The Team House - Inside MARSOC Controversies: Toxic Leaders and Moral Lines | Ivan Ingraham | Ep. 376

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

Ivan Ingraham returns for his second appearance to dive deeper into the powerful themes of his novel, Once We Pledged Forever, which examines the intense psychological and moral challenges faced by Marine special operations officers. Ingraham shares his insights on the corrosive effects of toxic leadership and MARSOC controversies, contrasting the warrior ethos with the difficult reality of maintaining integrity under pressure. He emphasizes the veteran's long struggle for reconciliation—balancing pride in service with the duty to family and the need to heal from war's hidden toll.Today's Sponsors:StopBox USA⬇️Get firearm security redesigned and save with BOGO the StopBox Pro AND 10% off @StopBoxUSA with code HOUSE at https://www.stopboxusa.com/HOUSE GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 10% off! PIA VPN ⬇️https://piavpn.com/TeamHouseFor 83% off plus 4 months free!-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured__________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 Start01:18 Book's Genre and Tone03:50 Writing Fiction vs. Memoir10:50 Controversies and "Blowback"17:48 Military Brotherhood and Leadership29:26 Family Impact: Compartmentalization49:25 Deployment: Anger and the Moral Line53:50 Analysis of Toxic Leadership1:05:30 Reconciling Service Pride vs. War's Reality1:22:27 Core Theme: Healing and ReconciliationBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

The Team House with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone. This is episode 376 of the Team House. I am Jack Murphy here with tonight's guest, Ivan Ingram. He is the author of Once We Pledge Forever, which we're going to talk to about tonight. We had him on the show back on episode 342 talking about his career in the Marine Corps, Some other interesting assignments. Hope you guys will go and check it out.

So, Ivan, welcome back to the show. It is great to be back. Love it here. And we should point out tonight, we are smoking the 1964 anniversary edition of the Padron's. In my opinion, this is their best cigar. This is the Maduro. No complaints. Paired with Diplomatico, a little bit of Venezuelan rum. It goes well.

pairs well. So, I mean, I'm not sure exactly where to pick it up, but I read your book. I actually read, you know, obviously it's available in hardcover right now. I read it on that dangfangled Kindle. And it was really good on there. I mean, people should check it out. But the book is, how would you describe it? Like, you know, you told me a little bit earlier that it's kind of like defies the norms of any given genre. And it's also like very autobiographical. in many ways, right? It is, and it does, or it does, and it is. The book, it is available on Kindle,

both hard and soft cover, and then, of course, any platform in which you publish that someone's going to want something more, you know, is it audible? We haven't gotten it there yet. Yes, I know. Is it available in Polish? Yes, I've had this question.

No, but we're looking for blackers, so please. When I went to start pitching it, I had a hard time conveying to potential agents just exactly what it would be. Because they very much want to have something they can say, okay, this is a military thriller, there's a military action book, it's a romance, or whatever it happens, the genre, they want to be able to bin that pretty directly or exactly.

So then when they go to talk to publishers, they don't have any problem. Right. The book itself covers quite a bunch of different tones. It is indeed an action book, it's a military action book, but is also a book of redemption, reconciliation. And as I talked with my publisher and he read it, he's like, you know, really this book is a love story.

It is about not only the love of the main character, Steve Keller and his relationship to his family and his wife, but also that's same relationship and fraternity that he has with his men, and sometimes how those two relationships are at odds, a very big odds. So to your question about autobiography, that is indeed how the book started out. More as a record from my family, just as something for me to get down on paper and say, okay, over the course of my career, this is what I did. And is it a novel because you didn't want to put people's real names in it?

Well, there are some people with real names in there, but for very specific reasons. A couple of reasons for that. As I talked to more agents, people send military memoirs to do indeed sell, but really to a niche crowd. Sure. People are into kind of what we like to read, what probably a lot. large number of the fans of this podcast and other military-based podcast. They very much will enjoy the book. Um, but those, one of the agents gave me a good piece of advice and said, unless you've got a lot of followers and people kind of know who you are, i.e. you're like McRaven or

Charles Beckwith or something, you know, where people are going to immediately recognize your name and you're going to have a brand that comes along with it because of that recognition. It'll just be a book that gets published and it's yet another one that's kind of on the on the shelves about some is military experience. And that is not to diminish anybody who's published books in that, in that genre, in that vein. And there's some very good ones out there. But the other thing is that as I started talking with people, it's particularly my friend

Scott Husing, who wrote Echo and Ramadi and is actually is my agent now, he read the initial manuscript and said, if you look at this from the perspective, of writing it as a fiction or a piece of fiction, you will have a lot more latitude to actually explore the themes that you want to look at in this book. And I hadn't thought of it that way at all. And of course, it's very much, I don't want to betray my own authenticity in these people.

And he's like, no, no, it'll all be, you can still have all of that, but you'll have a lot more, the aperture is going to be very wide. To drive the point home. Exactly. And you'll be able to be able to kind of, to weave things together

because as I say in the book they all happen in some capacity. Not all of them happened to me exactly as it's listed but I could take those pieces and then create the story. Right, right. And once I embraced that,

he was right. Opened up a larger creative valve. The only piece of any kind of media that I would compare this book to as far as like what you were able to achieve with it. And I mean this as a compliment.

Have you ever seen the play last out, Scott Mann's play? I have seen it online. I've never seen it live. Okay. So you know what it's about. So Scott and I have been, we've been in communication with each other. Not since I wrote the book. I like his work a lot of respect, respect a lot of the things that he's done.

It's great. I think that, you know, your book kind of rose to that level that, you know, I really respected that play that they put together because, It's the first time I had ever seen in any piece of media, book, movie, whatever, TV show that really told, like, the story of a special forces soldier, kind of from the beginning, literally to the end. And all the, like, highs and lows and everything in between, some of the darker things that happen in the job, the difficult decisions. Like, your book is in that same vein, except you did that for a Marsok Rader. And I really appreciated that about the book. Thank you.

The tenor certainly is a heavy, heavy book. It's published by the Sager Group. Mike Sager is my publisher. And he's been around in the business for quite a while. He wrote for Esquire and Rolling Stone. Actually hung out with Hunter S. Thompson. He's interesting in his own vein because of that, his own right. But he gave me a lot of good steering.

One of the great things that he did not put any limitations on the creative process. In fact, he said he didn't want to change it. He really liked the story. that we really made it unique was that it did indeed come from a different perspective. It's not so much a chest-thumping U-rah book of just tales of let's-go boys adventure. It's more that the protagonist, Steve Keller, he wrestles with his decisions and he has a lot of doubt. Some of the reviews so far on Amazon, people say they really like it because the character has a lot. all the characters have depth.

And they're not, they're not, not only not one dimensional, but they're flawed. Yeah. And so people then are kind of like, well, do I like this guy?

Do I, do I support what he's saying? And it is meant to make people think because there was a lot of ambiguity, obviously in combat. And the way I approached it also is that it, it's sort of a non-linear narrative with a little bit of supernatural undertone.

And that's what I'm saying. It's the, the established agents were just like, what am I going to do with this? Like, how am I going to sell this book? I mean, I have to say, we did interview someone on this podcast who he was in such a bad way. He would talk about getting drunk in his living room

and having full-blown conversations with one of his teammates that have been killed. So, which is the supernatural element in your book. I mean, to me, it did not ring. you know, supernatural. It's actually something that some people have experienced,

you know, when they're in a bad way. I think so. And I think those, the past has a interesting way of reaching out at times. And you don't always get to decide,

at least for veterans. And this could be anyone from doing with post-traumatic. When it hits you. Sure. You don't necessarily get to decide when that happens. It's,

in the book, it's very clean, if you will, you know, well, the actual interactions between the ghost and Keller are clean when the conversations happen, but when Keller first encounters him, there's just freaked out. Holy, what am I seeing here, even though he knows what, what's going on? And he's looking for that, that ability to converse and unload. And I think a lot of people are. I think they want that, depending on what.

what they've gone through in their lives. In our line of work with what we were doing in the military, particularly high-end kinetic combat, you've made decisions so quickly that when you come back around to really decide or look at that decision process, you may second-guess yourself for quite a long time. And I think I wrestled with that, myself and my own career, and that comes through in the book.

Yeah. I mean, I don't necessarily want to like, go through the entire plot of the book blow by blow because, well, partly because I think people should just read it to get that kind of information, but also because we kind of went through your own career, blow by blow in the last episode. But I would like to at least zero in on a couple different themes and issues and things that come up in the book. Some of it pretty controversial, I think. And you had mentioned you got some blowback already from this book, right? Yeah, I have.

Some people have not necessarily liked the method in which it conveys certain things. Some people have said that it presents Marine Corps and Marsock in a bad light. I don't believe so. I think that the narrative is a vehicle, that the backdrop is indeed the unit that I was in, but there are multiple units and things that these types of things that happen in the book have occurred. And there are items within the history of both the Marine Corps and Marsock

in which are illustrated in there and people have not particularly that has not been met particularly positive. So yeah, fraternally, there are some people who just went like, I don't like Ivan's work and I'm not endorsing it and I won't. Because it makes the brand look bad.

Yeah. And that's not something I sent out to do. I mean, I'm very proud of my service. I'm obviously a plank owner in Marsalk and it's not out there banging a drum trying to make that sound. But some of these things which... I think maybe you may reference it in the book,

but it's not talked about explicitly. You know, Fred Galvin's experience in his book. You know, so like he was exonerated, to be clear, and his guys apparently did nothing wrong. But, I mean, still there's this controversy and this terrible journey that him and his guys went through, which has some similarities to the protagonist of your book. There is, and Fred and I have not specifically spoken about his book,

but we spoke, I certainly knew Fred at the time that that was going down, and it does factor into some of the difficult parts of trying to remain loyal to your people, while there's a lot of things swirling around you, your own command to sort of turn their back on you. I tried to put myself kind of in Fred's position and say, okay, what might that have felt like? And it sort of, I wouldn't say it naturally fed to that, but it was just a way, going back to what Scott had said, hey, if you write this as a piece of fiction, it didn't exactly happen to you, but you look at it from it. It's a composite.

Right. Amalgamation of experiences. And truthfully, in the book, I do mention that the special forces units that were attached or working with us, in many words were there to keep tabs on us as a result of what happened with Fred and his guys because they just, so calm, at large and use of stock in particular, did not trust Marsog.

Right. And that was a tough thing to operate under at that point in time. And so, again, this is in no way to diminish anything that Fred and his guys and I knew many of them and still speak to some of them and think well of their service,

but they were in a very difficult spot that we all sort of live in their shadow of, regardless of how it ended up being solved, as you said, adjudicated. But at that point in time, it was all happening in parallel in real time as I was experiencing kind of what gets illustrated. And is there also sort of like a split in the command of people who are in support of and others who are like throwing the dude under the bus? This seems to happen inevitably. Yeah. that there'll be a split.

And there's something to be said for everyone gets their due. Let the legal process take its course. Everyone's innocent until proven guilty. But there'll be a lot of, well, I think they're guilty. Right, right. And you're either on board of this or not. And early in my career, I had just on a nominal level. I was an investigating officer for a because a piece of equipment, satellite communications equipment got broken.

And what happened is a bunch of guys who were offloading a truck, just grabbed the rug and just threw it off the back. As one does. Yeah. Just unloading at 2 o'clock in the morning, not knowing what was in it, and as a very expensive piece of equipment, it broke. and as I was brought in and after I did I was brought in after I did the investigation and I said okay this is what I found

literally it is no one's fault it is something that just happened yes the people who are responsible are these people however they wouldn't have done that if they know right to say this person broke this or this person is you know directly responsible check their pay that was just not possible

and the officer above me who I was giving that to was like someone will be blamed for this some go find I was like I was like I I can't go do that. Okay, who shall I pick? You insubordinate, you'll see a trend in there, you know, that I'm getting poked in the chest about that. So something can happen on that kind of smaller level

when you get into laws of armed conflict and some serious decision-making in, you know, split-second decision-making in difficult circumstances. That just takes it to another level. When you describe that, it reminds me of somebody who is on this show, but I won't say his name. I don't think he would want me to attach him to this story particularly, but in the special operations community.

And he was a leader. Some of his guys were out training. One of them got killed. Totally an accident. There weren't even firearms. The guy fell. And they wanted him to blame the subordinate, that soldier's team leader.

you know, throw him under the bus, fry him. And I'm like, hey, we've looked at this whole thing. Like, they didn't do anything wrong. And so the chain of command fired that dude and the guy who was the team leader. So he got fired because he wouldn't fire the team leader. I mean, it's like, what the hell? They can absolutely go scorched earth. And I do remember with Fred and his guys, you know,

there was this was kind of this Paul hanging over when they came back. Yeah, like I said, I don't think you directly referenced it in the book, but like there's this pole

hanging over the unit and I knew what you were talking about. And it split. And so as you see in the, you know, in the book, there's in microcosm, that's kind of what happened

that people take up sides. Hey guys, it's your pal Jack. I just want to take a moment to tell you about the sponsor for this show, which is Stopbox. Stopbox makes

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prepared and protected wherever you are. For a limited time only, our listeners are getting a crazy deal. Not only do you get 10% off your entire order when you use the code house at stopbox usa.com, but they are also giving you a buy one, get one free for their stopbox pro. That's 10% off and a free stopbox pro when you use the code house at stopbox usa.com. Discover a better way to balance security and readiness with stopbox. We were talking a a little bit about earlier how like these units form little cliques inside them. And this is like one of the big, I don't want to say like there isn't brotherhood in the military or in special operations. There absolutely is. But like when you talk to civilians or like when you talk to your parents, they have

this like impression that it's like the band of brothers and everyone's like, I got your back brother and you know, all this sort of stuff. And there's some of that. Sure, there's support. Absolutely. But as these like splits happen that you talk about, they're like these little friend groups, peer groups form. And, you know, what your future looks like in the military sometimes depends on which of those groups you're aligned with or friends with. I think that that lends itself to people also in a sense of self-preservation. Yeah. If it's loyalty to a fault and that's up and down the chain of command, well, then you're going to be. going down with whatever happens.

And if you distance yourself from that to some degree, then you can be, you can have a bigger standoff. And by not getting involved, you're better off, not taking up sides. But those loyalties go deep. And as I write in the beginning of the book, you know, we once pledged forever to the other,

and now we never talk. Right. Like, we, that's how a lot of this works. and the book certainly it centers around an officer Steve Keller

who is by all means my avatar if you will because as I said it started out as a as a biography although I developed Keller to be

a little bit different than me I mean it's just got it's more interesting than I am a little more depth but

the biggest thing is the the typical memoir the typical story, particularly the officer, generally not told from his perspective. And two, the officer, Hollywood has done a huge disservice because the officer is either incompetent or a complete, you know, self-righteous prick. And there are indeed some, you know, typecast guys in this book. But in the main, decision-making is hard.

And combat decision-making is hard. and maintaining cohesion while you're having your guys being involved in high-end kinetic combat and maintain their humanity, such as you can in those environments, is unlike anything out there. There's... Corporate can't envision that, no matter what they think on the layoff. There's also this portrayal, I think, there has been, and also the military, of course, itself advances this, this idea of like, you know, the zero body fat general that runs 10 miles every morning and is this like admired reader. We still want to think that. Yeah, we still, we still want to

think that. But I think over the last 10 years, there have been enough high ranking officers showing their ass in public that like that kind of perception has starting to wear off. And I think you can see that and how this, how the public relates to the military and everything going on right now. Yeah. And I think the book, tries to, or I attempt in the book to address the larger gap between the public and those of us are served because that's widening yet more. And at one point, we were all, you know, thank you for your service and we were serving in two fronts. And people kind of understood or knew somebody that was going to war or was at war.

And then as that started to wind down and diminish, you just, a few, and few people have that kind of exposure. And so because of that, those areas that you're talking about were it becomes yet more sensational. Right. I was like, oh gosh, has this been going on the whole time? Yes.

Maybe. You know. Hey, some of us tried to warn you. Well. And this is not a confession or apology. I promise. um yeah so there's a specific example in the book i want to get into but before we go into that we

should probably back up a little bit you know you start off you know your protagonist in the book steve keller he goes through uh marsox selection gets to his unit and um like pretty quickly kind of falls under uh his superior who kind of becomes his mentor um it was a joyce in the book right all in joys that's right and um i mean was that like a or that's obviously like as I'm reading this I'm like this is something that he actually experienced yes yeah and uh out of respect for the family of who that guy is based upon I have to leave his his real name out of that even though you loved him loved him yeah yes uh and he he was unlike any person i've ever met he's unlike any person anyone anyone probably has ever met and uh you know the basis for for who

he is and honestly some of the interactions that happen within that book have indeed happened to me um so i i have to i have him to thank for me getting involved um in in the way that i did but i that just rarely happens yeah that you get to have someone like that who's literally going to take you under their wing and and take you on their journey with them Yeah, and I mean, I think Steve Keller in the book is like kind of like beside himself, like, why does this guy even want anything to do with me? And I was. He was. He is. Yeah.

You know, and then, you know, the tragedy I feel like as I'm reading the book, Steve Keller, you know, things start to come unraveled for him, I feel like if you're going to point to a certain thing is when Joyce dies, when Joyce is killed in combat. And, you know, do you want to talk a little bit about, like, kind of what happened there? Well, you're friends with people, close friends with somebody. And then they have a friendship set, which you kind of get brought into, particularly if they've got a larger group of people with whom that they interact. And that may make you a periphery in some ways, although he, did not make me feel that I was a periphery. I was actively involved and I knew.

And he was, the thing that made him really, really great was that he just, he was friends with all kinds of people. He didn't really care of your M-OS or where you, which you, you didn't have to be a commando. And he just knew so many people and touched so many people that, by his presence,

you just felt good around him. And so I was involved in that. And then when, you know, in the book, when, when he dies and Keller has to sort of come to terms with now he's very, alone, or at least feels abandoned by Joyce's abandoned by Joyce because of his death,

he then comes to find that he was not necessarily in the club. Right. Or in that circle. And it wasn't that Joyce is lying to Keller. It's just like this is just how he made people feel. And without that central figure to be the, they bind it together. Yeah, to be the centrifugal pull. the central would be putting it out.

But to be that central focal point, that magnet, then people kind of dissipate. And that was a really hard thing for me to deal with personally when that happened, but also certainly it's conveyed in the book. That feeling of loneliness in alienation. That's another tone that's kind of captured in there. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of heart-wrenching to read.

And it's this very, like you can empathize, I could empathize with the protagonist and that there's this sense of like you're an insider, but you're still outside. Or you believed yourself to be an insider. Right. Yeah, exactly. And then you're like, wait a second. The door's closing.

I want to come. Wait, why is, why am I still sitting out here? And that kind of. And that was when at the, at the funeral in like Steve Keller is one of the pallbearers for his commander, but like these other guys are looking at him like, why are you here? Yeah. What are you doing here? Yeah.

who how do you how do you rate being here and you'd think being in combat with him when he died would be you know you kind of you would you would you would hope that that's how that all put that kind of matters and to to to to be fair in the in the in the actual you know world he um the guy on whom choice is based uh was killed out outside of me he he died elsewhere so i kind of okay because he in the book like you guys are on opposite sides of the objective right right right Right, and in this case, we're on opposite sides of the world. Okay, gotcha. In the real world.

But this just made it, it's an imagined idea of kind of what, gotcha. How I might have been when, if I'd been there when that happened. And that goes back to what we're talking about, you know, once you have the artistic space, the palette, you've got your palette, and then you've got this big canvas in front of you.

Well, then you can start moving together to say something. Yeah. And it makes the point pretty well. And I'll also say this. The book is, it's meant to be a story that people can relate to based upon, as I said, relationships. And my primary editor, ahead of sending, you know, to really finish the manuscript is a woman named Katie Keating. And she gave two passes, developmental passes on my manuscript. It's not a military person.

And she is not really familiar at all with. military stuff. So once she helped me like, hey, I shouldn't need a glossary to read this book. Like we got to clean up some of this jargon

that you've got. But on the other part, like she's like, you need to hone in on feelings and how people are reacting instead of being expository in the description.

Like people need to be able to read that in a different method. Again, this is helping me develop as a writer. I moved my selector from safe to fire. Exactly. And then if I product place the gun, then it becomes, you know, something else, right? Then it's a soldier of fortune

advertisement. And I didn't want to do that either. But ultimately, 85% of the people who consume books and read them are, are women. And I wrote a book, I hope, will be appealing to a wide range of people, of readers, even though I will not, it's undeniable. It's, it's, it's, it's, there was a military flavored book, but I've had other people read it. I've had female readers, had female beta readers read it, and they were like, this is great.

This is something very, very different. I mean, going back to what we're talking about with the relationship with Keller. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, to kind of go a little deeper into that, one of the things your book talks about is the relationship with the family, with the children, with the wives,

and Keller's relationship with his wife, which, like, they love each other, but also there's this separation. And like the more you pursue your marine career, the further away she kind of becomes and she feels this jealousy of it. And all of this, I mean, it was very like,

yeah, that's the part they don't usually show you in the movies. If so, it's done in sort of a sickly sweet kind of way. I wanted to have gravitas. I wanted to capture that sort of like, it's not just the crossing of the arms like you love these guys more than me it's more of like you're slipping away from me because right you're you're making this choice right and uh i'd be

remiss in saying that that that that did happen or denying that that that didn't happen absolutely happened and and i talk about compartmentalization in the book um particularly as it as it pertains to the military member going overseas and saying, okay, I have to be very focused on all of this. But a friend of mine made a pretty great observation that all you're doing is pressing pause, like on a DVD or VHS or something. Right, yeah.

That energy hasn't gone anywhere. The problem of that conflict, that friction is still there. you're just putting it somewhere else for a moment. Now how that comes to ahead, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, God forbid, family abuse, divorce, all of these horrible things that can happen as a result generally stems from, you don't understand me because, dot, dot, dot, well, you haven't allowed me in to understand.

Right. And so that becomes, that family dynamic was something I didn't think had been captured particularly well. I've had wives tell me over the years about how, you know, when their husband is repeatedly deployed for long periods of time. And when the husband is gone, the rest of the family, the wife and the kids get into this new routine of going to school and doing things. And the mother plays both the mother and the father role and all these things, right? And then when the husband comes back from deployment and they'll say things like, yeah, after he's home for like three or four weeks, I'm like, can you just deploy again? Like, can you get out of here?

because you're ruined in the routine. I was the fun dad, I admit. But I mean, it's a real thing. It's a real dynamic that exists to try to like find this balance, which is, I mean, hats off to any couple that finds it. I'm not sure I would say that I ever achieved the balance. We found a way to balance it. But I don't think I'd ever found the, I couldn't say.

Here's the secret guys. Like, you just do this. like a yeah it's different for everybody it takes yeah well I mean what do you think if there's like a key point to put your finger on uh to make it through all of that what what what makes the difference well I will say the compartmentalization for me did

um and there's also an acknowledgement when you get back that you you have to reenter the world that that is there not the one you want it to be and you can't reasonably expect them to come into your world again and understand it right and I will say particularly in the special operations community, the levels of divorce are absolutely astrodomical. And, you know, maybe it takes a while for a husband and wife to, or a guy, as he's,

this is sound bad, but making his way through wives, finding that person who's finally going to understand them. Or maybe it's just put up with your lame shit. I don't know. But ultimately, there has to be a meeting in the middle of that bridge. And you have to understand, you know, you can. can't go back and you have to be able to progress forward together and there has to be an acknowledgement and perhaps give yourself some grace for God's sake that you went through something terrible.

Yeah, and you can't come back with this attitude of like you don't know what I've been through because it's not their fault. How could they? And are you really going to lay that out for them? Yeah. Are you going to tell them? Yeah. Yeah. How could they know if you're not telling them? And I think a lot of ways, you know, the writing that I've done in my novels or novellas, the smaller books that I've written to up to this point, which were literally things that didn't fit in this book and kind of became their own stories, as well as my own writing, Substack,

and some of the other nonfiction commentary pieces, all of that has to do with a little bit of cleansing catharsis. I'm not sure that you can call it closure because you're never going to really close that out. But I think that you, for me anyway, that allows me to unpack those compartments and press play on those those tapes and and get it out and there's still plenty more maybe to write but I feel like I'm in a good space at this point I'm actually giving myself a little bit of creative pause even though every day I'm like I should be writing more I need to be doing more I need to be you know creating more I wrote this whole ass novel and it's taking me a long time to do it and I'm really proud of it and I love talking about it

I love talking about the writing process. I'm really happy to be on the show tonight to do that. But this is the first time I've actually allowed myself to sit back and go, you know what, man? He did something cool. Maybe it's time to just bask in that a little bit, you know. Yeah. For whatever it is.

Well, it goes back to finding the balance between like some of the bitterness or the decisions you wish you had made differently with, you know, I'm really proud of what I did. Yeah. I've got 17 reviews. I wish I'd had 1,700. I'd love to be sitting here right now with any number of accolades. Who doesn't want to be thought of well, right, that you wrote something great,

or you wrote something that people think are great. I'm not afraid of success. I just don't really know what it looks like at the moment. You hope that that that's going to somehow materialize. But on the other side, you know, I wrote it. People say, well, who's your audience for this? And I wrote it for me, and I did write it for my family, and I wrote it for people that I know.

And I think I wrote it for other veterans who might be struggling. And I wrote it for families and I wrote it, you know, there's all these things that kind of just blossomed as a result of this that I hadn't necessarily considered as I was. It wasn't like I set out. Look at this. Exactly. I'm going to put this together. And another aspect of it to, if we haven't ratcheted up the tension enough on this protagonist is that his wife has cancer, that she's having bouts of going into remission.

It's coming back. And I mean, again, that's like I had a teammate whose wife went exactly through that. I mean. And you're somehow got to stay focused on. On the mission. And especially as an officer. And this is the crazy thing is you want to do your job. Or at least at that point in time we did.

I wanted to play. I want to get out there. I want to. I got to lead my guys. This is what I joined to do. As Keller's told me, you were born to do this job. And I believed it.

And now maybe I'm not doing that anymore. I'm going, well, now what am I born to do? I guess it's be a writer or talk or I don't know. But at that point in time, it was like, okay, yeah, I firmly grasped hold of this. And you've got this whole other distractor on the other side. And I wouldn't call a distractor necessarily. It's not the right word. But you've got something that is pulling it at you that divides your attention and divides.

Right, right. It really does divide your loyalty. And if you spend too much time thinking about it, no matter how important it is to you, it can get you killed. Or as an officer, you can't make the right decisions. And that's a difficult place to be it. Yeah, I had, again, I won't mention the gentleman's name because I'm not trying to skyline somebody who doesn't want to be out there. But this officer that I had, you know, his wife had cancer and he didn't tell any of us about it.

It's just private business. He doesn't owe us any of those explanations. but it got to the point where he was like he finally, I guess you could say put his foot down and made the call like, hey, I have to go home early now. Like we're probably a little bit more than halfway through the deployment. I totally respect it. He's like, my wife is now at this point with this disease.

I have to go home and deal with this. Because I think he made the right decision exactly for the reasons you lay out. Like your loyalties are being divided, you know, whether you like it or not. I had a good friend of mine. as I was joining the Marine Corps, he told me, whether you're in the Marine Corps for four years or you make a 40-year career of it, at one point it will end.

And you will have great memories and great experiences that you can look back upon, but you need to ensure that your family is there at the end as well. Yeah. And you have to figure out what that looks like for you. And you may have to make some decisions to your point that are juxtaposed against your sense of duty. It's, you know, kind of ironical, I guess, in one way that, you know, while you're a Marine or a soldier,

whoever you're out there pursuing this dream of yours, but like the family structure really is the support system, even as you leave them behind. And when you see that support structure start to collapse, divorce and family splitting up, That's like an indicator, right, that things are not going right. And I think people are quick to blame the veteran or blame perhaps even the spouse for not sticking around. Yeah. And some could say who could blame them, especially if it's violent, especially if they're dealing with alcohol, substance abuse. They're wrestling with things psychologically and they, you know, I don't need any help.

One of the best things we ever did was especially in the special operations community was, not only get more psychologists, but deploy them forward to actually start talking to people. So you have someone to talk to you and the psychologist and quite frankly, the padre, the priest, whoever,

someone with whom you could just express these things with. Because it's not natural. Warfare is a human endeavor and it's also very unnatural. And so, as I allude to in the book, I write about it in the book, you can't be good at war and also revel in it.

I don't think. Perhaps there's sociopaths and people like that or just don't care, but I think if you're thinking, and we want thinking soldiers and we want thinking people who will make correct analysis, it's not enough to just thump your chest and say, it's war your ethos, we're lethal, and we're going to do, fuck all that noise.

You need to be able to have people who can make the right decisions. I mean, this is, for God's sake, we came up with the laws of armed conflict after World War I because it was so freaking bad that there had to be some method to, to, to, like, put limits on this shit. Now, it's a lot for a German soldier to say that using shotguns are inhumane when they were burning people with flamethrowers and using poison gas. But somewhere in there we have to be able to go, all right, he's got a point, you've got a point.

And how are we going to conduct ourselves? Because this is freaking terrible. And when you fight a war for 20 years and you do a volunteer force and you send people back for multiple deployments, and there were guys who had way more deployments to me in other units and saw much more protracted combat in very difficult situations. I know a guy who killed someone in hand-to-hand combat with his helmet. Now, you don't just go down to Home Depot and get a job after that. Yeah, I mean, it's an ugly thing.

Right. And so how do you deal with that and how do you come to terms with that? Never mind the fact that you might have done something that, you know, in the heat of the moment was one thing, but then you had a premeditation. Right, right. Because you were so angry that someone else got killed. killed one of your buddies. I mean, there's a psychology there that just is hard to wrap your head around. It's one of the reasons my father spent so much time studying unicohhesion and how people,

how soldiers in particular deal with stuff like that. What was he trying to kind of grapple with his own experiences? Well, my dad was a Vietnam-era soldier, but he did not serve in Vietnam. But he did help with the organizational psychology and the study of the United States Army in the post-Vietnam era, in particular, Staffancio Corps, in trying to get around why morale was so bad in the Army, not only in the Vietnam period, but then post-war, really, really bad. The military was bad all the way around, Marine Corps included. And that took a long time to rebuild. And so he spent a lot of time talking with people, guys in the brig, people who were in trouble for selling their officers, fragging their office with people who would drug dealers, etc. And it's like what? And it just really came down to, they felt, you know, these people felt that their leadership did not care about them and that they were just commodities.

And if we start, you know, in the modern military, you cannot look at the people that you've got to something could be easily bought or traded or just doesn't. done with you they have to be looked at first as human beings and treated with dignity and respect and I think that's what we really try to capture in the book is that the people in there matter and what they're going through matters even if they're bad that's this is really this interesting phenomenon that I've seen now of um dudes looking back uh at the 80s uh with rose tinted glasses and you know everything that came after that is political correctness and so on I mean the 1980s army was in a bad, bad way. Like, there was shit going on

that the American public just doesn't understand, like, fracking your squad leader, if he tells you to do something you don't want to do kind of stuff. Especially, like, over in Germany, the guys are stationed over there. I mean, I remember a general of that era

telling me, he's like, if we had to go to war with the Soviets, it would have been ugly. Like, he was saying, like, we were unprepared and not ready with that military. If you're in the market for a new mattress, you've probably seen all the brands out there vying for your attention. Big names, splashy ads, all promising the same thing. But here's the only brand that does it right. It's Ghostbed.

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Thank you. My father told me a story of it's called Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg, Germany. And they had a giant parade deck, parade field, that was flanked. on all sides by the barracks. And during the wintertime, inevitably, they would find blood in the snow and drag marks from people who'd been beat up. And so they started parking tanks on all four sides and putting these giant searchlights on to illuminate the parade deck. And then there were barracks in which the officer of the day, who was armed, would not go above the first floor. because the

rancor inside of the barracks was so bad that if they did, and this happened, one of the officers of the day went upstairs and tried to tell everybody, you know, hey, it's time to go to bed. They turned off the lights and put him in a stand-up, wall walker and threw him out of the window while he was in it. Jacked him up pretty bad.

So my father told me about this, Captain. In Vietnam, he is Silver Star. And he was OD. I was off of the day. And he turned to the staff sergeant and he was on duty with at the desk. And he said, I'm going upstairs because the boys are playing all this music. Whatever all else. Smoking reefer.

Smoking that devil's lettuce. Oh, yeah, it was probably just an absolute shit show. And he unfastened his pistol belt and he left. He said, I'm going to leave this here. And the staff started like, you're out of your mind. One, going upstairs. Two, unarmed, again, out of your mind. He goes, I only got seven bullets in this thing.

What am I going to do? So he went upstairs. And as he went upstairs, as my dad related this story, the lights went off and they heard this, hey, lifer, what are you doing up here? And he said, my dad told me the captain said, well, we got two choices. You can beat me up, which is probably what you're fixing to do. but really I just came up here to see how you are and I just want to know what's going on

so we can either fight in the dark or you can turn the lights on and we can talk like men and then the light came on so you serious? Captain said yeah I'm not up here I mean what am I going to do kick a hole in your high-fi I can't fight you

and then sure enough that's what happened people just sat down and they just like no one's listened to us like we're stuck here in Germany like we feel like nobody's treating us like men and that started a cycle where they started slowly writing the morale in that unit

and then the blood and the snow stopped and things started coming around now it's not like he was like I'm going to leave a trash bag out and put all your reefer in here we'll we'll you know amnesty box no

no hard feelings like he you know obviously how a lot to work with, but that was the first time anybody had tried to have any sort of legitimate conversation with them. And so, you know, as I was coming up as a leader and talking with him, it was like, well, you've got to remember that

you've got a lot of people who can think. And they may not seem like they're the most intelligent, but they absolutely know what's going on. And you ain't going to fool. Right? Well, like I said, Joe knows.

Well, Joe does know. Like I said, my first, you know, my first appearance here, I asked for who all my criminals were. Who can hotwire cars and who can get me stuff? Because when the shit hits the fan and I'm in a really bad place, I need guys who can get stuff done and I'm not going to be too worried about your education, if you will, about doing so. And so those relationships, the human relationships,

the relationships between staffiancio's and officers in particular as it goes down to the lowest level, that is the ladder. That's the glue of any organization, I think. And if you really want a good example of where that hasn't been working, Russia right now, with Ukraine is fantastic. Perfect example. They just don't have any sort of professionalism inside of their staff and

officer corps to be able to translate that to the people. Yeah, when you're having a push. It took a bit of a tangent there, but you're having to push North Koreans up to the front. I've heard they're actually pushing a lot of, um, African soldiers up to the fronts now. Yeah. Anyway, so back to the book, Joyce is killed, the funeral happens.

Now Steve Keller is being deployed, but with a new commander. And this is like kind of, you know, the meat of the book is this, in some regards, it's like the dream deployment, right? It's the epic Marsok deployment where you guys get to go and stay. ticket to the Taliban.

You get to call it heaven and hell. Yeah, yeah. And, but there's all this other stuff going on at the same time. Steve Keller is, we'll start with the first one here. Steve Keller is struggling with the anger he is carrying around over Joyce being killed. And it, like, leads him, there's this interesting scene in your book where it leads him to almost crossing the line. And, like, one of his, like, sergeants, like, kind of, like, I think it was the medic maybe, like, reels an end a little bit. Um, it's a platoon sergeant.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Without spoiling it. But yeah, it's absolutely, he's like, hold on. What are you doing? Like, you're, you're losing it, dude. Yeah.

No matter how righteous you may feel in all of this. At that moment. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you would, I think you'd hope that you'd have a good enough relationship with your staff and COs. That they'd tell you. Totally. Yeah.

And that they wouldn't be formulated that they would be like, yeah, okay, we're going to do this. Jesus. Well, I mean, but we've seen plenty of examples of that in real, in real world situations. And I think that's kind of what lent it, lent to that vignette. I did indeed find, you know, that facility, but that's not what happened there. But I kind of looked at like the psychology of like, how do you get to what it was a book where I think it's called Black Hearts, which is about a, army unit in Iraq that commits a war crime. That's a real one.

There's also the Marines at Haditha, which cost a lot of people their careers. You know, there's many, I hate to say it. But I started just kind of looking at these. And that's why I say in the book, like these things happen in some capacity. Not everything happened to me in the career. I was able to amalgamate, compile,

and then just sort of in my mind as a writer and as a chronicler say okay what is what would this look like if it was happening to him to them in a small small vignette and you know how would that be handled and I think I think there's um that's really where it's effective as you've got checks and balances if you don't lose face faith. Like, hey, everybody can make a mistake, but you didn't cross that. Right, right. Have you ever seen something like that where a junior soldier kind of stands up and does the right thing like that? Like, it makes me think of like the Eddie Gallagher trial, whereas all these young seals that were like, no, this isn't okay.

And the chain of command was telling them like, are you sure they were like trying to paper it over? But it was like the most junior soldiers in the unit that were like, hey, like, this isn't cool but that's probably who your audience is right like it's even worse if it's happening with a guy who's got a combat reputation right is decorated and then well shit man he's got to know what's going on here it's got to be okay especially if you spin them up you've taken some casualties you're pissed off and now it's like we're gonna whack and they admire they admire their leader they're like this guy is the shit yeah it's a cult of personality and go back to what we're talking about when you now you have these camps we're in there but um i think that that that stuff

generally does manifest itself from the junior level because they do, you know, have the conscience. You know, whether or not they've been exposed to everything that the person who's trying to do. They've been as institutionalized. And convinced that what they're doing is sacrosanct. Right, right. We'll be fine. Don't worry about it. No, we actually should be really concerned about this. And there should be ethics courses.

That's why ethics and combat training for, for ethics is very important, I believe, talking with people about it. I write about that in the book. I think the line I write is, you know, I thought we all saw things the same way. But there comes a time when the fabric of an organization will be tested. And that's where your leadership will truly be designed or tested. The design of your leadership will be tested. And so Steve Keller's new commander in the book is,

quite the character. He's amazing. He's quite the colorful character. I had a good time writing him. Yeah. I mean, he's a pretty reprehensible person, but I thought it was interesting that you kind of found a way even to humanize him and to try to find an insight of like,

okay, why is this guy like this? And it's coming out of, from my interpretation of the book, it's coming out of a massive insecurity of somebody who grew up in poverty and, you know, lack of self-confidence, you know, all of those things are kind of coming out in this way, to the point that he's even like making up stories about past lives he lived where he was a warrior in the Roman Empire.

Right. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so I wanted to create, I wanted to create this. So if Keller is based upon me and, you know, the traits of officers that I saw that I admired, and I also look at, you know, flaws within people that I knew and also myself as I captured that, Brian Garrity is his counterbalance, is Keller's counterbalance, his platoon sergeant. And I made him like this, and Brian's not clean, as you know, but he's, I made him sort of the super SVA, the super senior enlisted advisor of these great guys that I serve with.

I based him off of one guy and then I grabbed these other traits. And I was like, all right, what if I just stacked this and made this, this guy that just he's just got laser focus and he knows what's going on and he's Steve's right-hand man and in many ways his conscience or at least

can help him think consciously I wanted Ballantine to be the complete opposite of that and while at the same time also in charge and so you're like well shit he does have the rank

he does have the position technically he's not doing any anything unethically he's not he may be evil but he is not doing anything illegal illegal he may be shady but he's not necessarily a bad dude so to speak and so he became really an interesting guy to become to write and as I wrote about him and he is based upon several different people. I just made this mash-up guy that I was like, the, uh, wow, archetypical toxic leader. Yeah. And unfortunately, they're not hard to find. And they're, and they're out there. Maybe it's also a cautionary tale like, hey, maybe people will we read this and be like, am I that way?

Should I? Is it the mission at all costs? You know, where am I as a person? Some people are never going to have that epiphany. They're just, they're programmed that way. You can see that in, you can see that across what's military, corporate environments. It's the other thing about the book. I wanted people to be able to look at it. From a leadership perspective in that, toxicity and people making decisions

that are just frustrating to their subordinates is not germane to the military. It exists everywhere. Whether you're working in a grocery store. Big corporation. Big corporation, an intelligent organization, whatever. There's a human aspect to all of this.

And you hope in our line of work, and particularly in works, you have places that have screenings and polygraphs and all other stuff, that somehow you're going to weed out all of this stuff. But it's not a fail-safe. Well, one of the facets of this commander is that he didn't go through selection. He kind of, like, found a way to get grandfathered in. And that's a huge chip on his shoulder.

Right, right. Talking to his insecurity. Yeah. Did you ever come across a leader like that that makes decisions based on completely irrational bullshit? Yes. Did I say that too quick? Yeah. Like this guy is like making tactical decisions based on like his gut feeling based on when he served in like the Legion, you know, back with the Roman Empire.

Now, to be fair, I never actually saw that. I just thought it would be really fantastic to, to put that out there. but I think there are guys out there who really do believe. Like, somehow they've got this, you know, six cents, or they've developed it, you know. And, like, as, I mean, sympathy for the devil. Great song by the Rolling Stones. And, you know, if you listen to the entire song, it's just a guy that, it's the perspective, obviously, of the devil.

But he's literally like, I've been in through all this stuff, and I've seen it all. I wrote a tank in the general's ranks, you know, I've been a Blitzkrieg rage. Like I've been in the chaos and I help manufacture it and there's nothing you guys can do about it. And wouldn't that be a terrifying thing is to have someone actually believe it? I mean, there is a pretty, this isn't totally irrational or as extreme as the case in the book. But there is a direct connection with the way soldiers have related to and taken the symbols of Spartan warriors, Templar Knights, Crusaders, these sorts of things. and I always saw it as like an attempt to fill the moral void that existed in the war that we were fighting that like we didn't understand what we were there for and at a certain point we all knew that we didn't know why we were there.

I think it gives you some absolution and the feeling of righteousness in what you're doing. And I would be remiss, lying even to say that I didn't feel that in some regards, particularly, you know, in the early stages of the war. And if you look at the book and the way it's structured, you've got three phases. You've got kind of the first phase of naivete, the second phase of, you know, sort of learning and getting mature. And the third one, you just kind of surrendered yourself to the defeat of it all. You can even look at it as three phases of Afghanistan, which I didn't deliberately write as that. But that's kind of how it's, as I've gone to look at it has occurred.

But going back to what you were asking about, you know, commanders or people just doing completely irrational stuff are coming up with things. You know, when I saw some of the plans that we had enacted and they were saying, okay, this is what we're going to go and execute it. It was like, have we thought this through? okay so let's say we pull this off then what are we going to do I don't worry about that well no I am very concerned about that because yeah I've seen that with like units and other theaters like okay we can get in there and do this objective how the fuck are we

going to get out like you know those kinds of questions or what's the point after the fact right and and I you know I write about this in in my book the patrol where you know it's it's a day in the life of this unit and as they get done with it it's sort of like well okay, well, what did we really accomplish? And that's not laid out directly, you know, spoon-feeding the reader. But that's really the lesson at the end is sort of like, well, you know, came, he did this thing. It resulted in these things, this activity.

And what was the plan after the fact? And I've also seen commanders, brief hire commanders like, hey, this is a situation on the ground and we're doing great. What? I'm not doing great. You can't get the IDs to stop on this part of the road. We've been in contact every day since we've been here. Oh, we've inflected this many casualties on the enemy.

Well, we think we've infected that many casualties on the enemy. I know the casualties that we've incurred. So is that, you know, the balance, is that the metric? And that goes back to Vietnam. Or, you know, McKinsey and some of those analytical corporations came, Rand came to say, well, if we drop this many bombs and it results in this much and this is what, you know, victory looks like. Well, nobody told the Vietnamese is that that's,

what's supposed to be. And I think the Afghans, you know, kind of... Well, there's that study I always bring up, and I probably brought it up in our last interview. Lenny Wong's study, lying to ourselves, dishonesty in the Army profession about how we basically groomed an entire generation of officers on this idea that it's okay to send up false reports. It's okay to lie. And so every one of these units, when they got into theater, the unit was Amber, when they left it. was green. When the next unit came, it was amber again. And it went back to green by the end. And that repeated itself for 20 years. And I have, I said that in, in another podcast that, that interview that I did.

I, I don't believe there was any sort of plan for handoff as to like, okay, this is what it's going to look like. And then when you receive, not only here's what we've accomplished, but here's what we didn't get done and here's what you need to get done to move this forward. There's never like a 10-year campaign plan of like, okay, you're here for six months. You're getting this part of the plan done and it goes out this long because we always and we're telling the public too it seemed like our government was that we're six months away from victory. If you uncover that sent it to me, that 10-year plan. Yeah, that doesn't exist. By the way.

Okay. I just, you know, just to be clear. I still have hope once in a while. But it's, but it's, but it's, but it is true. And this is what, this is where the real juxtaposition comes down is because like a write about in the book and in my other, some of my other writings and as of late, some of my frustrations in my substack, it's hard to be proud of your service

and balance that against the larger picture. And with my own children serving in the military and my oldest daughter being married to Marine V-22 pilot, I'm extremely proud of their service. I'm proud of the military structure and I believe that it is valuable and service is valuable. But what I have found after all of this

is that our country needs to be really damn sure of what it is we're doing when we employ our troops. And I don't believe that that has been clear since Vietnam. I don't believe that across the board. And that's not to diminish the bravery of people fighting in Mogadish in the 90s. That's not to diminish any of the, you know, small wars, quote unquote, you know,

peacetime conflicts that we were involved in in the 90s up to about 2001. It was certainly dangerous. People died, never mind Central America, et cetera. People serving on the sharp end are doing their jobs at the best of their ability, but in the political side of that, it has got to be better to find,

and it cannot be just tied to a military industrial drive to keep profits rolling. And I'm not going to get too conspiratorial as we're sitting here, but it is absolutely inextricable. It may not be the driving force, but it's inextricable. That we're selling M16s. Well, we got to be, you know, our major export in this country is warfare. And we're good at it to a degree. But without those plans, without those sexist strategies,

without talking about exactly what victory is going to look like, we just get hammed up in these things. I think it's great that you mentioned that, you know, trying to juxtapose, you know, being proud of your source. service with the bigger picture, right? And I think we're at a point right now where a lot of, like, kind of our peer group, I guess you could say, are going through exactly that, trying to reconcile that. Because the war has ended, the guys that stayed in through the war on terror, they're retiring right about now. And they're all coming out on Sivi Street, and they're realizing,

like, they used to be part of a team and they fought as a team. Now they're by themselves. And they're having to think about this stuff. And, you know, back what we were saying a little bit earlier about, you know, the past and what we believed in the past. I mean, if you went and went to the Fobb in 2004 and talked to me when I was 21, yeah, I bet I had some pretty crazy ideas rattling around my head at that time. Me as a captain or no, 2008, for sure. But I see people today sometimes, not everybody, I see some people today, and it feels like they're still on the Fob in 2004. And that's some of that like warrior talk that we've been talking about, you know, Spartan warriors and warrior ethos and this kind of stuff.

And it's like, as hard as it is, like at some point you have to take the L as hard as it is, if for no other reason at all, so that you can move on with your own life and have a happy life. And that is, there's no reason why you should. Absolutely one of the bigger tenets of the book is reconciliation.

And kind of goes back to what you're talking about with the Valentine characters at all, war is all he knows and that's the only thing that gives him purpose and value and he has to look good doing it right he his his his image his his entire reason for being is tied to this and he cannot be seen as being inadequate cowardly he has his own issues and and i i think i think that messes with keller because he's like maybe i'm a little like this guy and i don't want to be And so we start to get into this whole scenario with the unit going after high value, their high value target number one is the guy that they think killed Joyce.

But at the same time, I mean, you know, you also, as they're kind of prosecuting those targets, and I think I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this and you didn't, you know, get to talk about it a little bit. there is also this big section of the book where you're talking about you know Marines executing highly professional operations, tactically competent operations and kicking some ass out there. And that's a part of the book also. And there's a futility to that as well. And, you know, night after night or objective after objective

and you're supposedly moving the war forward and performing incredibly well. as units and as individuals. I mean, the units I served in it, huge litany of Battlefield Valor awards. And the Marine Corps doesn't give out the rewards cheaply at all.

And that's not to diminish anybody who's gotten something elsewhere. But there are stuff that Marine get Navy commendation medals with Vs that would get you Bronze Star or Silver Star somewhere else, depending on Yeah, you mentioned it like the Steve Keller character gets hurt at one point in a firefight and it's just like, that fuck it, whatever.

Like I don't need a purple heart for that shit. Not when you got guys on ventilators, no. Exactly, yeah. Even though you rate it. I never had an earring in this year, by the way. Yeah, maybe maybe 20 years later you need that Purple Heart license plate after all. If my DD214 was rolling around on my car, then, you know, my truck and perhaps. But there's plenty of people with vinyl stickers that pulled that slack up for me, I think.

But, yeah, I mean, again, it's, it is a, it's a paradox. You don't want to be thought of as a coward. You don't want to be thought of of not pulling your weight. You don't want to be, no one wants to be not part of the team. Everyone wants to feel like you're contributing and doing something. And then it's sort of like, well, what is this all about? and as the casualties mount and you're still having gotten your guy and you just start to look around, well, what are we doing?

And that actually is what reigns the mind. The combat stress notwithstanding, but that is all compounding. Because during the moment, people will execute you will go to your training. You will go to the people that you've been around in the units that I served in. where you're very aggressively trained or obviously do that automatically as Marines, but then after that with resourcing and equipment and being able to just train pretty not only realistically, but in ways that other units just don't get that kind of exposure, don't get those opportunities to grab somebody from an SMU

and have them come teach you how to do some of the stuff that they do. and it just increases your ability, build your confidence and being able to do stuff. It's then when you're actually fighting and you apply that and it works. You're like, damn, man, I'm actually good at this shit.

And you feel good about it. And you come back and you're like, but we lost two guys tonight and we still didn't get our guy and I got months of this to go. Right. Or we're supposed to go home in two days and we just,

we just had somebody die. That drain that just takes the wind right out of you. Demoralizing for a unit. I don't know like how deep I want to or you want to get into with kind of the plot of the book, but there's

a conspiracy that gets hatched between this commander and is he a squad leader in the platoon? He's a team leader. Team leader. Yeah. And it's essentially to go and commit a war crime to go after HVT number one or your HVT number one and, you know, commit an extrajudicial killing.

And I say it's a conspiracy because at least in the book, Steve Keller has kept intentionally kept in the dark about this plot that they come up with. You want to talk? What would you like to say about that? Well, for Ballantown, it's about the win. so he doesn't care how he gets it. Right. And he knows what it will do, you know, for his career to get, uh, HVT number one off the battlefield.

And he also has a bit of deniability because if it doesn't go the way that he thinks it should, and you blame a team later. Like, well, and then he can also blame Keller, who is also his arch nemesis. Right. So we'll get too deep into, you know, what, what they do. Please read the book. But, uh, the big, the big thing is that, um, yes, it is enough of a conspiracy. but there's also enough plausibility in denying it.

And I think that's what really drives people the wrong way. It's like sort of like, we don't do this, we don't come up with this kind of stuff. Well, necessarily no. But we know that it occurs. I mean, as you said about Gallagher and others, you know, the vignettes are all out there. And so to compound all of that into, you know,

and the one thing, Keller wants more than anything, is to get this guy. The guy that killed Joyce. Yeah. So because that is something that just gets denied him and the way that it happens and then it's subsequent fallout, that becomes like its own,

now he's got to fight for something else. And what it is is his reputation, which again, juxtapose against Balantine, that's all he's concerned about. And Sun Tzu wrote, beware of the man who worries about only his reputation because he worries about nothing else. Yeah, that's person's hell to work for. Argumentates life.

So CID rolls in and there's an investigation. I mean, okay. In some sense, this guy survives the investigation, but like you said, his reputation is basically inextricably tarnished by these. events that he ostensibly had no control over, but hey, you're the officer. You're the guy. Yeah, you're responsible. And you know, in the book you talk a lot about or you describe a lot about like this character's feeling, feeling like ostracized from his own organization that like it's a brotherhood,

but now not so much anymore. Everyone's kind of looking at you like, oh, you know, are you a sellout or you this or you that? Yeah. And I mean, it's kind of relatable for some of. of us at least that, you know, it may be not the typical military experience, but sometimes you try to do the right thing and it blows up in your face. Well, I mean, I think you could probably call it a Jerry Maguire moment, right?

If you've seen the film or at the beginning, Tom Cruise is a sports agent and he finally decides, like, I can't do this anymore. And he writes this big manifesto treaties about how everything that's wrong with the sports world and how absolutely exploitative it is. and his own group of people are like, and he publishes this far and wide. And his own group of people are like, yeah, Jerry, I stand behind you.

I'm not with you, but I love what you said. And then he gets fired. And he has to pick himself up in the ashes of what he ostensibly was doing, you know, correctly. And he's sort of, he becomes this anti-hero in this cutthroat world in which he lives.

So the Marine Corps, could be looked at as a large corporation. You could look at what happens here in a corporate sense as well where there are people saying, you know, I don't agree with the way we're doing as far as personal management or fiscal decisions, et cetera. And we talk a lot about

and preach it. You need to have integrity. You need to come forward when something wrong is happening. But there's a risk with that. And when you do that, that will automatically get people I don't know if I want to get dragged down with that. I don't want to go back to what we were talking about earlier with people speaking up or people deciding, you know, he's my guy no matter what.

I'm standing behind him. And I think Fred and his own guys ran into that as well. Feeling very distanced, once the smoke cleared, if you will, it's like, oh, we're still friends. Yeah, but there's some words you can't take back, right? Or actions even. Yeah. And I remember picking Fred up from the airport. He called me and said, hey, man, I don't have anyone else to get me.

Can you come pick me up from Wilmington to 2 in the morning? I was like, all my way. And it wasn't like, oh, gee, Fred. I'm saying a lot of bad shit about you. But some people are like that. Well. A lot of people. people like that.

Yeah. And so I, I, I went and grabbed him and I, it was like we were driving along. I was like, so anything you want to talk about? Like,

you know, you didn't have to say anything. You already knew what, what was going on. And I had my, these are great, by the way. I'm glad you like it.

He had enough going on. And I think at some point, you just want somebody to be like, you know what, man? whatever happens it's okay between you and me and the difficulty

inside of units that are really close insular well that's exactly worth going with this is that they get very close as long as everything's going well everybody's really happy but that insular nature will actually become

insulation because people start to move to things that make them feel more comfortable. And for a leader, particularly an officer, that kind of situation, that's a very lonely place. And the most more extreme side of it is, you know, between this commander and this team leader, it's also an example of where a brotherhood starts to become more like a mafia. And it's like everyone kind of has dirt on each other, you know, and they're kind of like now tied into one another, in this case through crime and being elevated through the command structure in unison, right, as partners almost.

And that becomes kind of confusing, doesn't it? Because you're just like, wait a second, how could anybody... How's that work? How did you get back in this? Who? That's not how we're supposed to be. Well, he's a good guy.

He's a good guy, but good guy. And I would have him in a firefight. It's terrible if we take him out at a little bar. But it's a great guy to have him around. well, how much character do you weigh on that? I mean, I think the way I would describe some of these organizations is more like an organism in the sense that it, like, defends itself. If it detects a contagion, it starts deploying white blood cells. Like, we're going to destroy that.

Yeah. I'm looking for the military acronym, but it's, you know, it's isolate and bypass. Yeah, yeah. We're like, all right, just let that thing die out there. And that's kind of what you feel like. So, yeah, I don't know how much we want to give away about the book because we do hope people go out and buy it and read it. And I hope they do. It's worth it.

Link down the description. Is there anything else you want to say about like Steve Keller's redemption and sort of like that sort of like journey coming back from some of these terrible experiences? somewhere in everyone's journey. And I'll use the military side of it just because that's my perspective. And I've served 24 years of my adult life in military, particularly special operations. And I was enamored of it. I look around at your bookshelves. We've had these conversations before, you know, whether it was SOG or the early stage.

I love your book, you know, about the early stages of pre-Delta, you know, Army Special Operations. Somewhere in all of that, you make a decision to commit to this type of thing, or at least I did. And I think most of us involved in this for any period of time, you just say, okay, this is my vocation. This is what I pursue. I'm going to read about it. I'm going to understand it. I'm going to apply it. I'm going to learn to your point of your organization.

your organization should be a learning organization and you know your debriefs lend towards getting better and not repeating mistakes and you're looking for flawlessness in a lot of ways which is also unattainable and because of that impossibility put a lot of pressure on yourself to to be that and when that doesn't happen the guilt that comes with it particularly if you've lost people or you know you've you've destroyed relationships or you've just not performed as you'd hoped, there has to be a way to come to terms with that. And I keep saying that closure is not the right word because you're not going to close that out. You need to be able to address it.

And that's really the message in this book is that your past is something you have to not only live with but make peace with for its blind. is and it's good stuff it'd be too easy to just be like oh i did it all great and here's all the reasons why i.e balantine he's never going to have that idea of self-comeuppance where he just finally has a breakdown that's just not how he's programmed but in keller's case he's very much bothered by everything that has occurred and has struggled with that for really long time and the whole reason that joy shows up into his life is to be like look man it is time for you to to come to terms with this.

And you have to let go. And that doesn't mean released to the point of complete distance. But by doing so and really examining that, you can become whole again. And it is indeed a novel of healing.

And I believe at the end that's really the message. Because he is flawed. He's got a lot of things going on in there that, particularly the relationship with his family, his children in his later years and kind of how he looks back on them that he was trying to be the best man that he could be

and the best leader he could be. He's trying to be everything to everyone and he has to forgive himself for all the stuff that he just wasn't able to meet. And I think that's really what it comes down to is somewhere in there you've got to be able to just take a moment for yourself and go, it's okay for me to feel this way, maybe explore that. You know, you're saying this or reminds me of someone else we had on the show.

I think, D. Correct me if I'm wrong with Greg Daley, Marine Office or Marine NCO. Last name was Daley. John Daley. John Daley. John Daley. Tough Rocker Bathers. Oh, yeah. He wrote a great book. He writes in his book about, you know, some of the friends that he lost and so on. And he's makes it very, it's, it's, we don't often talk like this because it sounds selfish, but there's a truth to it too. It's like, hey, there's some advantages to dying young. You know, they, they died heroes. You know, when you live, when you live and you grow in an old age, you start to have these questions of like, was I inadequate father? Was I a good teammate? Was I a good husband? You know, all these things sort of sit on your shoulders. And in a firefight, you know,

you're not also going, is Jesus alive? Should I perhaps convert to something? Like, you're not having these moments, like, you know, of self-reflection, you know, epiphany type stuff. And I actually quoted Keith Richards in the book, you know, he says, nobody wants

to get a hold, but who wants to die young? Yeah. And Keith Richards taught Willie Nelson how to play the guitar, it tells you how old he is. Perhaps. But yeah, I think there's just a lot of, perhaps some universal

tenants in there that people can get a hold of. And that's, that goes for anything, I think as people retire as they get older, regardless of what they did, they didn't, you know, once you might have those moments

around the golf course or what have you, and be like, man, maybe I wasn't the best guy at that point in time. And it's just weird when stuff pops in, and people ask me, like, how do you come up with these stream of consciousness moments

where the guy's just thinking about something random? Because that's how people think. Right. that's what happens. I don't know if it's going to work in a novel. Like, well, does it make you uncomfortable? Because you're just, you know, eating a piece of pizza one day and you're like, man, why don't I ever say that?

Because that's when it comes up. Alana, you have any questions that you want to ask? Off camera. Are you sure? Yeah. We're all here. I can give you the mic. I say, we're all here.

Give her the mic. Yeah, come on. Yeah. Here we go. We can top off. We can top off. No, I loved what you said. I thought it was so raw and honest.

And I'm like doing with this. You're just talking. No. No, I, you know, I was thinking because I wrote a piece about how, so much of what you said resonated with me because I wrote a piece about how, for me, writing, it doesn't really, like, exorcise, you know, your demons, but it does help you make peace with it, I think.

That was the exact term I used too. You know, so. Yeah. That resonated with you. I believe it is a great outlet for me. Organizing thoughts and trying to get that. Put in kind of the Hemingway method of being as crisp and clean in the way you present that as you can be with the fewest amount of words.

But as someone who is trying to. as an expository writer that doesn't always work really well because you want to write as much as you can to explain things. And I think it is the challenge is to capture that in such a way that it has all the feeling and the emotion. And it deals with or conveys the message without being overt and also allowing the reader to understand. why you're being spare. And that's tough. Yeah. Or the reason he was really good at that, right?

You know, and the rest of us aren't. I have a question. You said you have two kids in the military? Mm-hmm. So what has their experience been and what sort of insights have you given them? Oh, they're on their own. I don't know. So my daughter went to West Point, which is its own leadership,

laboratory and she had a very I would say idealized view of kind of what being an army officer was going to be like and then she got to her first unit and then she was like West Point we'll do that. Right right and she was like

so we have had many conversations about leadership and both you know above you adjacent to you leading staff NCOs so the best I can give her perspective is we start to talk about different situations.

And it's not to say like, this is what you should do. It's more like, okay, I've encountered that before. Here's some things you can think about as far as, you know, talking to them, whoever it should be. But yeah, she's, you know, your second lieutenant, first lieutenant, you don't have any clout. You don't have any ability to affect much except for the people beneath you. And I think that military leadership is really should be about servant leadership.

and the higher you get, the more difficult that becomes, you can think of that in a corporate sense, too. And I think there's people in corporations who just don't have any perspective on that at all. You know, really care. They're not really tied to that. It's just a different set of programming. And certainly my son, he joined the Marine Corps.

He wanted to be a Marine officer for different reasons than I did. And he has created his own path. but still has to deal with the same things. And just the, I think there's an idea that you're told, and you talk about installation, inside of these officer training programs,

that this is how it's going to be. And then you get out there and like, wait a second, I didn't think I'd have to deal with a guy like this. Or how do you get somebody who just doesn't want to do this, you know, to at least do it enough until they get out type of thing? And there's a great, great book by Mike Malone. Michael Dandridge Malone called Common Sense Leadership.

It's only about this big. Absolutely fantastic. You should add it to the shelf. My dad used it. He gave it to me, and both of my kids have used it. So we've got generations of Ingrams using this book. I recommend it. I learned a lot from that, just reading it and applying his lessons, Malone's lessons.

He's a good friend of my father's to small unit leadership, particularly at the platoon level. and then as you get up, you know, further up the chain, there's tenants that you can pull from that. But I think people sort of look at, particularly in the junior officer side of it, that that's just sort of their formulation period. And then once they're done with that platoon, a company time, they can just move on and they'll put that behind them. But that's actually where you formulate who you are as a leader. It formulates your core. And if you get away from that, then that's where you start to diverge, from your values and tenants and things like that.

I hope that answers that a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned Hemingway. Who are your other literary influences? I like Michael Her, who wrote Dispatches. He also is the primary screenwriter for Full Metal Jacket. Okay.

Very interesting guy. I like Joseph Conrad as a novelist. I like Ambrose Beers. also a war novelist are actually rather pragmatic kind of dark writer but very interested like Jack London

I think he's really got some I love Jack London Yeah he's just Stephen Crane He's another Another very interesting writer I do like Edgar Allan Poe very

Again very dark But his prose is tremendous Have you read Tim O'Brien? I do like to. I love the things they carried. I like Carl Monterlons's Matterhorn also. It's some of Fields of Fire by James Webb. There's certainly plenty of modern authors, but some of the older literary people are awesome. Really enjoy them.

Great. You gave me a couple recommendations for World War II novels that are still sitting on. I bought them. They're sitting on my bookshelf. and hopefully I will get to them in 2026. What is it, Here to Eternity is one of them? Herman Woke? No.

No, that's Winds of War. Sorry. James Jones. He wrote Thin Red Line. Yes, he did. That's right. Yep. There's a trilogy.

Yep. Yep, yep. Steinbeck also huge. Speaking of Vietnam, he did a lot of dispatches from Vietnam as a writer, correspondent. I like John Steinbeck stuff as well. It's fiction is fantastic. Can't beat it.

I have to admit, I've never read the book. You need to read it. But I love the movie. Well, I haven't seen the movie. I was going to say, only watch the 1930s version. I watched the new one that came out, and the nihilism of it resonates. It has good tenants, but it doesn't, I believe it doesn't capture what the 1930s version is. Okay, I'll look for it.

In German. I just got on Blu-ray, actually, since we're on this topic, it up. Probably like my favorite war movie is actually this, it came out probably in the late 40s. Have you ever seen the Americanization of Emily? John Gardner, James Gardner is in it. And it's an anti-war film that was made right after World War II. It's like, it's an incredible movie. Okay. My favorite anti-war movie is Grand Illusion. Fantastic French film. Well, I'll look for that one too. I'm always fascinated by how many people we've interviewed on the show

who were inspired to join the military by watching Full Metal Jacket, which is like a full-throated anti-war film. We all fell for it. Man, oh, man, we did. Us jarheads, we really did. Speaking of which, Eugene Sledge, with the old breed, that's a fantastic memoir, Marine in World War II.

Yeah. His, yeah, it's a really, really great book. So tell us about the next novel coming, Ivan. It sounds like you're kind of in the final stages of writing it. Yep. It's called The Bear on the Wolf. It is a thriller. And this has a, this has tenets of a thriller.

But this in this case was absolutely written as sort of a cop drama. kind of thing. Adventure, murder mystery. Yeah, absolutely. It's got a very sinister tone to it. A little bit of a departure from where I've been writing, but actually that was a great next project after not only writing the other four novel novellas that I've written that have led to once we pledge forever, but now this one is just something very different.

I actually had to do a lot of research talking to police officers and some former military guys. And I said it in the 1980s, so it's not technology heavy. It requires a little more detective work and development. The book, the novel I have coming out in June, like it's very much set in a remote part of Africa. And when you strip all the technology away,

it's interesting that it allows you to kind of really focus on the characters. And the characters have to be much more. interesting because the political intrigue isn't there, the technology isn't there, you don't have these sort of gimmicks to rely on. Well, and because I said it in the 1980s, exactly what you're talking about, we have this idealized notion of what the 1980s are. And I took kind of a dark undertone with that, but really what influenced it was just the soundtrack I had in my mind of what this thing should look like.

The Pesh Mode. I did send you a link on that, the police, you know, foreigner, you've got Van Halen. Yeah, there's all kinds of great stuff. from there. It's a little, little eclectic. Tell folks a little bit about what the book's about, because I'm really interested by, like, the premise of it. I think it's an untapped moment in history, if you will. So essentially, it ties in with the serial killer scare. It's not to say they're not out there still, but certainly in the 1980s, we were growing up, you had just a large number of very high profile cases of people being serially murdered or having some really

bad things happen to them. And I looked at it from a perspective of, well, what if there was somebody who was involved in human trafficking was also a serial kidnapper, but he also has his own things that he likes to do. And I said it in Alaska. It's very remote. So the way he does this is, I won't reveal that, but he's kind of hidden in plain sight. And it's also tied to a fledgling group of the hostage rescue team out of the FBI, who at that point in time were developing different skill sets to conduct hostage rescues. And I kind of looked at, well, what if they managed to track down a guy who was doing this,

but his location was so difficult to get to that you had to have very specialized people to do so. And because it's set in the United States, you can't just use military forces because of posse comitatus. And how would they go about doing this? So if you haven't, I suggest reading or even contacting Danny Colson wrote No Heroes. He's the founder of HRT. Well, I actually wrote him into the book. Oh, really? So I probably should.

He's a cool guy. I wrote him, well, because at the point in time, it's really when the unit's being founded. And I talked to several members who are members of that unit, not only presently, but at that point in time. And, yes, it's a work of fiction. I take a little bit of liberties with kind of like how they go about doing stuff. But, yeah, it is action-adventure, but there's also a huge detective part of this, which, as I mentioned in, my earlier appearance on the podcast. I originally planned on being a federal law enforcement agent,

so I think I'm trying to scratch that itch that I might actually have gotten to do that. It'd be a little bit of a gum shoe. But I also very much influenced by the Netflix show, Mind Hunter, as I was looking at just, oh, yeah, all the stuff that they were doing with that. I was like, well, what if they just melded, you know, the investigation with this, you know, action arm of the FBI?

Right, right. And then we're able to come up with how they were going to, you know, track this guy down and the things that he's doing. Yeah. It got to a point where when I was in the head of the antagonist, the primary, you know, serial awful guy, calling him a killer is not, it doesn't do him justice. But I was just like, man, am I really developing this guy like this?

Like, is there something, maybe I should take a break from this for a moment as I put him together. HRT is an interesting unit because they're a counterterrorism unit, but at the same time they're also badged law enforcement, federal law enforcement officers that can investigate crimes, make arrests, testifying court, all that stuff. And they have to. Yeah.

You know, it's not just like, with us, it's really clean. You just go in and shoot up the bad guys and, I, we're, see you later. We're at them, you know, they've got a whole chain of custody that, if they're involved in it, they still have to, you know, participate in that whole, whole piece. When do you think that book's coming? Well, I hope Mike Sager's watching this and we can start talking about it.

But I need, I don't yet know. I really need to get it through, as Hemingway wrote, the first draft of anything is shit. I don't think it's shit, but it's definitely not great. It needs some work. Beta readers need to get their hands on it and need some feedback, and then I'll probably go back to Kitey and get some developmental editing and go back through my process. but I would love to see it come out in 2026. Cool. That's not a reach. It's just a matter of reason. Got it work. So far, the book's doing well.

I'd really like to get it higher visibility and people read it and just take advantage of what I do have out there. But yeah, always looking at the next project, I think of the S. But right now that's refining that. And I've got some screenplays that have been poking away at some other projects as well. Cool. Cool. So the book, once we pledged forever, it's out now.

There'll be links down in the description for you guys watching the podcast or listening to it where you can go and find it. It's Amazon, wherever else people go to buy books. Yeah. I think Mike has got it on multiple platforms. Gotcha. Sega Group is, sorry, the main publisher. Got it. Anything else that we haven't covered?

Anything you want to say about the book or anything else before we get going tonight? No, I think we've covered it. said I'm really pleased with it. Love the way that it finally came out. It's a journey. As Elena will absolutely attest, as you as you well know as well, publishing is a, it's a process. Writing is a process, getting it published as a process,

and just getting it out there as its own thing. A learning experience. Yeah, and so if anybody has done it, you know, congratulations. And if you're thinking about doing it, you know, just go, try. I mean, there's plenty of stuff out there. Yeah, we interviewed also just recently, I think he's a buddy of yours, Worth. Worth Parker, that's right.

Yeah, he's a writer also. Yeah, he's better than me. Yeah, he is. He's helped me a lot with just my own process. And I've done some writing for Tom Bebke and his guys, or his form, lethal Minds Journal, his substack forum is cool. Oh, that's right. And you have a substack plug that. Tell people where they find it.

Ivan F.ingram.substack.com. I publish every week. Lately it's been commentary. I'd like to get more in the creative space or at least more reflective space. It just kind of depends on my mood, but I try and publish every week. I do encourage people, obviously, to be paid subscribers.

Helms me out as a writer, but you need not subscribe as a paid member. There are some things that I publish exclusively for. the paid side of it, but ultimately it's really meant to be, you know, for discussion, discourse and for people to kind of just get a flavor of what I'm working with. And I kind of look at it as writing is a lot like playing an instrument. You need to practice to get good at it. And Substack helps me do that. So some weeks, I think, nailing it. And other times it just doesn't quite sound right. But I appreciate anybody who reads it anyway. So we know how that goes. Yeah.

the only way you get better is by reading and writing that's it and having other writers read your stuff and tell you're probably not as good as you think you are that's all right uh so guys go check out the novel uh like i said i really enjoyed it i read it on the kindle hard copy is also available um really like like i said it i felt like it kind of like tells the marine raider story kind of from front the back, you know, from the beginning to the kind of like recovery process. Yeah. Well, it is a psychological book for sure, not just while you're in it, but it is meant to make people think. And I don't think there's anything else out there quite like it as of now. I don't believe so. Yeah. My publisher said the same thing. It's like I've never actually read something like this.

Yeah. Yeah. This is very different, pretty different kind of book. Maybe special even, but So thank you, everyone, for joining us tonight, and we will see you next week. Thanks for joining us. Thanks. It was awesome. Appreciate it, Ivan. Hey, guys, I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Team House podcast, the Eyes on podcast, and the high side news outlet,

which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox. and you're going to get the most current podcasts on IZON and the Team House and whatever's topical or current on the high side. So it's another way for us to get the information out to you as social media algorithms are pretty iffy and you never really know what you're going to get. So this is a once a week email. It'll slide into your inbox and it will have the greatest hits of that week. It's really good, man.

Checking it out. The website for it is teamhousepodcast. dot kit.com slash join teamhousepodcast. dot kit.com slash join. Go there and you enter into your email list or you enter your email into the little thing on the website and you're good to go and that'll be it. So we really appreciate your support and hope you'll consider signing up. Where's the link?

The link will also be down in the description if you're looking for it there. And that's teamhousepodcast. dot kit kit kilo india tango dot com backslash join