The Team House - Marathon Deployments in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne | Andrew Bragg | Ep. 318

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Andrew Bragg is a combat veteran who served in the US Army for four and a half years after graduating high school. During his time in the military, he served as an infantryman and deployed twice to Afghanistan, first with the 173rd (1-503rd PIR) for a fifteen month deployment and second with the 82nd (2-508th PIR) for a twelve month deployment. He grew up in Hilliard Ohio but has moved west since getting out of the military. He worked as an EMT while going through school and graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Currently, he lives his days in the Rockies where he enjoys rock climbing, hunting, and various other outdoor activities while spending time amongst friends and family.Grab Andrew's book "The Devil's Playground: The Story of Two Charlie and The Arghandab River Valley"https://www.amazon.com/Devils-Playground-Charlie-Arghandab-Valley-ebook/dp/B0DG6KP34Q?ref_=ast_author_mpbOrder Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured—————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 50% OFF!!!Mando ⬇️https://shopmando.comPromo code "TEAMHOUSE" for 40% off your starter pack.____________________________________Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]0:00 start #82ndairborneBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to and we really appreciate that so go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house special operations covert ops espionage the team house with your host jack murphy and david park everybody welcome to episode 318 of the team house i'm day park with Jack Murphy and tonight we're happy to welcome Andrew Bragg, Andrew with the 82nd Airborne. Actually, with the 173rd end in the 82nd? Or are they both? Yeah, that's correct.

Yeah, I did a deployment with both. All right, great. And we will get to some very, very harrowing tales right after Jack, thanks to one of our sponsors for tonight. So I want to tell you guys about Mando. They make a whole body deodorant. that safety use anywhere on your body. It's created by a doctor who saw firsthand how normal B.O. is being misdiagnosed and mistreated.

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Teamhouse at shopmando.com. That is shopmando.m.a.com. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Smell fresher, stay drier, and boost your confidence from head to toe with Mando. That's like the new Ranger Creed. Anyway, Andrew, thank you very much. One of the things I failed to mention is your book, The Devil's Playground, that talks about one of your deployments,

the one in the Argonaut Valley. But let's start from the beginning. Tell us your origin story. How did you grow up, and what led you to the military? All right. Hilliard, just west of a, Lumbus and just corn and soybeans. That's I was a country boy and I really just loved military movies. I watched Black Hawk down and same private iron and you know just like any young lad would do.

And that's what really kind of sparked my interest. But I remember when 9-11 happened, I was in the eighth grade. I was an art class and my teacher turned on the TV and I watched the second, plane crash into the tower and it really kind of solidified my wanting to serve my country. And I knew that is what I was going to do ever since that day. So once I graduated high school, I enlisted into the Army. And yeah, that's where it all began. So, I feel so old when I hear somebody who was in the eighth grade when 9-11. So how old were you or what year was it?

I imagine you're 18, but what year was it when you enlisted? So I enlisted in June of 2006. Okay. All right. And so you went in infantry? Yep. I was an 11 X-ray contract. So I had the RIP, Airborne and Rip.

Made it through Airborne. Went through Rip. Made it all the way through Coal Range. The day we were supposed to buy our tambourets, they pulled five of us aside and was like, you guys didn't pass your history test, you're out. So we got recycled. Yeah, we got recycled and I don't want to go to Colerange again.

So I chose to go worldwide. That end, it was like right around Christmas time. And I was just tired of being in training. You know, I wanted to actually do what I set out to do in the military. So I decided to go worldwide. and I got orders to go to the 173rd in Italy. Very nice out of Vicenza, right? Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. And how was that for you? That was all right. I didn't spend a lot of time in Italy, unfortunately, because that was the 15-month deployment time frame that the Army was sending out guys for 15 months instead of the usual 12 months.

So I got to Italy, immediately went to a whole number, Wendzfeld, Germany, to do kind of like our, their version of JRTC out in Europe to kind of like certify us for deployment. Got back from that and then went on pre-deployment leave and then deployed to Afghanistan shortly after that for 15 months. Wow. Wow. So none of the glamour of being stationed in Italy.

Yeah, no. I didn't get, I did get to travel a little bit, but not. as much as most would like. Yeah. So you, where did you guys end up in Afghanistan when you got there? So with the 173rd, we were in Pactica province. That's eastern Afghanistan. It's right along the Pakistan border.

We were, our company was at Bob Burmell, is what it was initially called. But then I believe it was renamed Fab Boris, because one of the Calvents. Henry First Sargeons died there after hitting an ID and his Humvee. So they renamed his, or that Fobb Boris. And we spent the entirety of that deployment building and manning, you know, combat outposts. I don't know if you guys heard of the documentary Restrepo. Uh-huh.

That was that time frame. I was with the first of the 503rd, and that was the second of the 503rd. So they were up in the corn and gold just north of us. But we were doing the same stuff. You know, we built a, one of the problems was all our major bases were, you know, in the valleys. So they would rocket us and it used a lot of indirect fire to engage us. So to mitigate that or minimize that, we would build our outposts and give them something else to shoot at. So that's what we did.

We built a Malik Shay Kopp out in the mountains right along the Pakistan, border. So we'd intervene with their, limit their freedom of movements across the Pakistan border and, yeah, just fight out in the mountains instead of at Faber Mel. And yeah, we constructed from the ground up, Malikshay cop. And it was a pretty sweet cop. I'm not going to lie. Yeah. The thing was, yeah. Oh, yeah. We eventually ended up like getting like Humvee glass, so the bulletproof glass and installing that in the guard towers and stuff like that because we had a lot of a lot of a lot of fights going on and we had the 120 mortar tubes up there and the 60 millimeter mortar tubes

and got to learn how to be a Charlie just in case something happened to the Charlie team up there. So yeah, I did a couple of fire missions, you know, with the 60 on my own. That was pretty cool. But I really got to learn, you know, what it meant to be a soldier. and, you know, what I meant to fight. And, yeah, really master, you know, my lane. Yeah. And what was the, like, what was the operation? First off, what size was your element up there?

And then what was the operational tempo like for you guys? Yeah, so our company was out of Faber Mel, and we'd leave a platoon up at Malakshay Cop. And then we'd have a platoon. So we'd have a platoon at the, at the fob for like force protection and kind of like a down week and then we'd have a platoon up at the cop doing force protection and patrolling out there and then we'd have like another platoon doing mounted patrols and you just kind of rotated through that cycle I don't exactly remember

how long those cycles lasted like I don't know if it was like a week and then you rotated but I know once like winter would hit access to the cop was very limited with the snow and stuff so you know we got stuck out there for like 90 days uh wow one time yeah um and you get resupplied by you know helicopters and they drop off pallets and stuff off of planes and we go secure them but uh yeah i can't remember the the rotation you know of that schedule and then there you know we do support uh operations we had like operation uh i can't remember it's like winter storm or something where we would go and for a whole month. We do just basically a presence patrol in a village, just kind of letting the locals know, hey, like, yeah, the Taliban might be hibernating, but we're still here. We're still, you know, trying to win hearts and minds. But a lot of our operations were along the Pakistan border and we were trying to intercept, you know, guys that were, you know, coming in and out of Pakistan.

Taliban going over there for R&R and then coming back with more guns and ammo and guys. We got in a lot of fights in the mountains out there. Yeah. And what were those fights like? Because you guys, you know, we have a lot of people from special operations on the show. And a lot of times, you know, it's a Gucci mission. I mean, it's a hard mission, but it's a Gucci mission. And you generally have whatever support you need.

You've got air, you've got dedicated fires. And if you don't have dedicated, at least you're high on the priority of fire. buyers. For you guys, what was that like? Well, during that deployment, we had a lot of priorities, assets set out to us just because of who our company commander and battalion commander at the time were. McChrystal was my, my, Captain McChrystal was my company commander at the time there. So, yeah, we, I mean, it's not like we didn't have a,

lot of like, you know, like, HBT hits that we would do, kind of like the special operations, would, you know, like the grab and goes or stuff like that. It was kind of like a movement to contact, you know, we were doing presence patrols. We are trying to engage with the locals, establish relations with them while just, you know, playing a big game of fuck around and find out. Yeah. And, yeah, we wanted to see if anybody would find out or, you know, fuck around with us. And, I mean, most of the time, since we had such a huge area to cover, we'd be mounted in our Humvees. So I was always the lead truck, 50-Cal gunner. That was like my bread and butter.

I love that gun. But, yeah, so we'd be driving around the Watties and the low grounds, because that's kind of where the roads are. And that's with the terrain. That's really all you could really drive through was, you know, the creek beds and stuff. So then, you know, we'd get into a lot of fights where they're up on the hills. shooting down on us and very rarely would be there was occasionally some close contact but a lot of the fighting was mountain top to mountain top so you know your launching machine gun rounds you know from one mountain to another we're just watching tracers you know and then seeing their uh muzzle flashes

and stuff um but uh the number of enemies that we had come across the border was was quite significant There was an operation where we were in support of an engineering company that was building an outposts, kind of similar to what we were doing by ourselves. But we would secure the surrounding areas and basically tried to give the enemy something else to shoot at while the engineers were building this compound. And yeah, when we were exfilling from that operation, our company came into a 150, man ambush and the kill zone was over a kilometer long. And they, you know, it was a, they, they were waiting for us there. I'm just glad they didn't have an ID set on that road because, there was only one road in and one road out. So the entire operation, they were just messing us, messing with us with indirect fire, you know, rockets and mortars. But on their way out, that's

when they, they hit us with their direct fire contact. And they disabled one of our vehicles. We had to get like ex-ville or you know get guys out of a burning vehicle and the whole shebang. And yeah, it was a long day. But, yeah. I bet. And how did you guys fare in that fight? That's the crazy part about that deployment was, is we didn't act. We had casualties, but we didn't have any KIA.

Everybody made it out of there. I say, you know, with minor injuries, but that's, you know, that's in perspective. Because, yeah, taking shrapnel to your legs and stuff, you know, not minor to you, if it's your legs. But after dealing with, like, the amputation injury, the multiple amputation injuries and stuff that we were dealing with on my second employment. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, it's a little minor.

But, yeah, I apologize if that offends people that, you know, that might not be minor to them. Yeah. Yeah. So are there any like major stories or any like high points or low points of that deployment that you want to talk about? There was one day where we are out on a mounted patrol close to the border and truck two. I was truck one always. So truck two, they got high centered on something.

I don't know. They got stuck. So myself, our truck, and they got. and the dismounts in our truck, we pushed to the nearest hilltop to kind of provide Overwatch while the rest of the platoon was like unfucking truck two. And so as soon as we crested this hill,

the dismounts in my truck got out and as soon as their doors closed, that's when the enemy on the other hilltop started opening it up. So it was myself on the 50 Cal, our saw gunner, and then my squad leader were the only ones, you know, that were able to engage this element. And that day sticks out to me because, man, I could like just, I don't know if you've ever had a chance to use the 50-Cal machine gun. But when you have a 300-round startup belt on that sucker and you go through it cyclic, that's always a good day.

Yeah. And, yeah, just no one got hurt that day, thankfully. We were able, the rest of the platoon was able to get the truck two unstuck and assist us. And we had the mortar team in the third truck. So once they got to us, they were able to assist and we were able to fight off that force. But for a minute, I had to lay waste by myself so that my dismounts could get back to the truck. So that, I hold that day special in my memories. Yeah, I'm at full mass just listening to them.

Yeah, me too. Yeah, I mean, and it's funny, it's, did they have a Dishka on their side, or was it like smaller arms like AKs and maybe PKs that they like? Yeah, they had a lot PKMs, RPKs. They were shooting RPGs at us, but thank God there wasn't any Dishkas there that day. Otherwise, I might have been met my match. But, no, it's just, it's funny when you guys are hiding behind trees and then you shoot the trees over. Yeah. That's what I was going to say is it. I like to imagine their shock and awe when they open up and all of a sudden a 50 opens up in response.

And it's like, oops. Oopsie. Yeah, I don't think they were ready for that one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I love hearing stuff like that. So how long was that, you said that deployment was 16 months or 18 months? No, that was a 15-month deployment.

15 months. And how did that wind down for you? Like I said, I mean, we had a lot of fighting. So once we were done with that 15 months, it felt pretty good to, you know, take off the cape and go back home. But we got pretty lucky. We didn't take any KIAs. Our fob mates, like I said, the cab unit that was with us,

they lost their first sergeant. But our company, we didn't take any KIA. It's a company. I lost a couple of guys. And I'm sorry, I apologize. I can't remember if any of the other companies had KAs. But I do remember that our company was pretty fortunate and we didn't have any KIAs. So after that experience and getting back home with all your buddies, I was kind of like,

all right, like, you know, let's celebrate. But for myself, I got. orders to go to Fort Bragg once shortly after we got back. So usually the unit, once you get back, you go home on leave and then you start back up on your train cycle. And for the, for us, it was doing EIB courses. So because I had orders to go to Bragg, they wouldn't let me go through the EIB course. So I just had to kind of hang out and, yeah, just wait. You're still going to the infantry. Right. Yeah, exactly. It's so weird.

It's so weird. Well, the funniest part was, is, like, the 50 Cal lane, like, I knew so much about the 50 Cal. Like, I could disassemble that thing better than most of the armors could. Like, I was breaking down that thing, like the bolt and taking out the firing pin and everything. So they had me, my squad leader was in charge of the 50 Cal Lane, and he had me assist, even though I didn't have my EIP. Yeah, that's funny. So you end up getting assigned to God's Division, the 82nd Airborne at Fort Brown.

Yeah, I went to the mothership. Yep, so I PCS from Italy, and on my 21st birthday, I was flying to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And, yeah, I got to the 82nd, and I was assigned to the second of the 508 parachute infantry regiment. And, yeah, got into Charlie Company, and I was assigned to. second platoon. Once I was there, initially I was the RTO. I didn't quite make me a team leader yet, but I wasn't a Joe.

I was in kind of like a weird spot. I didn't know who to fall in with. So I fall in with the team leaders and the leadership because, you know, I'm not a cherry. I got a 15-month employment under my belt. But I'm not, I also wasn't an NCO yet. So I was like, all right. So, but I'm, you know, I'm, or do I fall in with the Joe's? And so I was just in a weird spot.

So the platoon sergeant at the time made me his RTO and went through all the training cycles that you usually do before deployment. Initially, we were slotted to go to Iraq. And then with the Obama administration, then the surge in Afghanistan, that shortly shifted after most of our training was over. And we got a slot to go to Afghanistan to the R.C. South. And, yeah, so because we had a change of mission, our command at the time, they worked their asses off to run us through another ITC cycle, to get us as much trigger time as we could to get ready for that fight. Yeah.

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That was a four-year. Four-year. And you'd just come off a 15-month deployment. And generally in the deployment cycle, I'm sure that the 173, like, they have maybe about a year, right, before they're looking at deploying again. But because you switch units, you're automatically, like, you just came off a deployment, and you're looking down the pipe at another one, at another one. or long deployment?

It was like, like, I'm trying to think of when we got back from the 173rd's deployment. I want to say it was July of 2008. And then I didn't PCS until January. Okay. So you had a little bit of time. Yeah, I had, it wasn't like, you know, I was like, you know, getting off the plane just to get into another plane and, you know, go right back. So I did have a little period.

time. And then we went through, you know, we went through JRTC, we went through OP 13 at Fort Bragg, and then we went to another ITC cycle and stuff. So we didn't deploy for that Argonob deployment until September of 2009. So it was a little over a year before, you know, I was boots back on ground. Okay. So can you tell us because you said that, you know, they were planned, the 80th I was planning on doing this trip to Iraq, but then it got switched to Afghanistan, so they were running you through the cycle. Can you tell us what the difference is in training or preparing for Iraq and Afghanistan? What are the differences for those? Yeah, so, I mean, when we were doing the Iraq fight, we were doing a lot of mount training, you know, entering clearing rooms just all day, every day.

you know, you're training for an urban fight versus like in Afghanistan. It's a different type of fight. And it's a different operation. Like we were kind of like a like the coin fight was a lot different, right? Yeah, you were fighting alongside your Afghan National Army forces and your Afghan National Police forces. It was almost kind of the Greenbra's mission, you know, to train up this foreign army to, you know, fight on their own.

Yeah. So when we were started to do like the ITC cycle of going towards Afghanistan and that and like what we were going to do there, there's a lot of more like we did mock villages where we would interact with villagers, kind of conduct sure us and, you know, talk to like people that, you know, not for people that pretended to be villagers and stuff. And then we would get, you know, engaged by enemies, you know, on the way. to kind of simulate ambushes and stuff like that. But it was a lot more movements to contact stuff and kind of patrolling as opposed to just kicking indoors and, you know, really focusing on that aspect. Yeah. Yeah.

Very different environments for the most part. Yeah. So how does that your second trip now to Afghanistan, how does that start off? Yeah. So initially when we get there, our battalion didn't really have an AO of its own. We kind of were scattered all throughout RC South. And our platoon, second platoon of Charlie Company, we got assigned to a Canadian task force in Pangeway District. And we were just kind of the Canadian spitches.

And we would go out with them and conduct like a, you know, anti-IED operations. We do President's patrols in the area. We go out on our own quite a bit. We found out very quickly where we could go get into a fight. There was Chow Gar and Three Tank Hill. Those were the two places where we could always go and we knew we were going to get into a fight.

And we'd just like to, you know, shoot at us there. But for the most part, those fights in the Panjoy district, were pretty one-sided, and we gotten lucky up to that point. We would always win. We'd always call in the Kiowa helicopters to do gun runs and stuff and chase off the enemy. Sometimes we'd even have the Canadians. They were a tank force, so they had strikers and tanks. So you'd be dismounted and in a firefight in like a great portrait, and you'd call for a QRF,

and then you'd hear a huge explosion, and both sides would stop huge. and then you'd see this Canadian tank bust through a wall and you're like, oh, okay, they're on our side. So it was pretty cool. Yeah, and I mean, we got to stay on, it was a cop, Mesaumgar, or, yeah, cop Mesaumgar. And that was the Canadian outpost. And, you know, they had a chow hall. They had a gym. They had Canadian women.

They, you know, like they had, like, it was weird living life, you know. We'd go out, get into a firefight, come back, and we wouldn't even have to pull tower guard. We can go to the Chow Hall and get Hoggandas ice cream. And, yeah, it was sweet. Yeah. But that came to an end, well, before that came to an end, we did take our first casualties in Pangewe on one of the operations that we were supporting Canadian forces on our ex-fell. our convoy hit an IED and we lost two guys and had three more wounded in that IED blast. It blew the Humvee and a half.

The whole, like when you're looking in through the front, you're looking in and you can see the back seats. The front seats are gone and the whole front half of that Humvee was gone. And yeah, it took from us our first two guys and it really kind of, was a gut check to be like, hey, man, like, you're not invincible. You can die too. Yeah. And that realization, yeah, definitely was kind of like a foreshadowing of what was going to happen once our battalion got our own AO in the Argonaut River Valley.

For you personally, because you had done a 15-month deployment where you had WIA, but no KIA and no necessarily serious, serious injuries. Was there any sort of shift for you in how you looked at combat or war or anything like that? I guess so we all go through this cycle, right? You're a brand new Cherry Joe. The first thing you want to do is pop your cherry. Yeah. And you want to get into that firefight.

Right. And you want to join that club, right? Right. You want your C-I-B and you want to earn it. And I went through that phase when I was a Joe, you know, with that 15-month deployment with the 173rd. And we got into a lot of fights. So by the end of that one, I was good. I would have been happy if I didn't even fire my rifle that second deployment.

Right. But seeing the new Joe's and their eagerness to get into a fight, you know, it's kind of, I don't know how you put it, but you see a little bit of yourself in that. right? And you're like, you don't know what you're getting into. Like, you know, it's like, be careful what you wish for type thing. Yeah. So we did end up, you know, taking those those first KIAs. And I mean, that was, it definitely hit me. It definitely hit me hard.

But I had already experienced, you know, combat and stuff. And so seeing, like, you just. kind of try to get your guys through it, the Joe's, you know, that hadn't been there. And up to this point, the only thing that they thought was is, oh, yeah, we go and we win. Right. So, yeah, it was the first time where we experienced, like, oh, no, we can lose. Right. And, yeah.

Yeah. So after that, and you said it's a foreshadowing. So what happened in terms of the next phase of your device? employment. Yeah, so our command actually they got us our own area of operation in the Argonob River Valley. And our battalion got word that we were moving in and replacing the striker unit that was currently there. Just from word of mouth, we heard a lot of information, like all these guys had sustained so many casualties that they are combat ineffective and we're replacing these guys who had a rough go at it,

which is terrifying to you in a little bit. Yeah. I mean, to some, some might like like that, you know, but, you know, when you hear this unit before you's taken so many casualties that they

can't even continue, you're like, oh, fuck. Yeah. It's like, we're going there now and we have like 10 months left. Oh, man. You know,

buckle up. So, uh, yeah. Charlie Company, we moved in and there was three different outposts that Charlie Company secured on the north side of the river. We were the farthest northeast in the battalion. So Bravo Company, they were on the south side of the river, south of Delta Company. So just across the river from us was Delta and Bravo. And then we were on the north and then Alpha Company

But yeah, we moved in and first platoon and third platoon secured what would be called Copt Nolan. And that was just that was like further into the pomegranate orchards and great great venues of the of the valley. And then second platoon, which is, you know, where I was. we moved into coptimes and our platoon we probably had the biggest a.O of the entire battalion in that valley like our I can't remember the exact square kilometers of our AO but it was huge. Yeah. And we'd be doing like seven kilometer movements, which is in Long, you know, it's not very big, you know, but in the Argonaut River Valley seven kilometers, you might as well be on the moon.

Yeah. Because you're walking through a maze in a labyrinth of mud wall. pomegranate orchards, grape fields. It was pretty slow move than through the valley. And Andrew, can I interrupt you real quick? Just because you mentioned that the unit you were replacing, you were replacing them because they were combat ineffective due to the level of casualties. So I have to assume that the leadership in their wisdom came up with an entire.

new strategy, new manning requirements, new assets and resources for you guys, right? They didn't just simply put you back in the exact same situation that caused these other units to become combat and effective. Well, the difference is we're paratroopers. So I can't speak to what the command decision making was. That's one thing is my book's kind of written from the lower enlisted point of view. Sure. So the decision making that went into that, I'm not sure of.

But from my point of view, yeah, we just kind of took over and, yeah, had to learn and, you know, do what they were doing. If you look, it's kind of crazy looking back because the literature wasn't available at the time, or maybe it was and we just didn't know about it. But there's books now written about the Argonaut River Valley. And if you look at the history of the valley, this has been a fighting area. since, uh, don't call me on this, but like Alexander the Great.

Yeah. Uh, you know, and it's got history of the, like the, the, the, the muja,

adine, uh, like origin stories, like with, uh, Muhammad Omar. I think one of his wives was from the Argyndab River Valley.

Um, and they fought against the Russians in the valley. And if you read the book, uh, I think it's like over the mountain. Uh, I can't remember the exact name. But,

um, it, The Tala or the Mujahidim commander in that book speaks of how they fought the Russians in the Argynab. And they would just litter the area with anti-personnel mines. And they'd set up their ambushes and they would wait until, it's basically their version of wait until you can see the wide of their eyes before you shoot. They said they'd wait until they knew they weren't going to miss so that they could kill them all. and the Russians had two major offensives, and they lost both of them.

They lost a whole, like, I don't know what the size element was, but it was bad. But you look at the names of the villages that they were fighting in in this book, and they talk about, you know, ambushing Russian soldiers out of Jalawar. And Jellowar was just like right next door to us. And they would medevac, they're wounded to the village of Bavir. And it's like,

we fought in the village of a burr almost every day. So it was really spooky looking back and being like, we just repeated history. You know, history doesn't repeat. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Yeah. And to just be, yeah, it just kind of like, oh, it gives you the shivers. Like, oh, man, I know exactly where they're talking about in this book.

But, yeah, so when we moved in, it was December and it was the wintertime. So the valley itself was like kind of hibernating. All the great vines and the pomegranate orchards and stuff were like all the leaves were gone. It's just kind of like skeletal branches and like a Tim Horton film. But it allowed us to kind of really see the valley. We could see for like hundreds of yards and stuff, which is kind of a blessing in disguise because we got to learn the terrain. and we had the freedom of movement at the time because the fighters weren't in the area. I'm sure you guys know that Afghanistan, like, they're seasonal fighters that like to fight in the cold.

So that's not to say we didn't have anything happen in the wintertime. We found historic IEDs all over the place and we dealt with those. But for the most part, we spent that time kind of getting a census of the area, learning who was who, who was, you know, village elder here, who lived where. So that way when, you know, the fighting season did begin, we came across people that weren't, you know, normal people. We could be like, hey, who are you? Where are you going?

Why are you here? But, yeah. Yeah. So you guys move in. And what size element did you guys? You had a company? Yeah. So our company was kind of split up between.

between cop Nolan, uh, Cot Tynes, and then we had another outpost called Tera Nova. So our headquarter element was, uh, out of Tera Nova. And I think they had like a squad from either one or three Charlie.

And then one and three Charlie were out of cop Nolan. And, uh, and, uh, two Charlie, uh, we were out of cop times.

So we'd be moving around the valley in squad size elements. Because out of cop times, we had to provide our own force protection, uh, our own QRF and, you know, patrol. For a platoon.

Yeah, for a platoon, yep. So we'd patrol in squad size elements and then we'd have the QRF squad just kind of staging at the outpost

and then we'd have a squad doing, you know, like tower guard and force protection. So for people who might not be aware of the sizes, when you're talking about a squad,

you are talking about nine soldiers. So you essentially have nine soldiers. going out looking for a fight essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Against unknown elements.

And that becomes a very difficult grind, too, when you're having these different duties back to back. You know, you're out on patrol. Then you're on the QRF for the guys who are on patrol. And then you're on, you know, tower duty. You know, okay, when did the Joe's sleep? Yeah. I mean, it gets to be difficult for such a small element to do all those things.

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, it got worse. like that's when you're at full force like I wish I had a platoon to do all that the whole time yeah well we got down to once we started really taking casualties like I was telling you guys earlier we were down to two and a half squads to do all that so you had a squad on patrol a squad on QRF and then you had a like the skeleton crew to stay back at times you know one man per tower and then one guy in the talk so um yeah but uh I mean we in the beginning it was kind of weird because we were anticipating this huge fight because we had heard all the stories from the striker guys before us and stuff and it just wasn't there.

And it was just because it was wintertime. But yeah, we were kind of anticipating this, you know, huge battle app. And it's not that we got complacent at all. I don't want to insinuate that. But, like, you know, you do, like, you can't be at it in like a high. stress like that intense of a you know like on your guard at all times you know so the winter months uh it was kind of just like a walk through the mud of the valley fest and come back and try to dry off and we were building up the outpost because the outpost that we inherited from the striker guys

was bare bones it was they had like a couple sandbags filled up and they put like it literally a bed frame with a parachute over it to kind of shield the guy up there for from the sun and that was one of their towers. You times that by three and that was their force protection. So it was like, oh my God, we got to, we got to start, you know, improving our defenses. And, you know, we started getting Hescoes and filling Hescoes by hand. So if you weren't out on patrol, it wasn't like you were, you know, out back at Kopp Times chilling.

No, you were filling sandbags to dump into Hescoes. And how long does it take to fill one Hesco by hand? Oh my gosh. I don't even know. I mean, I don't like to think about that time in my life. But yeah, you're doing it all by hand. And it just sucks. And so initially in the valley, we were doing three patrols a day.

Well, two during the day and then one at night, just trying to saturate the valley. Because as much like our first deployment, our kind of task was kind of limit the enemy's freedom of movement because they had they had wanted to kind of limit the enemy's entryway into Kandahar which the Argonaut River Valley was just northwest of Kandahar

city so it was kind of crazy that you were in this like Vietnam jungle and like maybe a couple of miles over one ridge line that's Kandahar City so yeah yeah so when did

like when I assume it was kind of springtime when things started heating up for you guys yeah the is really when the we we talked with one of the village elders

and we were kind of asking like hey like when are the when are we going to see these fighters that everyone talks about and he kind of laughed at us and he he's like you see those trees and we're like yeah And he's like, when the leaves return to the trees, the fighters will return to the valley.

And yeah, you're right. Spring came. And the leaves started budding on all the pomegranates. And the great field started, you know, getting leaves. And that's when we kind of had our crescendo fighting. It wasn't like, you know, it was a light switch. But there was like a couple of events that happened. And then it just escalated very quickly.

And once those leaves returned to the. valley, your visibility went to zero. Like we joke and say it was like Vietnam, but that's really what we compare to is like the amount of vegetation and like you couldn't see more than 50 feet in areas because of all the trees and all the leaves and the grapes and the mud walls. And so when we started seeing contact, initially it was just a small group of guys that would, you know, send pop shots our way. and they were kind of watching and seeing how we would react,

how we would conduct battle drill one alpha and, you know, flank and maneuver on them. And they would collect their data and they would learn. And that's when they would start to be like, okay, so we're going to put IEDs in here. And we're going to put IEDs in here. And there's going to be an IED on our flanks so that when we ambush them and they try to maneuver,

oh, they were baiting that. They basically were baiting us into IEDs. Yeah. So their tactics started to become less of pop sheds. shots and more of let's set up L-shaped ambushes, you know, on an IED. And they would wait. And they'd either wait for us to set off the IED and then they'd pop over the walls and engage us with P-KM machine guns from less than, you know, 50 feet away.

Or if we were by chance walked over an IED and didn't set it off, they would pop over the walls and try to create some sort of panic in hopes that we would step on the IEDs. Right. And the IEDs in the valley really evolved. Initially, they were all just kind of pressure-plated IEDs. But the problem with those is we had a lot of villagers that setting those off because it's a farming community. So they're out in their fields every day. Dig-in and tending to their crop.

So they'd walk through a walk down the path and walk through a gateway and they'd step on an IED and blow themselves up. So initially there's a lot of villager or like, local casualties. But that's when they kind of started to evolve and, you know, fix their problem of like, okay, like, how do we prevent that? So what they would do is they would, they'd bury the main charges, so like jugs of homemade explosives or HME or, you know, unexploded ordinances that they got a hold of from like the Russians back in the 80s or whatever they had on hand. They'd bury the main charges and then they would wrap that in debt cord. And then the debt cord would lead up to like the surface and that's how they'd have like their initiation device, which whether it be like a

tow popper IED or a pressure plate or, you know, we ran into trip wires. But the initiation device is what they could actually like disarm. So say we were at cop times, they take the trip wires down. They take away the toe popper. They take off the pressure plates, you know, off the deck cord. Yeah. And So then once we left the outposts, they were always watching. So, okay, which way they're heading east. All right, all those guys set up your IEDs. So they'd put up the tripwires. They'd put up the pressure plates.

They'd put in the tow poppers and, you know, bury them and then wait. And yeah, that's how it got. But then there was a point where, like, the fighting force actually got into the valley. That was just kind of like the IUD task force, if you will. Yeah. And then there was a point where like, okay, the fighters are here. And yeah, those guys really had, I mean, they needed their stuff. They've been fight.

We taught it to them in the 80s when we were, you know, like fighting the Russians with them. So, yeah, where village elder and we're like, hey, man, like, everybody in the village was panicking because we were in it. And we had snuck into this village without the enemies, you know, noticing. but we came in under the cover of darkness and once the sun came up the villagers realized we were there and they started panicking so we snagged the village elder and we're like what's going on why is everybody freaking out and this was the first time like a village elder actually told us the truth he just pointed to the south and he's like look they have a bomb on every bridge and every path down there

and they have their ambushes set they're waiting for you you can go down there there and fight them or you can go home i don't care just get out of my village and that was terrifying to hear like him speak truthfully to us yeah yeah oh shit uh we're not going down there right you heard them they have a bomb on every bridge and every path uh and i'm rolling the dice on this one so um but that's kind of like the the fight we we saw every single day was them baiting us into iEDs them close ambushing us. And yeah, it just became like a day in, day out task of, you know, just going, you know, going down into the orchards and into the grape fields and duking it out.

What's the attrition like for your platoon as you go on? Yeah, so we had another IED incident. the beginning of March where we lost. We had another KIA in our platoon, and we had four more wounded. Of those wounded, I think one was able to return to us. And, yeah, we had another one where we lost. We had another KIA, and then we had, let me think,

one, two, three, four, so four more wounded in that blast. And then two of those guys were able to come back to us. But so when we were taking casualties, you know, it was usually from IEDs and blast injuries. And it was mass casualties. It wasn't, we did have like firefights where we had one of our guys get shot in the face. And we, you know, we take direct fire injuries and stuff like that. but a lot of our casualties were from the IED em placements in the area.

And it wasn't just, you know, one or, you know, it was usually a decent amount of people. I remember after one day, like first squad was down to like four or five, or no, four guys. So we had to combine squads at one point and we formed what we call, or we coined 31st squad. So we combined third squad and first squad. and so 31st squad will go out on patrol and second squad would be in QRF and we just, yeah, like we didn't have enough guys to do stuff so we'd just be piecing guys, you know,

into other squads and filling slots and like guys would be going out every single day. There wouldn't be a rotation anymore. It was either you're going out with the squad or you're going out on QRF or, yeah, it was, where we, sorry. Where was that? coming, where was that directive coming from?

That yes, you guys are getting hit by IEDs yesterday or every day, but we want you to keep going out to these basically channeled avenues of, right? Because you don't, you don't really get to choose where you're going in places like that. You're going where the paths and the roads tell you to go. You're not sneaking or you're not sneaking around by some route that the, that the, the Taliban don't know about. There's no secret goat path that they're unaware of. So who has given you that directive to, hey, guys, tomorrow, go out and get blown up?

I mean, well, that wasn't the exact order that was given. No. Okay. But, I mean, that's kind of the objective of the area was to saturate the area, right? Try to limit the enemy's freedom of movement. With nine guys. Yeah. We didn't have the numbers that we needed to do that.

The unit that replaced us, they had more manpower, so they did. But like the fight in the valley, like you needed to take ground and then you needed to keep it. Right. We weren't able to do that because we had to man cop time. So we'd go patrol, we do our patrols and then we'd have to come back at the end of the day. So we'd take ground and then we'd have to leave it. Right. What you really needed to do was take it and keep it.

And we just weren't able to do that with the manpower we had. But that's not to say that like, so as a team leader, I was point man on every patrol. And yeah, I got orders on where we were going. But how we got there, that was up to me. So the route selection, a lot of us team leaders spent a lot of time with route selection. Right. And no, I wasn't on the path. I would climb over the walls.

I would climb under the walls. I'd climb through the walls. I'd climb and tree. My guys and my squad give me shit all the time for my routes. But I'd make it the most unpredictable route that I could. Just so that the, you know, and I feel like we missed a lot of IEDs because of it. Yeah. And yeah, just being unpredictable was the only way to combat that kind of a fighting in the valley.

But they were always watching. So you had to, you know, we cataloged all the routes that we had taken as team leaders. And we had like a database and we'd overlay it and be like, okay, we haven't gone here yet, you know, so let's do that. And you just try to be unpredictable. And but you can only go so many ways. And who's to know that, oh, you know, we're not just combing the whole valley for IEDs. And it's like, yeah, we haven't gone there yet. So maybe that's where an IED is, you know, since you're just rolling the dice.

but as a point man my main objective was is just to be unpredictable and it's like oh like here's a path that looks like obviously like i want to take it i'm not going to take it or oh i'm going to walk in the canal or i'm going to walk in this like shit drainage ditch you know i take like areas of approach that didn't look convenient yeah and uh my guys gave me shit for it but that's uh yeah that's yeah So, yeah, we did. I mean, RTPs evolved like that as the fighting evolved and, you know, and they learned from us and their IEDs evolved. So they became less and less pressure plates. And that's when, you know, like I came across a tripwire.

And that day was crazy for me because I literally was, you know, one step away from setting off a tripwire IED. And that was that like, like, how would you describe that IED? I mean, was it like, like I visualized in my mind, you know, like fishing line attached to the pin of a hand grenade or something. I mean, what was it? It says it was an old Russian, like the initiation device was like an old Russian. I don't even know what it was. I have photos of it. I can send it to you guys.

But basically, that's what it was is like fishing line across a path. And they tied the other end to a twig. And then they used a kind of like a branch to hide that like. pin and then that pin once it's pulled it sets off the uh initiation device and the main and it set off like there's deck cord that ran all the way and there's like they puttied the mud against the wall so there's all these signs that i just like wasn't adding up you know at the moment until i saw the actual trip wire but that that that cord ran down to an anti-tank mine that was in the in the path that my face was literally two feet away from and i'm like looking down at this

like weird like like dry mud area on the path and seeing this ant trail up the wall and seeing this bush and just going between the three of them like this is weird and it just didn't dawn to me until um the you know when you walk through the woods and you see like a spider web and there's like that shimmer of that i saw that out of the corner of my eye and the wire was literally right over my shoulder because I was standing in like a drainage ditch and uh that when when I saw that shimmer I looked and I looked and I that's when I added it all up and I was like oh shit uh so I had my guys climbed back over the wall and uh we called the EOD on that and waited for EOD and uh yeah that was a that was just a crazy day for me like there's a parallel universe where I'm uh

I'm gone yeah yeah did did you have EOD uh at one of the cops or did they have to come out from the primary fob? It really depended on timing. Like a lot of the... They... If they were attached to us, it was at Taranova. But a lot of the times we'd have to call them and they'd have to either get a convoy to escort them out

or they'd fly in and then we'd have to escort them out from time. So it's not like, oh, you know, it's like we found a bomb like this... And I'm like, cool, no, we'd be out there for hours. and sometimes even overnight securing the area and waiting for EOD assets to become available to, you know, blow the IED in place. It's actually kind of cool, though, like as I was sharing with you, like, I can send you the photos of my tripwire. One of the EOD guys that was there that day and there for a lot of the days where they blew, you know, they did BIP, they performed BIPs of IDs. this EOD guy, he read the book and he reached out to me and he's like, hey man, like, I think I was there. And he's like, would you like to have a folder of all the bombs that you guys came across?

And I was like, yes, I would. And yeah, I went that was going through that. And I found this the photo of my tripwire from that day and I saw Sergeant Mayor. And I was like, this is 100% my trip wire. And so, but that was crazy that he, you know, was the EU is, I mean, there was so much shit in the valley between Charlie Company, Bravo Company, Alpha Company, Delta. You know, like, they were just hopping around from company to company. They only had so many guys. So it's like, you know, they can only cover so much ground. Yeah.

It's so wild to me that, you know, you guys didn't have, like, ready access to support like that. What was your air support like when you would get these ticks and, you know, these prolonged ticks sometimes? Yeah. So we had Kyla helicopters. kind of on call for a lot of the time. But there'd be times where, you know, the valley would be perfectly fine, clear skies, but for some reason, air would be black. And I don't know if there's, you know, sandstorms or, you know, what was going on in

Kandahar or what, but, like, you know, we'd be like, why is there black? And maybe those assets were designated elsewhere. But, yeah, so there'd be times where we'd be out on patrol and it's like, all right, you know, you might as well be on the moon, you know, it's us. No one's coming to help you. And it's like expect self-rescue. So that's why like a lot of the times, you know, our QRF came from us from cop times, you know, is your buddy out there.

So you were going to get out there to him. And I don't know what you could do, but you wanted to be there for him. So, but the Kaya was, like they were, don't get me wrong. I loved having those guys. And one of our TTPs was we would, when we would get engaged by the enemy. So the Kiwas couldn't really engage unless the ground troops were getting direct contact. So they'd fly over and they could be like, hey, look, there's an ambush line about 100 meters to yourself. Just giving you guys a heads up.

And be like, okay, cool, shoot them. And they'd be like, are you guys getting engaged? and we'd be like, uh, was it, what was that direction, 100 meters to our south? And I'd be like, yeah.

And then I'd be like, okay, and tell my solgunner, hey, hey, start shooting to the south. And he just started opening up and be like, oh, hey, yeah, we're getting engaged from the south. Can you,

uh, you know, and we call in our gun runs and stuff like that. But a lot of times what we do is we bait the enemies into engaging us. Uh, so we'd call off the Kiwas and make it seem like they were going to refuel or something. So our FOs would, uh, you know, constantly be, you know, in contact with them on the radios,

but they'd have them fly out of earshot so the enemy would think like, aha, they're alone now. So that's when they would engage us. And then we'd have them come in, guns hot. And, uh, that was, uh, that seemed to be pretty effective. But, um, the fighting, uh, once it pushed further south into like the Palmer got our orchards and stuff like that. The Kiowas can only do so much because those orchards are so thick and they can't see through them.

So you're down in it and the enemy knows that they can't be seen. So, yeah. They got a little braver. What did your BDAs look like after like some of these larger ticks? I mean, a lot of them. So, I mean, sometimes we didn't have the manpower to conduct. you know, BDAs, you know, so you, you'd be engaged, it'd be a lot of break contact, really. Yeah.

And plus with the threat that they would emplace these ambushes, hoping that you would maneuver on them to bait you into an ID's on their flanks. Like, you know, our battle drills really shifted. We didn't really maneuver. As a, you push a base, a line of fire, call in Kiwis if you could. But for the most part, like, it was just. engaged the enemy until one of you ran out of ammo or you know until the enemy ran out of ammo and

exfilled or you know you guys had to X fill because you know you had a casualty but the old battle drills of either assaulting through or flanking because of the IED threat the way they had in place their IED threat you guys kind of put a pause on those

I mean initially we did you know we had assault through and stuff and we conform we you know perform our BDAs and we came across the lot of like blood trails and what like and stuff like that. But you got to think like these guys aren't just leaving their dead and wounded. Right. Their ex-fill and their guys too. So it was nice to come across blood trails and like drag marks and stuff. It's like, oh yeah, we got them. But we never actually came across any bodies. Yeah. That kind of came from like listening over the ICOM radios with our

interpreters. You know, they do their roll calls or they, you know, report up like, hey, we got like, Omar's dead, you know, and stuff. So that's when we would cheer. But as for us coming across, like, actual bodies and, you know, like, that never happened. Yeah. That's what I, you know, all the Vietnam veterans would say about, like, the NBA. Yeah. You'd have a huge firefight.

And then in the morning, all the bodies are gone. And it's very spooky. So it's just amazing to me to listen to this and hear, like, you know, when you compare it to Vietnam, I understand where you're coming from. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't want to, like, I feel like, I'm. doing like a disrespect to the Vietnam veterans but I'm like man like it it was there's parallels like

vietnam like I mean I ran into a trip wire come on man yeah it's like it's like you know and it's these close ambushes like you know you're already outnumbered and you hit IDs and like I said it's not that we didn't maneuver we just had to be very careful about maneuver sure I get it you had to be like it's like okay why did they ambush us here yeah because they're trying to be us to flank them and there's the IED or is the IED here and they're hoping to spook us and, you know, cause chaos and oh, oops, we stepped on it. Right. Because the day that Lovelace got shot in the face, that where they shot him, that's what

they were trying to do is they had an IED there and the guys danced all around it, but somehow didn't set it off. Wow. So I was on the QRF that day. So I did. We flanked. My squad, we flanked the enemy and we chased them into Turok Kalacha. and that's when, you know, we came across the blood trails and drag marks and you're like,

oh, heck yeah, we got a couple of looks like. But, yeah, so we got surrounded in the village of Tarak Kalacha. And this firefight ended up being like an like, it ended up being like an 11 hour firefight for the guys of third squad and maybe like a nine hour firefight for my squad. But we, when we entered into Tarak two, Turok Kalacha, we found a lot of HME material. and just bomb making material, ammo, stuff like that. So we had to call in EOD to blow it in place. And because we weren't taking all that crap back with us, it was just way too much.

So we found one of their stashes, and they didn't like that. And they surrounded us and fought us throughout the whole day. And the element that was escorting EOD out to us, they hit an IED exactly where they, where Lovelace got shot in the face. Yeah. So they hit the IED that was intended for us. And so it's just, you know, you're just rolling the dice. You know, it's like, what do you want to do?

Do you want a flank and possibly hit an IED there? Right. Are they trying to make you hit one where you're standing? It's really like a crazy fight. Like, like from my first deployment to my second employment, like they limited our freedom of movement. And I cannot tell you how effective that is. Like my first deployment, yeah, we can.

could flank, we could, you know, conduct all our battle drills. We, you know, you weren't afraid to go anywhere. But the second deployment, it's like you were afraid to take every step and you had to try not to get shot while doing it. Yeah. So it's just, it's kind of a crazy, a crazy fight. It really is. And, you know, it's interesting because CQB changed a lot during the war because of how the enemy adapted to it. And, you know, and how they would barricade rooms. or hide and things like that. And I think this is the first time that I've heard

how much ground operations regular army battle drills had to adapt to the evolving situation because of how they were adapting to U.S. tactics. Well, it's just like even the way we moved adapted, right?

We no longer went we no longer moved in wedges. You know, the standard squad movement is, you know, fire team wedges. That is asking for a bad day when you're walking through a minefield, right? Right. We filed everywhere. Right. That way, hopefully, you know, the man up front was the one who's stepping on it, you know.

And you're not combing a minefield with, you know, a wedge. Right. Everybody's walking on the same footsteps and, yeah. So that type of movement's not the best for firetebring. firefights, right? Because, you know, once you get into a firefight, you got to get online and everything like that. But like when you're dealing with, you know, counter IED, you know, measures, like that's, that's the best way is to get behind the guy in front of you and walk into his footsteps, which is, you know, it's what we had to do. Yeah. Ranger file everywhere. And, you know, we use the canal, we utilize the canals as best we could because we figured they couldn't put an IED in the water. You know? So it's like if you were in the water, you know, like you were kind of safe. You just had to stay away from the banks because they'd started putting in homemade claymores and stuff like that.

But they'd fill coffee cans with like nuts and bolts and stuff and, you know, make directional charges. And, you know, it's basically their version of a Claytmore. But yeah, you'd be walking through the canals with your rifle over your head and you're like, man, this is Vietnam. I don't know what you guys say. Even walking in file everywhere. Like in Vietnam, you know, they weren't doing wedge formations through double canopy jungle, you know, and trying, you know, trying to maintain, you know, eyesight of each other and things like that. You know, like there's, there are a lot of similarities to how you guys were fighting for sure. Yeah.

And, I mean, we even, like, so you know, Vietnam vets call Vietnam nom. We call the Argonob the Dob. So that was our joke that we'd have It was like, oh, it's the dab. Yeah. Were there at all? Because what I'm hearing are a lot of lessons learned, right? And a lot of things that you guys are innovating based on enemy tactics.

Were there people at all interested in what you guys were learning? Well, you know, you do your AARs for every. major like event that happens and like every patrol was a major event for us so we were doing a lot of documenting what happened and what we did and stuff like that i don't know who is interested in that right um like i don't know like were you referring to any like organization i'm talking about anybody outside of your direct you know your company chain of command um this seems like even though this was not you know one of the things about afghanistan is because of the very terrain obviously combat was different everywhere, right?

Yeah. But you guys are learning or relearning very specific lessons of a type of warfare. I hope somebody out there is like writing this up as a case study that people can learn from in the future. Yeah. Yeah. There was, so this was my last deployment before I ETS. But I do remember hearing from the guys that, you know, had a deployment like the

Joe's, the deployment after that, how like kind of like the counter-eye. measures have like shifted completely and we were kind of the guinea pigs of trying to figure that out right like we were the the first wave if you will and then so like their second deployment was to a different area but like their tactics shifted dramatically like with like the way they used the mine sweepers and they had like all this other like us like I can't remember what the term was for it but like the electronic warfare like yeah like training that they received and how they maneuvered their second deployment was very interesting. I was like, man, I wish we had that kind of shit while we were there when I was point, man.

But no, we were kind of just like the tip of the spear, like first wave. Hey, this, you know, like, and there was data collected. I don't know who. Yeah. Who looked through that and stuff. But we definitely learned from it. And, yeah, like, we developed a whole new kind of way of fighting in that kind of an area. Afghanistan is so crazy because it's like there's so many different regions.

You know, the Argonaut River Valley, that river valley was like a jungle, but the Pactica province was, you know, mountainous. It's like Colorado. And then you got Helmand, which is like Tatooine or, you know, like some desert, you know. It's like, so it's like there's so many different types of ways to fight out there. But the IEDs were what was the most important, I guess what most sought after. Like what types of IEDs were you encountering. And that's what you, like the, the, the powerpoints you get at CAF when you're flying in is like,

be on the lookout for coffee cans, be on the lookout for everything, you know, it's like, so, yeah, I'm sure that's evolved. And like they, the EOD guys did an amazing job of documenting everything they came across, right? That was part of their job was to conduct their BDAs and stuff. And before they blow it up, they document. And, yeah, what they did with that, I don't know. know if that was over my pay grade but uh yeah no um but yeah it is definitely we were we were the first way for that how how did that deployment start to wind down for you uh so we i mean there's a point like i said where we were down to like two and a half squads and we still had that it's crazy

there will there was light at the end of the tunnel uh even though we were we're didn't really feel that way. We all thought we were just all gonna all die out there. We kind of went crazy at one point, I feel like, but we did get reinforcements. We got some leadership back, and we got some new Joe's and stuff, but we got our replacements came in. And we did what was called, like, you know, what you always do in the Army when you're being replaced is the left seat, right seat. Right. And so we were replaced by a artillery battery. we were not replaced by infantry, which blew our minds. We were like, are you kidding me?

Like, oh, my God. So they took a battery from the 101st, and they replaced us at Coptines. And we did everything we could to kind of get them ready for the fight that they were able to, or that they were, you know, going to inherit. But it's also the end. of our fight, right? So you got away, like, what, you know, do you risk losing another guy to give these guys the best chance you can? And we did. We ended up, you know, losing another guy shit. And during our left seat, right seat. But I really opened up the eyes of the 101st guys

and, you know, showed them the fight they were about to inherit. And they actually, they're writing a of their own right now, and it'll be out in June. So there would be a sequel to our book, kind of, if you're interested in hearing their story. Your book dovetails with Yiske's book, it's the same battalion. Yeah, so William Yeske, his book, Damn the Valley, he was in Bravo Company, and he tells the story of Bravo Company during that same time. So the 2009-2010 deployment to the Argonob River Valley. So his book talks about his platoon.

And like I said, they were on the south side of the Argonaut River. And, yeah, my book talks about my platoon, so second platoon of Charlie Company and our fight on the north side of the river. I didn't include a lot from one or three Charlie, mainly because, you know, I didn't know a lot. We didn't interact with them a lot because, like I said, we were doing our own patrolling, our own QRFing and stuff like that. We did have some interactions, and they came out and help us, you know, here and there. And, you know, the boots and rifle ceremonies they would all come to and stuff. But for the most part, two Charlie was out on her own, out of cop times. And one in three, Charlie, we're operating on a cop Nolan.

So I didn't speak to their story as much because I kind of want them to come out and tell their story. And I don't want to take that from them. Excuse me. But, yeah, so that's the same time frame as Damn the Val. just on the other side of the river. Yeah. And yeah. I feel like, like, it's just reading his book and stuff, it was just crazy to hear the difference,

you know, just on the other side of the river. Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's a crazy story. What, and how did your book, The Devil's Playground, how did that come about for you? Yeah. So, about November of 2020. three I want to say yeah there's a book that came out called Bravo Company and it was uh I'm going to give Ben Kessling his kudos. It was written by a wall street uh journalist um named ben Kessling he uh was doing

like kind of I think he was doing an article about uh operation resiliency uh with the independence fund and he met the guys of Bravo company and decided to write a book um so when that book came out it it kind of lit a fire under a lot of our asses because the story was out, right? Like a lot of guys have been struggling with the Argonauta River Valley for over 12 years. We all, you know, run ways after that deployment. Some guys, you know, went to special operations. Some guys like myself, ETS, the company got mixed around, you know. But I quit.

it too. We ran away from the valley like, you know, cockroaches and the light. We didn't want to have anything to do with it and stuff. So when this book came out, I kind of let the cat out of the bag and it's like, hey, man, like the story's out. You know, so I read that book in like two days and I don't read it a lot. So the fact that I was just so drawn to the sights, the smells, the sounds, you know, I just brought it all back. And I'd really been thinking about it every single day for the past 12 years. But because it was now in a physical form of a book, I was like, man, we got to tell our story. And I know there's hesitation in the past with two Charlie guys not wanting to, you know, share what happened and whatnot. But I think it was because it was one of us that was doing it, that, you know, they were kind of more on board. So I reached out to everybody who was Facebook stalking.

and I asked them, I was like, hey, guys, like, what do you think about me writing a book about our deployment and us? And they were all in. So what I did was, is I got a hold of as many as, and as many of the guys as I could, and I traveled around the country and interviewed each one, collected our stories. And the way I wrote my book is it's a third person. So it's third person omniscient. So you get in the heads of all the guys.

And so it's not just my story. It's our story. Right. And that was the most importance to me is to keep it our story. Because, you know, it's like I, in order to do this story justice, I couldn't just tell it from my perspective. Yeah, that's really cool. I think that's the right way to do it, man, that you go around and, you know,

you take sort of like a historians or a journalist's approach to it and you get all these stories from your teammates and then collect them together. Um, it's really incredible. Yeah. And, uh, I, uh, I conducted over like 30 interviews. I didn't get everybody. Some guys were harder to track down than others, but, uh, I got a lot. And, uh, I think I saw 35 guys, but I only did 30 interviews because, uh, you got to understand

I was playing with fire. Um, a lot of guys had, uh, buried a lot of demons and to try to unburry those, you know, it's, uh, it's, uh, is very risky. Um, some guys were more, um, um, some guys were more, willing to be open with it than others and I respected that but I wanted to see everybody um because I know like I hadn't spoken to any of them for 12 years it was weird uh we just like I said we all scattered and uh tried to figure it out on our own and uh I think the one thing that we were missing was each other um so we got the band back together uh Dale Nolinger was a huge help in that

he's a two Charlie guy and he was the one getting me phone numbers, getting me addresses, and we'd conduct Zoom calls during my trip around the country, which kind of mimicked my routes in Afghanistan because I'd just go everywhere, like back and forth. But yeah, so we'd be doing Zoom calls and we'd have those discussions together. We'd talk about the hard days. We'd talk about and we'd catch up, you know, we'd see what guys. what guys are up to now, you know, and that was the most powerful time for me was seeing these guys current day.

And seeing their wives, their kids, their families, their jobs, what they're up to, where they're living, the men that they had become. And, yeah, that meant a lot to me to see that. And, yeah, so we had a reunion. Our platoon sergeant's son was getting married, and we went and crashed that wedding. That was the first, 18 of us showed up to that. And that was the first time that we had seen each other for 12 years. Wow. It was like we just saw each other yesterday.

Yeah. And we picked up right where we left off and same old stupid jokes about each other and, you know, calling each other names and the same name call on. And yeah, it was awesome. But after that, the honeymoon was over and I had to get to write in the book. So I went to the local library with the rest of the homeless population. And every day I just sat down and listened to the interviews, took notes and kind of put it all together. And now I got the book right here. Where can people go to find the book now?

Yeah, you can order it off of casemates website or you can get it on Amazon. It's available on Audible or like audiobook. I think it might be on basically wherever you get books. You know, wherever you think it's on Spotify even. You can order the audio book on Spotify. I got a Facebook page for the book. It's The Devil's Playground Book. And then we got an Instagram at the Devil's Playground Book.

But yeah, make sure you put the Devil's Playground book. Because if you just put the Devil's Playground, there's like a lot of like romance novels out there that has that title. which I think is hilarious because our, I mean, our story is kind of a romance story. If you think, if you want to dig deep into it, I guess. Yeah. So out of curiosity, you know, you mentioned, and it's very understandable, you know, that a lot of guys kind of buried this and, you know, stuffs it down deep.

And for you personally and maybe for some of the guys, did you find this to be a cathartic process and then getting all the guys back together? together because I think that there's a thing where a lot of guys like divorce themselves completely from the community, from the service, from everything when they're trying to create a new life and, you know, move on with things. But that's not necessarily the most healing way to go about it. So for you, for the other guys, did you find this whole process to be, was there any kind of catharsis in it for you? Yeah. So, I mean, I can only speak from myself but I mean I guess I can speak to some of the guys uh they've come out forward and you know

thanked you know thanked me thanked Dale for just getting the band back together because we were that's what we were missing uh there wasn't a day that went by that we hadn't thought about the valley I hadn't thought about one of those guys or what you know like not just the bad times but just you know I'd see a tree and it would remind me of a tree in the shoe ins or something stupid like that, you know, like it had taken a hold of so much of my life that I didn't even realize it. And, you know, you keep moving to stay alive if you're stagnant, you're dead. So that's the, that's the kind of the philosophy that I had is like, I just got to keep moving. Just got to keep moving. Go to school, you know, become this, do this, get your degree, do that. It'll go away.

But it never did. And, yeah, I think, This is, this was so much more than a book. And to me, it never really was about a book. Yeah, I told the guys I wanted to tell our story, but it was really about getting the band back together. Yeah. And so much healing has gone on over the last two years of this whole process. And it's going to continue to go on because we're continuing to do reunions. We had a, last November.

We're planning our next one. We had a reunion at Fort Bragg a couple weeks ago. That was pretty cool. But initially, yeah, our first get together, there's a lot of talks about firefights. There's a lot of talks about member this, member this, remember this, you know. That's our origin story. Sure. We're always going to have that.

And we're never going to be able to get rid of that. But the more we do these reunions, the more memories we have that aren't linked to just the valley. and, you know, the most recent one, we were talking about the wedding or we were talking about the Colorado reunion. And the questions kind of shift from, you know, talking about firefighters and asking about, you know, this stuff to, hey, how are the kids? Yeah. You know, like, collectively you got some closure on it.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, by no means are my therapist and I don't know what the heck we're doing, but we're doing, we're doing something. But you're building, you're building new history, too. Right? Like, you're building, like now, so that will always be your history. But now with each reunion and each get together, there's new history to, to revel in and cover and talk about.

Yeah, exactly. Like I said, we'll always have our origin story. Like, we're bonded through trauma. Right. There's no getting away from that. But hopefully as time progresses and we have more of a bank of memories together, we'll recall and, you know, we'll recall less and less. of the bad ones and we'll talk about more and more of the good ones. And I feel like we're on that path.

I mean, we're on a path. I don't know which one we're on. But I can speak for myself that like I think I got a part of me back. Yes. That I didn't have and it feels good. Yeah. We got questions for Andrew. Let me check.

No, everybody loved it. Yeah, no. Okay. Yeah. I've been a one thing I'd like to say is, like with the book coming out and other groups of veterans reading it, especially like Argonob veterans, because there's been the guys from the unit we replaced that reached out to me.

There's guy, I mean, I told you the 101st, their book is coming out in June. Joseph Fontneau, he's the author. He was one of the 101st guys. It's called, I believe, the Sons of the Argonob. The big guns in the devil's playground. So these stories are coming out, and it's like a snowball effect. Yeah. And I'm not saying you guys have to go out and write a book, but get the band back together.

Yes. Talk with your guys. And there are organizations that do that. But really what it's going to come down to is team leaders, squad leaders, reaching out to your Joe's and being like, hey, what are you up to? How you been? Yeah. Let's get, you know, let's do this. And it's really awesome to see different.

unit starting to do that. Guys reaching out to me and being like, hey, man, I was with this unit. You know, you replaced us. We're getting together in November. We're going to start talking about maybe telling our story. And the guys after us having reunions and I've been reached out by a lot of people. And this snowball effect is what is necessary to get, you know, the healing started with a lot of veterans, you know, struggle.

And that's the coolest thing I've ever done. It's incredible. I mean, honestly, there should be. an Argandab Association for all the guys that were there because it is it is one of those areas like it's like a Ramadi or a Fallujah or whatever it's it's a unique experience within the GWAT that really only the guys that were there are going to get yeah yeah yeah and like I said I really appreciate you guys letting us

you know giving us a platform to kind of share our stories because like a lot of the stories out there are all green berets and you know maybe seals oh yeah man that's And sent that 101st guy our way when his book comes out. Yes. We'll have him on the show. Even though he's a leg. We'll still have a show.

Arasol. Arisal. No, but we do, we want to tell more of these stories. And there are people out there. I'll put you in touch with Matt Tardio, I think, who also wants to tell more of these stories. These are stories that need to be told. And unfortunately, you know, in the market, you know, for, you know, in the market, it's, you know the delta or seal or green beret that's going to get the views but but these but these are really

stories that need to be told need to be heard because like I said you guys were out there with like one 20th of the resources um and hooking and jabbing every single day you weren't flying out with the 160th doing a DA you know mixing it up and then flying back for hot chow in the morning. Yeah. That's like what I like to tell people is like, yeah, those guys, those guys are lucky. They get to fly in, fly out, and then they're done. You know, we had to stick around the neighborhood where one of the top dogs just got,

you know, smacked. And we had to deal with the aftermath. Right. This sucks. Right. Right. So I just want to tell viewers out there, we're taking two weeks off for the holidays, but we will have an episode for you next Friday.

Jason Davis served in Ranger Battalion and in the asymmetrical warfare group. And then right after New Year's, I think it is, it's going to be our New Year's review episode. So you'll have two shows coming on. They're both pre-recorded. So we won't be here, but you know,

you guys will do your thing. Where can people find you, Andrew? Like I said, I got Facebook and Instagram, just The Devil's Playground Book. Okay. And yeah, there's a bunch of photos that didn't make it into the into the book itself.

I was only, you know, I was limited as to how many photos I could have. Sure. I just photo dumped on the Facebook page and I add photos throughout the week. But yeah, you can check us out on Instagram, Facebook, and yeah, just I'd love to hear what you guys think about the book

and what did you guys think about our story and, yeah. Hey guys, and do you please like and share this episode? Again, this is one of those things where, you know, These are stories that absolutely need to be heard by the American public. They don't really have an appreciation for what guys were doing. They really don't. I mean, to me, it's amazing, you know. And, you know, sometimes talking with the conventional guys are my favorite interviews

because, like I said, you guys were hooking and jabbing, like, nonstop. The idea that you guys were innovating battle drills based on what was happening on the ground, that's important. That's historical. That's important stuff. Yeah, that's, we really kind of fine-tuning everything to a very specific fight. And, yeah, it's kind of, you bring up like the people, like, people don't know what they don't know, right? And if we keep showing them, like, the sexy stuff. stories of, you know, like the, you know, all those, all the, you know, special operations and

Navy SEALs and stuff like that. That's all they're going to know. Right. And I remember, I kind of, kind of to pivot off of like that idea was it's like when I was coming home on my mid-tour leave from my first deployment, you know, you're in your uniform when you're flying home. So I had some lady like on the flight, you know, asked me and it's like, oh, where were you? And I told her, I was like, oh, I was in Afghanistan. And they're like, oh, thank God, you weren't in Iraq. This was, this was like after I had been on like in a 150 man ambush and pull guys out of a burning vehicle. And I'm just like, oh, yeah, you're right. Thank God, I wasn't in Iraq. Right. But people, people don't know what they don't know.

Right. Yeah. At the time, the media was covering Iraq and that's all they would cover. And, you know, Afghanistan kind of got shadowed. And then once that was over, Afghanistan got the light. And that was my second deployment. That's when we were kind of starting to get the light. And we were on CNN and you know the argendad river valley was where all the reporters would go because that's where they would get their story yeah and yeah yeah Andrew thank you so much for doing this show and for writing your book uh hope people go and check it out a casemates website or on amazon there's a link down the description for you guys if you want to click on that and find it there um thank you so much man yeah thank you uh and we will well i won't and d won't but there will be a pre-recorded

episode for you guys on Friday. We'll see you then. And go check out Eyes On Our Sister Podcast and subscribe to the YouTube channel if you haven't. So see you guys after the holidays.