The Team House - Inside Delta Force: Afghanistan, Syria & the War on ISIS | Brent Tucker (throwback ep)

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

Brent Tucker, a 20-year Army Special Operations veteran, takes us through his path from the National Guard and 20th Special Forces Group to Delta Force, including combat in Afghanistan and Syria, getting shot on a mission, and fighting ISIS. He also discusses Delta selection and training, working alongside the SAS, the physical toll of two decades at war, and his life after the military.Grab some FRCC here: https://frccoffee.com/To help support the show and for all bonus content including:-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse00:00 – Start02:28 – Growing Up & Joining the Army After 9/1109:48 – Fighting to Get Into 20th Special Forces Group16:28 – Becoming an 18 Echo Green Beret23:22 – Bolivia & Getting Sent to Combat Diver School29:25 – Surviving the Hardest Military School of His Career36:32 – Afghanistan With the Commandos43:57 – Operation Bulldog Bite & Rescuing Pinned-Down U.S. Soldiers1:02:29 – A Desperate Call for Help From an Isolated Combat Outpost1:09:14 – Operation Rockstar & Clearing an Enemy-Held Valley1:19:12 – Trying Out for Delta Force & Failing Selection1:26:58 – Making Delta & Going Through OTC1:35:43 – Delta Force Deployments & Getting Shot1:39:53 – Fighting ISIS in Syria1:46:56 – Extreme Long-Range Sniping Against ISIS1:52:36 – The Battle for Raqqa & Returning to HVT Raids1:58:00 – The Deaths of John Dunbar & SAS Operator Matt Tonroe2:04:04 – Injuries, Memory Problems & Knowing It Was Time to Retire2:08:21 – Delta Force Q&A: Selection, Squadron Culture, DEVGRU & SAS2:17:03 – Life After Delta & Training SWAT Teams2:21:02 – Starting First Responder Coffee Company2:24:33 – The Anti-Hero Podcast2:26:26 – The Rob O’Neill / Bin Laden Controversy2:29:41 – Giving First Responders a Platform2:32:55 – Closing Thoughtsoriginal air date 9/22/23Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, guys, welcome to episode 235 of the team house. I'm Jack Murphy. I'm, uh, is it over here? Oh, sorry, guys. My phone was on. Apologies. So episode 235 of the team house, we're here with our guest tonight, Brent Tucker. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park.

Brent, again, thank you for being on the show tonight. Really appreciate you joining us on a Friday evening. Absolutely. for having me. I truly do appreciate it. So again, because I got a little distracted in the beginning, Brent is a 20-year veteran of Army Special Operations. He served in 20th Special Forces Group, and then he served in Delta Force deploying to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Today, he runs the first responder coffee company, and he's also the co-host of the Anti-hero podcast. We're really happy to have you here today, Brent. And, you know, I'll kind of start it off from the

Top asking the same question. I ask all of our guests about their origin story. If you could tell us a little bit about where you grew up, what your upbringing was like and sort of how that took you on a path towards the military. Yeah. I grew up in a small town in Florida, Sanford, Florida, working in a family business. We own, you know, Tucker's Farm and Garden Center that my grandfather started. That was, I was one of the few people who didn't want to leave my small town. and I just wanted to work in the family business. My, like my path in life was already set, and I was more than happy to go down that path.

I definitely wasn't an adrenaline junkie as a kid. I was a pretty quiet kid. So definitely not someone you would have pegged for anything in the special operations realm or even leaving town at any point. So how did that happen? I mean, if you were on this track of like going on, taking over the family business. Yeah. So the September 11th happened.

I mean, I had, it's crazy. September 10th, September 10th, I'm 20 years old. You know, still chugging down that, that same path that I was on as a little kid. September 11th happened. And, you know, it changed my world. It's the same way it changed a lot of people's world. I knew I wanted to do something. I made a decision that day that I kind of would make time and time again throughout my

military career when I had to come to make a big decision, which was I didn't want to live a life with regrets. You know, I didn't want to be, I didn't want to be 70 years old, you know, looking back and said, man, when I was 20, our country got attacked, almost 3,000 people died, and I felt like I should have done something, but I just played it safe and stayed my small town. That honestly is the, I mean, there's the genesis right there. That line of thinking started it. I raised my hand. It took me till September 27th to actually signed the paperwork. And off I went. And I only meant to do a four-year stint and then come right back to my small

town. And as the saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell me your plans. I couldn't have been any more wrong. And I continued to be wrong about my career as it progressed. So what did you enlist as as far as like your MOS? What was kind of like your plan going into the military? The one that God laughed at, of course. Yeah. When I, I knew nothing about the military. And I mean, well, next to nothing. My dad would take me to air shows. My dad. My dad. wanted to be a fighter pilot so bad I guess when he was in his late teens then eyesight got him and so he didn't get a chance to chase that dream so I definitely grew up in a military friendly family you know we watched war movies my dad made us watch all the Vietnam documentaries and I loved it

so we were we were a military friendly family but no one was talking about joining and I had no idea what I was going to join. So a good friend of mine that I went to high school with, Jessica Butters, her dad was a, all I knew is that he was in the military. I knew nothing more than that. Come to find out he was a CW4 at a National Guard unit, a National Guard air defense artillery unit out of Daytona Beach. So he was the first, he was the only person.

and I knew, so I went to him and said, hey, you know, a country got attacked. I want to do something about it. So I came to him. He gave me pretty good advice. He's like, hey, I'm in the National Guard. I think you should do that. You'll get a chance to fight. You'll get called up. But, you know, you don't have to go away for four years. It sounded like a good plan to me. It sounded like I was going to get what I wanted, which was to deploy. And so I went to the recruiter. that he recommended me to go to. And for a guy who wanted to join the military and fight, I got put in Air Defense National Guard,

which may not have seen a lot of action. So that was, that was, it took me about a year to, well, probably took, it took, it took less than the year for me to figure that out. But, you know, figuring it out is one thing, but doing something about it. is is is is another so as soon as uh as soon as i got a basic in a it we did get mobilized to go to the invasion of iraq and we sat around for like six months in fort bliss and um at that point we had a sister battery coming back from afghanistan and so i couldn't wait to talk to those guys to see what war was like and uh i asked them and uh they did like a 14 month deployment to afghanistan uh and i found out

that was this a a patriot missile battery that you were with brent sorry to interrupt yeah uh so that would have been um a part of of of the unit i me in particular i was in uh short range air defense which was stinger missile operator okay so or stingled yeah so shoulder-fired Stinger missiles, 14 Mike, which eventually became 14 Sierra, because I had to go to the little bit longer course to do the Avengers, like that, that Humvee with the four missiles on each side of the turret. So that's the Avengers. That's what I went to school for.

But when those guys went overseas for 14 months and came back, they just guarded the gates. That's all they did. They did nothing to guard the gates, which was my worst fear come true. I kind of eventually was slowly figuring out. I don't think the Taliban has a lot of helicopters to shoot down. And I'm not sure my skill set will be utilized in the war on terror. So I asked those guys and said, hey, what, like, then who was doing things? And they told these stories that were probably a little bit true, but a little bit embellished.

they'd be like oh man these special forces guys these green braes would come on to uh would come to our come to our gate with blood all over their humvees and i'd have to be like hey sergeant uh i need your IDs and they'd be like f you just opened the gate and so i was like so what'd you do it's like well i opened the gate what do you what did you expect me to do i was like man uh and a part of me it's like this guys kind of sound like assholes and the other part of him was like Those guys sounded really cool. So I eventually found out about 20th Special Forces Group, which is a National Guard group. And that started really my whole first fight trying to do that because we were mobilized at the time, getting ready to go.

And that was the nail in the cough. It was like, I don't want to do this. I want to do that. And so it's very difficult as a National Guardsman who's already mobilized and we went through the whole mobilization process. And what, you know, we're supposed to be, even though we didn't leave when we were supposed to, they were going to just kind of hold us in this limbo as a mobilized unit they could call any time. And so we sat there for months at El Paso waiting for a call that never came. So I started fighting with my company leadership then telling me, hey, I want to go to Special Forces.

I want to go to National Guard to 20th group. They kept saying no. They told me all sorts of lies. Like, well, you have to be an E5 to go be a Green Beret. So you'll have to wait a few years. Yeah. I've been just talked to a few more people, found out that wasn't true. You know, I mean, just a 20th group when in a weird way,

a lot of like with other National Guard units has a lot of myths like it surrounding it. And you're like oh you can't go to 20th group because you have to be, you know, an active duty special forces guy first and when they come out, that's how they go to 20th group. I mean, just all sorts of things that just weren't true. I eventually found I don't know if you guys remember this. You guys remember the A. K.O. White Pages. Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's how I found my 20th group recruiter.

I went to the A.K.O. White pages, and I Googled, 20th special for, Google, I probably went, searched 20 special forces. And I actually found a recruiter number out of Ocala, Florida, which would have been the closest one to me. So I'm still deployed or mobilized in Texas. And I call them. and I still remember the guy who picked up because I ended up, he was a support guy there and was a recruiter. He picks up the phone, Sergeant First Class Kerry. And I was like, hey, I just want to introduce myself.

My name's Private First Class Tucker. And I want to be a Green Beret. And he asked me like two quick questions. Like, yeah, how long you've been? He was like, private first class, where are you at? I told him, he was like, how long have you been in? And I told him. And he basically goes, call me back.

in like a year and then hangs up the phone and again i was like man these guys are kind of dicks i think maybe i'm a dick but that's like i don't know i kind of want to like i love that like you're not good enough and you have to prove yourself and you know this yeah it's like you know not you got to come and stand out in front of the door and wait wait your turn right yeah i mean you know it's not this everyone gets a trophy mentality i can't can't wait to welcome you you know i you know i've i've i've I enjoyed that. We we demobilized a few short months later. I called him right back and talked to someone else on the phone who was a little more welcoming and told him my sob story.

I said, you know what? Come over here and do a small tryout and we'll see. So I show up knowing absolutely nothing to this small tryout. I knew they told me to get ready to rock and do a PT test at least. And so I said, okay. And I showed up not knowing anything, but knowing the, hey, like, all I know about soldiering is like boots and uniform matters. And I'm not a green beret yet. So I better show up with with polished boots and a press uniform. And I did that. I was immediately scolded for it and told to get into PTs and don't ever wear those around here again unless there's some

sort of award ceremony going on. And I said, okay, I like this place all right. I did the PT test and the and the Ruck and I did very well on it. They said, hey, we want to bring you over to our program and send you a selection as soon as possible. Go back and tell your unit that you want to, that you want to transfer over here. And that's where the real fight kind of started. You know, they had already been given me a bunch of, you know, slow rolling me. And now they just simply told me, nope. We're not going to send you.

But like before the mobilization, we sent a couple guys over there. They never make it. You know, don't waste our time with the paperwork. Don't waste your time. We're just not going to send you over there. So I carried that message back to 20th group. And the sergeant major laughed at it and said, hold on. I'll make a phone call.

They can't. It's, I told you to do that. But it's really not up to them. So it makes a phone call. I go back to work a couple days later. They're like, well, you got what you want. I hope you're happy. We'll see you in a couple months when you don't make it,

which was one of the best things they could have done for me because I absolutely trained my ass off. I couldn't stand them anymore. I had too much pride to get to fight that hard and then have to swallow it and come back and tell them I wasn't good enough. I go to selection a few months later. I come back. I think I had to turn in some gear that I still had from them.

And for whatever reason, I was kind of hoping that they'd be like, hey, we were wrong about you. Good job. You're like the only guy that's ever made it. Instead, they're like,

well, guess what? You haven't made it yet. You know, half the guys don't make the Q course. So you'll be right back. And that was the last time I saw him. And I'll tell you how petty I can be. when I retired 20 years later after the Delta Force,

a part of me wanted to drive down there and shove my 214 on their face and say, see, see what I did. But of course, I think everyone there would have been. Yeah, they were like, who are you? I would have to know who I was. Yeah. So that's how I got to,

that's how we got to 20th group. I was unfortunate. I was unfortunate enough to be smart, which means I got to be an 18 Echo. I put, after selection, I put down the four MOSs I wanted. I put Bravo, Charlie, Echo, Delta. I sure said, didn't want to be a Delta. They said, congratulations.

you got you got you got you got your top three is what the guy told me and I was like what's that mean he goes your NECO was in your top three there's only four choices it was it was second to last is what is what I viewed it as there's two reasons I wasn't real happy about getting neck being an echo is because at the time they had a longer Q course than Bravo and Charlie and so at that time in and in 2002 everybody thinks the wars are going to go away if you don't up and get over there. So I wanted a short MOS. Bravo where Charlie. You know, I wanted to try to clop out of Spanish and, you know, and be in Afghanistan and, you know, eight, nine, ten months.

I mean, the Q course is already long enough without the rest of that. Again, my, what I wanted never seems to work out. And I always have to just deal with what I got. So I got Echo. I stayed there longer. I tried to test out of Spanish. I missed it by like two questions. And of course, the, you know, the jokes on me, I didn't get to miss. Maybe I missed the deployment. So instead of 13, maybe I'd have 14 if I got out of there a little quicker.

But yeah, there's a lot of war left. And really, I look back at that generation of kids. Q-course guys, and they were good dudes. Man, I'm telling you, I couldn't be, I still talk to some of those guys in the Q-course to this day. They're such good dudes, and they went on to do amazing things. And really little did we know that era of Q-Course students was really going to see 15 years of war after that, which really may be the most amount of combat.

You know, any other generation was going to see. And we had we had no idea what, what, uh, what, uh, what we were in for. Hello, everyone. If you're hearing this, uh, you are not a member of the Patreon. You can get your hands on ad free episodes that come out early. And you can ask us questions. Maybe we'll answer them. You can also watch the team house podcast completely ad free and early.

And you can also watch it live as we interview our guests. Um, and it's the best way to support the channel. So if you can, if you're open to it, you can go to patreon.com slash the teamhouse. That link is in the description. We appreciate the supporters and we hope you would consider being one. So it's patreon.com slash the team house. Thanks, guys. Brent, I want to ask you a little bit about how 19th and 20th group are structured

because we know that the different SF groups generally have, you know, are assigned an area and aligned to a particular area. How, like, how did they choose your language? How are 19th and 20th group, the guard units aligned? Yeah. At the time, a battalion aligned with the group. So third battalion, 20th group aligned with seventh special forces group. So I got Spanish because our battalion was aligned with seventh.

Okay. That's, yeah. The, well, which really kind of gets me to, to my days. with 20 Special Forces Group as a Green Beret. I spent my whole guard time as a, you know, as a single guy, just being a guard bum. I just went from set of orders from school to school to deployment to deployment and just stayed active the whole time.

And I loved it. I absolutely loved it. As soon as I graduated the Q course, I was on a C-130 down to, down to Bolivia for a month. I had only got to see the different ODAs in the company a few times. And I saw these guys on the dive team who were just better than everyone else and were more than happy to prove it. And my senior echo on my first ODA was going to dive school because he wanted to go to the dive team. and and by by the second or third time you know we had done some training together he looked at me and

he goes hey you should go to die school too um and so i was like i'd love to go to dive school he goes yeah it's it's easy just you know raise your hand there's always slots go to die school so i'm getting ready to go down to south america and just like he said you know all he had to do is say you want to go to die school and they'll put you in a slot so i go down to south america uh i start training for Dye School before South America. As soon as I get to South America, I get an email, back to A.K.O. Again, I get an A.K.O. email saying that funding fell through and don't worry about, don't worry about Dye School. And so I said, okay. So the next three weeks, I went on a very different

training regime and partied my ass on and had a great time. We trained hard, we parted hard. It was a great first experience. In fact, that team I went down there with had, you know, their Bravo on their team. I went to the unit before me. Their 18 Delta on the team went to the unit as a medic before me. It was a stacked team of great dudes that were seasoned guys. You know, they had all been to Afghanistan already and multiple trips,

and they'd all been on the team for like five, six, seven years. So it was a great, great first trip learning. I was the only echo on the team. So, you know, it was a great experience as a new guy to have all the commo to fall on me. It was a real cool experience going to hotels and setting up a, you know, satcom, you know, PSC-5 and, you know, shooting out reports, you know, from a hotel room in different cities and Bolivia, just kind of in civilian clothes as you're traveling around.

So just definitely a cool experience in that part. It's a couple days before Dye School is supposed to start, and I'm at a roadside cafe in Bolivia, and I get an email that's an A-TAR's notification saying, giving me details of checking into Dive School. So I went to the, I went to the warrant officer on the team and I said, hey, this is probably nothing, but I did get this ATAR's notification. And he's like, well, if you have an ATAR slot, you're going. Like you need to get on a plane right now and go to Key West.

I was both excited to hear that. And also, you know, like getting punched in the gut going, I'm not ready for this. Let's hope by, you know, yeah, but there's a lot of things you can do with your 24 that you can't do later on in life. So I, you know, not to make these stories long, but, you know, just kind of, you know, I get in a, a one-way rental car and we drive like me and one other guy that was going to go back with me, drive like nine hours straight. And there is these massive unrest going on because. of the elections just happened and no one's happy with the the election and there's roadblocks everywhere we don't our Spanish actually wasn't too bad but it it wasn't enough to be by ourselves negotiating roadblocks um we just randomly gave people money that you know just kept on giving

a money until they seem to be less angry with us and they let us go we get to the airport and uh we landed on a military base dirt runway in the middle of the night, unloaded and left. So I didn't get my passport stamped. When I get to the airport, we're trying to load up. And the guy's like, hey, something's weird. You don't have a stamp on your passport. How did you get in the country? And I remember the last thing my warrant officer told me was, hey, if you get in any trouble,

you know, here's, here's the, here's the number to the embassy, call this guy. He's our fixer. And so I didn't give them an answer about how we got in here. I just said, hey, you should probably call this guy first. And the guy told me, goes, I don't care who that guy is. How did you get in our country? And you can go ahead and start looking at other flights because you're not getting on this one. And I was like, you know, okay, that sucks.

but, you know, call this guy. He walks away 30 seconds later. He looks at me with disgust. He just takes my passport and he stamps it and he says, get out of here. To this day, I don't know who that guy was. I don't know what he told him. But, you know, just that it was, at the end of it was a very cool non-combat first experience of being a Green Beret and just, you know, doing things that really is really unique to, to Green Berets.

I end up, I get a, I fly right to Miami and check in to die school and proceed to have the worst six weeks of my life. Whole week was absolutely horrible. Like, you know, I quit doing breath holds. I was not ready for it. I was, I got dragged out of the pool, you know, almost every day and asked why, why I suck so much. and I just, and I remember calling my dad at one point and saying, hey, dad, we have, you know, the Q course has been a lot, you know, just went on a trip down south.

Now I'm in now I'm in die school. It's just, it's really tough right now. I think I just need to come home for a little bit. And, and, but my dad is not the, the, the guy to, to cry on his shoulder. He's, he's just a very hard man. but I also never complained to my dad about anything. So I think my dad knew if I was calling him to tell him things were pretty tough right now. He just said, do what you got to do, son.

I said, okay, I'll call you tomorrow and let you know. And every day I showed up to the pool and had to fake motivation like I wanted to be there when it was everything I didn't want to do. And I never called my dad back and told him that I wasn't coming or was coming. My dad said he figured that when I didn't call back, he knew. And again, my dad's just a hardcore guy. So it's like he's going to call me and ask what's wrong. That was just the odd random conversation we had.

It was a fleeting moment of weakness. I'll come back to that story here in a little bit because I tell on myself later in my career saying, hey, this is the hardest thing I've ever done. And I'll tell you the one. particular like time it was like the end of pool week and you're just you know you just physically exhausted um and uh they they put us in and again and part of it was why it was so hard is because i i wasn't ready for it so i mean i'm not saying it would have been easy otherwise but i definitely didn't help myself out they put us in the pool and they're going to have us do these

uh sprints and they said hey and they told us her say, bring two shirts to the pool this day. And so at the very end of the day, they said, hey, get one shirt wet. Take your brown shirt off. Put them in both your hands. And that's what you're going to swim in to get to the other side of the pool, these two soggy shirts. And they said, pays to be a winner. First one to the other side of the pool gets to get out.

And so everyone, you know, swam as hard as they could to get to the other side of the pool. And they didn't let anyone out of the pool. pool. They're like, hey, but that's not this round. They send this back and forth, back and forth like 15 times. No one gets out of the pool. And it sounds dramatic, but it's just true. Like, guys are getting fished out of the pool because, you know, they're, cramping up and they're giving it. They're all. And they're just, and I remember thinking, you know, look into the guy beside me on the gunwale. And we didn't say it, but we both, you know, looked at each other just, you know, I've said, this sucks. Yeah, that, that, that,

that look at another, that empty look at another guy's eyes, when he's just giving it at his all. Yeah. And yeah, we've all, we've all been there. And I remember thinking to myself, I got one more in me. And if, if they don't get us out of the pool, I'm quitting, because I'll end up at the bottom of this pool if they send me again. So they send us again.

I get to the other side of the pool and I'm talking, I'm coaxing myself up. You know, well, this is, it's time. It's time to quit. It's time to quit. And me and that guy look at each other one more time. And we both kind of shake our heads like, this sucks. And, and he goes, eff it. I quit.

And gets out of the pool. And I remember looking at him getting on the pool and thinking, you quitter. I can't believe. What is wrong with you? Noah that I was just as big as I, if he wanted to beat me, to it I probably I probably would have quit and just like do you remember watching him quit just disgusted me and I stayed with we went back and forth or six or seven times but I guess maybe

he left me some of his energy on on on the way out uh super glad I got die school out out of the way early in my career like insert joke here but like like most divers I'm a proud diver really proud of that accomplishment. And it got me to work on the best ODA I ever worked with, the best group of guys. Honestly, I ended up having one of my best deployments in my military was a 20th group deployment with that dive team,

running the commandos out of Afghanistan. We just, you know, just when a group of really good friends deploy together, have the same mindset and just wanted to get after it, To this day, one of my, one of my best experiences in the military and die school is what it kind of afforded me that possibility. You know, it's interesting because I want to paint sort of a picture for people who may not understand. Earlier when you're talking about going to die school or, you know, the chance to go to combat diver's school, you know, you said the senior echo said there are always billets available.

There's always slots open. And the reason for that is because combat diver is such a notoriously hard school that people don't sign up for it in general. Like, it is, it's one of those schools that somebody has to generally be really motivated to go to because it is such like a dick driver. I don't know if I'd have gone back. I don't know. I mean, I mean, I mean, I thinkfully, I didn't have to make that decision. I'd like to think that with a little bit of rest and, you know, I'd have got back on there. I was really lucky in my career to have not have recycled, to not, we'll get to a little bit.

There's one thing I recycled, but SF didn't hand that to me and die school. I'm not saying the Q course was easy. By no means with the Q course easy. The Q course had really tough days in it. But just for just an absolute smoke session day in, day out, you know, running red line the whole time. Dye school without a doubt was the hardest military school I went to. Yeah. So talk to us about that deployment that led you into with the Kandak commandos.

Oh, yeah. So we, um, I had, uh, I had, I'd been selected, uh, for, for the unit. Actually, I got selected and I told him to, hey, we're on the verge of another deployment. And I want to go back to this, well, I should say my second time at selection, I get selected. And we're going, I want to do this deployment with our guys. It's one last two are off, if you will. And I told them that. And they were like, absolutely, you just not going anywhere.

go, you know, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, they respected that. So I go to, so that was really cool in a weird way, kind of being a made man and 20th group as a guy already selected to go to the unit. And it was such a great mission. So we didn't have any air assets dedicated to us, you know, we didn't. But we got a lot of aviation assets given to us. by the battle space owner. And how those deals usually worked was, of course, we're, you know, we're, we had plenty of direct action targets that we collected the intel for.

And we, you know, we, here's a, here's a blast from the past. If you remember terms like J-PEL targets. So we had our, our list of J-Pels to go after, but most of them required to, to do it properly, you know, aviation assets. And the battle space owner was interested. in giving us aviation assets, but the battle space owner is actually a really, a really good dude. And he also wanted to work out of us, and smartly so. He would give us assets if we would do missions for him.

And what he wanted from us was to take our commandos and do valley clearing operations for his conventional forces, which really was, which is a great opportunity, you know, really for us too. And he's absolutely right. Like that's the commandos should have been at the very forward edge of those Valley clearing operations, you know, taking bullets that so Americans don't have to. It's it's, it's their country. They're a motivated unit. They were more than happy to do it. They had a short shelf life. So if it wasn't, you know, I can't remember the exact hours. It's 48 or 72. And trust me, they knew what the shelf life was. It's even, it's in their charter.

And I want to say it's 72. So if, you know, if 72 hours is about to come up, they'll let you know, hey, our, our work's done here. This is, this is as much as we're allowed to suck. And, and on more than one occasion for a unit that can't logistically do anything on their own, if they're on an operation, a valid clearing operation, than longer than 72 hours, they'll, they will find taxis to come pick them up in the minimum. of the world all of a sudden they're logistical masters and can find their way back to base but they can't find their way to a mission to save their life um that's even i know i just said they

they were a great partner force but that's that was a that was a reality of them i'm telling you i feel like uh you know the more experience i got in sf the more robin sage was real yeah yeah You know, I remember being Robin Sage going, I have to show up and beg these, you know, these fake Gs to let me in their camp and to, and to fight with me. Like, we're in the real world, we're Americans with, you know, with bombers and suitcases full money. No one's, you know, I don't have to, I don't have to beg anyone to come fight with us. And there I am in Afghanistan begging our commandos not to leave us going, I, am I in Robin Sage right now? This is crazy. But sure enough, happened on more than one occasion.

But those valid clearing operations were great. They did suck. I mean, everyone prefers to get on a helicopter, hit a target in the middle night and not miss a meal or workout. They could be trying. You know, even those are, yeah, and they're still considered short duration missions at three and four days. I'm sure there's some conventional guy listening to me whining about being out for three or four days. But they, you know, when it was cold, it was freezing cold. When it was hot, it was miserably hot.

And they would reserve the commando unit to go down the worst parts of the valley. Again, rightfully so. And that's exactly where we wanted to be. But, you know, we did those valley clearing operations. You know, if they teed it up for us and they teed it up for us, right? Then they put us right in the thick of things. We got to do a lot of good work. There's a couple really cool stories that actually come from that particular mission, that deployment.

We were the, and I don't know who keeps track of these stats. I remember them telling me, but, you know, adding up our, you know, the various kills you get as an ODA, and they, you know, they, they give you your cast, you know, kills and your small arms kills. and we were up in the high couple hundreds, and they said that we were the leading ODA in country and kills, which really wouldn't have been hard. It's not, although we were a really good ODA, it's not because we were amazing. We thought we were.

But they put us in a good area with the commandos. So we operated in all of the east, N2KL. I used to be able to tell you what N2KLs did for. I could probably get most of the, most of the acronyms. And it was just a hot spot at that time. So we had the right partner force in the hottest area of the country. One mission was a fair, you're not, it was a great mission, but it's not necessarily the

one you want to get woken up for. Yeah, I told you that battalion commander was a great dude. He calls our team leader and our team sergeant into the office. He was like, hey, I need you guys. And I guess he's teared up, you know, asking for this help. You know, my team sergeant's like, my team sergeant, Rick Spear, he goes, what do you need? You know, he's always given us aircraft. He's always been real, real good to us.

He goes, what, you know, what's wrong, boss? He goes, my boys are hemmed up. My boys are hemmed up in a bad way. You know, we got, you know, we got double digits dead and double digits. wounded and those numbers are climbing if we don't if we don't get someone there like right now and uh came back got the oda said hey the you know blades are spinning we we got to get there we if i remember right this is called operation bulldog bite um we were going to insert to the south of their location because they were still in a firefight so they didn't want us to

insert there we're going to insert south their location and the rangers were coming coming in, we're going to insert to the north. And we were going to, and we were basically, it was really going to, we were supposed to meet them there together. But everyone, everyone knew it was going to be a race to try to get to them first and, and, and, and help those guys out. Well, when we inserted, the Ranger 47 had mechanical failures. And they, and they didn't insert. So it was, it was just us. when we got there we got there right as first light was there

we got there a little bit later we were supposed to insert in darkness it was just first light AC130 got there early to try to make sure that everything was going to be kosher for us and as soon as AC130 got on station it started lighten off and it didn't stop shooting it was shooting while we landed and when the and daylight when the 47s took off it was still firing um and and i remember looking at that one of our guys and like isn't that weird he's like what's that he's like i've never seen an AC 130 in the daylight he's like yeah that is that is kind of weird um come to find out uh and heck one of you guys may know but it had to go up to like two or three star level approval to keep to keep specter

flying daylight that low. Yeah. Agent targets. I was going to say that almost almost always a C specter would be like denied daylight because it flies so low you can see it. And they were worried that would have present a target for manned portables and stuff. But to have a AC 130 during the day is exceptionally rare. And like you said, probably had to be eligible.

elevated because the in-country commanders, like the Air Force, they did not allow that at all. Yeah. I'm telling you it was a weird sight seeing it. You know, you get to hear it a lot. You know, you know, on multiple, multiple nighttime operations. But when you actually see it during the day, it just stuck out. I'm like, man, that's really weird. And we confirmed, you know, obviously that, you know, it got told to us that they had to get special

approval to stay on station. And it took us, and of course, we get, we get inserted a little bit a little further than we wanted to be inserted. So it's going to take even long. So it's going to take all day for us to get up there. We get into, you know, we, there's a couple villages between us and then we get into a little bit of contact. But the right call was made, like, you know, this, you know, engaging, killing an enemy right now isn't really our, our mission, our mission is to, to get these guys as fast as we can. And again, I'm the, I'm the only combo guy on, on this mission. I was the only common guy for the most part during that deployment. And as we're traveling at night, we know we should be getting close to these guys. And it goes back to, again, I feel like

I'm in the Q course. Like at the times you feel like the Q course is so basic and things they tell you in the Q-Course, they do, they come back to ring true in operations. And I remember in SUT being said, being told that the most, and let me know if you remember this, you know, especially in small unit tactics, what is the most dangerous part of any mission when you leave and come back from the wire? You want to take a guess at it? I mean, oftentimes it's right as you clear the objective. right because everyone's tired and you're chilling on security what the seven dash the seven dash eight answer

for that will be re-entry of friendly lines oh geez yeah yeah yeah so you're yeah you're yeah you're linking up with friendly forces yeah that's right reentry of friendly lines and uh always thought that was uh you know a little bit a little bit over the top like i don't you think most dangerous thing is you know and out here and you know and get it on an ambush line and mix it up with the enemy um but here i am at 2 a.m in afghanistan and there is this you know there's these young 11 bravos that you know that are bearing their brothers and watching their other brothers maybe you know slowly bleed out and there's these guys trumping through the woods trying to link up with them and i cannot raise them on the radio and and i was walking point at the time too

going, well, this is about fitting. You know, it's my, it's my fault, I guess, why we can't make commo. So I guess I should be eating these rounds. I did everything that I was supposed to do before leaving. You know, I did, you know, I got their fills. I got their frequencies. I did radio checks with their guys from the ground. Why I couldn't make commo at that time is just is the, is the bane of every echoes existence.

And, you know, when when you need to come with a most, I couldn't make commo. And I just remember walking with my butthole puckers going every step, I'm afraid these, you know, these, these bushes are going to light up. We never made comma. We never made a radio contact with them. And luckily for me, they, you know, they, they, they, they heard things in the bushes. We let up them like, you know, they, they yelled from a distance. Hey, who is there?

We got, we got to, you know, speak. English and they knew it was us. Wow. And they knew that there was an American force coming, you know, to link up with them. And luckily that got disseminated all the way to the outskirts. But I'll never forget how, you know, just how dangerous that something that that really seems like the least amount of dangerous thing that you would do. Like, you know, there was really, there's no enemy at the time.

I yet there's so much other dangerous stuff I've done in my in my military career yet that to me when I tell that story I can still feel the yeah the hair stick up the back of my neck walking to those woods you know waiting to get lit up with a vs 17 panel like yeah it's night but it's nighttime right so yeah yeah it's yeah it's nighttime I have nods I you know I don't even know you know if they got nods or if you know if all their guys. you know, have nods or if they're still rocking seven deltas on a low loom night, right, makes them almost just as dangerous with them as without them. Right. I'll, I'll, I'll tell you this, this war story real quick, how they even, how they, how they, how they, I'll rewind it and tell you how they got to this position and what'll blow your mind what we talked about after we met up with them. So it's really a sad story about, about the bureaucracy of our military,

and the inability for people to make decisions. This was one of their very last valley clearing operations. It had been a very quiet deployment for those guys, and they just hadn't seen a lot of action. So they started, in my mind, a little bit to lose respect for the battlefield. I mean, people don't understand, you know,

there's a lot of lull to war. Yes, we lost a lot of guys. in Afghanistan. There's plenty of guys who went deployed and never fired their gun and they never saw anything bad and they just, they woke up every day, went to bed every day and eventually went home. And it's not a sexy use it story to tell your friends. But that's the truth for really a lot of soldiers in Afghanistan. These guys hadn't seen much, much combat at all. They come across this house. And this house is completely, full of IEDs, full of IEDs. And so the company commander says, hey, we're not going to touch this

stuff. There's way too much. None of it. I don't feel that we're competent enough to, to move this stuff where we should anyway. I'm just going to call a strike on this house. So they get into a long halt and they start the process of trying to get someone to authorize dropping on this house. No one wants to make the call. The, you know, the battalion commander doesn't want to make the call. The brigade commander. And in fact, it's probably worse than that, not the drug out the story.

But the, you know, the opso didn't want to make the call who eventually made it to the XO and eventually made it to the battalion commander. Like all of these thresholds and levels and everyone just passing the buck up, passing the buck up, passing the buck up. Well, they've been here for like four hours just waiting for someone to give them. them any sort of guidance of what of what they should do well it's human nature i'd probably do it to but what does joe do after four hours being in the hot sun yeah you're not seeing any yet joe does what joe does yeah and and i say that like said i i'm not a robot i i do the same things um we're all it allowed me to get up within very close proximities and and and lob of volley of RPGs and and machine gun fire and just absolutely lay waste of these guys.

And they really didn't have a solid fighting chance at it. They overwhelmed them pretty quick and hurt them pretty bad. And that's when we got the call. So the fact that at the end of the day, it was just indecision on anyone wanting. And of course, as you can, it's collateral damage is the reason they don't want to destroy a building yeah destroy that building or and there was another building close fairly close to it so they were concerned about that building

rather than being concerned for their safety and well-being of our soldiers they cared more about mud buildings and we sent guys on the body bags for it it'll always be wrong and that's how so that's that's how we got there now get now we'll fast forward we're here we're talking to these guys the we're going to go you know we're going to go up and get a little bit of shut eye

because we're they're going to go come pick them up in daylight the next day and so we tell them and of course they're still in the they're in the valley like this house is is in the valley they're still in this house or in this compound and we said hey we're going to go up to that high ground over there

and get the tactical advantage and I suggest you guys come with us and and even then they're like no like you guys got it up there like you guys can protect us from up there right and like kind of like what would be what would be a better bet would just to be up there with us like that's that's where you want to be not down here in this valley but but you know I'm not going to be too hard on them you know I mean obviously they were dealing with a lot beat down pretty hard and maybe they just needed him they're more than willing to have someone come save him help him out that's that that that and i'll tell you one more after this but you know we'll let you guys ask questions or talk about it a little more you

remember the rank that was one of our better missions sorry but i don't mean that and yeah guys lost their lives yeah sure trying to think of a good word to use where i say you know better missions It's one of the more significant actions. And you guys went in there and helped out fellow American soldiers. That's right. It makes it meaningful. That's right. Yeah.

I mean, the, the feeling, it's only happened probably two more times in my career. Like, you know, to get there and face to face and strangers, just absolute strangers, look at you and want to hug you because you showed up. Yeah. And they needed someone with guns to show up. And, you know, they, they were sitting there waiting to die. And we're, I mean, if they knew us, we were as big as jackasses as, as anyone else, you know, like we're, we're, we're, you know, we're, we're definitely not at times to be put up on a pedestal. But at another day, hey, would the green berets show up and the guys with beard show up?

Like, you're expected, you know, to, to, to, to, to. to fill that role we were more than happy to fill that role for him and we were more than happy to to protect those guys and get those guys out of there uh out of curiosity do you remember the size of that that that element that you guys went in to relieve or to solid uh i want to say in in the in the 20s and then do you do you recall like what the uh was it was it a captain was it like a uh a pl or second or a lieutenant I know. I'd have to, we, there's, there's, I don't know if a few guys have one like this. I would need a lifeline and our medic, Mark DeMayo, remembers everything.

Yeah. Everything. I can call Mark right now. He can tell you exactly how many guys are there, the rake of that dude, and the area we were operating in. Yeah, I'm just curious if like the, the officer, like the, the ground force commander was the one making the call not to like Evac, with you guys up the, up the hill or if he was getting from higher that no, like stay in place until we resolve what we're going to do with this, these IEDs. Yeah, I just, I just remember that being, you know, the, the answer to the, to the conversation. Obviously, the team sergeant had that, had that conversation with whoever is in charge.

Yeah. And being the combo guy, I was probably right next to the commander sitting up sit reps. Yeah. And so was there something else with that you want to talk about how that operation wound down or if it sounded like maybe there was something else who wanted to say about it? No, not about that one. I'll talk about one more. Okay.

You know, that's kind of similar, happened to the same trip. But I'll tell you, one of the weirdest things, one of the weirdest things that happened was at the end of that operation. And by the time we actually got heloes in there, it was actually at nighttime. So we actually stayed, you know, all day during the day, got all the wounded out. and whoever could walk to this next LZ, we're all going to walk to that HLZ and get out of there with a under with a 47. So it's nighttime.

We're in PZ posture, and our interpreter comes up to me and goes, hey, one of the guys found a goat, and he really wants to keep it. And my initial action was, like, no, you can't bring a goat on a 47. But, you know, I don't know, another part was like, you know what? Sure.

Yeah, he can have the goat. So I, for whatever reason, authorized this guy to have a goat on the 47. And he's just holding this goat the whole time. He's holding it. And we're on this, like, steep ledge. So here on this, the top of this plateau is where it's going to land. and we're at the very edge of this really steep ledge. So when the 47 comes in, tailgate this way,

I look at him and I told interpreter, hey, hold on to that goat tight. We're getting ready to go. And I'm just watching them. I'm just watching with nods. And it looks like he does this and then just throws the goat off the ledge to its little goat death. And I'm like, those,

they're so weird. You know, Afghans just do weird things, you know? Just shaking my head like, I thought you wanted that goat. Why would you throw that goat off? And so this,

this question is, is boggling my mind the whole ride over. So as soon as the wheels land down and, and, uh, and Jalalabad. And we can get away from the rotor wash. I go grab the interpreter.

I'm like, hey, why did he kill, why did he kill that goat? I thought he wanted that goat. And he said, and apparently he says the 47 scared the goat, and the goat back legs launched off of his chest and he tried to grab it. But from my angle, it looked like he threw the goat off. So the poor goat jumped to its death. But it was the weirdest thing in the world to witness not knowing what's

going on and I really feel like that sums up my experience. I mean, honestly, you're lucky it was just one goat because that could have started. If there had been like a flock or a herd of goats out there, whatever it is, like everybody would have wanted a goat and you would add a 47 full goat shit. We would have started a horrible precedence of them, probably stealing goats and taking them on the 47s Yeah. And I'm sure, I'm sure that would have been a, uh, a theater wide email at, uh, at some point.

Pretty soon you're up to donkeys. Yeah. You would, you would have been the, the doctor doodle of Afghanistan, uh, shepherding goats around on 47s. Yeah. The, uh, that, that same trip. Um, um, I'm in, I'm in civilian clothes. I'm getting ready to go on the ring route.

And I have to go down to Bogram. Uh, I don't even. either for Op Fund or for crypto. There's some reason I had to go down to Bogram. So I'm in Jolabad. I'm in Jabad, I'm in J-Bad, waiting for the ring flight. And this, like, this E-5 or E-6 guy comes up to me and goes, and me, there's another guy with me on my team.

I can't remember who was with me. But like something goes, hey, you guys special forces? And, I mean, I'm wearing civilian clothes. I mean, could have been a contractor. but, you know, lucky guess. I'm like, yeah, we're special forces. And he's like, hey, I've been looking for you guys. I've been trying to call you guys, been trying to email you guys.

I'm really trying to get a hold of you guys. I'm really glad I got to see you. And I'm thinking, what email are you using? What phone number? Like, how do, like, this whole thing's starting out weird already. And then he gets like, you know, real emotional. And he's like, hey, man, we're out at Kottnogil. He goes, it's, you know, the next province over.

It's a really small base. He goes, we're just waiting to die. He goes, there's nothing we can do about it. We're just waiting to die. I have to sit there and tell my guys that they're going to be okay. You know, help is coming. You know, it's not that bad when I know it's that bad. And I'm like, man, that is a horrible story.

I was like, look, give me a red line number and we'll see what we can do, okay? And he was like, all right. And so he leaves. I cancel my ring flight trip and I go back to the team house. You know, and I go to the team leader and team sergeant. Like, hey, like, you know, tell them the same story. I was like, you mind enough to look into this? And like, no, it sounds like something you should look into.

And again, that's what's really cool. and that'll always miss about, you know, being a green gray is, you know, the, the autonomy to do whatever you want. It's a lot of work, unfortunately, to collect your own intel and to, you know, create your own con-ops, you know, execute your own missions with only 12 guys and a partner force, but it's, but it's, but it's, but it's all worth it at times when you get to, to do things like this. And so I call, I call the guys up, uh, I talked to their first sergeant. It's a company size element out there, Combe and Jill. And without trying to throw that guy on the bus,

trying to feel out what's going on. And the first arm's like, yeah, it's pretty bad out here. Can you guys come out here? And I was like, okay, we'll come out and look. And so me and my team sergeant get on a Black Hawk, and we fly out there to Combe de Jill to see what's going on. And it's a, gosh, I wish I could remember the state. I want to say it's like an Illinois National Guard unit out there.

and they start telling me everything that's wrong. And I remember thinking myself, they're, they're screwing this up somehow. Like they're, you know, they're, they're being cowards.

They're, you know, this is what happens or you're not aggressive towards enemy and, uh, you know, obviously that was like deep in the back of my, in my mind. But yeah,

I thought it. And so I'm listening to these guys story. And I'm, and so I'm like, so that's, so you know the, you know the point of origin where it's always coming from. They're like, well,

there's only three points of origin. I said, all right, well, send out an SR team and set up on all three ports of origin. There's nine, ten, twelve guys. I know you're a company, but that's easily doable. They're like, can't do that. We can't go out, and I'm going to screw up the number a little bit, but we can't go out with less than 12 people on a patrol. He goes, and so with 12 people on a patrol, if I'm to go put three people,

people, so, you know, on, on those points of origin, three teams of those points of origin, that's 36 people right there. That already puts us at, you know, at full strength for, for running operations because that means half the guys are sleeping while the other half are out. And as soon as those guys come back, those guys go to go go, go out on operations. And the only thing we've done is run 24 hour ops on three different, three different point of origins. And we're not even, we're not even living. We're not doing like, we're not Like you can't run operations right right right I'm like I was like 12 guys to leave these points of these poos if you will are like 1,200 meters away like they're not that far like you have to 12 guys to go a click outside the wire

and he's like that absolutely um and just they couldn't they couldn't drive they couldn't drive down to the next village which was only 4 500 meters out outside their gate without getting completely riddled and have to turn back around. They couldn't get air support. They asked for guys to do valley clearing operations. And just the more, you know, I sat there with those guys. The more the first sergeant, again, he was a National Guard, infantry first sergeant. He was a good dude. He was, you know, he was just a solid guy.

He had a lot of answers and a lot of things he tried. But in the day, they just weren't capable of solving this problem. and so we went back and we did something that we rarely, rarely do. We put the, I'm going to forget words now, but the Kandak was broken up into three elements. Like Kandak is already a battalion. So whatever, companies, yeah, sorry, companies. So they're broken up into three companies. And we were going to bring two companies of command windows to clear this valley,

which we've never done because, you know, they're on a red, orange, and green training cycle. So they're always in third. So to bring two companies forward was a big deal. The SOTF headquarters gave us a bunch of pushback. And they're like, I don't know what you guys are talking about. We've asked, you know, we've put singing birds around there. We've asked our human mentors. Like, we're not getting anything in that area.

Like, they're asking us to please go do something else. And they were like, no, we've been on the ground. These guys are hurting. Like this valley needs to be cleared. We set off of what we called Operation Rockstar. That was back in the day when ODAs could still name their own naming conventions before people probably took some free speech liberties within their operations. Operation Penthouse, you know, approved. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I love it. And everyone got behind it, like all the, the aviation support called all the HLZs, like Ringo and like all in, and, and, you know, HLZ Bon Jovi and everything. It was, we inserted that night and the Helos, it was, it was a long valley. And the, the cop was at the very base of the valley. So we were going to insert. at the very northern part and then kind of like a hammer and an anvil operation. So the base only had to basically be the anvil of it. We would push them all down, all down the valley, or at least contain them in the valley. We get, we come into fire as heavy fire as soon as we, as soon as we land. And we're thinking, and the SOTIF didn't even want to say, right.

Here we are taking massive, you know, RPA. P.K fire from PKM fire from the from the mountain sides. And you told us there was no one here. And that was just a bunch, yeah, a couple, uh, basically a couple low level crooks lobbying RPGs in the base every now and again. Um, the, our team leader immediately called, uh, called Cass. Um, that's a whole another story, but I'll touch it on it for just a second. At the time, you had to have battalion level approval to call Cass.

We had a great team leader who knew the rules, and there is a caveat to that. During the infill of an operation, when they know you're vulnerable, you do not have to call battalion for approval, and you could immediately call cash from the ground. That's exactly what he did. If you wouldn't have done that, we'd have had a bunch of shot up birds that night. So he does that. We quell that. there's just these pockets as we move pockets and pockets and pockets and pockets and

most of them were really from from the sides of the mountain so it wasn't a whole lot of like close you know personal type combat but the type of combat that is it's great and it's great for numbers because really just by you being in the valley is what stirs them up you know on on these on these mountain sides and there's just air support comes in and crushes them well the very first one that we called air support on was way up there and uh i wasn't on it but we we asked a couple guys to go up there and do a bda on on that it took them hours to crawl up this mountain to get to that bda site but when they did what we found were guys in acu's and they were foreign fighters oh shit and we found them all through the valley long story short by the time we get done with this

Valley and get home. The guys who didn't want us even going on the mission were giving us all sorts of kudos and praises for one of the, for the, you know, the biggest noble operations, you know, that, that we took on. And they didn't even want us to go. Um, our, our captain, as soon as we get home, gets home, uh, gets, gets, um, uh, where I want to like, um, temporarily, uh, fired or, or, we'll see if he's fired because the siege of sort of commander wanted him on his on on the carpet like now because he heard that he didn't use the right protocol for calling in cass and he called in cash without a battalion level approval and he sat there in bogrum for like a week and then he sees the siege of soda commander tells the story and goes oh i didn't know it was during infill you're

good and sends them back to the team. Wow. Fortunately for us, while we're running amuck for another solid week without our team leader, actually had going on, I'm going on some great missions. But they didn't deserve that.

And again, that deployment was really like one of the the spur, you know, the moments that truly spurred me to say as, and as great as that deployment was, like, you know, we got to save those guys and we got back to their camp. They all gave us the biggest hug.

And they're like, man, thank you for saving our lives. We don't think we were going home without you. Like, you really feel like you did something worthwhile. But there was a reoccurring theme that deployment, which was this. Con ops had gotten crazy to 20 and 30 pages. Yeah. It was getting increasingly harder to fight. You feel like you're fighting the enemy and the Sodef and Siege of Sadov trying to get out the door.

if the enemy could move as long as the enemy moved every night then he was moving faster than than then we could keep up with because that con-up that was approved was was for this location um it got it got it got really disheartening i mean what a what a ridiculous we have what a ridiculous situation that you have soldiers on the ground there who are telling you hey we're getting hit every night but hire is saying well we don't have it on sig and so i guess it's not happening It, the whole thing at a, at a battalion and higher level, you know, not just at within SF and within the military, really just kind of to start to discuss me. You know, and if we weren't there with such a solid team of good dudes who were just willing to do whatever it took to get out the wire, they really didn't have a good attitude, generally speaking.

They're like, okay, fine. You want 20 pages? I'll make you, I'll get, if that's what it takes you out of the wire. why I'll give you 20 pages. You want 30 pages, then we'll get really efficient at writing 30 pages and we'll get out the wire. They were, you know, they were just a really good team when it came to that that really could have crushed, you know, other teams and did. And it did. What year was this? Do you remember? Roughly. Yeah, 2009. 09. Oh, nine. This is about McChrystal years. Yeah, because I remember talking to, um, 10, 2010, 2009, 2010. Yeah.

Yeah, I remember talking to an SF soldier, sometime in like in the 08 to 09 timeframe. And he said that if they were on target and they fired their weapon, there would be a, they had to fill out of 15-6-6. Like that it just got so ridiculous for a while. Yeah. And I don't, I don't mind if the war warrants that. If we're making results and we just don't know. need American Cowboys, you know, going on target just to spike the football every night. Right.

I did that, you know, and as, and as a younger soldier, that's, you know, I would, I would have never said that. And I'd be like, as long as we're here, we need to be out on target. Yeah, I did get a little bit older and wiser, but we weren't there yet. And I think the biggest problem that I saw was ground guys were reporting ground true. Right. saw it firsthand that those reports we had these like green yellow and red reports about how they're doing planning wise how they're doing logistically how they're how you know how their how their

how their how their training is going and we generally gave him yellows and reds across the board yet when you see a polished product later up at a siege of sodas level looking like it's you know like everything's rosy when that's not what we said yeah right it's always and and not to disparate military intelligence because because there are a lot of two shops or a lot of human like there's a lot of good work in the intel but there's also a lot of bureaucracy bureaucracy there where when guys like you were talking about these guys but when guys are on the ground are reporting what's going on and then you have you know two shops you know intel shops going no we don't have any intelligence and support that's like well there's your fucking intelligence like why do you think you think your product supersedes what these guys on the ground are telling you. And that's that's part of unit history right there. Like we we've, there's been a disconnect for a while. You can go all the way back to, well, I'll get close.

But Operation Anaconda in 2003, someone helped me out on that, but it's got to be close to that early war where, you know, these ground units are saying, hey, there's a major a collection of enemy personnel in this area and and higher-ups going, nope, we sent over ASR over there, didn't see anything, and go, no, they're there and say, nope, we sent ISR over again. There's nothing there. And then it, you know, it took, you know, unit AFO troops to go to go up there in twos and threes and live on the side of a mountain for a few days and go, holy crap, this place is crawling with. people and and even then like them kind of like well we don't really see it on on isr that's one of the

reasons operation anaconda was such a debacle so relying on on on on on i sr right and not got ground we uh we jumped forward a little bit um you had talked about that before this deployment you would also you'd go on a selection beforehand can you talk to us a little bit about um when the idea of going to trying out for the unit came about into your mind and and and then like going to selection? No, because I failed selection the first time. I don't talk about my failures. The going to selection the first time goes back to the, you know, the adage of I didn't want to,

I didn't want to be done with my military career, not that I was thinking of retiring or being done at any time real soon at that point. But at this point in my career, I felt like, you know, I went into the military, you know, check. I, you know, I became a green beret because, you know, being in the regular military wasn't enough. And then I was like, hey, there was a small group of guys within SF that I thought were even better. And, you know, and going to a dive team, check. Like, you know, I can, I continue to push myself and, and, you know, and make it. You know, I wanted to go to war real bad.

I went to war to war several times. And I felt like I was really good at it. You know, you know, check. Like I'm, I'm continuing to get to look for challenges, meet them. And, you know, there's a couple things going on. One, I want to see how far I could go. I didn't think I was the best guy on my team. And that's why, like, you know, I needed to go to selection because I got a,

because I'm, you can't, you can't soar with, with eagles when you're hanging around buzzers. It was, it was nothing like that. And in fact, I was probably the third best guy on my team. I wasn't even the best guy in my ODA. And but I was the only guy that went to selection. And I did, I never told anyone this, but I did get tired of hearing a lot of people train up for selection and, you know, going to sniper school, you know, and going to this school. and, you know, like, and always like collecting this, this perfect packet to go to selection with because they're going to go to CAG, but they forgot the most important part of the process,

which was going to selection. And so it's had a lot of people talk about it, but never do it. And so there's a lot of, and I knew even before that deployment, handwriting was on the wall. Deployments are going to go away. Iraq was already starting to go away at that time. You know, there were rumors of, you know, of Afghanistan combat operations beginning to get questioned and put into halt. And I wasn't done deploying. And I knew I could go to one other place and hopefully, you know, continue to deploy and maybe even deploy the rest of my career. So you kind of take that whole, you know, that whole mound of evidence.

And that's what that's what drove me to go to selection. So took two shots, which is not abnormal at all. Right. And in fact, I don't like, I like calling the first one a reckey. So the first one, the first one was a recie. And I made it really far. I made it like the only thing I didn't do was a 40-miler. And it was definitely one of those things where you show up, you know,

And even though, you know, as an ODA, you don't have this like, yeah, I never felt this weird, oh, we're just 20th group. You know, like our ODAs always thought, you know, had nothing but knew they were good. And if you questioned it, we're more than willing to prove it to you. So I never really had this in my career, this, oh, I'm just 20th group. Until I showed up to selection. And I don't know, it was just a bunch of really big guys. And, you know, guys telling all these crazy stories. I'm like, I don't know.

Maybe, you know, maybe I am out of my league a little bit. And then just slowly, you know, the days go by and the days go by and the class gets smaller and smaller. And you're still here. And all those big loudmouth guys, you know, didn't make time standard this day and that day. And really by the end of it, it's probably a dramatic way to say it. But you kind of know how on 300, like, they're going to. they get to the end of it and like we actually might win this thing you know they kind of thought it was a suicide mission and then they think they actually could pull it off um it's kind of like

how i started the field like actually i you know i'm looking at everyone around me and i'm just as good as as as anyone here um i can i can make this thing um and as soon as i said about the time i started feeling like that uh i got cut um and uh which was the very end of it and i remember going to the I won't talk about the we'll just I got we'll just say this I got interviewed that at the end and the the interviewer was like I yeah I'm just not going to not not going to talk about it did did you did you get good feedback as in terms of what you could improve if you came back no okay I'll try I I I'll try I do I don't mind coming on podcasts. I don't mind, you know, talk about the unit and send, you know, selection, you know, selection is sacred.

Yeah, right. Yeah, we get it. There's, and there's some things I will talk about. But, yeah, I was, yeah, I was able to talk some at the end. He did ask me some questions. I'm afraid if I go into it, I'll end up, you know, given some answers. Sure, sure. But they, but they did welcome you to come back again, try out again.

Yes. He, he asked me how I did. I told him I thought I did. I thought I did pretty well. And then he laughed at me because he said, well, you're, you're sitting here. You must not have done that well. And I was like, ouch. Yeah.

That's pretty much true. We had a, we had a lively conversation after that. And I must have said something right to let them have pity on me and bring me back for a second try. And so I went, went deployed. came back, came back again and was, was just, and I truly mean this, I got, just lucky enough to, to get through the process. Yes, I trained for it. A lot of guys did. You know, I was, I was in the top third, you know, of the class whenever we did anything.

You know, I mean, I know physically I deserve to be there. So, you know, why do I feel lucky? Because there are guys that were way ahead of me. and always ahead of me and didn't make it. You know, it's just, it's a weird, it's a weird process that has, that has a weird way of working, of working things out. And there's, there's a saying that didn't make a whole lot of sense the beginning. And, and, uh, they'd say, hey, we're not looking for the best guy.

We're looking for the right guy. And, uh, I never thinking myself, wouldn't the best guy be the right guy? Kind of doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And again, just the longer I was there, the truer that that saying rang out was, it's, it's not the best guy. It's the right guy. So I was just, again, lucky enough to be the right guy. So you get picked up and then off to OTC. And I mean, what was that experience like for you?

I mean, did you enjoy the training? Yeah, I'll tell you, I will tell you this about selection. it'll because it'll it'll roll into OTC as well. Selection, bar none. I don't care where you've been, what you've done is the most professional thing you will ever witness. And, you know,

I wish I could kind of go into detail and tell you like what, you know, how professional is and how it'll blow your mind. But I'll just leave it to that. It is. It is the most professional thing you'll, you'll ever experience. And I don't know if you ever,

you know you've ever had this experience where you go to a military school and things are they're they're run okay but they're a little discombibibulated and you know it makes you feel at one point like is this you guys first time ever running this course yeah are you just making this up as you go along yeah yeah you got to have this figured out by now that happens zero times ever in west virginia it is the most professional thing you'll ever it's so professional we've had guys quit before because they saw the level of professionalism in a course and just said, I'm not that professional. I can't be this professional and I can't meet this standard and select themselves off

off the professionalism of it. So I'll absolutely say that. The unit in selection that deserves that credit to be known for that. and OTC was still professional. I say not as professionals. They, it, you messing up an OTC on a CKB run,

and there will be a, you know, a large muscular man yelling at you from the catwalk, you know, letting you know how much you suck and much you probably don't deserve to be here. And, you know, it is, it is up to you to deal with that information. and react accordingly. The two things that they gave me were this.

I felt challenged and I felt like the skill set that I was acquiring and the resources required to needed to develop this type of skill set were finally there. Like, it just, it's, it's like, it's like being in tactical Disney world. I mean, just everything's at, at your fingertips. If you need it, you'll get it. It's without a doubt the most amazing place I've ever worked. And I almost feel bad sometimes telling people like how great I had it. Because even though special operations, and as a whole, generally speaking,

you know, have money and they have equipment, but very few people really know what it's like to never want for anything. So what was it like when you graduated and showed up to your team and walked into their team room that first day? I knew this. I knew when I graduated OTC. It's one of the few times in life where I feel like I took a moment and thought in my myself, hey, like, remember this.

Like this will be this, this may be the greatest accomplishment of your life. I know, you know, maybe, maybe that even sounds dramatic. But at least, at least I felt aware enough to know that this is something, you know, few people actually get to do. At the end of the day, if you don't make select, even if you make selection, but you don't make OTC, you did something great that still very few people do. But it's not, you don't feel good about not making it. uh and i and but i knew at that point even if they fired me in six months i was an operator and i you know

and i did you know you did this i accomplished this i was good enough i you know and and one of the very i'm in a part of one of the small brotherhoods and all of the military and i definitely i i i I enjoyed that moment. And then, of course, when the realization of, you know, getting into your team room and that what you thought was pretty good CQB, my first team leader did, who did not hand out compliments ever to anyone, kind of let it slip that I graduated number one in CQB, which I knew I knew I was doing pretty good at then,

as in his EQB. But it was letting me know, he goes, so you think, you think you're good just because you graduated number one in CQB? What's, it's not going to be fast enough here. And, and I looked at him and I go, so I graduated number one in CQB,

huh? I remember, I'm going like, no, that's, that's not what this is about. Forget that. But that's,

that's not a copy of it. It's nothing. I'm going, I mean, I heard it. Oh, I heard you. Yeah.

I want to see you be. No big deal. But he was absolutely right. Man, you get over there and those, and they, and they'll tell you, this is usually a pretty similar experience. They'll go to the shoot house for the first, the first couple, you know, the first couple days and at least the first day, the first couple runs, they'll tell you, hey, just hang out in the back and don't try to shoot anything. And that's, and, and those, and I'll always remember those first. few runs going, oh, yeah, that's, that's going to be tough to keep up with. You know, I, I didn't feel like I didn't belong, but I knew that I was about to get challenged again. And it, and it was just,

it was just another good feeling knowing that, because it happens sometimes in our careers in special operations where you make it to something and you're like, now it's good. And it's, I mean, it's really good, but it's not exactly everything I thought it was going to be. You know, you have those moments. And you know that the unit just never really gave me that moment. Right. It is what you think it is. It must be like on one hand as a new guy a little intimidating,

but at the same time, you're like, I'm with like the absolute top-notch guys. I mean, it must be awesome to be around that kind of talent. It, um, that particular team leader loved, you know, you know,

loved his team to, um, to have a lot of, confidence, but, but to back it up as well. And I remember, you know, my first deployment going over there with those guys, you know, still think, yeah, I have more than enough experience under underneath my belt of combat experience. But there's always this, um, um, when you're on the white side, again, it's kind of like

National Guard and 20th group. Like you know guys that went there, but like once they go over there, they go into a black hole and you never talk to them again. Like you hear rumors of what goes on over there, but no one really knows. You hear that they're, you know,

you hear their target sets are are so much livelier. And, you know, when they go on target, you know, it's always, it's always a lively night. And you just hear these, these stories.

And so, you know, I was a little bit, you know, didn't know what to think of the unknown, you know, on, on my first deployment. But I do remember, you know, being next to those guys and after, you know, running through the shoe house with them and, you know, watching them in mission planning and decision making and just how they carried themselves day in and day out and how well they knew their job.

Like I remember getting on a helicopter going, I'm good. Like, I'm with these guys. You know, I'm good. And still feeling like I can contribute with these guys, but still knowing these guys, these guys are going to take us home. And that's what they did. And man, that's what they did. Those, those guys were exactly who I thought they were as soon as we got to combat. They were great.

Just can't say enough good things about them. And so at this point, I mean, you're off to the races. You did another, another eight deployments to the Middle East. And I mean, what would, I mean, I don't know what you're comfortable talking about. I mean, are there any particular operations that stand out in your mind or any particular experiences that you think are significant? Either to you personally or maybe to the history of special operations, frankly. I could have done without getting shot. I get it.

I stands out. I was, I was running pretty clean there for, you know, probably going into almost double digit deployments. And, you know,

everyone on my team had a Purple Heart. And, but then I do remember, I'll, you know, I'll say this about the night. I got shot. I was,

I was getting more, more aggressive and more aggressive, you know, and things that, that I probably, I knew, they weren't like flagrant. But I knew that I probably shouldn't have been doing business that way and that there was probably a smarter way to do business.

But it's not like I just turned into like an aggressive retard. Like I just I'd slowly continue to go down this, you know, this path and got away with it and then got away with it. You know, and even, you know, a couple times like, you know, got to kill, you know, some people that I, that I wouldn't have been in a good position to kill otherwise. And so it, you know, kind of reinforces that, hey, you know, just the most aggressive guy, the fastest guy wins and always wins. And that's just how it is. And that is true 99% of the times. And you, you, you play like that long enough. You, you will roll snake eyes.

Yeah. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you know, on squorder control, you know, you know, a click away out from the rest of the assault element, continuing to engage guys, engage guys and get drawn further and further out. And even knowing that and being like, hey, we're, you know, there's, you know, we just got away with that last one. And there's, there's more people, you know, behind, you know,

in this next group. I probably shouldn't go that far. And I should probably, you know, plus up another operator or two, you know, if, if we're going to do that. And then just going, no, we got this. And we did not. So I got shot. Our combo guy that was with us got shot.

I got hit by a grenade about five seconds later after getting shot. Another round skipped off and shot my nods in half. So my panos were dangling on my face. just shot up in a really bad way and really lucky, lucky to get out of there. But we did. And it didn't change me to being hesitant or scared. I truly think it reset me to exactly where I needed to be. Right. I don't think I would have ever operated scared. It's just not who I am. If I think I couldn't have got out of that, I'd have just medically retired at that point. I just, you know, that's just not come cut. So I either just would have been like, well, I lost it and it's not for me. But, you know, the whole time that I was in rehab, I could not wait to get back on the battlefield. I couldn't wait. I know it sounds maybe weird to some people, but I couldn't wait to kill someone again.

and to prove like, hey, that's not how my career ends. There's no way that, you know, I felt like my career would end it on a mistake. So I worked as hard as I possibly could to get back out there and then to, you know, I don't know, validate myself still. I don't know the right way to kind of describe it. But that small reset, if I would have continued on that path, I would have died in Syria. One, 100%. that Syria was such a different, such a different game. You think you know IEDs, you know, in Afghanistan.

You don't know what it's like until ISIS retreats from a village and leaves about 3,000 IEDs everywhere, on every road, on every courtyard, in the walls of houses, puts them on timers, puts them on IR trip devices, just an absolute IED debacle. And they were more than, and they were smart. Like they were more than willing to, to use your aggrisiveness against you and pull you into situations only to find out too late. Yeah, we made have, that's what they wanted us to do.

Right. This really was a formidable enemy in some aspects. And in other aspects, they were just dumb terrorists like the rest of them. So they're definitely a dynamic there with ISIS. But I hate, man, I really did. I really hated ISIS on a level. But in the day, I kind of respected the Taliban. After operating in Iraq, guys in Iraq were just so quick to surrender, you know, at times

and just take their chances with the judicial system, at least in, at least in Afghanistan. And generally speaking, they were willing to fight it out with you. And it was almost more like a tribal war as well. Like, I don't know. Again, I'm not going to sit here and give too much, too much respect and credence to the Taliban as if there's some sort of legitimate government, you know, fighting for their existence. They're horrible people. But compared to ISIS, they, you know, I can, I view them in.

two two different categories yeah the taliban wasn't so much into like the flagrant war crimes and stuff like that that isis was yeah i mean they they had it you know i mean they were they're capable of it but they they the the the amount when iis was willing to do it they were willing to do it often and do it on a very large scale right and uh and they were and they were willing to do it you know to kids as as much as anyone right they were they were just they're just a different breed of evil and i i i don't i remember you know seeing uh you know seeing ice's dead bodies just looking down on them with absolutely no remorse or no you know internal struggle going man that was someone's son you know that was someone's father but just looking at them and absolutely not caring

and being like, NASA's a two-legged dog, you know, wish they were more next to them. I just really disliked them on another. Yeah. Could we talk a little bit more about Syria? Because you mentioned that that was like a totally different environment. And you guys presumably working with the SDF. And was it more of like a UW environment than some of the other deployments? Yeah.

I'll tell you, that was an SF mission all day long. That was an SF mission. We had way too few guys doing way too much, you know, and for people who really aren't set up to partner with other units, and I will tell you why SF didn't get that mission, and they wanted it. Fifth Group wanted it so bad. In fact, there was a plan to give it over to them. When we got to Raka, we were going to hand it over to them, and then cooler minds prevailed. So it's a horrible idea.

Like that's like, it's like handing it over it, you know, at halftime. They either take it over now or they don't take it at all. Like don't, don't, don't turn it over to them to them right as they are getting to the, you know, the climax and need, and you need to be a well-oiled machine. Right. Fighting their capital at, you know, at the most. And then, you know, and then give it to a new guy to figure out all their, all their, all their initial problems. the reason SF didn't get it is because

SF, the same reason I started to not like SF at the end. They quit trusting their ground guys. They required too much oversight and that war was going too fast if you, if to slow them down with the protocols

that they would inevitably do. So So the unit does a great job at trusting their ground guys. I never, never had an issue of being questioned or asking why am I doing this or why do I need that. I just tell them what I'm doing and I tell them what I need. And if you don't give them a reason, you know, to question you, they, they never will. And so my first trip was very, was very unique because it was, it was still, I wouldn't even call it UW.

Like it was, it was, it was closer to, to World War II. Like, you know, we had, you had friendly lines. Yeah. Yeah, enemy lines. And there was, there was, there was, there was, there was, there was no in between, you know. And, and even weirder than that at times, it was like, you know, we called it a banker's war. Like no one, no one fought at night. They didn't, they didn't have night vision, you know, so, you know, when the sun

came up and everyone woke up and ate some breakfast, they started lobbing mortars, you know, and right before dinner time, when everyone got hungry, they, you know, they packed it up and, you know, and waited for the sun to come back up. That's, yes, that's a little bit of a, you know, satire way to describe it because it was very unlike that at times, but there is, there, there is a lot of truth, uh, to, to that as well. Um, there were times, you know, if you were to, you know, have a fire or, or even a loud generator, like it would, it would, it would get you some, some mortar rounds at night. I mean, they, they, they would come out and play at night if you gave me a reason to, but generally speaking, if you

didn't give them a reason to, um, they were just, it was just a very much a, uh, this was a good side, this is the bad side. They're in this village, we're in this village. There's two clicks of open ground between the two villages, and we're going to fight it out to see who's either going to lose this village or gain this village. And for us, as a sniper, it really pushed us to lean heavily into what we started to call at the time ELR, extreme long range. Because everything at the time was 800 meters and in, you know, 800 meters if you're lucky with a 308. Well, 308 wasn't going to do anything, you know, from from 2,000 meters away, but that's where our engagements are. And so now we've always had three, three-eighths, but we never really dusted them off and

used them with a lot of, you know, extremely at, you know, at these engagements. And now, you know, we're finding out, you know, we, the way we use are, yeah, I would have a tripod and a, you know, and a pillow for my, for my laser range finder. Like things that I've never had to do before, but, you know, you know, I would have a $3,000, really write stuff tripod just, just for my laser rangefinder because comes to find out, you know, at 2,200 meters away, if I'm just a little, little bit off and i lays the you know the building in front of the building i'm i'm you know i'm trying to get you know i'm off you know i'm off by by 50 meters and in that 50 meters now my elevation is drastically different and i'm never going to hit my target at 2 000 meters even though that you know that 3 3 8 is more than capable of making a 2 000 meter shot so i either just excited a lot of some of some of your nerdy shooter audience or i just put to

sleep some of some of the guys who just like direct action we learned a lot about our equipment and about our guns in Syria it was a very very different war do you find the the 3-38 once you guys dialed it in that you guys were pretty effective using that weapons platform at those ranges yeah oh that 3-3 was great it was the one thing that we would go back and forth is when you get over 2,000 meters, the problem we'd run into is spotting your misses, even though you think the 338 is a large round. Man, it is.

But you can easily not see a miss at 2,000 meters. And if you can't see your miss, then you can keep throwing rounds all you want. But now you're just trying to get lucky. And even though the 50-cowl is not as accurate as a 338, at least you can see your misses. And especially if you put like a Raffis round, you know, inside there, you can, you know, you can seeing your, your misses in that environment becomes a lot easier.

And even though it's not as accurate, you know, I at least can, you know, can make an informed decision on a correction, which I just couldn't with a 3-3-8. Right. And did the really change the way we operated a lot from long distance? The reliance on the sniper platforms have to do with the air support not being as quick as it was in Afghanistan or Iraq? No, we were the only game in town, so we always got to kind of got what we wanted. It has more to do with guys hanging out in windows or hanging out or being underneath structures that an aerial platform isn't really going to be able to see as well as. someone from a ground level now did you guys and and if I called in an airstrike

and I really have a hard time saying that's my kill so I'm at least going to try to couple throw rounds at it before I call it an air strike yeah now between the 338 and and the the 50 do you guys experience experiment all with like the 300 windmags or anything like that you know for that the sort of medium range type of yeah the 300 windmack just what wasn't a platform we used and no particular reason. You know, the SF groups, to my knowledge, I think, are the only ones that use that 300 WinMag. And it's a great round.

I mean, it's a laser round. I mean, the ballistics of that round is absolutely great. It doesn't have a great barrel life to it. And unfortunately, the SF groups purchased that. and they didn't do a good job of having a like kind of a barrel replacement plan. So they actually had a great, they probably had one of the great medium range or one of the best medium range long guns in the arsenal for for anyone. But with most of the barrels were shot out. Yeah.

Ended up not as great as they should have been. Yeah. Because I know that's something that seals use quite a bit and they seem to be very happy with it. Do they use a 300 as well? I believe so. They use it in their sniper school. I know. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. We didn't even, the only thing we even used, I went to group SOTIC and, um, uh, and level one SOTIC.

Um, gosh. I got a thing with, uh, SIFIC, or SIFIC, if you will. Um, Special Forces sniper course.

Uh, and we only use 308, you know, at, yeah, 3.08. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know why I said 3. So as, So as these, you know, you're going back and forth from Syria, I mean, how did you see the campaign evolve over time? The campaign was pretty straightforward, really. You know, even though we handed off to other squadrons, you know, it was, they really, you know, encountered the same things we did and, you know, worked very similarly. So really, it was just like, you know, we'd come in and out. It was just picking back up where you left off.

in between rotations i missed the the uh the fall the fall of raka so i'm sure that would have been a lot different and i'll tell you why i feel like it's a lot it was a lot different um because when i showed up to raka like very shortly after the fall of raka i remember driving around that place at night feeling like i was at the you know the opening of of terminator when there's just bombed out buildings just everywhere in this dark smoky atmosphere i've never seen um damage at that scale to to a city the way we leveled raka we absolutely leveled raka and rightfully so yeah and i have to ask too while we have you here i mean did you have any involvement in the baghdaddy raid no that that was the very first

first deployment of missed. Gotcha. So hit Raka and what happened from there? I mean, you said that you actually went into the city at one point. Oh, yeah. Well, from, from there, we went back into a more traditional high value target. Right. Hunting. So the The war, the traditional war was over, and then that kicked off a much more fun part of Syria, where we went back into quick strikes and a lot of them and had a great time. That was probably my most enjoyable trip would have been after the fall of that. And, you know, some of those guys pretending like they can just put down their guns and build back into the population.

and and the Kurds will just forget about them. Nope. The Kurds didn't forget about you. And they told us by where you're at. And these are the, from the outside looking in, the occasional like Centcom press reports that somebody flew in and black helicopters in the night and hashed out business with the bad guys. Yeah.

Yeah. It happened a lot more than the press releases. There was no need for the press. get wind of of any of it what what was that like for you and and you know your fellow soldiers in the sense of there there was you know the press might report on and occasionally like we had just had these two very long wars right that were in and out of the media but but there was a national awareness about it but then syria comes and and it's not in the national consciousness the way these other wars are, but we have troops that are fighting, same as we do in parts of African stuff.

But what was that like for you guys? I welcomed it. Well, I shouldn't say I welcomed it. At the time, I didn't know about it. I mean, really, like, you know, when you're in that world, like, I don't, if, I don't know what the news is reporting on or what they're not reporting on. You know, I live in a very, I lived in a very, almost in a bubble, you know. Do your job.

Go home. You're right, yeah. Do your job, go home. And when I'm home, I'm training for my next job. You know, so I don't, you know, I don't have time to listen to see what, you know, to see if the news is reporting about Syria. I, you know, I live it in Syria. I don't, you know, I don't necessarily. The only time I would see anything on the news is someone like, you know, showed it to us and say, hey, this is this is what they're talking about. Or if something got leaked, you know, if something got leaked, we'd always, you know, we'd always know, we'd always know it. You know, they'd always, you know, they'd always, you know, show it to us. that something got leaked and try to, so like those are, those are far in between. Would, would they try to like, like, scare you guys straight, find out who did it? Like, no. Most of the time, those leaks would, uh, would have come from, um, a partner force or, um,

you know, someone, um, someone at a much, you know, higher level in the military that, that they, you know, they knew it was way. Yeah. It's not some piece. Yeah. It's somebody in the 3X or. It's right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not even somewhat J-Soc related. Yeah. Like it's someone it's, yeah, at a, at a, at a theater like sitcom level that has a relationship with Fox News and, and, and leaked it. You know, that's usually where. Yeah.

Yeah. So, uh, from that time period, uh, is there any other, like, significant missions that kind of stand out for you? I won't go into great detail about it. And I don't mean to do that as a teaser, but I'll say this more or less to kind of set the record straight on it. It's another thing that it's funny what does get news traction, what doesn't get news traction,

what should have been a much bigger story and was it. And I'll talk about it because like I said, you can Google it. You know, John Dunbar, you know, dying in Syria and Matt Tonroe, which was a British SAS guy, which was right next to him when he died, should have been a huge news story. You know, if you think about it, I mean, you got a Delta Force guy and a British SAS guy dying on the same target. When has that ever happened? You know, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, of, of, of our, of our existence. yet in Syria that was without a doubt of first. But that ended up being a bigger news story in Syria,

I mean, in England, because, you know, we had told our people that we obviously have, you know, ground troops and combat operations happening in Syria. They were, they weren't as forthcoming with it, with the SAS. Right, right. And so when the news, so when the news hit that an SES guy died in Syria, a lot of the public was like, whoa, what's going on here? You guys said that we were kind of there in a support role.

That doesn't seem like a support role. One of the worst misconceptions of that mission is that newspapers reported that it was that it was fractured that killed him. I can't remember something about that. But it was an IED, wasn't it? and there is a problem with it. You use terms like IED, which you're right, but people assume like roadside bomb IEDs. Because that's what, you know,

when you talk about IEDs is what, you know, what almost always is. We were dismounted at the time, really close to target, to a bomb maker's target. He had, he had early warning.

And his, a, like an IED makeshift Claymore went off and John took the brunt of that but it set off his wall charge and his wall charge is what

is what killed Matt and that is that story you know that story is out there but generally speaking it'll say hey it was a fratricide and you know he died due to a friendly explosion they'll they'll say it in ways that that are that

of really um yeah it's a sympathetic explosion it's not yeah jump around the truth yeah i would like the way they say that because it's so let's it would be like writing a story and saying um you know sergeant first class smith died in afghanistan due to a fuel a gas tank explosion in his humvee well did the iED set off the gas tank explosion right yes well but the gas tank killed him Like that makes, you know, nowhere in the history do we ever, do we ever say that? I don't know why we do it here. It gives the direct cause of, you know, of, of direct contact with. Yeah.

Newspaper stories were written. Yeah. That's so differently. That painted it, insinuated differently. Right. It just, it bugs me. It's sort of the way fact checkers work sometimes, right? Is they, they, I mean, technically.

what they're saying that it was an American explosive that killed them is true but they're leaving out really how it all went down. Yeah. It's like that's one way to say. Yeah.

It's sort of like saying that somebody who died from you know, from enemy fire died from Bob Boss. It's like yeah, they did die from Bob Boss. That's right. Right. Yeah. But that's so true.

But they didn't just start bleeding. And like a, and, you know, the, the, the, uh, I don't remember which newspaper, but, you know, the, the, the, you know, and in England, they, they did like a whole investigation on it and then, you know, wrote a report saying, you know, this is the official report, you know, off of it, you know, and sent it out as, you know, as official record. And again, it's, it's technically true, but I feel like it's, it's wildly, uh, misleading and doesn't do justice, you know, honestly. Right. So either one of the guys who were, who were, you know, we're doing. who were warriors. I mean, they were both truly, truly good men. I'll tell you a story just real quick about Matt Tonroe was an S-A-S-G guy. That guy would, he'd have to go on helicopter every now and again and go, you know, and go visit, you know, other places where they were at. And if he found out that we were going on a mission that night,

he would do everything in his power to get his helo to come in sooner or see if we would push the mission later because he didn't want to miss a single target. He was absolutely addicted to going on missions. And I love that about him because, you know, that's, that's the way you want every, every one of your guys to, you know, to be. And so just it's very unfortunate that, you know, that he lost his life in Syria and in that manner because he absolutely was represented his, his unit, you couldn't do a better job of representing those guys.

And so how did this start to like wind down for you? I mean, it sounds like you really like rode this wave throughout your career, did some amazing things. And you had a great, you know, 20 years in the military. I mean, what was it sort of like for you? Like you must have some inkling that like, this is coming. I'm not going to be able to be an operator forever. I mean, what was that transition like for you?

Yeah, I mean, I was, I was deep in my 30s and, you know, almost, you know, a decade at the time on on a team. Yeah, which my team time was coming to an end. The, what really, you know, kind of did it for me was, you know, after that, after that Syria trip, we had been, we were doing training the way we always do training. and I was just unfortunate enough to be close to a couple really big kind of training explosions that just really they really rocked me and unlike earlier you know there's yeah I'd been near those size explosions before but for whatever reason you know at this point in my life you know maybe it just finally shook something loose I was I was having some some real some real issues. So we'd get and and what would happen is almost every time we'd go back to to do an

explosive training like these these mental issues would would would rear back up almost like like like like a re-injury of it. It would get to a point where like just simple stuff like I've you know I'd have to I would I would write notes in my in my locker to tell to tell me where I parked my car because I would just go wandering out in the parking lot and looking for it and It's a massive parking lot. And I feel like the first time it really felt odd to me. Because usually when you see your car, you're like, oh, that's right. That's right.

That's where I parked my car. But like to see the car for the first time, be like, that's not, did someone move my car? And literally going in there and starting to accuse, you know, hey, who moved my car? Like, I was parked, you know, at the right. And like, Brent, no one moved your car. I parked right next to you. That's where you parked this morning. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's right.

you know, trying to play it off. And, you know, I mean, I go on and on and on. But one of the, you know, the, the weirder stories is, you know, taking the wife and kids to church and just driving. And at some point, you know, having, you know, your wife put her hand on your hand be like, do you know where we're going? I'm like, no. No, I don't know where we're going right now. like we're all dressed up kind of nice and so i'm going to guess we're going to church uh but yeah

i don't know i don't know what day it is i don't know where we're going and uh and i was my wife's like here you're going to go talk to someone monday or or i will and uh my team time was was was i was within yeah i had one more deployment left you know really i mean i was um so it was it it felt right. And I felt, I felt complete with my career. I mean, really, Syria was great. Man, I love Syria. But when I got home from that last trip, I don't, you know, just something clicked. I was like, you know, every trip I couldn't wait for the next one. And it's not that I didn't, you know, didn't have the hunger, didn't want to wait, you know, didn't want to deploy again. But there was a feeling of completion, you know, there that had just never been there before.

So when it was all said and done, it wasn't, it, honestly, it wasn't, it wasn't the hardest transition. It was at first, you know, realizing its time. But as we started making steps towards that, I was, I was kind of excited about the, you know, the next chapter in life. That's awesome. Do we have, do have questions for Brent? We do.

I just wanted to say also that air tags. I put an air tag in my car. It works wonders. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's hear. Jackson, thank you very much. Was attending selection for the unit more challenging coming from GuardSF? Is Guard SF well represented in the unit? And also how often do you see Marines, airmen, and sailors at the unit? That's a good question. I was surprised at how many other 20th group guys were there. There was a period of time where the highest,

it was a short period of time, but it fluctuates. That 20th group had the best success rate at selection. So, yeah, there's definitely no shortage of, or at least at that time, you know, of guard guys. There's, you know, there's an eclectic mix of guys of the unit. At the end of the day, it'll always be heavy with green, gray, and rangers. But there is, there's someone from everyone there. I'll just, you know, leave it that.

We'll necessarily talk about the percentages of all of them, but they're all there. And they definitely all show up to selection. And Jackson, thank you very much. How different are the cultures between the squadrons? Oh, that's, that's. That's another good question, actually. When I first got there, the cultures were, I wouldn't say drastically different because the truth is, if you went back a little bit further when I was there, some people would say they were drastically different. When, you know, when I got there, they were still very, very different.

they all had their their own personalities. And sometimes for better or worse. And really by the time I got to the end of my career, a lot of those, I would probably say more on a negative, you know, those negative type cultures just had had pretty much all but disappeared. And even though there are still slight differences

between the squadrons, it wasn't as much as it used to be. And then how did you feel about, how did you feel about dev group and HRT when you were in? I didn't feel about them. Joe, who are they? I think I read a book about the second one. We had a lot of interaction with the dev group guys. And, yeah, I've done, you know, I've done, you know, large.

scale training exercises with them. They've come over in a large trail, you know, send one Z, Tuesday guys or a team over to do large scale training operations to get that crossover. And we'll just say in various places around the world, I've had one or two of their guys attached to us so they could get experience of where we're at. And they were always good guys.

They really were. They were always good guys. H.R.T. I don't, never, never saw them. They just, you know, completely different mission set. They're generally speaking, they're conists, we're O-conis. There was a time we had HRT guys kind of attached to us, but when they were attached to us, they were just evidence collectors.

You know, they weren't, they weren't shooters by any stretch of imagination. And nor could they be. They, you know, they haven't gone through our level of training. Joe's got you. Thank you very much. Did you work a lot with 22 SAS while deployed? I think we got that one. Yeah, I think we kind of got that. Dogpoint.

There's another one. And I'll just tell you just a quick story of how much respect we have with the SAS. Obviously, we were modeled after those guys. They helped us out a lot with our tactics in the beginning. By the beginning, I mean, talking like 1977, you know, Charlie Beck with Founder Days. and that type of relationship has has maintained for 40 plus years. So, I mean, I'll make up this, you know, this fictional scenario, but it's, but it's absolutely true.

If I was in Syria and some, you know, and heck, I'll make it close to him, a green beret. A green beret comes and knocks on my door and like, hey, you know, heard who you guys are. I just want to come over and say hi. I'd be like, go walk 40 miles and you can come back and say hi. You know, you know, I'd say it nicer. But generally, generally speaking, that's turn it around, bring a foreigner to my door, a guy who's not even American, but make it an SAS guy come and knock on my door and say, hey, hey, mate, you know, I'm with the two, two. I was told to come say hi. I'd open that door as fast as I could and bring him right on in. Invite him for a spot of tea.

That's right. Yeah, the relationship that the two units have are great. And I'll, I still talk to some of those guys. Great, great guys. Dogpoint, thank you. What'd you like about your squadron? What was the vibe like, any funny stories? There's always, it doesn't matter what part of this business you're in. You know, you work with the funniest guys you've, you've ever been around.

You know, and I don't care if you were a seal, green beret, rage. I don't care what you did. You're just hanging out with the funniest guys. you'll you'll you'll you'll you'll ever work with um you know the the vibe my squadron i think was a very was a good middle-of-the-road vibe like we we were very we're very professional when needed to be and you know could could kick back and relax when when needed to be i think other squadrons at times that were too professional and we're very fun to be around and uh you know some of them were uh you know, we're a little bit more, say, say, cowboy-ish.

But I don't mean to say that unless, in a bad light. But I think we had a good balance of both. And so I really enjoyed, enjoyed the culture of the squadron I was in. So Goldilock would find you guys just right. Yeah. Nick TCHH, well, this is actually for Jack. Will Mike Perry ever return? Maybe.

if he wants to, sure. We'd love to have him back. Dano, not. Yeah. Yeah, first group, like Perry. Oh, no, obviously. I'm planning. Okay, the bare knuckle fighter, Mike Perry. Not that, Mike Perry.

Okay. Dano Notton Lions Den. Thank you. Delta leads the way. Big PP, 82nd Pugan Dragons. It was just a comment. Yeah. And then

So Joe's got you. Thank you very much. You can talk or not talk about this, obviously. Was your squadron involved at all with the battle of Qasham in 2018 against Wagner Group? Yeah, I was in Darazar. It was a good time. There's a news article about it. You can read it.

Dogpoint. Great. Thank you very much. When you went back to HVT Rays and Serra, was it business as usual, or did you have to change it up? Oh, more or less business as usual. You know, all the IEDs was definitely more of a thing on, you know, that type of, you know, gaining ground, conventional forces. They're pulling back, you know, laying them all in. They still kept, you know, the knowledge of that and some of the TTPs. But generally speaking, it was back to business as usual. I believe that is it. So tell us about FRCC and some of the things that you're involved in now. Yeah.

When I got to the military, I had to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. I had no real, you know, solid plans. I did a couple like 1099 gigs. contracting, but all Kona stuff. I knew I didn't want to go overseas and contract. Nothing against any of those guys who do. You know, I just, you know, it's not something that I was looking to do. Had a couple former unit guys, you know, start calling me up, be like, hey, we're training

a SWAT team here. I need an extra instructor. You want to come out. I was like, that sounds, yeah, I'd love to, you know, hang out with SWAT teams and, you know, try to transfer some of this knowledge that's really kind of very uniquely, you know, to us. am kind of uniquely to unique to SWAT teams because they, you know,

they deal with with barricaded shooters, active shooters, things like that, that would happen on, on our targets. And I really enjoyed sharing information with those guys. Like, I really did.

Like, I got a, you know, I felt like I, you know, every time I went and taught those guys that I, I truly gave them the tools needed to be, just as effective, if not more effective, and to do business smarter to make sure that they can go home at night.

And I'll never teach someone tactics where safety is somehow in like the lead of a reason for teaching a tactic. Never, never, never, never a safety ever played a part on that's why we do this tactic. but if the effectiveness can stay 100% the same and there is the same end result that this guy dies, yet I can increase your survivability, yeah, we'll talk about that. And so, you know, I got to basically show those guys the lessons that we learned in blood. Like I really wish I could say that we're so much smarter at the unit than everyone else. and that's why our tactics are so much better. We're kind of smart, but the unfortunate truth is we just get to see a lot more targets,

and we had to learn it the hard way like everyone else does. So we just get a lot more exposure to mistakes and to doing things wrong. And some of those things, to be honest, it took us way too long to change the way we do business. So I'm really glad to be able to share that with. those guys. That's something that eventually turned into me and a SEAL Team 6 buddy were going to start or did start the beginning of a nonprofit to raise money for police officer for police officer training. Budget is such such a big deal to those guys. They have no budget. They want to train. And sometimes they can get like equipment budgets and sometimes they have more equipment than

you think they would that they would have because of certain grants, but training doesn't come along with it. And some departments don't have the necessarily equipment either. So it's a, it's really a diverse, you know, group of people you run into in SWAT teams. And I'm not talking about your, your wokeness term of diverse. You know, I'm talking about just the different, the different experience levels, the different, the, training the different equipment it's it's all over the place so we're going to start a nonprofit come to find out I don't like asking people for money and that

is a integral part of big a nonprofit right it's much so very it's a key component to a nonprofit so I ended up starting a you know starting first responders coffee company first you know that I'd much rather you know you know sell things, have an exchange for, you know, a value for a product and then, you know, take the money we raised from that and put it towards first responders. So we started with the coffee company. We started November of last year. We've donated back a little over $20,000 in less than a year. And the truth is, I love saying that number because it kind of sounds like a big number for a small business but we we get more requests than that I could ever feel right now so we won't be happy

until we can stop telling departments that hear what we're doing and asking for help until we can fulfill all those requests we will never be satisfied and so that comes into the the next part of the business you know we could add another coffee line which would take a lot of work and maybe add a little bit of revenue. But we decided on, hey, if we added a whole new product, we can get into a whole new group of purchasers. And so we started First Responder Cigar Company and hopes of garnering a wider audience.

And that's been great. That's been a little bit of a selfish pleasure because I smoked two to three of my own stash every day. And so I needed that at wholesale price. pricing. But besides that, if you think half of the country drinks coffee, but it is a very, you know, kind of convoluted market. There's a lot of people fighting in that space. Right. Even though I don't, you know, I could argue within first responders, there's a, you know, a multi-million, you know, person audience that, you know, that doesn't

have a product, you know, kind of like ours catering to them. So, you know, we, you know, we do have a nice niche cut out in that area, but a small percentage of people smoke cigars, but we're the only cigar, you know, we're the own nasty. One of the very, very few American disabled veteran own, you know, cigar lines. And then, of course, the only one doing anything for first responders. Our cigar sales will probably take over our coffee sales in the next couple months. I'll check you guys out, Brent, because we smoke cigars on the show. We have our humidor here.

So I'll definitely check out. You got a box coming at you. All right. We're happy to support the cause. And we encourage everybody else to support the cause, whether it's for coffee or cigars. Or I guess you said whiskey, but I guess cognac would go better, right? First. Oh, there you go.

Yeah. Yeah. I kind of have this FRCCC thing going. Coffee, coniac cigars. That works. Yeah, company. We'll work with it. We'll massage that.

But you guys can find them at FRCC Coffee.com. That's Foxrot Romeo Charlie Coffee.com. Check them out. And it's going to be in the link. It's going to be in the show description also down below. And then also you started out as a guest on the anti-hero podcast, right? and kind of work your way up just through sheer talent and charisma. Right.

He needed a co-coats with a small vocabulary, and I was the clear choice. And you guys, yeah, you can find the anti-hero podcast on YouTube and also on podcast platforms, right? Your favorite podcast. So tell us about that. Yeah, it really coincides with the first responder, coffee company story. I think if I remember right,

a local news channel picked up a story about us and I just got a random email from, you know, from a small podcast, you know, saying, hey, I'd love to have you on the show. I'm an Orange County deputy, which is the county I live in. So I was like, well, absolutely, I'll do a podcast with you. I mean, you're in my own backyard.

Went over there, did a podcast with him. Really enjoyed it. It was a good time. He's a really good dude and a first responder. It was an easy conversation to have with him. He had me back on, you know, a couple more times. And, you know, the times I was on was always the, you know, his bigger shows. And, you know, not to be edgy, but it's just true and it happened. You know, I ended up, I ended up saying something on a 30-second snippet on a podcast,

ended up into a much bigger ordeal. I try to make it real quick. he just he asked me uh he asked me some off-the-wall question on a on a first responder topic interview and he goes hey well are there are there any secrets like you want to tell me about uh you know black ops i was like no i don't really have any because be honest with you most things get leaked so you probably know them all anyway and then he randomly goes did roboneil kill assama bin laden and I just I answered the way I kind of do in a team room and I go Rob O'Neill didn't kill bin Laden it's the worst kept secret in all

special operations and he cut that as a snippet and posted it as the promo although it had nothing to do with the uh with the with the episode and it goes viral Brent you rabble rouser and Rob O'Neill did he actually respond to that or uh so So for anybody who's curious, you do have to check out like the full episode where you go into the weeds with it, which was episode 37. 37. So the problem with that was it was cut as a teaser, an unintentional tease. So it wasn't a teaser that was going to go into something more.

That was it. That was just my comment about it. It goes viral and has, I don't know, between all of a million views. And a lot of people were upset. They're like, you can't just say something like that and not back it up. And there was a lot of that. And a lot of people just upset that, you know, I would make such a claim without any, you can't call someone a liar and have no, you know, evidence to it.

So it took me a little bit. I was like, you know what? They're right. So I came back out with a two and a half hour podcast talking about this exact subject, taking open source information from Matt Bissonet to, to your guys' podcast, to, you know, to, not my normal star witness, but, um, uh, um, uh, Osama bin Laden's wife, who was also in the room actually makes a statement about what happened that night. Uh, hate to, hate to ruin a surprise ending, but everyone's

story are all the same except for one. So everybody's lying but Rob? everyone's no rob is the only outlier in here everyone else has the same exact story about what happened that night except except for the guy making millions off of it i mean words like stolen valor being thrown around but i don't know you can use your own words so yeah and i people should go check out that that podcast the deep dive that that you guys did well in the podcast in general because you guys cover a lot of really cool topics because you talk about, I mean, a lot of first responder stuff. I mean, and you guys, you guys call out bullshit where you see bullshit, too.

We, we do. But I told him, although my co-host, Tyler really, he has, you know, very like of, you know, he loves punk rock and he has that, he likes that culture and he doesn't, he doesn't mind mixing it up a little bit. Although, ironically enough, you know, that, that comment makes it looks like I'm, I'm more than happy to stir things up. but the truth is, you know, I stepped in it and then I had to own it. And I told, you know, the anti-hero podcast when I came on at the day, I really want this to be a platform where we can tell the stories of first responders that I just don't think get told.

And there's always going to be the, and we'll have those stories on. In fact, we have one coming tomorrow with a cop that got that took around and, you know, got shot in the line of duty. you know that's very you know very unique to any profession you know there's cops getting shot all over this country it's it's an epidemic and it's it's horrible um but you know those those stories are out there but let me take there are stories out there that paramedics and ambulance right you know writers can can tell you that never get a voice and never get to tell you know their side of your mind they see some of the worst stuff day in and day out kids and moms getting

mangled in a car wreck, you know, on the way to, you know, on the way to school, just things that are that are horrible. But, you know, they, you know, I, I just want to make, I want to get a, a platform out there to where all first responders, that's great. You know, can tell their stories. Yeah, that's fantastic. And yeah, I mean, like, it's weird that reporting on police shootings, police being shot, like, it's gone way down, but police are like getting shot a lot out there right now.

Two police officers in Orlando just got shot a couple weeks ago. And here's what's a really cool story. Usually when that happens, however, it's how it seems is the suspect flees into a county or, you know, or an area outside the SWAT team's jurisdiction. So it's just just the way it happens. Not often enough does the local SWAT team whose brother and sister you just shot get to go take care of it. But that's exactly what happened in Orlando. This guy holds up in a hotel still within the Orlando city limits and the SWAT guys go to work.

And that guy got the good news that night. I guess I'm assuming he resisted arrest or had a gun he shouldn't have. You know, and the good news is he doesn't have to go through the court system. He's already, he's already got a sentence. And I got to send those guys a whole box of cigars with a handwritten letter. And I said, hey, you know, you know, enjoy this. You know, taking human life is obviously something you should, you should never be, you know, taken lightly. But that being said, not not everyone here deserves this life.

And I gave them just a long, heartful, you know, a heartfelt letter that said, like, you know, I've gone through doors. It worked out well tonight, but I know, I know what it feels like to not know how tonight's going to work out right before that door opens. Right. You know, and just, you know, some kind of intimate stuff about it. And they loved it. They framed it. They smoked my cigars. And, you know, and they're back at it.

Take, you know, removing bad guys from the streets, you know, every other night. And I love that about SWAT teams. Yeah. Brent, again, man, thank you for doing this tonight. And I just want to let people know, we'll be back Monday with William Osgood, who's Special Forces in Vietnam. And then next Friday, we're going to have Robin Horsfall on the show, who was in SAS. So we're really looking forward to talking to those two guys this upcoming week.

Brent, any final thoughts before we wrap up tonight? No, I just, again, I couldn't be any more humbled. you guys have me on here and thinking that my story is interesting enough to listen to me, run my rap, run my trap for a couple of hours. No, you were great, man. It was really fascinating. And I really appreciate you doing this. Yeah, we deeply appreciate your time.

What, uh, are you on social media much? Can people follow you if they're interested? I, uh, some, some habits I, I didn't want to break. Um, the only social media I have is, is the business. And, uh, and, and I keep it there. And I didn't even want to learn that part of social media, but I had to.

There you go. That's cool. People can go check that out. So definitely check out FRCCC, first responder, a coffee company, cigar company, and soon-to-be-cognac company, or Cerva's a company. You'll figure something out. Yeah. Get something out.

And check print out on the anti-hero podcast. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, like I said, hit us up when you're coming through New York sometime. you want to light up some stogies we'll be around um and everyone else out there have a nice weekend and uh we will see you on monday yeah and r s thank you thank you just saw your donation thank you