Corps with 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, or a sister battalion. Also worked down on Parris Island, South Carolina, teaching recruits how to shoot. I worked over, went back to the school of infantry and worked there. And then I hit up Afghanistan in 2000. 2009 and then again in 2013 and then finally rotated out in 2014.

So that's kind of the military origin story in a nutshell. Cool. So what was it like going over to Afghanistan in 2009? By that time, I mean, the war is fairly mature. I mean, did you think, I mean, we were going to be there another 10 years? No. Well, I mean, I felt more that way when I went back in 2013 because President Obama was trying to end the war by 2014. 2009, the war was expanding.

I was a part of President Obama's surge of troops into Afghanistan. In particular, my battalion, second battalion, youth Marines, was selected to go the furthest south that any unit had been in Afghanistan. So we headed down to Southern Hellman province, and the objective was to leapfrog over the British Army. And so we were July 2nd, 2009, which is Operation Kajari, which translates to strike of the sword. It was the largest helo insertion since the Vietnam War, or at least that's what I was told. And it was basically to stop, you know, because the Taliban would run supply routes through the Bahram Shah in waste southern Afghanistan and then resupply their 14.

versus north in Afghanistan. So our objective was to cut off those supply lines in Southern Helmand. And so that's what 2009 was. I mean, to me, it was like a culture shock. I didn't realize how, like, rural it was and how, like, biblical. Yeah. Like, yeah, like, you kind of expect Moses to walk around the corner. You know, and then, like, a lot of them, a lot of,

the Afghan populace thought we were Russians when we first showed up. Because that's just what they remembered. So they thought we were Russians when we showed up. And then they also thought like Cobra helicopters. So they thought Cobra helicopters were like large mosquitoes. And they thought like Harrier jets were like aliens. So it was just really weird, you know, talking to people who had no concept of what those aircrafts were, you know. but no it was really a culture shock

can you tell us a little bit about that airborne or I should say air assault infiltration into into the southern part of Helmand and you said it was like the largest that had been conducted since Vietnam yeah I think it was like 4,000 Marines in total that took over you know the southern portion of Helmand and we had to do it in waves you know

So the, I remember, you know, we were, we launched at a Camp Dwyer. And I remember it was cold the night before. Like I do remember in the middle of the night, you know, before we launched on the helo, I was getting up and walking over to the Port of John and just sitting in the port of John, despite the smell, despite how disgusting it was, just sitting in there because it was so freezing cold, you know, and it was also, you know how like enough games. understand like the um i feel what it's called but like like during the summer like the winds pick up and so it just like you know it just blankets all your gear and your weapons and stuff like that so

the next morning you know we're all trying to like you know clean our weapons because none of it's going to work because there's this like blanket of dust and dirt that's on all of our gear and stuff uh and then there were no bases where we were going so we had to carry everything so each one of us, it's like that, the way I can describe it is like, if you ever saw like Band of Brothers when they're about to jump into D-Day and they just got so much gear and equipment on them that they can barely kind of stand up, that's kind of how it was, is guys were having to help guys put their backpacks on because they weren't, the backpacks were not meant to carry that much gear and that much weight.

Neither were their reins. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, you could see the benefit, you know, the VA. claims just racking up as a person who puts their backpack on like like oh oh man that guy's knees are not gonna you know um and yeah so like i remember i was carrying like like a mortar round in my backpack like seven like an ungodly amount of seven six two uh grenade like just stuff i would

just not normally carry uh and i was also a i carried a parasaw so i already had weighed down like six to eight hundred rounds myself of just my own stuff and then i had all this other stuff and then the plan was okay we're going to load up on the heloes and everybody's going to carry two like cases of water so the plan is you you get off the helo drop your two cases of water drop your backpack and then get into the fight that was the plan it didn't go that well um they uh they landed us into like fleshly, like the fields were freshly like plowed. So everybody's, so it's like running on the beach and you're weighted down. So, you know, it was just, it was a nightmare.

And we landed at like seven o'clock in the morning. And, you know, the temperature is already like climbing into the hundreds, you know. And so for the first like 20 or 30 minutes around the ground, it was pretty quiet. And then the shooting started. and we started getting shot at just kind of all day. I didn't fire a single round on July 2nd, 2009. It was incredibly frustrating because they were engaging us from such a distance that I couldn't even see them. And I also didn't want to fire back.

I really worried about, like, accidentally killing someone that didn't, I did not intend to kill. And so I just had, I was being, I was really. frustrated with getting shot at and not being able to return fire. But, I mean, things became really real when me and my team leader, who's still in the Marine Corps, stood up to engage, we finally saw a target, we stood up to engage, and they fired an RPG. We both ducked down RPG flies over the head, and I look behind me and explodes and almost takes out our rear echelon. It was, it was, it was, it was like something out of a movie.

Like, it didn't, it didn't seem real, you know? Like, it was one of those, like, did that just kind of happen sort of things? I mean, it was, it's the same reaction when, you know, people saw plans going into the towers on 9-11. It looked like a movie. Right, right. You know. And, you know, again, the temperature's climbing. People are starting to go down for heat exhaustion.

luckily nobody's gotten hit yet and then the call comes over that the PJs are coming in and so my squad was tasked to go try to secure a landing zone for the PJs to come in because okay now someone's gotten hit the person who had gotten shot was Lance Corporal Charles Seth Sharp of Dary'sville, Georgia. He'd gotten shot in the neck there's video of it. There's a documentary on Netflix

that I participated in. It's called Turning Point. And there's video of him dying. Jesus. Because PBS's frontline was with us and they embedded with us and we're taking video. And so he gets shot in the neck.

His buddies are like yelling out to him to like kind of like wake up and he's just he's he's out of it and so they finally pick him up and they run him down the road and push into a building corman start working on him uh but it's just you know he doesn't make it but uh but it was the first time i'd ever seen you know i'd never heard of a PJ before that day i didn't know who they were uh and i mean those guys like those guys are heroes to me like i love the PJs like i mean you talk about guys who And I saw their Black Hawk helicopter, and the guys who fly them, too.

I saw that Black Hawk helicopter do things that, like, I didn't know what Black Hawk helicopter could do because, like, the Black Hawk, it came in and went almost straight and vertical. And I thought the tail rotor was going to hit the ground. It went straight, vertical, and then landed. And then you just saw these PJs jump out. I mean, I didn't know who the hell they were. Yeah, like that, you know, but, I mean, those guys were awesome, you know. But, I mean, the firefight started at like 705 in the morning, and it didn't stop until probably around four or five that afternoon.

I mean, it was an all-day engagement. And the other thing I remember about that day was, you know, when I was going through the School of Infantry, and they were teaching us how to dig two-man fighting holes, I used to think that that was really stupid. I was like, this is so dumb. When am I going to do this? Like, it's not World War I.

Right. You know, when are we going to fight in trenches? My first day in combat is when I was going to need it because we were getting, you couldn't stand up because of just how much, you know, the volley of fire. So we started digging two-man fighting holes in the prone. You know, we took out of E-Tools and started digging. And I was like, I just, I just remember that thought of like, oh, yeah, this is when you'll need it. You know, your first day in combat.

I always thought it was stupid to learn what a two-man fighting hole was. But in that night, you know, everybody, we didn't get any sleep that night, you know, because everybody, I mean, people were falling asleep just because they were so exhausted. You know, we had been fighting all day out in the sun, you know, you know, guys started shooting at, they thought trees were moving, you know, so they started shooting at trees in the middle of the night, you know. But we were exhausted. And I think it was like by the next day, our company commander was like, we need to start

rotating these guys in and out of sleep because they're not going to last if we keep up this sort of op tempo. But that's kind of the first day in a nutshell. How long did that operation go on for after that? Well, from that, we went into sustainment operations because the goal was to establish a permanent sort of combat outpost. It took a few days to establish to like find a permanent place.

Eventually we did, we were so actually Operation Gujarry probably went into July 3rd and maybe into July 4th. I'm not sure exactly when that operation stops and then goes into kind of sustainment operations. But we took over a school that was, so this is, let me back up, so this is Minipash Day, which is on the outskirts, it's on the outskirts of Garmshire in Helmand province. And so we took over this school that

the Taliban had taken over the school and transformed it into a recruiting center. And it was right next to a marketplace. And so we established a company outposts there. And the goal was, the near goal was we're going to open this combat outpost there and then hopefully that will reopen the market next door and people will start to feel comfortable coming back to the markets and you know buying and selling of goods that sort of thing so that was the near goal but prussian canjari probably lasted i would say july second into maybe the fourth maybe the fifth i'm not i'm not exactly sure it sounds like you guys were like out there flapping for quite a while though Oh, yeah.

And we're like living off the ground. Like there was no. I mean, this stayed true for the entire deployment. Like there were no showers. There were no bathrooms. There was no, I think we had, I think each platoon had one satellite phone. And, but the squads were all over the place at different, like, outposts.

So you might get a phone call every two weeks. And that's if like, A staff sergeant didn't take up all the battery on the sat phone. You know, but I mean, it was rugged living. I mean, we would push into a building and that's where we're sleeping. You know, the word, you know, I think total time. I think I probably went four months without a shower, you know. And I don't know if they have them in the Army, but we have like these like frog camis,

which they're really breathable, but they don't hold up to the terrain. so everybody's like ripping their pants ripping I mean we look really raggeded you know but yeah I mean it was rough living so it sounds like best of times worse the times right the objective was to continue pushing south like you were like on foot clearing south it sounds like yeah I mean it was basically to clear

the supply routes going north that was the main objective and so we were trying to cut off the choke point there were in our AO were these two roads. One was named Cowboys and one was named Redskins because all the roads were like NFL teams. And those two main supply routes would go north and supply Taliban forces in northern Helmand or into another province. And so our whole objective was to cut off those.

And then eventually that turned into making the community safe so people felt comfortable voting in elections when the elections would come around, things like that. It was very, you know, it was offensive in the beginning, and then it quickly turned to counterinsurgency. And how long were you guys over there on that one, on that trip? It was a seven-month deployment, but I think combat time. It was July 2nd to, I think we got out of there late. October, early November. So that was full, like, total combat time.

But, I mean, I mean, there's only, like, one month that I can recall where we, we maybe got into maybe one or two firefights. But other than that one month, it was like two or three different engagements a day. Just because we were the only unit down there. I mean, it was crazy. And we lost 14 Marines across the battalion that summer. Our company lost two. a whole bunch of

I don't know the number of our wounded but I will say we got we got lucky I mean it sucks to say that it was it was two guys but yeah I mean the amount of times where so many of us like came so close to dying you know it could have been way worse

you know and which is funny though because if you ask any of us you know how do you feel about this despite how many firefights were getting in everybody almost had the same answer. Like, well, at least we're not in the corn gal. At least we're not in the mountains, like the army. Because that sucks.

So that was kind of like, luckily, like most of the terrain down there was flat. Yeah. We didn't have to, we didn't have mountains. We didn't have, it was mostly like farming. You know, so like the worst was there was a lack of cover. There was a lot of concealment, well, I could cover. But like when you would go into like the, like, the, like the fields, like the, the humidity would rise. So if it's like a hundred degrees

outside, if you're walking through one of the, you know, like farming fields, the temperature would go up to like 130. It was crazy. You know, but compared to the mountains, I thought we had it pretty, like, we lucked out. Yeah. Because, you know, like, you know, the combat video that I've seen from like the Korangal and the Hindu Kush, just ridiculous. Like, you know, you're fighting an enemy

that's above you. You know, like that doesn't even make sense to me. Yeah. But it's like you say, I mean, the flip side of that is you guys had no cover.

And there are, there are few worse feelings than being shot at when there's absolutely nothing to get behind. Right. Yeah. I mean, that was one of the,

yeah, we'd get into the fields, we'd have concealment. And then, we'd start taking rounds in and it was one of those like everybody starts pushing everybody like start running and get to the nearest building as fast as you can you know yeah and then it got into like um you know because as our tactics uh change and adapted their tactics changed and adapted and then so they started you know laying in iEDs throughout the fields that we were using for concealment

so then we started patrolling up rivers and and and and it really felt like I mean I mean, I've never been to Vietnam, but yeah, that's kind of how it felt. It was like, I bet this is what Vietnam was like. Paint it black is playing in the background, yeah. Painted black, yeah. And guys are like, you know, like, and it's so hot outside, you know, guys didn't mind getting into the water, which didn't look like water. Like the water was like black and brown, you know.

But, but then we had to change those tactics because then intelligence reports started coming out that they were laying tripwire just above the water surface. So then that cut off those routes. So then we had to, you know, change those tactics too. So I mean, I was, I really respected the Taliban for like their ingenuity. Like they could make an IED out of like anything. And I just didn't have the knowledge of that. So I was always kind of like fascinated with like,

Because they could take like a plastic bottle that looks like it's crushed. And it looks like just a piece of trash on the ground. And it's actually a pressure plate. And if you stepped on that piece of trash, it would, you know, it would connect the, it would complete the circuit. And then there's an IUD going off. But I wouldn't have the wear with all the things. You know, I'm a young, dumb grunt.

So I was kind of like really impressed by just how good they were. Yeah. And it's always interesting, like, in that part of the world, where as you, as you were pointing out, like, some of these people had no idea what a helicopter was, but they have, I mean, the things that they can do to repair a vehicle, for instance, like just insane things they'll do that. You and I, there's something about us that we don't have this sort of like ingenuity or like, I don't know what that's, that certain type of thinking that people who live in in really impoverished areas are able to improvise, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, and you're absolutely right. Like, like, I would have no, you're right.

Like, they could take just simple things, which was crazy because they didn't have anything. Like, I've never seen that level of poverty before. Yeah. You know, and I, like, I always considered myself at, like, a poor kid myself. Like, my dad was a truck driver. My mom worked at McDonald's. And so we were always living paycheck to paycheck. And sometimes we didn't have enough money to pay all the bills.

you know and all my clothes are like hand-me-downs and stuff like that and I remember seeing their level of poverty and feeling kind of guilty about calling myself a poor kid because this was kind of the first time I've ever seen real real poverty you know and I was like I felt really guilty about just calling myself that and and I haven't really adopted that moniker since then just because I'm like man you have no idea what poverty is right until you see you know until you see it with your own eyes right right You know, most of those houses don't have not even one light bulb. Most of them didn't, I mean, they didn't have electricity. You know, they didn't have access to clean water. Very little food. Right. But despite their poverty, I found just regular everyday Afghans to be incredibly hospitable, you know, offering you what little they had. Yeah.

You know, and that's where I kind of felt bad for them, where they were trapped between, you know, the big. American war machine and trapped between this Taliban force that was also, you know, very oppressive themselves. And so they were just trapped in the middle trying to get to the next day, you know, and then that's where sort of the talks became of like, you know, the counter-narcotic missions started to come about. And it's like, well, that's all they have. Like I understand they're growing marijuana.

I understand that they're growing poppy, which gets turned into heroin. But if they started growing corn, they're not going to be able to provide for their family. Nobody's going to export the corn from them into another country. So that's where I kind of felt bad for, like, just your everyday Afghan farmer who was told, hey, you need to stop growing poppy or you need to stop growing marijuana. Because as you guys know, in certain situations, they're forced to grow that stuff. And if they stop, now their family is in danger from the Taliban. So it was just this, you know, this catch-22 of like, what's the right answer, you know?

So after this whole insane experience, you're no longer, I think Chaps called it a ribbonless bitch. And is that what they call it in the Marine Corps? Well, for us, it's like you're no longer a boot. Yeah. You know, yeah, yeah, you're no longer a boot. You got some ribbons on your, you know. you don't look like you just get out of boot camp

yeah you know like what was it like coming back home from all of that I mean that must that's it's like reverse cultural shock right coming back home from Afghanistan oh yeah I mean it was surreal I remember my buddy and me were we're sitting in an Applebee's and we're just kind of like

I don't know we're just like we're not saying anything to each other like me and me and this guy his name's Greg Beterra I mean we were in every firefight together. We were in every fighting hole that we dug. We stood post together. We did everything together. And I remember we were sitting at an Applebee's. And it was with this weird thing, you know, it's like the whole world is happening around us. And we're just like sitting there, not talking and just kind of staring. And, and, you know, the thought was like, you know,

finally one of us said, you know, two weeks ago we were getting shot at. And now we're at an Applebees. It was that surrealness, you know, where we realized that the whole world had not stopped. Yeah. You know, like we had, to us, it was like the whole world stopped. But in actuality, it hadn't. And it was coming to that realization. Yeah.

You know. And what seeped into that was this feeling of like that nobody really cared. Right. Yeah. You know. Yeah. nobody really cared, which is a horrible feeling, especially when you just lost your friends,

you know, and you got funerals to go to and you got the Italian memorial you got to go to, you know, and then this feeling seeps in that nobody really cares and that the world really didn't stop, that the world just kept living on, and nobody has, nobody around you has any idea about what you were doing just two weeks ago. It was that really surrealness.

And then, you know, after the memorial services and after the funeral services and after the funerals and a little bit of leave. Like six months to a year later, I just started to get angry. I was just walking around pissed off and not really knowing why. And by this point, I had moved, I had re-enlisted, and I had gone from my battalion to Paras Island to teach recruits. and there was one day where this recruit had, I was teaching recruits how to fill out their data books,

and this recruit had fallen asleep in my class, and I went off on them. Like, you're going to get people killed, you're not dependable, all your Marines are going to die because you fell asleep on post. I just went off on them, and I felt myself getting angrier, like I was going to punch him in the face, which thankfully I didn't, because that would have been. been the end of me.

But after I yelled at this kid, I walked past them, and I went outside and kind of broke down near a tree. And it was like, it was after that that I was like, okay, I need help. I need to get into therapy because I'm just so angry and I don't even know why I'm angry. You know, so yeah, that was, so coming back was like, it was very surreal, but then it was just these feelings that I needed, it was one of these things. Like, I needed to deal with all these feelings, and I needed to go through the process of, like, dealing with them, you know?

Which, you know, at the time, the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps was still very much, I will say this, the Marine Corps has done a lot of work to try to destigmatize post-traumatic stress, but at the time it was not. You know, it was still very much like, well, if you go see a therapist, you're seen as weak. So that's just not something you did as an infantryman. at that time. You know, I will say it's gotten way better, you know, but at that time, you just didn't do that. So you started going and, like, seeking out some therapy sessions, even at that point, before you got to the second deployment.

Yeah. Yeah, no. Yeah, I started going, but it was, it was not steady. So if I remember correctly, there was like 50,000. You came to that realization. a lot faster than most of us, though. Oh, yeah. I mean, well, I just, I was just something, well, like, I don't know.

It was just feeling of just walking around angry, you know, and then there was, right around that time, you know, I put a gun on my mouth. My ex-wife walked in and stopped me, thankfully. But, yeah, so I got into it. But the therapy at that time was not consistent because I don't remember, correctly, it was something like 50,000 Marines between, like permanent personnel, between Paris Island, South Carolina, and Marine Corps Air Station, Buford, which was near our base. And it was something like only a handful of therapists between the base.

So when you went in to see the therapist, they're like, okay, we had a good session. I'll see you in like a month or two months. And that's just not, you know, I needed something week to week. Right. You know, right. And I was also very adamant about, for me personally, I was very adamant that I didn't want to go on pills. I didn't want an antidepressant. I didn't want, you know, whatever, Zoloft or whatever.

I just wanted to talk. I just needed someone to talk to and sort of tell me what was wrong with me, you know. And so that made it hard because just because of the amount of clients they had, you know. I remember with my one therapist, I was making a lot of progress, and he basically got burnt out and retired. And so that caused me to revert because I felt like now I was going back to step one and that I had to kind of retell my story. And by that point, I was already sort of annoyed by having to retell the story over and over and over again. So, you know, I quit therapy for a while just because I just didn't want to have to go through the whole process. of having to tell another therapist, you know.

And in the meantime, you're kind of like on trajectory to deploy again in 2013. Right, yeah. So I stayed at Parris Island for two years. I had felt incredible guilt because my buddy Greg had redeployed back to Afghanistan. And I felt so guilty because I wasn't there. You know, like we had come so close to death so many times. it was you know like you know I've said this like if he had died on that deployment where he had gone back and I'm down to paris island teaching a bunch of recruits had to shoot like I don't know if I'd have made it

you know because like he was closer than family and so luckily nothing happened to him on that second deployment when he went back and I didn't go with him but I was so guilty for not having gone So this guilt was lingering. And so I heard that my battalion was going back in 2013. So I cut orders from Parasinan back to my own company. And then I went on the 2013 deployment. But my role was different. So by this point, I'm a sergeant.

I was an infantry squad leader, but I was also in, I was in college. I was going to like, I was going to American military university and I was taking like courses in like Homeland Security and my company commander was like, hey, you would do good in intelligence. And so they

so they took my squad away from me, which I was really upset about. And they put me in charge of an intelligence cell, which at the time I was really upset about, but in hindsight I kind of loved it.

Because I think that was my pathway into journalism. And so, yeah, so when I went back to in 2013, I'm the head of an intelligence cell. But not only that, I'm kind of a liaison between our intelligence cell and other intelligence disciplines that are in country. So it turned out to be a really cool job. But also kind of sad because, you know,

working in intelligence, as you guys might know, It's like, you know, it's like the Wizard of Oz. Like the curtain gets pulled back, you know. And it's like, well, look at just how bad everything is, you know. And I remember getting, you know, 150 emails a day about just how bad things are going in Afghanistan. You know, and having to go through each email to get down to the three emails that pertain to my area of operations, you know. but yeah you know that that's kind of what happens in 2013 and so what kind of when you got back what kind of made you decide to leave the Marine Corps at that point did you have any sort of like

transition plan am I going to go to college or this is what I want to do with myself no I actually didn't want to get out I was trying to reenlist for my third enlistment I just fell into a horrible fiscal year in terms of re-enlistments. So it's 2013. My fiscal year of re-enlistment is 2014, which just so happens to be the year that President Obama is trying to end the war. And any time you try to end a war, you become over-budgeted in terms of your personnel.

So I essentially got laid off is what happened. They, you know, they're like, look, you didn't do anything wrong. Thank you for your service, but it's not for your job. to go. And that was not, that, yeah, that was not my plan. Uh, so I had about when I finally got told that we're not going to reenlist you. Um, I had about a month to check out. Uh, so, yeah, it was, it was really, I didn't have any plans for college. I didn't just, the Marine Corps was the plan. I didn't have anything else. Um, so it, and it was, it was difficult because, like, I had a month to check out of the only thing I knew for the past eight years in my life.

So it didn't feel like I was losing a job. It felt like I was being disowned by my family. Right. Like I really love being a man. You're losing your life. I'm losing. Yeah. I'm losing.

And I'm losing my identity. Right. The thing that how I define myself, I'm losing. Right. And your support group, like you're a support group and your friends. Because no matter what they say, like once you leave, you stay friends with people, but you're also not in the. the club anymore. Yeah. That's right. You're not in the club anymore. That's exactly. Like,

it's almost like, you know, you got, you know, there's a like cliche saying of like, well, I got the t-shirt, you know. Right. It's like they're taking, they're taking the t-shirt back. Right. And you're no, you know, you're out of the club. Yeah. And so, yeah, I felt like I was, it was, it was a very difficult transition just because I felt like I was losing my identity. And even though they kept telling me, you didn't do anything wrong. It felt, like I did something wrong and like they didn't want me for whatever reason. So I felt like rejected, which was very difficult for me. And so I got out not knowing what I was going to do. So I went back to college and I started driving. You know, at this point I have a, I'm married,

I have a mortgage and I'm going to college and then I'm driving Uber on Friday and Saturday nights kind of feeling down on myself because I'm like I was an infantry sergeant I used to classify documents and now I'm driving around you know college kids on a Saturday night in my car you know like I just felt like my whole life had come to a screeching hole in college wasn't fun for me because um you know I'm like 28 and all my classmates are like 19 you know I feel so old. And, you know, going to war just naturally ages you. Yeah. And so I don't even feel like I'm 28. I feel like I'm in my 40s and 50s, you know. And I have nothing in common with my classmates, you know, who are, have interesting ideas on how the world works. And I'm just sitting in the

back in the classroom like, oh, man, you guys are in for rude awakening, you know, you know. So, But yeah, it was, but it was really a loss of purpose. The whole thing was a loss of purpose. And journalism, thankfully, was the thing that gave me my purpose back. But it was weird. I didn't go into journalism wanting to inform the public. It was, I'm not ready to kind of talk about my own experiences. And so I thought, well, maybe if I write about,

other's experiences, through that, I'll get some sort of therapy. That was a bad idea because it didn't work out that way. I found that the more I wrote about people's experiences and more, the more I would take on their trauma because I empathized with them. And I could put myself in their shoes, especially like the first kind of stuff that I covered when I transitioned to journalism was like I was covering suicide, veteran suicide, and like, uh, legislation, like congressional legislation to try to prevent suicide, which I will say at the time was probably not the best idea for my mental

house. Right. You know, like, I remember I told an editor, I was like, I think I needed to take a break from covering the stuff. It's really having an impact on me. And that I was like, well, how about, maybe I'll do a movie review to like, like, lighten things up. And it was a movie about a dog with PTSD. And it's like, you got to be, you know, I was like, like, like what's worse, you know, a dog that has PTSD. Yeah, a dog that has PTSD. Yeah, it was a

movie called Max. It was about this dog that had come back from like, I think Iraq or something like that. And yeah, it had, you know, horrible PTSD. You know, so, you know, but, but journalism, I will say journalism at the time really gave me a purpose. Yeah. How did that come about, though? What was your initial foray into journalism? Do you take a class on it in college or like what was that that put that idea in your mind? I found it to be similar to working in intelligence.

And so that, that, you know, I was already writing these intelligence reports all day and talking to sources and verifying sources, you know, taking raw information, putting it through. the intelligence cycle and making an intelligence product. And I had been reading about how journalism was similar. I mean, I minored in journalism in college. I didn't graduate. I think I I'm missing, I left my senior year. I think I'm missing like three credits in Spanish for my degree. But I majored in political science and I minored in journalism. But really my journalism school was I'd watch like old 60 Minutes pieces. So I'd watch, like, I'd watch like Mike Wallace and how Mike Wallace interviews someone.

And then I just, I started reading people that I really love their writing. So like, CJ Shivers was an early influence. Yeah, I started reading Elliot Ackerman, you know, guys like that, you know, because one, they were veterans and two, they were writers. And so, but yeah, I didn't really know how to be a journalist.

You know, I was just kind of stumbling my way forward. A lot of sitting out a lot of cold emails saying, hey, I'll write for you for free. And, you know, not really knowing what I'm doing. But there are a lot of people out there who go to school for journalism, who, you know, take all these steps and still don't get jobs. And here you are, you don't, you don't have a degree in it. You don't, I assume you don't have like the bona fides. Like, you know, your uncle is in a big shot in, at a, you know, a magazine or whatever. How did you get, how did you get your way into it, find your way into it, when so many other people don't?

I don't know. I mean, a lot of luck. A lot of people, I will say, everybody that I reached out to in journalism, took the time to help me. I never had anyone say no. And so I think it really came down to me just not being afraid to ask for help and not being afraid to say,

I don't know something. I don't know how to do something. And everybody I talked to took the time to help me. One of those early people was like Dan Lamoth at the Washington Post. He had just moved over from the Marine Corps Times to the Washington Post. He's the guy who gave me my first byline

at the Washington Post. Now, I still wasn't making money, but I was learning. Right. You know, I was learning the craft. I was learning the trade of not only journalism structure, but just had to be a good writer or how to be a good reporter.

It was really just came down to me not being afraid to ask for things and being humble and not knowing what I didn't know, you know. That's what I would say. You know, I mean, it was hard. Like I, especially when, you know, I had a mortgage and I got a wife who's expecting the bills to be paid. Right.

You know, and, you know, it wasn't easy. I spent about four years, about four and a half years as a freelancer before I actually got like hired full time. And that's, that's a recent thing. Like Newsweek magazine hired me in 2018. So I spent a lot of time just on my own without health care and just kind of hoping that I was putting out enough articles to pay the bills, you know. And it was always a struggle for month to month, you know, figuring, like,

am I going to be, you know, am I going to be able to cover the bills this month? How did your very first article happen? Did you have an idea and you reached out to somebody like, how did that happen? So my first, like, toe dip was I was still in Afghanistan, in a tent. And I started to get some inklings that they might not accept my reenlistment. And so I didn't know, but I started to get that inkling. And so I'm in my tent in Afghanistan with horrible Wi-Fi. And I found it was an outlet called Policy Mike, which I think today is like Mike.com.

And my first editor was a girl named Laura Diamond, who she later told me, my dad's Jamie Diamond. And I was like, oh, okay. I don't know who Jamie Diamond is, who I later find out is the CEO of J.P. Morgan. I was like, oh, okay. But she had gone to Columbia School of Journalism. So she was kind of the first one to teach me, you know, inverted pyramid. And this is, you know, how to structure a news article. And I was kind of learning that, but I learned that from just reaching a cold email that I sent from Afghanistan. And she took the time to, you know, and that's when I was kind of just like, you know, if this military thing doesn't work out, what am I going to do after this? Right.

You know, and so I was just kind of dipping my toe in. But, I mean, I didn't really, I don't know, I've never, I've always had imposter syndrome when it comes to journalism. I don't know. I still have that. Like, to me, like real journalist or like Bob Woodward, you. You know, I'm, you know, like, those guys, like, Carl Bernstein, like, those kind of guy, you know. I just feel like I'm a guy that knows some things. I don't know why I still have that, but I don't know.

Maybe it's because the way I came up, but I've never really felt like a journalist. Well, it's also interesting that I think, like, there have been complaints in the past and that there aren't enough veterans in journalism. who kind of have like a wherewithal about the military. When there is someone who did not serve in the military and they try to write about the military, this is kind of an unfair statement. I don't want to make a blanket statement across the board, but I think there's sometimes a tendency because the military is so insular and closed off to see it as like something sinister.

Like there's kind of like something. There's what's going on on these bases. Like there's something very dark happening about going on inside. these bureaucracies, whereas someone like you that comes out of it and decides to write about the military, like, you know that you know the good and the bad. Like, yeah, there are some dark things, but also it's a lot of like good things and a lot of Joe's just, you know, waking up at 05 in the morning doing PT and doing good things, right? So I think there's a real difference in perspective. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's that separating, you know, separating the soldier from the policy,

you know, you're right. Like, A lot of the military is, you know, 18 to 25, and it's people who are just, you know, they love TikTok and they love, you know, Avenger movies. And, you know, they're just trying to do the best job that they can. And that is separate from the institution itself, which the institution can, at times, not make the best decisions, you know. And so, yeah, you're absolutely right. But at the end of the day, it's, you know, I like having more veterans and journalism because, I think they are a conduit to help people understand that the military is just a microcosm of larger society. Yeah.

That's all it is. We're not that separated. We're not that different. Yeah, I might wear a uniform every day, but that's no – you wear a uniform when you work at McDonald's or you work at Wendy's. I mean, we're not that different. You know, and I think that's what veteran journalists can do is bridge that divide. You know, also, I mean, you know, also, I mean, you're not. I mean, I've always, I've said this before.

I see journalism just as an extension of my military service. I'm just serving the American people in a different way. Nolan, one of my early people that I learned from is Nolan Peterson, who he covers Ukraine over at Coffee or Die. He's a phenomenal reporter, especially a conflict reporter. But he had this quote on his email that I stole. I love this quote. It was, journalism is just as important to the survival of democracy as the armies that guard its borders.

And I absolutely agree with that. You know, and I think that's one of the reasons why the founding fathers wrote it into the Constitution, because they understood the importance of a free press as well to be a check on government institutions. And what better person to do that than a veteran who's been in the institution? Sure. It's almost like having an insider. Right. Yeah, the military doesn't really like that, though.

No, they don't like that. Because there's nowhere for them to hide when they talk to you. Yeah. Oh, like, I remember one of my favorite exchanges was, I was at a press conference in B.C. And John Ismay over at the New York Times was, had been the hounding, I think it was a Secretary of the Navy that he'd been hounding. And the Secretary of the Navy had been like dodging him, left right and center. But John Ismay, before he was a New York Times reporter, he was an EOD officer. And he was, and he was specifically asking him about like cluster bombs and how dangerous

cluster bombs are and how soldiers were getting hurt by working around cluster bombs. And the Secretary of the Navy had just been dodging him for months. And finally he cornered him at a press conference. And every answer that the Secretary of the Navy gave, John could, you know, say, no, that's not true. And this is why it's not true. Because this isn't this. Because he just has this knowledge of being an EOD officer. Right. When it comes to bombs, you're not going to get, you're not going to stump a guy who used to dismantle them. Right. And disarm them, you know. And it was phenomenal to watch, you know, to watch that go down because your garden variety journalists probably would not have that that knowledge base i'm surprised they even let them in the

room i mean all of those press cores they're scared to death of the tap being right yeah well yeah it wasn't at the pentagon it was uh it was the military reporters and editors association yeah and so you know the secretary of the navy showed up thinking i'm going to give a you know an afternoon speech to a couple journalists yeah yeah that's hilarious he stepped into it yeah You stepped into the ant pile, you know. Speaking of which, I'd love to hear the story about how you got banned from Camp Lejeune. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a story.

So I was a freelance journalist at the time. I was doing mostly freelance work for The Daily Beast and the Washington Post. a colonel who full disclosure I used to serve under this colonel he was once my commanding officer this colonel that I knew had been accused of sexually let me see if I

inappropriate behavior with a minor I'll say because I'm not sure if it's molester assault I'm not sure, but inappropriate behavior with the minor of one of his officer's daughters. And so he was brought up on a number of charges under that. And I started investigating him for nine months because I knew who he was. I knew kind of all the players. And I worried about, I worried about a bias in my reporting. So to check my own biases on this colonel, I brought in my journalism professor who taught me journalism at University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

And we reported it together. And he was a check on any biases I might have, you know, to keep me just focused on the facts. And so for nine months, we investigated this colonel and this alleged act. I had base access privileges at the time. One of the victims, at the time, I'm trying to remember correctly, they didn't trust, for whatever reason, they had a deep mistrust of Camp of June public affairs. And so for every other story that I had ever done around Campa June, I would always go through public affairs.

this is the first time that I went around them. And I intentionally did not contact public affairs before I contacted this alleged victim. Because to me, that would have, what's the right word? I felt it would have, I wouldn't have gotten honest answers. And I knew this victim wanted to talk to me.

And so I went on base to talk to the alleged victim without Campbell June Public Affairs knowledge. And then after that, I stopped by the brig. Now there's some back and forth on was I at the brig as a reporter or was I at the brig to just see the colonel. But they didn't like basically boil down to date. Campbell June really did not like me coming on base. without public affairs being read in. And so despite me having access to the base, they decided that I was in security risk,

and they banned me from base. Skip to be to that nine months, the colonel, he's convicted on the charges. Three generals and four colonels convicted him. It goes up to the appellant courts, and it's overturned. and so that's kind of the end of that story. I'm still banned from Camp of June.

And that's just because I haven't gotten around to appealing it. But I was bummed out. It really hurt me just because, one, I served there honorably for six years. And I thought it was kind of ridiculous that I was a security risk to the Marine Corps. when I loved being a Marine and I loved my time in the Marine Corps. But the other thing, the other reason it bothered me is at Second Battalion Heath Marines, we have a memorial to the guys that we lost in Afghanistan. And on July 2nd, I would always go and put flowers on the memorial.

So when I got banned, I wasn't able to do that anymore. So that was the thing that kind of sucked about it. But that's kind of the story of why I got banned. Jim, this also brings up an interesting, you know, sidebar to this whole conversation about veterans and journalism. And this is a personal observation that, you know, you can accept or reject. But do you find that it's quite difficult to be a veteran in good standing with your prior branch of service or unit or whatever, but also be an investigative journalist trying to objectively report on that area of service? I have found it impossible to balance these two things because you end up having to tell people some things they really don't want to hear. Yeah.

I remember I ran into that when the Marines United scandal in 2017. For those who might not know real quick, Marines United scandal was there were the secret Facebook chat rooms. one of them had like 30,000 Marines, Navy Corbyn and I think British Royal Marines. And they were basically trading the nude photos of their female colleagues like baseball cards without their consent. And so it was a big kind of revenge porn. Another Marine, also in journalism, Thomas Brennan, broke that story. And then once he broke that story, I started reporting on that for the next four months. But it was during that time where, you know, I was talking about.

talking to a lot of senior leaders in the Marine Corps and public affairs officers. And there's this perception of me that I was a bitter Marine, that I was somehow bitter towards them. There was a bitterness towards the Marine Corps and that I was somehow not happy with my service and all that kind of stuff. And none of that was true. I was just simply reporting what the facts were. And it had nothing to do with being bitter or me being or having some sort of

vendetta against the Marine Corps. It was just that the Marine Corps didn't like what I was reporting. You know, so yeah, it was hard because I wasn't a bitter Marine. I mean, you could make the argument that, you know, that, you know, transparent investigative reporting helps the service and not, it doesn't hurt it. Right. You know. Right. Right.

Yeah, I mean, if you allow bad behavior to fester, it's sort of like reporting on war crimes, right? It's like if you, and I'm not comparing the two. I'm just saying that if you allow bad behavior to fester, then are you really honoring the service in that way? Right. Well, and oftentimes military does take that stance. I mean, it was just recently that, you know, the Army secretary was asked, about low recruiting numbers in the Army. And her response was, well, there's a lot of bad press.

I remember that, yeah. And so to me that's, yeah. So to me, to me it's like, well, that falls into, you know, the problem is not the problem. The problem is that you're pointing out the problem. Right. According to the Army Secretary. You know, and so, I mean, I mean, that was her answer. but the military commonly takes that.

You know, I mean, HR McMaster is no different. HR McMaster, you know, given, you know, if you look at the withdrawal from Afghanistan, HR McMaster blamed the media for setting conditions in Afghanistan. You know, and it was, again, it's, you know, the problem is not the problem. The problem is you're pointing out. Yeah, it wasn't your secret negotiator.

that took place behind closed doors between the U.S. military and the Taliban. That had nothing to do with it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Or, you know, no, you're absolutely right. Another story that you worked on, I think this one was just in the last year, was about weapons and explosives going missing on military bases.

And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. The story actually starts like 10 years ago. My colleague here at the AP, Kristen Hall, she was covering Fort Campbell and started seeing a lot of these like, you know, weapons going missing, you know, a rifle here, rifle there, that sort of thing. And she had the idea of trying to, you know, figure out how many weapons go missing in a year. you know and so she submitted a freedom of information act request and that turned out to be a very difficult answer you know i mean she stuck with it for 10 years trying to figure out you know but over that 10 years she had moved on from being a military reporter to being an entertainment

reporter so then when i came to api i was trying to figure out what did i want to investigate and I kind of had the same idea that she had 10 years prior, which was everybody I know in the military has some sort of rifle going missing story, you know, or some sort of gear going missing and the whole base gets shut down and everybody's got a police call online until they find, you know, the thing. And so it was a, so I almost had the same idea she had. and the AP smartly paired us up along with a really great editor, Justin Pritchard, and we started looking into this question of how many weapons go missing?

And so we started to do it over a year. How many weapons have gone missing between 2010, you know, and present day? And then we added in explosives. And the reason we added in explosives was because we found that a lot more explosives go missing than rifles. So, like, for instance, just the Marine Corps alone, I think it was between 2010 and 2020, they had over 33,000 incidences of explosives going missing. And this is, and this is like, I'm talking C4, grenades, you know, things that kill. We took out any reference to, like, we took out smoke grenades, we took out, you know, practice,

practice already rounds. We took out all that stuff. So this is just stuff that can kill you in Mamio. They had over 33,000 incidences of where explosives have gone missing. And that's just the Marine Corps. So then you think about the Army and how much bigger the Army is, you know. So that's what we did for a year and a half, trying to figure out this number. What we found was it was a little over 2,000 firearms.

that had gone missing over that time period. Some of these firearms were ending up in the hands of street gangs and being used in the commissioning of a crime, a felony crime. We had video of, like, firefighters in the streets, and the pistol that's being fired is originated from, like, Fort Bragg. I mean, it's pretty crazy. There's this one story that is this guy who lived in Atlanta kind of a bad part of Atlanta, he walked out to his backyard, and there was a pink pillowcase.

And he took the pink pillowcase off, and it was a full can of 40 mic mic. Like, he had no idea where it came from. There was no relatives that he had in the military. He has no idea where it came from. Another story that I really love was, car gets pulled over in San Diego for a, I think it was like a suspended tag. or something like that, and they searched the car, and there's an M203 grenade launcher

under the front seat of the car. And so the police officers didn't really know what it was, so they posted a picture of it online. And someone in the Marine Corps saw that, and I think it was like Camp Pendleton. And so Camp Pendleton called the police station. They said, hey, we're missing an M203. We think that might be ours.

And they're like, can you read us off the serial number? and the police department said, no, we can't do that. But if you read us the zero number that you're looking for, we'll tell you if it matches. So the Marine Corps reads off the zero number, and it turns out it wasn't. Which means there's two men. Right, right.

Right. Out there. You know, it was just crazy story. Like story after story. You know, there's another guy who stole a, I think it was a 240 golf. And he hit it under his grandmother's, he hit it under his grandmother's bed. And his plan was,

he was going to sell it to the hell's angels. But he got, he broke up with his girlfriend and his girlfriend was mad at him. So the girlfriend called Air Force investigators and that's how he got busted. And the 240 was like still under the grandma's grandmother's bed. I mean, it was just story after story like that. Jim, did you, did you ever look at, and I see AP did report this story. This happened when I was in special forces. There's a guy in one of the other battalions who got busted by.

ATF, he had 100 pounds of plastic explosives buried out in his backyard. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, that was the other thing, too, is like, a lot of times, you know, guys were stealing this stuff to like, they were trying to make a buck. So they were trying to sell it at a pawn shop or there were guys who were taking home just to blow something up in their backyard. I mean, there's a couple of cases of like, you know, they're white supremacists or they're in a gang or stuff like that, but those, those are really outliers, you know, most of the time it was like, it was almost like stealing office supplies and trying to, you know, it's just, yeah, but it was just like the office supplies. Yeah, it's just like the office supplies was C4, you know, so, but that's kind of

what it was like. It was just they were stealing this stuff to try to make a quick buck. By the way, before I forget, and this is totally off topic, but you just mentioned special forces. I have a really good story that I made a fool out of myself in front of, I think it was like third group, I'm not mistaken, but like, I don't know if it was third group, but it was like guys with beards and they look cool.

And so this is going back to 2009. This is totally off topic, but you brought up special forces. So these guys come down, they got their beards, you know, they're glad, they look cool.

And I was a young Marine. and I wanted them to think I was cool too, and I wanted to be in, like, their group. And so we had a series of buildings that we had to clear. And I was like, I'll take point. I got this, despite I had a parasol, which I shouldn't have been the point, man, to begin with, but I wanted to impress them.

And we stack up on this door, and Afghans typically hang, like, bed sheets in front of the doors. And I was like, I got this, guys. And so they bumped me into the room and my saw, the barrel of my saw ripped into the blank, into the sheet. And I panicked and I wrapped into it. And I was basically just twisting into the blanket thinking I'm about to get lit up. Like I'm about to get, I'm about to die because I thought someone was in the room. I started panicking because I couldn't see anything.

But the more I twisted, the more I blinded myself. It's like a Scooby-Doo. cartoon. Yeah. And, and I finally got the blanket off me and off my gun and there's nobody in the room. And these guys are just like, are you all right? You okay, man? And I'm like, yeah, I'm fine.

And I was totally doing it to try to look cool. And I wanted them to think I was cool, but I wasn't. You know, I was one of those like, you know, because they got beards and they could like, you know, they didn't have to wear their Kevlar, you know, like, look at that guy. guy's got like a hat on backwards, you know. They were just cool looking guy. I look stupid. But I really like that story. Guys, if you have any questions for Jim, get them in. I want to ask you about one of, really the story that you've been working on lately about Majuski. What's going on there, man? Yeah. I mean, that story came about, I've just been one of my. One of my. tasks is to vet

candidates who are running for the midterms. Regardless of political ideology, you know, Republican, Democrat, doesn't matter. You know, just anybody who's running who is a veteran. So I just been

and we got his documents back and something wasn't adding up. You know? Um, um, um, And he, this is a congressional candidate in North Carolina, right? Uh, Ohio.

Ohio. He's, he's, he's, he's a Republican candidate for Ohio. Um, uh, you know, his, he's running kind of on the moniker of, I'm an Afghanistan combat veteran. Um, and we started to pull his records and there's nothing in his record. that indicates he was in Afghanistan. And so we started asking his campaign, like, can you provide us with anything? You know, you know, anything that would, you know, confirm that he was in Afghanistan. I always take great care in these kind of stories because I don't know if you guys know the

Admiral Mike Borda story. No. So Admiral Mike, so back in 1996, I remember this. Yeah. Admiral Mike Borda was the Chief of Naval Operations, the head of the Navy. And Newsweek was going to accuse him of wearing two medals from the Vietnam War that he didn't earn. And these are low-ranking medals. It was like a NAM with a V and a Navy con with a V.

And Borda was someone who really, really loved the Navy. Like he lied to get into the Navy at like 16, something like that. he was the first sailor to go all the way from the lowest enlisted to the head of the Navy. He's the first sailor to ever do that. And at the time in 1996, you know, the Navy, every good thing that the Navy did, they would step into another scandal. And so Borda was trying to correct the ship, but it just, they kept hitting rough seas. And Borda didn't want to bring another black eye on the Navy by being accused of wearing

medals that he didn't earn. And so he drove home and he shot himself in the chest and he killed himself. Two years later, it turns out that he actually did earn the medals. And it was just a paperwork error of why they weren't on the record. And so I always kind of keep that story at the forefront of my mind when I'm doing stories like this. And so, you know, we kept going to Mr. Majussi's campaign saying, can you provide us with anything? You know, and some of the material he provided us with was, you know, a DD-214 that did not show that he was in Afghanistan.

He provided a picture of him. It looked like he was in a bunker, but there was no context of the picture. It didn't show where he was, and it also didn't show when this photo was taken. There was no context of the photo, you know. So, yeah, that's kind of been our picture. reporting lately on Mr. Rajuski. And you guys reported that, you know, he's maybe stolen valor is a term sometimes gets applied to people who didn't serve.

This guy actually did serve, but he doesn't have, as far as we can tell, as far as your reporting, can tell service in Afghanistan. And then he did that press conference and he said his deployments are all classified and he can't talk about them. Right. Yeah. Which, um, I mean, to be, to be fair, there are classified deployments.

That is a real thing. But they're usually, everybody that I've talked to about people who have gone on classified deployments, I've talked to several national security lawyers, talk to seals that have gone on those kind of deployments. There's something in the DD-214 that shows that they went on that deployment. Right. You know? Right.

So there's usually something listing that. So, yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure about, you know, classified deployments and stuff like that, which, you know, I don't know. Well, I don't know what to do. The thing is, though, is generally if there are those types of deployments, because saying something was classified is generally like an immediate alert for stolen valor, right? I went to jump school, but it was clapped. I went to the classified. Sniper School. Right.

Yeah. So. Right. And generally a place like Afghanistan is not, even if you're in a in a classified unit with, you know, the, like there's still going to be history of deployment if the area is not classified. And this, this dude was like an Aops guy, right? He wasn't like some high speed, you know, splinter cell, Sam Fisher dude. Right, he was he was an aircraft loader Um, uh, yeah, I mean, and you know, in terms of his deployments, you know, um, he was in Japan,

Okinawa, he was in, um, uh, served in cutter, um, I think between May and November of 2002, if I remember correctly. Um, so he had, you know, he had deployments. Um, he did serve in the Air Force. Um, and from what I can tell, you know, uh, despite, having an NJP, for what I could tell, he got out honorably. Yeah. You know? But yeah, I'm just,

I don't know. What years did he say he's, what years was his service? Off the top of my head, I think it was like 98, 99 somewhere on there to 2003. And then I think he finally gets out of the IRA in 2007. That's off the top of my head. I'm not,

I don't have the numbers in front of me. Yeah. It doesn't make sense to me why, if you went to Afghanistan, why that would be a classified location, you know. And here's the thing. If he did go to a classified location and earned, you know, whatever the Air Force gives as a combat deployment award, like in country,

I don't know if they separate that out. right if they have like an in-country award the idea that he talks about being deployed to Afghanistan and a combat veteran defeats the purpose of it being classified so you'd think there'd be in trouble for that a bit of a conundrum yeah there's yeah several people pointed that out about if the deployments were classified then then he wouldn't have been able to run on the moniker of, I mean, I served in Afghanistan if, in fact, that deployment was classified. Right, right.

That if that hypothetical is true, which I don't know if it is, but if it, let's say for the, it is, then that would be revealing classified material, you know, and so that a lot of people actually pointed that out where that didn't make sense. if the deployments were classified, why are you running on where you served? Did he say where he was deployed in Afghanistan? Or is that classified also? I think he made some statement like,

oh, it's all over the place, all these different bases we flew into. Yeah, usually his response was, I went all over the Middle East. Yeah. And then- But Afghanistan isn't the Middle East. Right.

I know. But in Afghanistan, it would be like we did short emissions in Afghanistan, but yeah, no bases. Yeah. Yeah. Like that just makes no sense. Like maybe if the unit was classified and he was in, you know, some, like there would be a cover unit, but he still might have gone to Afghanistan for logistics purposes, right?

But what I'm saying is the deployment would be there. The unit would just be. a cover name. Right. There has to be a name for the unit. Right. And I will say for our, for, for the AP and the Associated Press, I will say like we haven't said that this is, that he is stealing Ballard.

We have not used a term stolen Ballard. And that's for the legal, because that is a legal distinction. There's laws. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And usually there's an element of fraud to that. an element of like financial gain to the person. So that's, so we have stayed away from that.

I know most people use that term, but I just wanted to make it clear for this podcast. Sure, sure. Not used that term. Sure. Just, just because that is actually like, you know, that's like saying someone, you know, again, it's a legal distinction. Somebody's a murderer when they didn't actually. Right, right, right.

I mean, but. I mean, that would be for someone else to decide. Sure. sure I don't know I mean then there's got to be then we have to come up with a new term for it that's not a legal term because because that's also a term like we could say like I would say that somebody were stolen valid

if they just lied about well you know if they lied about having you know an additional silver star or whatever you don't mean like even if they served and did an amazing job for their country if you're lying about your awards or whatever else, that's still very sketchy. It does, I mean, separate from the Mujuski issue, there does seem to be an issue with terminology. Yeah, like, you're researching.

You know, I know you love, right? I've written like six or seven of those articles, Jim, where you got to point out the distinction because some guy running for Congress is saying he's a ranger and you got to point out the difference between rangers. school and the Ranger Regiment. Technically, though, he is. I mean, I will be fair. I didn't know that. Yeah.

I didn't know that. I didn't know the difference between, you know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I've gotten so much hate mail from like all kinds of different people. But when you graduate Ranger School, they sit there and they tell you that you are, you don't know. You have a tab. Like you get a tab that says it. So.

But, but also like to your point and I think you were going to say something, but maybe like combat veteran. Like what is a combat veteran, right? Exactly. And that's exactly the issue that came up with this is, you know, like, I mean, before this story, I never really researched what is a combat veteran actually mean. Right. And from what I can gather, it simply is it's how the IRS taxes you.

You know, and has very little to do with, you know, actual combat that you saw. It all really depends on did you serve in an area designated under executive order as a combat zone. And that's really all it comes down to. Interesting. But if you ask the common American what a combat veteran is, they'll usually tell you, well, it's someone who saw combat in a country where they were getting shot at or, you know, getting bombed or something like that. but to the U.S. government, combat veteran really just means you served in an area designated a combat zone. And so, for instance, Cutter, George H.W. Bush, during the Gulf War, designated Qatar as a combat zone, even though it was a support area. Because of the sky.

And this was kind of the first, it was kind of the first time that a support area was given, you know, the combat zone exemption. And so really it was just how the IRS taxes you that year. Interesting. But it also, though, doesn't it have to do, is it just the IRS in terms of active duty and reserve and guard soldiers on active duty? Or could you call somebody from, say, you know, what's a contracting company? like a facilities like the big one that Cheney was a part of or you know like KBR yeah KBR or man tech out there doing networks like are they also considered a combat veteran by IRS firms that's a great question I don't know yeah

that's a good question I don't I don't because like like for instance like in Afghanistan in um my on my 2013 deployment I served with with a civilian. He was a retired NYPD detective, and he was a part of the LET program or what's called the law enforcement program. And I would definitely consider him a combat veteran. That's interesting.

I mean, the guy had more deployments than I did. Yeah. And had probably been shot at a lot more than I had, too. I mean, between his time and the NYPD and the deployments that he did in Afghanistan. Yeah. you don't like for me you you raise a good question i actually don't know because i you know like i've had this discussion with my friend jack and i've had the discussion like i would never call myself a combat

veteran and i've had to stop people from using it on like bios because i am a veteran and i have seen combat but they were not at the same time i you know i was peacetime when i was in the military i was in the national guard actually when i deployed but i didn't play with the national guard you know i i I deployed as a contractor working in sort of similar situations in advisory capacity, but on a lot of deployments in combat operations. But I would never call myself a combat veteran just because, just because I don't want to get embroiled in that whole, and the whole mess of semantics.

And I don't want people to think that I'm misrepresenting myself. Right. But I wouldn't. No, that makes sense. But I wouldn't look at like the person that, you like the cop like i wouldn't look at people in that similar situation and and think that that was stolen valor or anything for me it's just a personal choice because of the semantics of it not because of any like it's sort of moral indignation or anything yeah i mean i know

that's going to be a topic that we explore here at the apse especially for the um my editor one of my editors ron nixon is a is a is a point of that's a point of that's a point Marine infantrymen served during the Gulf War. And we've been talking a long time about like a military style guide as an attachment to the AP style guide. And I think, you know, combat veteran is going to be the next one we explore. Yeah. And what do we really mean when we say combat veteran, you know, just to provide, because I mean, if here we are, you know, journalists and we're also veterans in the military and we're kind of like, huh, I don't really, you know, how would you really apply this term? I'm sure your journalists out there that have not served in the military are probably going through the same thing of what is a combat veteran.

Yeah, if you guys can work out that and get people to stop writing special forces units such as Army Rangers, Navy SEALs. I personally really look forward to seeing the AP style guide sort out the Ranger School versus Ranger Regiment dilemma once and for all. Right. Lay the law down because the Army won't apparently. And special forces, right? like that every special ops unit out there is a special forces. Only green berets are special forces. I'll get my righteous indignation.

No, I'm just joking. I don't care enough to get angry about it. As a young journalist, I mean, as a young journalist, I stepped into that a few times. Yeah. It got dragged on Twitter for it. Yeah. If you don't know, you don't know.

I mean, that's in it. And it's not like it's such a very specific distinction in the military that if you're a civilian and you're not used to that world, you know, like, you can't be faulted. Six or seven articles written on this topic. I've got an email saying I'm a bad American for pointing out the difference. You hate the military. Yeah, yeah. I guess I just hate America. Yeah. No, it's, you know, it's its own world for sure. And the thing is, is like, you're a former military. But if you're not part of that particular world, world, then why would you know?

Why would you know? And why would you care? Honestly. Why would you even care? Right. You know, so it's, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I mean, that's the other thing, too, is just how much, you know, being a journalist covering the military, it's amazing just how much you don't know. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, big time. Because, like, when you're in, you kind of figure, like, well, I know, you kind of, you feel like you got a good grasp. And then you get out and you have to cover. You're like, wow, I really don't know. anything. Yeah. Like when it comes to the Air Force. Missiles and I don't know anything.

Like I don't know the rank structure. Yeah. I couldn't tell you a senior airman from a master. They all look the same to me. So it just shows just, you know, how much, which, which is why I kind of go hard on the research just because I just don't know. You know. Yeah. like unless you would run into the whole ranger issue like why would someone know you're right like

why would someone know that right you know right yeah they went through ranger school until you run into it in a bar with somebody who was a special forces ranger and it's like okay dude now now here's my question right so if you have that here's the question i ask so if you have that distinction for rangers right the ranger tab versus a scrolled ranger right does that exist for people go through airborne school who don't get assigned to airborne units. Oh, there's a big, yeah, there's a, there's a little controversy there.

Yeah. There's a little controversy there about like, are you a paratrooper if you're, are you a real paratrooper if you're not in an airborne unit? Yeah. Yeah. Are you just a five jump? Are you a five jump chomp or are you airborne?

That's like a spec four mafia, you know, kind of like barracks controversy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. interesting but but let me ask a question for you do we is the airborne obsolete do we still need one is not the most like no god damn it i'll flip this table over right now james i mean we we we don't need it until we need it right i mean it's it's one of those things where

if if you fight every war like the last war sure we don't need it but then all the sudden if there comes a point in time when we're doing near peer if you know something happens where we do need it and we need, you know, 3,000 people on an objective that's deep inland somewhere, then then how do you train those people up, you know? Right. And, and the, I mean, you could do it World War II style, which is like, here's, here's how to do a PLF if they even did that, and here's your shoot. And furthermore, the airborne infantry is the moral center of America, James. The real question is, do you need our assault? And I'm sorry for my hundred and first guys. out there, but we can put, we can put anybody on a helicopter, right? Right. Right. Just

Lance, like in that point, James did that. He didn't go to aerosol school. Like, at this point, everybody knows how to get out of a helicopter. No, no, I did not. Now, granted, I also didn't know what I was doing. It was to run that way, you know, like, I didn't even know there was a school for it at the time, you know. Uh, James, few things from our viewers here. John Pierre, Thank you, man. Really appreciate it. Very generous. Yeah, thanks. Jacob says at Newsweek, James uncovered that a Marine, Kelvin Wellie, had duped my business partner and I with made up wild combat stories. He is as fair as any reporter in D.C. I did not know that. I remember that story. Huh. Okay. Well, I appreciate the compliment. I don't, I don't live in D.C. though.

I well and and you know and given you know the overall trust in media you don't know if saying he's as fair as any reporter in DC is actually a compliment. No, I'm just kidding. No, I just. I'm just, I'm just kidding. No. How do you deal like with that and not just in terms of you being a veteran and reporting on military issues that that's that the military doesn't want to expose? Because generally that's what reporters do, right? It doesn't matter if it's the military or. Facebook or, you know, or a police department or J.P. Morgan, if reporters writing a story about them, chances are they don't want that story written. Right. But how does that affect sort of your personal life if it does and your professional life in terms of people's trust in the media these days?

I have found the two things I work for me. is one, to try to be as transparent as I can with how I got the information that I got. You know, and so, you know, for instance, the J.R. Majewski story, right? When we originally put out that story, we didn't put out the documents of how we, the documents that we obtained to write that story. And so my argument was, well, we should put those documents out there. So if anybody wants to see exactly how this story came together, they can read the raw material of themselves.

They can see the documents for themselves. So I think one is to try to be as transferent as we can when reporting a story of like, this is how I gathered the information, this is who I talk to, you know? The second thing is, like, again, I come from the freelancing world, and my heart, you know, as much as I love national reporting,

my heart is really with local journalists, And local journalists are members of their community. They live within their community. And that I've tried to be as accessible to people as I can't. Like, that's why my DMs are always open. I post my email. I post my phone number. You know, and to where even if someone has a problem with me, I'll still, I want to be accessible, you know, to, for any, clarification reasons or anything like that. I mean, personally, in terms of my personal life in journalism, you know, it's mostly just working long hours and, you know, having to apologize, you know, like if I have dinner plans, it's like I'm on deadline. Right. You know, or I have to make this phone call, you know, that that's kind of where it affects.

But professionally, I think those two things, being accessible to the readership and, and, and, you trying to be as transparent as possible with how a story comes together. Yeah. And then when you're approaching, like, sources for the first time, whether they're, like, long-term, you know, become long-term sources, or whether they're sources for a specific story, do you have to, are there, like, not for you personally, but are there, like, credibility issues or,

or journalists hate the military issues that you have to, overcome in order to get people to trust you, especially with veterans or whatever, or active, yeah. Well, that's where the veteran, my veteran background helps. Right. You know, because there are veterans and there are service members who don't like the press. And so that, that's where it helps. They feel comfortable talking to me because I've been in fire fights. I've, I've been in, you know, deployed before. I know, I know what it feels like to lose your friends. Yeah. You know, I will say most of the military sources that I have that have stuck with me for a long time were built, not by building rapport with them, but because they watched my reporting.

Uh-huh. Specifically, specifically, because I've asked them, like, why are you coming to me and not some other reporter? They've, they specifically watched how I report on KIAs. because I had certain rules when it came to if a service member was killed in action. One of the rules was I don't, it's the only story where I don't scoop the defense department. So even if I have all the information and I could publish as soon as it happens, I don't. Right. Because I know, you know, service members are about to go knock on someone's door.

Right. and permanently shattered that family. And so my fear has always been that they learn about the death of their loved one from a news story. Right. So even if I have all the facts, I hold it. So that's been a rule. The second rule I have is I don't reach out to the family, which is, and that's just been a personal policy in mind. Like, I know not every person agrees with that, but I've never run into an editor that has had an issue. but my opinion is like they're going through the worst day of their life right now and the last thing they need to hear

is from some reporter asking them how they feel right and there are other ways we can still tell this story without bothering them right now now it's different if they want to talk and they want to talk about their loved one that I'll do that but I'll find that out through like a friend

or you know or something like that i try to stay away from the family um and and the sources that i have have taken note of that and so in their mind it's like well if i can trust them with those stories that are not national breaking news you know then i can trust them with the more sensitive information if that makes sense yeah yeah james uh last thing uh what's going on in the future if there's any of your work that you would be comfortable revealing about what you're working on. I'd also be interested to ask about what you see is like some future trends in the military, as we're maybe in this transitory sort of phase. Where do you see military reporting going, you know, maybe over the next five to ten years?

Are there any trends or themes that you see emerging? Well, you know, it's interesting. Well, on military reporting, when I started military reporting, it's interesting how it was seen. is every kind of outlet that I work with, they always saw military reporting as niche. Very niche reporting. Like, like, that, you know, it's not, you know, military is not for as, you know, the Defense Department is the largest government agency in, in the, you know, in government, but it's not covered, say, like the White House.

Right. And it's not covered, like, say, Congress. So military reporting was always seen as very niche. but I think what I hope what I'd see a trend in is you know with the wars in Ukraine right or even

not even military reporting even like like if you take mass shootings in the United States right I think news outlets are starting to realize the importance of journalists who have that experience of either being a veteran or covering the military, you know, because it's such a unique skill. It's like covering the cop shop.

You know, covering police departments is a very unique skill, you know. And so that's where I hope military reporting go is that military reporting wouldn't be seen so much as a niche, that it would be seen in the same vein as covering, again, Congress or covering the White House, you know, or, you know, even the State Department. And I would also hope that the VA becomes that too. You know, the VA is historically never had a press corps. And, you know, off the top of my head, I can only think of a few dozen reporters who cover the VA. And it's kind of sporadic.

Right. You know, so I would love to see more coverage of the VA, you know. And in terms of the military, I mean, it's, it's, it's. It's going to be interesting to see because we're still pushing towards near-peer competition. You know, the fifth domain is coming in and we're all training for electromagnetic spectrum warfare. But we're also not meeting our recruiting goals. So what do you do? Right.

You know, when it comes to cyber, you know, the question I always ask is, how do you define sovereignty in the cyberspace? That's always been my historical question. How do you define sovereignty? Because we know what the red, like, so in a physical war, you know, we know that if one country invaded another country, that would start a physical war, right? Well, what are, what is sovereignty in the cyberspace? What are the red lines? Right. What would start a physical war if that cyber line, that digital line is crossed?

Right. It's something I wonder about. And it's interesting that if you ask five people about that, you'll get five different answers. you know so those are kind of the things that i'm focused on uh because it's scary because we don't know right you know what is what is mutually assured destruction in the cyberspace i and i'll be honest i don't i don't know the answer it's also and when it comes to a cyber attack what is the red line that crosses the nuclear threshold and uh i i believe there is an answer to that but um i wouldn't be privy to it of course

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if I'm not sure what, you know, I don't know what that answer is either. And the challenge, the challenge with that, you know, or one of the challenges with that also is attribution, right, is that any time a nation state takes action against us in the cyberspace, you know, they can, they can work it off that, no, with some, it was some random hackers in. our country. You know, we can look at these advanced persistent threats and we can we can know that an attack came from them, but but you can't show how you know that without without laying out your methods and protocols and you know how your sources and methods and everything like that. So it's like you can't really prove it on the world stage. Right. You can just say you're right. You know, this happened. It happened through a proxy. by, you know, the trademarks, the trademarks of the attack, we know it was this group in this country.

But that's flimsy, right? Because then you could take any action against any country you wanted just by saying, we know it was this group in this country. Right, yeah. Well, you could definitely see an increase in like false flags. And then it's like, well, how do you know it's a false flag? And how do you know who is legitimately, what is the legitimate? legitimate targeted.

It's kind of like Iran, where, you know, Iran using, you know, um, uh, proxies to fight their war. Yeah. You know, um, and to attack into Iraq. You know, it's not Iran proper. Right. You know, um, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's force using proxies to, to, to, um, to conduct their offenses.

No, you raise a good question. You know, and then the other thing, too, is just like, um, you know, watching the Russian Ukraine war, like, I'm kind of so, thankful that I never had to deal with drones. You know, like that is just a game changer. You know, like watching these drone attacks, you know, either Ukrainian

forces attacking Russian forces like, I'm really glad that the Taliban didn't, I mean, I know towards the end there of the Afghan war, the Taliban started to, using more drones, but, you know, I'm really glad I never had to face that.

You know, in my own deployments. Yeah. James, where can people go to find your work? Where can they go to find you? So they can find my work at the Associated Press. They can find me on Twitter at Jim LaPorta, on Facebook at real James LaPorta. There's more than one of you? You had to be the real Jim LaPorta?

Yeah, well, you know, the whole gym thing comes about because when I joined Twitter, like James LaPorta was taken. So I went with Jim. Yeah. So, but that's where I'm pretty easy to find. And shoot me a DM and I'll get around to it. Cool, man. You know, thank you so much for taking some time to do this interview tonight and explore some really, you know, difficult subjects. I really appreciate it, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It was very great conversation. Thank you. Yeah, I have to do it again sometime, talk about some future reporting. And for the rest of the folks out there, We'll see you guys on Friday at our normal time with Tim Weiner discussing the history, his book Legacy of Ashes and a bunch of other topics about the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.