The Team House - Marine Raider (MARSOC) Operator | Mike Halterman | Ep. 252

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

Michael currently serves as the Vice President of Operations at The Honor Foundation, where they oversee the organization's operations. Prior to this, they held the position of Director of Virtual Programs at the same company, where they facilitated a transition education program for Special Operations Veterans. Before their role at The Honor Foundation, Michael worked in various roles at the U.S. Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC). As Senior Operations Director, they planned and synchronized future global operations and built contingency business operations plans. As Operations Director, they provided senior leadership for a business unit and managed assets and budgets. Michael also served as a Team Leader and Team Element Leader, leading cross-functional teams and managing business assets. Michael's career began in the United States Marine Corps, where they held the positions of Faculty Member, Team Lead, and Employee. Michael led training programs for new employees, led teams responsible for daily activities and international travel preparations, and worked internationally in Panama and Greece.https://www.honor.org/To help support the show and for all bonus content including:-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/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]#marsoc #marineraiderBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Team House know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our team house. the team house and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not so good review, why don't you just send us an email to talk about it. Special Operations, covert ops, espionage, the team house with your hopes, Jack Murphy,

and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 252 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy. My co-host, Dave Park, is out tonight. He'll be back next week. Thank you for joining us. It feels like it's been a long spell

since the holiday break. So I'm glad to be back. Our guest on tonight's show is Mike Holterman. Mike served for 20 years in the Marine Corps. Was part of the standing up of Marsok. And all kinds of other interesting stuff we'll get into. And he also works with the, the Honor Foundation, helping transitioning veterans.

So we're going to talk about all of that as well. So, Mike, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Hell yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely, man. It's great to have you here. And, you know, I'll start off the interview, the way we start off almost all of them asking about your origin story. If you could tell us a little bit about, like, how you grew up

and how that took you towards a path of military service. Yeah, so I was a small town kid. I grew up in a really small town on the central coast of California. Central Coast of California is like the dead zone between L.A. and San Francisco. No one's ever heard of it unless you grew up there. It's very different, right? It's not like the rest of California. It's a lot of red, white, and blue and football and backyard barbecues.

So I grew up doing that, but it was also California, so I got to surf a lot too and ride skateboards. And, you know, what I realized was, although I lived in a cool, small town, It was small and my life was going to be small. And if I was going to stay there, that was, I kind of saw the writing on the wall. And so as I finished high school and all those things, I want to, you know, I wanted to go adventure. Young man stuff. You want to go see the world, go travel. And I had a couple of buddies who had joined the Marine Corps.

And I thought, well, man, if those guys could do it, I could probably do that too. And so, you know, I found myself following suit, joining the Marine Corps in 19. 1998 and joined more or less right after high school as I was early late teens, early 20s. And man, it was the exact thing I needed at the right time of my life. I was a bit of a wayward child that wasn't great in high school. And the discipline, you have to get up at this time and you're doing this and this is your job was what I needed at that time. Plus, I got to play with guns.

and I got to make a lot of new friends. So that was pretty cool. So I found myself going through boot camp in San Diego. And then they're like, hey, so you're from California. Let's go ahead and send you to North Carolina. Right. So I had more or less did my first five years in North Carolina, which was great because I never would have been in a platoon or been around, you know, a bunch of kids from New York,

a bunch of kids from the South, a bunch of guys from Miami, you know, and from all. all these different places. And so you're thrown into this mix of America. And it's just a great growth opportunity, learning new culture, learning new, interesting different perspectives on life. And then learning how to survive the infantry as young E-N-Nuthens together, where you're being challenged, I'll say, in the late 90s, early 2000s, a lot of tree lines.

And a lot of things happen in those tree lines. and, you know, in the first four years, I made such good friends. I was like, yeah, I could do this for 20 years. No problem. I was having a great time. Yep. Those first, that first enlistment in the Marine Corps during quote unquote peace time. What was that like for you?

I mean, what was there, you know, do you go on training to like Okinawa? I mean, I know the Marines definitely get around a little bit. Yeah, yeah. It was a lot of travel. It was, I think we'd only, you know, I checked in and it was like, hey, you're going to straight to the field. And we started doing nuclear biological chemical warfare training, like immediately. Like that was the very first thing.

Getting gassed, getting gassed in the fleet as a young infantryman is way different than all of the safety protocols that they put in boot camp. So that was an uphill learning experience, but builds character. And so being a young infantryman, a lot of travel to places we probably don't go to as much anymore, Greece and a couple of other spots that I can't really recall off the top of my head. But what we did a lot of shining boots because we had the old black boots that you shined and uniform inspections and a lot of standing in formation waiting for the word. Right. So what are we doing tomorrow? you know, and then, okay, throw your PTs on and go PT.

So, I mean, you're having a hell of a good time. And the Marine Corps, it sounds like you're deciding you want to do this for a career. And then it must have been around, I'm guessing, around the time when you reenlisted that 9-11 happened. Yeah. So I'm out, I'm on the USS Kier Sarge. And we are floating around the Mediterranean. And somewhere around, I guess, July, August. They drop this off in Kosovo because Kosovo was the hot thing still going on.

So we go into Kosovo and we're going to do interdiction operations on the Macedonian border, make sure drugs and monies and things are not going one way. And, you know, guns and human slaves are not going the other way and all of those things. So first real world op. And we're setting up defensive positions. We're kind of out in the hinterlands doing kind of old school infantry stuff. patrol-based operations. And I'm patrolling around.

I'm literally taking out my very first patrol for the first time. We had been there a couple weeks, and it's my first PL lead. And we had a call across the radio that America's been attacked, return to base. And I'm like, come on, man. You're messing with me. Nobody attacks America. Like, come on. And they're like, no, seriously, return to base.

And so I'm thinking, you know, I get the boys together. We all take a knee face outboard. I'm like, all right, drink water. We're going to hump it back. We're going to move pretty quick. Sure enough, we get back to our little patrol base, and it's already being torn down. Army 47s are coming in, already taking platoons out. My platoons, one of the last ones to leave.

Takes us back to Bond Steel. And the Bond Steel Chow Hall is just raucous. Every time you walk in there, it's Army, Air Force, Navy Marine Corps, all of the K-4 forces. It's loud. Just all kinds of nonsense going on. I crack the door open. And I'm still thinking, like, this is crazy. Like, what's the real story here?

I cracked the door open and you could hear a pin drop. And so we slide in quietly and they have these big old school TVs. And it's just the repeat over and over again and the planes flying into the towers. And it was just, it's surreal. And just to see like 200, you know, guys and gals in uniform just in complete silence. Like no one's even serving food or anything. We're all just standing there in shock. Jump back on the CIRSARGE and we're like, okay, we're already out.

here. What are we doing? Where's the fight we're getting into? And, um, but it happened to be right at the end of our deployment. The next Mew had already spun up. They had already done their final exercises and stuff. And they're like, now you're steaming home. Uh, the next me is going to come out. And whatever happens next is it's going to be, uh, their game to play. Uh, so I steamed home, uh, not knowing what was going to happen next. Uh, we were home a couple of months and, um, commander started saying things like, you know, be prepared. you're probably going to find yourself in a desert here shortly. So, you know, let's start getting our things in order.

Make sure you know where all your stuff is. You know, Will's power of attorney started happening and all of those things. And then, yeah, 2003, we found ourselves in the desert of Kuwait, staring north going, man, is this really happening? Yeah, I mean, could you expand on that a little bit? Like, as a young Marine and like you're about to push across the berm line, right? Yeah, yeah. And it was, so, you know, at the E5 level, nobody's telling you nothing, especially back

then. And it's not like I'm able to just jump on a red side and figure some things out. That's not even available to me, right? I'm living at a GP tent sleeping on the desert floor, 110, 115 is pretty much the norm for Kuwait around that time of year. And we're all just wondering, right? And we're in this giant grid square with a berm around us, with lots of other. units and we're all just kind of wondering, is this thing really going to happen?

And sure, you know, and then we're doing the gas mask drills. You know, that's why I alluded to my very first training up ironically was NBC. Nobody cares until they care because nuclear biological chemical is bad, right? So we're doing all the drills thrown on gas masks, throwing on the Saratoga suits that are green, ironically, and here we are in the desert. And then we get the call like, okay, this is the order of March. This is the vehicle you're in. Here's where everyone's going to be.

We're driving north. You know, here's probably where we're going to stop and so on and so forth. And I remember taking off, you know, zero dark something and driving. And we did it for three days, four days. It's been quite a while. I don't really remember how long it was, but it was a long time. Driving 24 hours straight night and day, nonstop, switching out drivers, just keep moving. moving and massive trains just in parallel of vehicle, American vehicles going over the berm

and through the southern deserts. And, you know, even crossing through the berm was pretty surreal because it was literally this giant sand dune of a berm with giant, you know, ditches on either side and Constantino wire and all kinds of things that had already been cleared out and were going through those breach points. It was, yeah, it was surreal. I mean, what was it like when you, when you crossed over the berm and got into Iraq? And I mean, it's like, this is war.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, right. Is, okay, so have I checked the box yet? Yeah, yeah. Is this, did I do it? Am I doing it? Yeah, it was a lot of that, literally. You know, because what do you have to, you know, thinking back to the movies and the books that were available back then?

You're comparing yourself to like, Commando, Rambo, Predator, Delta Force, you know, Charlie Sheen jumping off the bridge and Navy Seals and you're like, you know, platoon like, okay, none of this equates. Right. Like, what am I actually doing? You know, and then you, you know, a couple days later with some broken vehicles, you know, in all the madness that happens in a really long log train movement, all of it happened, right? Literally wheels fell off of vehicles because they were just, we're just grinding him up with

all the weight of all the things we're carrying and so on and so forth. And then there were also times where we would see, you know, Patriot missiles going overhead and gas, gas, gas, like throw everything on. Let's go. And we would just be riding around a gas mask for six hours, seven hours, eight hours straight, just waiting for someone to say like, it's real, it's not real. That was just a really good drill. Good job, buddy. You're still alive. So keep going.

And then we pulled into southern Nazaria. And well, excuse me before that, we got in just south of the third largest. city in Iraq, Nazaria. And it was our artillery with Iraqi artillery kind of trade rounds back and forth. So we just weren't moving forward. That was the plot at that point, I guess. And they're just kind of figuring it out, just throwing rounds back and forth. And we're a truck company. So we move pretty quickly through the desert. And this is just, I'll probably allude to this a few times through my telling in my own story, there's these little moments that happen that at the time you have no idea how impactful it is, but then they become something that is, it changes the

trajectory of the rest of your life. And so because we had to stop, because those already rounds were getting tossed back and forth between those two units, it allowed an AAV track company to catch up because the AAVs don't move as fast, but they were able to catch up. So when we continue to push forward, the AAVs took our mission to push into the city, which literally saved our lives because they got eight up hard when they hit the city. But they were in armored vehicles. So they took a brunt of that off the armor, whereas if we would have been in trucks, that would have been a whole different story about the entirety of Iraq because the amount of instant casualties. that would have happened. And just prior to that, so then, you know, the artillery goes back and forth.

That kind of ceases. They push the tracks up. We kind of follow behind. And it's the first time I'm sitting in the southernmost portion where we entered was really the city dump. And so we're just getting swamped by the flies for the very first time. And you're like, oh, little did we know that is Iraq. That's what you're going to experience the rest of the time you're here. Welcome.

Welcome to Iraq. and it was the first time I saw American vehicles, bullet holes in them, on fire, tipped over, American uniforms. This was no longer training. This was, okay, we're in war now. This is real. And I want to say less than 45 minutes later, we took a contact left. And it was one of the coolest things I ever got to be a part of.

We dismounted, got online as a company, a rifle company, and pushed through. it was just total mayhem but it looked exactly how it's supposed to look like on Range 300 at whatever complex where you do that and I was like wait we did it like that that actually went really well like I saw all my parts

so I'm like everyone's okay oh that was cool so you guys did like a like a bounding overwatch as a company like moving forward yeah yeah yeah Sheen guns, 60 mortars got out and threw mortars in and a whole bit.

About how many, who was the op, the op-for? I mean, what was the ambushing force composed of? Couldn't tell you. E-5. E-5 halty had no idea. I just heard bullets come from this way. He said contact left. I was an anti-tank assaultman, so I'm running around with a 83-millimeter recoil-less rocket launcher.

And I just remember my company commander saying, that building hit it. Roger that. Yeah. What I forgot during that little piece was, you know, we put in earring protection at the range. Yeah, I went hot with the smaw for the very first time in combat and didn't put in hearing protection. And I felt like my head was going to melt for about the next three, five days. It was pretty gnarly. And then you came to find out if you could tell us a little bit about like what you found out after the fact about like the vehicles you came across.

it wouldn't come together for another couple of weeks i mean there was a you know beyond that first contact left there was some legit gun fights we got to experience um lots more probing the lines as we dug in the defense and kind of held the southern end nazaria um and it was a couple weeks to a month i mean the timelines are sketchy now at this point it's been you know a couple decades yeah i'm standing on a rooftop though and it was that this is after the the major rainstorm where we I'm on a rooftop again doing firewatch and I'm going to slide off the roof because the amount of rain and those mud buildings are just coming apart underneath us. But a couple days after that, we got intel that some of the survivors of those vehicles were local to the area and they were correlating their position and trying to find them in the city. And we had done shaping operations and a couple of other things that I knew I was a part of to just to attempt to make.

that happened. So fast forward, I'm standing on a roof again. It's zero two. I'm kind of reflecting on all I experienced up to that point. I'm loving my infantry career. I'm reaffirming this is a 20 year thing for me. This is awesome. War is pretty cool as a young man. It's a mixed bag of emotion, but it's mostly pretty cool. And I see three tanks, and they just face Abrams, and they just face their cannons outboard go over the bridge and just start lobbing rounds into buildings because it was a free fire zone because of the gunfights that had been happening. I'm like, okay, I've seen some stuff. Never seen that happen.

That's a bold move, cotton. Let's see how that plays out. Some other vehicles start laying out some pretty heavy 25 millimeter rounds into the city. And then basically what happens next is I hear a C-130 pull into orbit. over a set of compounds and then the wump, wump, wump of 47s and little birds come screaming in and it just lights off. And it would take me several months after that fast forwarding to realize that what I got to watch on a monocle device. So it's not like I was watching it like we're seeing each other right now. I was highly grainy. But I got to see the big muscle movement

of essentially the raid to get Jessica Lynch back. And the whole time I'm standing up there, I'm thinking I'm really enjoying combat. I think I'm actually kind of good at it. And we're performing well. I'm enjoying it. I'm going to do this forever. But whatever that was, I've got to go be a part of that.

I've never seen anything. Like, that was the cool stuff ever. Like, I didn't know that Socom was a real, like a real thing. I thought it was movies and books and all of those things. So that just put me on a completely different path after that. How did the rest of that deployment to, the 2003 deployment to Iraq, how did that continue and then eventually wind down for you? It was, you know, we thought incorrectly up front that, you know, we had defeated the Iraqi army,

that we had liberated the people. And so they started exfilling forces pretty rapidly. We were probably only there about three months was probably the total amount of time in country. I think I was there. And yeah, we ex-filled. I got right back on the cure sergeant and steamed home yet again. And then it, right, it just slowly unfolds. And then it starts to turn in this meat grinder that just doesn't end. And then I'm thinking, well, going back in the fight, coach, get me in there.

But I'm also in this career point in the Marine Corps where they're like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not your, it's not your future. That's not the needs in the Marine Corps. You're going to go be an infantry instructor at the School of Infantry. which I also felt pretty, I felt really good about because I was, my experience at the school of infantry was not a great one. I learned a ton, but I felt there was a lot of room for improvement over what I experienced. And I was excited to go back and give back meaningfully to my, my job field, my MOS.

And now that I have combat experience, I've done something, I can bring something relevant. And if this thing's going to continue, I mean, I know that I'm sending these years, young men straight into it and I'm I'm 100% in like if I've got to do this then all right let's go yeah so that's where I went next yeah I mean you it sounds like you were pulled in two different directions or maybe more than two I mean part of it was that you wanted to get back in the fight but part of it was also you were realizing how big an impact you were able to make on these young marines it was I mean it was the the impact portion was in retrospect right because in early 20s or mid 20s or whatever was at that point. I didn't have the prefrontal cortex at that

point to have enough understanding and really think that completely through. But it availed itself, I would say, over my time as being an instructor and the relevance of, it was really tough for all the instructor cadre watching the big things like Fallujah unfold. And we're getting it, you know, on the very early version of YouTube and all the other different platforms and things way back when. And so tell us about like your pursuit of special operations. And at the time, at the time we have to also mention for viewers that the Marine Corps was not a part of special operations command at that time. Yeah. Yep.

So and I knew that I wanted to pursue. a different path. And I started really, I had to do the research to figure that out. So I'll also remind everybody, Google didn't exist yet. So doing the research was actually really tough. Socom didn't have a public facing web page. So it was a lot of books and research and talking to a buddy who had done this thing, who had a cousin who was a ranger who in all of these conversations. And I figured out, okay, if I was going to get to Socom, I was going to have to leave the Marine Corps. Interservice Transfer is an option. And so when you say that as an even, you don't get treated real well.

It's not the most popular thing to say. And first sergeants will be the first ones to let you know that is not going to happen, in fact. And there's a whole lot of other things I now have for you to do right now. Yeah. So I got to learn the hard way that I was going to have to be a little more strategic about it. And I saw the opportunity also going to School of Infantry to be an instructor that would lower my opt tempo and I could really start to work out harder and I knew I'm a terrible swimmer. So I knew I regardless of the selection process, I was aiming towards I'd have to get better at that and I'd have to

get better rucking and all the other gamut of skills. And so I started trying to layer those things on. And that allowed me to be mentally and physically prepared for what eventually happened in 2007. and I'm again right time, right place. And it's one of those fortuitous moments you just don't know. I had made really good best friends and one of my brothers to this day with another instructor who was very close to a bunch of force recon guys. And they bynamed him over to the unit that was going to become Marsok on the West Coast. And he bynamed a couple of other people and I got to be one of those other people. He said, check it out.

this is how it works. I'm going to vouch for you one time and the rest is on you. You have to show up and do the work and do the rest. But I'm going to vouch for you this one time. And I was like, all right, let's do it. I'm all in. Because just before that, him and I had already gotten our orders. He and I both knew where we were going.

We had already talked to our infantry platoons that we were going to and the commands and all of those things. And we're like, yeah, we're 60 days out. You know, we're going to, you know, we're going to go do the right thing and say hello first. and get acquainted with everybody, and that way it's a super smooth transition. And then this thing just kind of pops up, and we went for it.

And we had to do a lot of work to fight the system, to make it all happen, get orders changed. Like, that doesn't, that's a rarity, I would say. But we got lucky. And him and I both got to stay for 20 years, which is also very fortuitous. Yeah. I want to ask you about the birth of Morsak,

but I'm going to give a quick shout out to my friend at Casa Carabaeo Cigars. They keep us well stocked over here. I hope you guys go check them out. Really love what they do. Casacarebeo.com is the website where you can go and get them. And I also just wanted to plug real quick our Patreon. If you guys want to get ad-free episodes of the Team House, $5 a month, you can get all of them ad-free. So please go and check it out.

And we, of course, really appreciate your support, and it keeps the show going. So, Mike, walk us through a little bit about the birth of Marine Special Operations and also like your personal experience, what you were kind of going through to get that, because I mean, standing up any unit from scratch like that is a huge, huge pain in the ass. Yeah, yeah, but such an opportunity and I'm so grateful that I got the opportunity to do it. And it was, so that as the legend was told to me, old Donnie Rumsfeld is troll. rolling around the different special operations communities and asking the SOCOM commander, what else do you need? And he said, I need more bodies. Like, it's a war. And he goes, okay,

well, how do I, how do I facilitate that? And I think he probably kind of said, Marine Corps is not helping us out, none. And I think he pretty much turned to the left and said, hey, Marine Corps, you have X amount of time to get this done. So debt one, the very first Socom test unit was stood up. They went out and they were catastrophically successful is the best way to put it. They did some great work

that I hope goes down and is chronicled in Socom history and especially in all of those men who paved the way for us. And so then that happened and that was the left seat right seat essentially. Socom said

yeah, check. That's a check in the box. We'll take them. And then the command was stood up on the East Coast, and the year late, it was in 06, and then in 07, the command was stood up. First Marine Special Operations Battalion was stood up. And I had just showed up. I'm Nick the new guy, brand new, looking lost and not knowing what to do. And I find myself in formation where they traded the First Force reconnaissance guide on. for the first special operations guide on.

And the other thing that happened in that formation that really changed my perspective and understanding of what the rest of my career would be like was there was, I don't know, three, four silver stars in that formation and there was at least as many bronze stars. And I think every single one of those dudes was also getting a purple heart. Plus there was a whole section in other guys getting purple hearts and comms and everything's with Vs. And it was just, I had done some really cool things in the infantry.

And I had worked with some of the best infantrymen possible, some of the best machine gunners that taught me invaluable skills, mortar men and great guys. But now I was definitely in a different place. And to hear those citations, it was just like, these are the things of legend. And I'm standing in formation with these gentlemen,

shoulder to shoulder. And I realized instantly, I'm not working hard enough. I'm not smart enough. So I've got to fix both of those things as fast as possible. So shut my mouth, listen, and do everything as best I can. Could you explain also a little bit about like, you know, this is a brand new unit? I mean, what's the, what's the mission as far as it came down from higher?

I mean, you must have had, you know, your mission essential tasks. And how did you go about beginning like training for those and getting prepared eventually for deployment. Luckily, again, I was young enough in my career where I didn't know any of that piece. I was a staff sergeant by that time and still a very young E6 staff sergeant. So I was literally just doing what I was told, when I was told and doing it to the best of my ability. And when I was asked, how can we do it better or ask for my opinion? I was trying to provide really good feedback.

So my experience was more of one of go to a school, pack all of your things. Because as soon as you fail anything, you're gone. You're getting orders and you're leaving. And so my very initial experience was people would show up to formations and meetings, and I would never see them again. And the new people would show up and they would be around for a while and then I would never see them again. and I would go to a school, come back, go to a school, go to a training package, come back, and people were just in and out, in and out, in and out, because the selection process was pre-having a hammered out selection process in place, and it was happening at the unit level.

So it was very, it was a free market economy. If you were not playing and putting in your number of points on the board, man, you were gone. So that happened quite a bit. And so that's how I got to experience. And I got told more than once, you don't belong here. You're not an 0321 recon marine. This place was built on recon marine.

You're just an infantryman. And just make it easy for us, fail something so we can get rid of you. And that got said to us, me and my buddy, who vouched for me to get over there. And the master sergeant who said that to us, I don't think he realized the effect that had on us. Because as soon as he walked away, me and my buddy looked at each other. We didn't have to say a thing. I already knew what he was thinking. You're going to have to kill me and drag my dead body out of here.

I'm here. So that was my initial experience. But then after that, once I kind of earned my place and my ability to have an opinion, it was well received. And it was a very entrepreneurial environment, figuring out the uniform, figuring out how to wear what, wear, when, and how and how much. of those things were being figured out in the moment at the at the ground level and it was it was a was really again just grateful to be there at that time even like what what you guys were going to be called like now you're raiders but i mean it it took some time even to get to that didn't it it did so the original unit was marine special operations battalion because the marine corps

wanted nothing to do with uh standing up the raider battians again um it's very against the culture of of the Marine Corps. And so even calling ourselves Raiders was highly who poohed upon, I would say. It was, or in other words, it was illegal. So we couldn't use like the skull and stars that you see behind me.

Guys were getting it tattooed and they were literally getting kicked out of the Marine Corps and out of the unit. Oh shit. Wow. For those things. NJPs and all kinds of things. Couldn't use Raider. And so it was, it was very much, Marines are who we are, operations are what we do. We're more than a one-trick pony. We're willing to do windows.

And I understand why all that was happening. Stay humble, work hard, check, got it. And then over, over the course of a couple more years later, we were able to procure the device, change the name, get an MOS. You know, we didn't even have an MOS up front and then secure the MOS for officers so they didn't disappear. And they were able to stay as well. So, All of those were critical steps in the years following. How long do you think it took to stand up like your task organization, get all the equipment and weapons and everything you need and start to go into like that pre-deployment cycle?

The GWAT money was flowing in pretty hot and heavy, even from day one. I mean, just duffel bags of gear and trying out lots of new things. If you're going to sniper school, you got another duffel bag of things to try out. You're going to free fall, another duffel bag. And it was very, okay, this works, this doesn't work, these combinations, things. And we were doing that for a lot of the, my initial package, my initial workup was probably,

probably the longest one at about 18 months where it was just our company together doing, doing the workup, going to schools and all of those things. It contracted considerably after that. And then in terms of the TEO, like what does the team consist of? That changed from, we went from a three years. four team model, excuse me, four team, four-team, four-element model to a three-team model, just like deployment after deployment, we're changing the model, changing the model. And in terms of, as I rose to the ranks, understanding enablers when they're added,

who was added, how many were added, that changed considerably. So the construct of the entire company, it was just an ever-changing model. I would say up until about 2016, then it got very solicit. And it became very, yeah, in stone at that point. And I'm sure they're changing again now for the world's changing. It's fascinating. And like you said, I mean, as challenging as it is, it's also a big opportunity to create something new, a new model. You know, because there's nothing set in place already.

Like right now there's a, there's an, you know, internal debate and special operations command about changing the 12-man ODA to potentially. be a 16 man ODA. And this is like sack religious. You know, the 12 man ODA is like the ride or die for a lot of people. But I mean, and I only bring that up just to talk about like institutionally how it's interesting that,

you know, you're able to kind of like mold this block of clay. Yeah. Yeah. And to be at the team level really, you know, my humble contribution was really more at the tactical level and being able to, you know,

to contribute in that way. But there, I mean, some of my peers and mentors were really, really doing the hard struggle with big Marine Corps, you know, fighting for being able to be called Raider, renaming the battalions, no small thing, fighting for the MOS and all of that. And of course, as a young enlisted dude, this is my chance to eat humble pie in a live broadcast or in a large way.

Like, I was probably one of the complainers back then about all of that. It's not happening fast enough and it should be this, should be that. The device should look like this and all that. and it worked out the right way. And I appreciate all of those, yeah, leaders who fought for all of that ahead of me. Yeah, I mean, the military is a huge ship that takes a long time to change its asthma. Yeah, absolutely. No getting around that.

So tell us about, you know, going into, when you, I'm sorry, tripping over myself, but when you finally get orders to deploy as Marsok, and what was that like? like training up for that and then getting deployed initially. That workup was probably one of the best and most comprehensive because it had the longest timeline and lead up to it. It was probably the most schools I got in terms of going to sniper school, going to jump school and so on and so forth because they just all kind of fit in because we had the time to do it.

And then driving schools with your team and shooting schools with your team and all of those things. We were playing with a very funky model because we didn't know how the command structure was exactly going to work above us. So we still had Marine Corps tasking us and thinking they could task us all the way through the deployment along with SOCOM, you know, asserting no, no, no, no, they're ours once they deploy. They're deploying under our deployment orders. And so my team ends up back on boats where they're not supposed to be. And I do half of my first deployment with my team on a boat out in the Pacific and heading towards Asia.

And finally, over all of that, it was a little bit like dad slapping mom at the dinner table who was super awkward when Socom came over the top, called the boat and said, where's the commander? Hey commander, get your team off the boat, get them to Kuwait. We've already logistically planned all of that. Then you need to figure out how to get to Afghanistan where we told you to be three months ago. Ready, execute. Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah. No, go ahead. We show up on the, you know, and we're taking up half the boat too because we've got all of this cool guy, Socom equipment. We've got vehicles and quadcons full of stuff. and we're taking up way more than our fair share of the boat because we're ready to world deploy. But we didn't follow the basic orders,

which was you're supposed to be in Afghanistan. So when we left the boat, the boat was happy. And when we left the boat, Socom was happy. The only one that wasn't happy was the Marine Corps, but they got over it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not exactly the correct way to employ your brand new special ops unit to put them out of fleet like that.

So logistically, how did that work getting from the ship to Afghanistan. Lots of planes, trains, and automobiles, lots of borrowing flights and flight space, got majority of the guys to Kuwait and then got everything into, I'm pretty sure we were in Bastion. We started in Bastion, got the whole company coalesced there and then spent the next three months doing, you know, because we show up late, you know, what do we give the guys who show up late?

We'll give them whatever's left, right? So all the good jobs were taken. They said, you know, basically, why don't you guys go out west and disrupt? That's your mission statement. So that's what we did. We went out to Farah province where they told us to go and we disrupted. How did disrupting go? Disrupting was awesome.

We did a lot of driving around waiting to be shot at and just annihilating anybody dumb enough to shoot at us. because we're in gun trucks. Fraup province was not full of IEDs yet. It was mostly low-level shooters, low-level fighters, I should say. So we weren't doing anything earth-shattering by any means, but it was a great way to get our feet wet and to really shake out how do you operate in the desert with new VIX, new guns, and all the things.

And so what did you think of the unit itself of like this unit that you, You know, you helped stand up even though you were a pretty junior guy. And now you're getting to see it in action. What was that like? It was because it was such an entrepreneurial guys are leaving at any given moment, you never see them again or even no one even talks about them. Like they're just gone. I was doing the best I could to keep my head down and just kick ass at whatever.

Any task I was given do it better than was asked for. but the caliber of humans I got to be around. I mean, so calm and being in the teams. And it's interesting, I don't hear this talked about enough, but I find it fascinating is you run into all the genetic freaks. Right? It's a gene pool of genetic freaks who end up in this one place that are just super athletes who are also extremely intelligent.

And so the level of conversation in the infantry, I would just say is a little different than the level of conversation in a team room with a bunch of guys who have to have a standard IQ that's that's a little above the norm. And so being around all of that made me raise the bar of my performance. And I'm just, again, I don't know that I helped stand up. I can't claim that, but just being able to be there. I just feel grateful, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, that must have been such a cool experience to get to see it all come together after, you know,

all of you guys put a lot of hard work. into that, I know. Yep, absolutely. And then to see the way it's progressed, you know, watching the selection process come together and seeing literally bigger, stronger, faster, more intelligent young guys come into the unit. And you're like, oh, man, this whole thing's working. Like, this is working.

Yeah. And so redeploying back home and then is it like getting ready to go back back into the breach? It was. It, once we kind of figured out. that initial hiccup, if you will. That was Afghanistan one of three, and I pretty much the next one, I hopped the rotation because I was still on the edge whether or not I was going to get to stay in the unit because I was not a recon marine, and that was what it was predominantly fielded by.

We still didn't have an MOS yet. I was too senior to go to BRC. They were basic reconnaissance scores, so they were not going to, they had no reason to let me in. They had every reason to let me fail, which I totally understand. And so I snuck away to some of the special schools because I had a team sergeant that looked out for me, a team chief that looked out for me and said, hey, you know, we're just going to make you too valuable that they, you know, we're going to invest too much money in you and they, we're going to make it dumb for them to get rid of you. So I did some of those special schools that are hard to get into and then like

free fall, like you can't put a free fall or out in the fleet. Like, what's he going to do? And so I got very fortunate because I got taken care of by great leadership, honestly. And in all of that, yeah, it was just amazing experience. What was the second trip to Afghanistan? Like, how did it differ from the first? We actually knew what we're doing. Yeah, that made a huge difference. And we were given a legit mission.

And so VSO, it just started. And we got to be one of the first VSO teams, not popular, but it needed to be done and needed to be executed well. And so we ended up in a little village called Msao. And man, we took a rag tag group of local indigenous villagers and turned it into a police force. And we built bridges and we built a school. We got to kick that school off before we left. So we got to actually see like the first class start. You know, Dougson Wells, the kind of the stereotypical stuff.

And we made a, you know, it wasn't a, it wasn't a quantum change, but it was certainly a step change in the right direction. And it was, yeah, it was really good to be a part of and to have, you know, we used to call it season two, right? Season one is your first season, kind of like the TV shows. And so season two is just very different because you have a much better sense of what is right and wrong. to do. And so we just operated much better and a lot of far more efficiencies, I would say. How do you think the, the Marines did transitioning from, you know, we're combat, we're meat eaters and now, hey, you're fighting a counterinsurgency. You need to make friends with the villagers. We're trying to build up a security, you know, security apparatus around this area.

What was that sort of transitional or if there was one? What was that like for you guys? Yeah. I would say the general consensus. at my level again. I was like a brand new E7 at that point, gunnery sergeant, and everybody in it, my rank and below was like, nope, we're here to kill people. Like, what are you telling us to do? There's, there's a war going on and you want me to buy and sell goats and dig wells. Like, this seems like not the right job for us. Seems like a job for somebody else. So it was not overly popular.

And we were still looking to get in gun fights no matter what. And so we pursued that fairly heavily on the side while trying to, you know, train and do the right, train our indigenous forces to do the right things and all of that as well. So not, not overly popular. Well, what were your thoughts by the end of the deployment? I mean, it sounds like you did make a tangible difference in that village. It was kind of like I alluded to that only in retrospect, you know, it's really hard to do when you're in the moment. and you're hot, tired, eating terrible food and all of those things.

And you just want to be in gunfights. But to see a school open, right? And it was a burnt shell that was like literally just like ashes. And to rebuild that and see the first class kick off and all of those things, it was like you can look back and go, okay. Like, I don't know if that school's still there, but I mean, you guys did something. You did good while you were there. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And then third trip to Afghanistan, how did that one differ from the previous two? Third trip was, I would say, the tactical pinnacle of my career. By far, I got to be on a commando team. So we're just doing raids. It was seven commando candac out of Bastion, all helicopter raids. So 72 hours-ish was kind of the sweet spot to go into, you know if a VSO a village

village stability operation was having a hard time because they're doing the handing out soccer balls and doing all of that stuff and they're having a hard time with fighters and IEDs and all those things we'd go in and smash the problem for them and so that is just a lot of fun yeah that's awesome yeah yeah

and so finally getting to ride on black helicopters on a on a very regular basis and then interfacing with I mean hats off to the 160th. They're just, what an amazing unit that is so professional and totally made me rethink the way I approach how I speak to other units and how I coordinate with them because of the professionalism that they showed at every step of that. And a small short story aside from that, we had a guy that was injured. I happened to be injured at the same time.

It was a twisted ankle. My guys love beating me up about that. But they're like, well, you're the most useless. So you got to take this other useless guy and you're going to take him back to the hospital. So I ended up taking that ride. And I show up, you know, in Kandahar and I have no idea. I get rid of my dude that I'm responsible for as a local national. And I kind of, and I don't know what to do next, but the Sotiv shows up and then right on the heels of the Sotif is the 160th guys. And they're like, we got you brother. Like, come get some hot child with us. Like, we knew you're coming. We've been tracking the whole thing. And I go into the 160th talk. coolest thing I've ever seen to this day.

And one of the dudes actually gave it to me at the end of the operation. They were tracking on paper the entire operation. And they had my guys on, you know, because you can listen to them on satcom. And they're tracking every fighting position. They're tracking every gunfight. They're tracking every movement and everything that's happening on paper and on it because they're like, well, yeah, if everything, if we lose, electricity or whatever else

why of course we do this but it was just in like we do it too in our own talk but just to see the level of detail and care that was being done amazing and they're like hey you want to go back yes get me out of here so they had a bird going back so you got to go back into the gunfight it was good any particular

stories from that deployment that like stand out in your mind where you know you thought that your team really kicks some ass that day we had one particular gun fight. We'd been in zone for it was, we'd been in an area where a bunch of the red dots had kind of come together. So we were chasing red dots and there was some, some bigger red dots that were important there. And so it was my team and an ODA and to do a joint operation. And then I just happened to be in just one of the best gun fights of my career. And I'm, I'm a team chief. So I'm really just

tagging along with my element leader who's doing all the all of the real work and a hell of a dude madronzo wherever you're at i hope you hear this you're a badass um he let me tag along right and so i'm supposed to be running the radio because i'm the gfc um the gfc for the gunfight and all that but we get lit up pretty good and we just happen to have a bird overhead sort of like oh you boys aren't getting away with this one and it was the first time i'm wearing a garment and i can fully track everything that's going on. And we had great comms with the bird. And like everything was just clicking and it was still daytime.

So they're just, yeah, we tuned them boys up. We chased them for then they didn't, they had no idea we were chasing them. And so we ended up catching them boys. And they had called in reinforcements. So we tuned up their buddies who came in to reinforce. And then they made some phone calls and got some more buddies. And yeah, it just, it was, man, it was a great day. mayhem

absolute mayhem yeah i think we may or may not have stacked all of their motorcycles after we took care of them and lit it into a large fire it was great area pacified yes it was very quiet in that area after that

yeah so i mean it's super cool that to hear your story about going from being this young marine on the rooftop watching the jessica lynch rating like now you are that guy I mean, did it dawn on you? Like, I'm here. I'm doing it.

I've honestly never thought about it that way until you just said that. Really? It's surreal. Yeah. I mean, I'm a small town kid who grew up riding skateboards. And then fast forward, I got to have these experiences. And yeah, it's amazing. I'm grateful I got to do it.

You also, when we were talking earlier, you mentioned that you got to do some J-sets with Morsock. Mm-hmm. Yep. So in between those Afghanistan's, we managed to find some time to go, Philippines and some other places to do some J-Sets and work with, you know, local country, police forces, ATFs, FBI's, and all of those. And really, you know, worked on their shooting capacity,

working on their intelligence gathering capacities and all those things and doing the, kind of the classic foreign internal defense kind of stuff. and yeah and it was it's a great way to kind of decompress from a from a tougher deployment from from from Afghanistan to go do one of those it's a little bit of an out of boy and still doing good work um talk to us a little bit about i mean we get up to uh 2018 you know the years the years are ticking by here and i mean you've had a pretty amazing career and it sounds like you had a hell of a lot of fun. After, you know, those deployments, I mean, what's sort of like the next step for you? Yeah. So I find myself too senior to have fun anymore. I find myself right in a desk and,

you know, future ops or somewhere upstairs in the S, you know, pick a number, probably the S3. And I'm, I'm coming to work one day. I'm a little bit late. I've like spilled my coffee. I'm trying to find my badge. Like, where's, where's, how do I get it, you know, trying to get into the building. What's my code again? I get to my cubicle and, you know, my left knee's hurting. My right shoulders hurting. I'm already late for the first meeting. And I'm like, hmm, am I still here for the right reasons?

Or am I now part of the problem? Hmm. And I spent the rest of the day not really tuned to the meetings, but I realizing I was at like the 17 and a half year mark. And maybe 20 was the hard stop. Maybe it was time. Because like I said, I saw the selection process working and the new young guys coming in were Jack Studs, man. And they were smart.

And so it felt like a really good transition point at 20 years. So I started looking around. I started really paying attention to my peers and mentors who are kind of a couple years ahead of me. You know, what are they doing? What's successful? What does success even look like? You know, what do they recommend and starting to have those conversations about, I'm thinking about dropping my papers and all of those.

things, which makes you super popular too, by the way, right? You see, you've got to be very careful how you have those conversations because no one wants to hear that you're a quitter, right? But I start having those conversations and I really start realizing the longer the runway and the more my finances are locked down, that's going to predicate my best possible transition. So I started working on those things because that was in my sphere of control. And then on the weekends or nights when I could go to a networking thing or something being put on by a veteran support organization, I would go do that. And then what I got told, though, right around that same time, the Honor Foundation was

standing up. And it was primarily aimed at Seals and Swick down in Coronado. And they had opened up the first couple seats to Raiders and the first couple seats that went. And one of them happened to be one of my former commanders, great guy, Andy, wherever you're at you did a hell of a job. And then another guy, Matt, one of my SEAs who still mentors me to this day and is a really good friend. They both said essentially the same thing. No matter what you do, you have to go through the Honor Foundation as your, that's your men force for infill to civilian life. If you don't do that, like you're you're making the wrong choices here. So

fall in to suit with that. And so I had done a couple of other things. things. I had a resume I felt good about and I had all of these other, I kind of figured out how to talk about myself a little bit and all these things. And I, I'm in the seat very first night at the Honor Foundation and the director says, okay, we've all introduced ourselves, all of that. You're going to introduce yourselves. And I'm sitting in the room with 30 other seals and SWIC. And there's the odd green beret in the background. Somehow, I don't know how he snuck in. And because there's not a lot of green berets in Southern California. And it said, the director says, So check it out.

You're going to introduce yourself, but here's the catch. You can't tell us your rank and you can't tell us what base or what you used to do. We want to know who you are, not what you did. Ready go. We're all just like, wait, what? What do you mean? So what did you say? Yeah.

Yeah, I'm master sergeant Halterman. Like I work in Camp Pendle like all of these things, right? And he stopped us. He's like, don't worry. We know you don't know how to do that. Not yet. That's what the next three months are. about. So then we, I go through the program and it's just a absolute change. I mean, it's,

it's completely different than anything I experienced to that point. And it is at the level that you would expect for SOCOM. Like all of the things that takes you to get in and be and stay on the teams at whatever level, this is the next logical step as you're transitioning to the next phase. And it is at the level of professionalism and done in such a way that you're like, oh, yeah, this is what it looks like. So I finished that. And I was ready to go be a tech entrepreneur. Like I knew that's what I was doing next. And I got offered the opportunity to stay at the Honor Foundation as a staff member, though.

And they're like, we have a tech problem that we're trying to solve. You seem to have a propensity for it. Why don't you solve our hard tech problem and, you know, continue to serve? And I was like, yes, let's do it. I had no idea I could have even had a chance to work here. Like, absolutely. So in September of 2018, I hit my 20 year mark. I got my DD-214.

I'm retired. And then January 2nd of 2019, brand new civilian, brand new employee, showing up at the Honor Foundation as a staff member. Wow. What was that? I mean, it sounds first of all, like you were very smart about how you train. transitioned out of the military and made a lot of really good choices to kind of set yourself up for success those last few years. But nonetheless, I mean, even more so for the Marines, that that's just like such a part of your core identity.

I mean, what was it like when you finally got that DD-214 and, you know, leave the base for, you know, the last time in uniform anyway? Yeah, it is. It's another surreal experience, especially if you do 20 years. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure even a 10 year or beyond, it's a surreal feeling because at that point, I had as much time in the Marine Corps as I had, you know, that was half my existence on the planet. And a good chunk of that was spent in war. And a good chunk of that was, so it is a, it is a, it is the most mixed bag of emotions you can possibly have of joy, excitement, pure fear. Because you don't actually know what you're doing next. Not really, right?

Because you haven't done it yet. It's easy to talk shit about being a good gunfighter. And then you go get in a gunfight though. Because training and reality don't always match. So all of those things are churning. And I was just trying to, you are correct. I did the best I could with the information I had to make the best decisions to posture myself for best possible outcomes.

you know and if you're in special operations and you're transitioning the honor foundation i would submit to you is is that step well yeah let's let's take a moment right now i'd love i'd love to hear you tell us i mean you talked about your interaction with honor foundation but if you could kind of give us the elevator pitch or you know the 30,000 foot view like what is the honor foundation what's their mission what do they do sure so the elevator pitch and then i'm going to transition from that and give you kind of the real real sure the elevator pitch pitch is it's a three-month executive style education. We're going to bring you in two nights a week.

And if you're in a physical campus, which we have eight of, we're going to feed you dinner because we know you're coming from your challenging day job. We're going to ask you to be in civilian attire and business casual at that caliber. We're going to feed you dinner because you know you haven't had time. And we're going to have some interesting people in the room, anywhere from executive coaches to business owners to executives. in corporate to entrepreneurs, and then you can just naturally have some conversations. And from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., you're going to grind over the actual curriculum.

And then the doors don't close until the last person leaves. It might be a couple of drinks, but then you start to have sign of the other conversations. And you do it over the course of three months. Each month is a phase, excuse me. So each phase is one month long. and where we start, which makes the Honor Foundation very different from all other veteran support organizations is we make you work on you. And so, you know, if you're wearing ranks and titles for a good chunk of your life,

it's hard to remember who Jack is again. And what does Jack actually like? And what is he actually want to, what are you good at that you never want to do again? That's a really good question to ask yourself in transition. So we work on a bunch of those things, a bunch of introspection. We don't let you flounder. We put you in a cohort of other like-minded, high-performing individuals who are also in transition. So now you've got battle buddies or swim buddies, you know, depending on who we're serving.

And then we give you an executive coach that you've got to check in with once a week, who's a civilian, more often than not, who's volunteering, who's going to help you figure out your transition because your needs are going to be a little bit different than mine. even though we could both be E8s, getting out 20 years, been in gunfights together, all the things. You may have kids and you're moving back to New York and I'm single and I want to go be at Google, right? Those are just very different outcomes. And to facilitate that, we give you a coach so that you can get really down and in on what those individual needs are. So broad curriculum that helps everybody with individual one-to-one care, if you will.

And then the big proposition without going into all the rest of the rest. of it is we serve you for life. Once you graduate with us, you're in a growing population. There's 2,550 plus alumni right now. So if you're looking to get in the company, as soon as you graduate, you have access to a Ranger or somebody at Google. You've got access to a SWIC or a SEAL who's an entrepreneur in the industry you want to be in and on and on and on. If it's a company you've heard of, we probably have a connection to it at this point, either directly through one of our graduates or through our great supporters or the company is actually donating to us or a myriad of other things. That's the elevator pitch.

But I'll tell you what we're really doing. And we never expressly say it. We're helping guys deal with identity, community, sense making, purpose, and meaning in life when the uniform comes off. And because even though you're going to have to do a really long checklist. to get out of Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, or Space Guardian, and you're going to have to do another really long checklist to get out of your individual unit. And you're going to have to do all of these things for medical, and you're going to have to do

all these things for the VA. And you're going to get a job? None of that is transition. That's change management. Right. That's all that is. Transition happens in your heart and in your head. It's how you feel about all of those things.

It's how you make sense of it. It's how you figure out who you are and who your new team is going to be. And then what is my purpose? And how am I going to find meaning from all of that now? Because if you're wearing the uniform, all of those things are answered, like, instantly. And then it's gone. So that's what we really try and help guys and gals grapple with. I'm really glad to hear you say that so explicitly and that the foundation helps guys

with that issue, with those, that series of issues. Because, you know, I've been out long enough now, what, 14 years long enough to kind of reflect back on my own transition experience. And, I mean, I really think that, you know, we'll take special ops guys, for example, you have to fight as hard to transition as you did to get into that unit. You know, like you talked about your fight, you know, to get into special operations, that was a big uphill battle for you. in my opinion it's just as big a battle to transition out of the military and find that purpose

and find that identity that you mentioned absolutely and hey it's hard yeah like I'm just like if anybody's listening you're not there yet but you're thinking about transition yeah it's hard

but that's not a bad thing it was hard to get in it's going to be hard to get out and the things that are the most meaningful to us in life the things that have the highest amount of value or the things that we had to struggle through that we had to grind

over and that we eventually found a solution to. So when you do it and you do it right, it'll be one of the most gratifying things that you, one of the most gratifying things you accomplish. No, it's super cool. And it sounds like right now the Honor Foundation serves the special operations community. I mean, is there a specific? We are 10 years old. That's what we are chartered, chartered to do as a national 501c3 nonprofit. The dream or the vision, really not dream, the vision has always been, though, to serve, how do we effectively make a bigger impact than that?

And so the vision has always been, what would it look like for us to take our knowledge? And look, we do all the other things too. We do resumes and we do LinkedIn, because all of those things are required. You have to have all of those things to get in and through a hiring funnel, start your own company, or go on and be a college student for a while. Those are kind of the three big buckets most guys, gals fall into.

But how can we contribute to the greater 200,000 who get out of Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps in mass every single year? And so we think the unique area that we can provide a real meaningful difference is in the areas I talked about, working on identity. community since making purpose and meaning in life. Because we really feel like that's an area that's not being touched at all because everything is focused around the necessity of getting in and through a hiring funnel or getting to a school or starting your own company.

But to do that effectively, knowing who you are first starting with the self, we would submit to you is the best place to start. And so we're currently piloting a program. We have about 100 pilot participants right now from, a wide swath of military experience who are in the transition process. They're going through this curriculum with us right now. And once we get done with that, we're looking at launching and making it available, potentially in May of this year to all transitioning veterans so that we're really giving them

that, you know, we would call it phase zero. Like here's the initial step you need to take. Before you can navigate to a point, you have to know where you are. So let's help, let us help you figure out where you are. And now you can plot a course with all these other great foundations who've already figured out best in class, you know, building the best LinkedIn, building the best community. You know, Bunker Labs already figured out how to do entrepreneurship. And we're going to hand you off closer to a whole human who knows who they are. So you can chart a better path.

I mean, it sounds incredible. And you said you served, or the Honor Foundation served 700 troops last year. Yeah, we served, yeah, about 700. We will serve about 800-ish, you know, depending on how it goes this year of special operations, individuals. Yeah, and that's Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, J-Soc, and Enablers. And what has your role been at the company since you took the job there? in 2019 i got hired to be the virtual director of the very first virtual campus so i got to be director of the fourth campus uh in existence at that time um and it was literally figuring out

is it possible to deliver high quality content over zoom or over another digital medium so that we can scale it and do it for you know we've got uh guys and gals and socom who are all over the map not co-located with the base and we hadn't we hadn't really grown at that point yet either. And so we knew it was a capability we needed. And so I got to prove the concept. I got to, there was already pretty much an 80% solution that was handed to me by,

it's people that did much harder work than I had to do to figure out a lot of the base stuff. All I had to do was get over the goal line. And so figuring out, yes, it is possible to deliver high value, high touch, quality content over Zoom is possible,

although we all now hate it because of 2020. It's just the reality of the world we live in. But it was fortuitous. Right. And that I got to figure it out in 2019 so that when 2020 happened, the entire company was able to pivot. And we served about 200 more service members in 2020 than we did in 2019 because of the team just going, okay, Halti, you already figured this out. Like, how do we do it? And just having great team members, just like in special operations who know how to feel, flow and go, make it happen.

Do we have any questions for Mike? We have a one of the interesting things about doing these interviews live is some of the viewers chime in with some questions. Awesome. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Please, Dee. Thank you. Jackson asks, do you ever foresee a Marsak tier one element being stood up kind of like Delta Force, but for Raiders, or is it unlikely? Oh, man, that's a great question. It's so contentious. It's a spicy question. Yeah, that is a spicy one.

I'm thankful to not be in uniform to be able to answer this honestly. You know, it's been talked about since the very early days. And we do have an allocation and opportunity to go that direction under other already formed J-Soc commands. currently in terms of the future that's a that's a big you know it's easy to say the men are capable it's easy to say have the experience it's hard to say that is standing up something very different that is also a big budget somebody much higher than any decision maker and the DOD is going to have to make and all of those things so I don't know the actual reality of that.

So yeah, I'm hopeful, though, because I think I definitely worked with some genetic freaks who are also highly intelligent and would fit in over there. And there might be one of one or two of them over there right now.

That's it for the questions. I have a question. Yeah. So we heard from a journalist Matt Cole, who wrote the book Code Over Country, that at some point during the GWAT, I guess SoC,

Socom or J-Socq was wanted to bring in like a bunch of Marines into buds and like flood buds with Marines. I remember this story. Do you know anything about that? Have you like was that something that came across your radar when you were there? No, that's the first time I've ever heard that. And I don't know if I'm, I don't know if that's awesome or terrifying or a bit of bull. Like, no. I mean, the closest thing that I had an experience, it's, and it's,

It's only mildly close to that was 18 Delta got opened up to us for like a heartbeat. And I got to be on a short list to potentially go to 18 Delta. And then that got shut down very quickly because when you talk about how do you, how do you sustain that over long periods of time and all of those things? I think the command had no answers for that. And so that got shut down. So what's next for you, Mike? What's the next step in your transition?

I guess you're transitioned out now, but in your civilian career and life, what's the next step for you? Yeah. So after having the privilege of being a director and serving cohorts for about two and a half years, and I transitioned into being the vice president of operations. So I've been doing this super sexy behind the scene stuff like insurance and HR and IT. I mean, just the really cool stuff. everyone when you get out wants to go do. And I say that,

obviously, because a knuckle dragon door kicker infantryman like myself is probably the wrong choice, but I have an amazing CEO who lets me run with scissors. So thank you, Matt. You're awesome. And he's let me figure out a lot of things. And so I've pseudo gotten an OJT MBA

along the way and learned a ton, some of it the hard way, most of it the hard way. and I really enjoy. I get to be the one person now, second person on the team because I have a teammate who's joined me in ops in earnest. So she is,

she's kind of like current ops and I'm doing future ops as best as possible. And we're the two people on the team who really get to focus on the team. Because most of the team are kind of inside culture or motto is fellows first. And the fellows are the ones who are in transition going through the cohorts. and we do everything for the fellows. No matter if we've got to pay for it or if we've got to bring in a world-class instructor, we don't have special operations guys teaching LinkedIn.

We have LinkedIn professionals teaching for all the classes. So we put fellows first, and because the team does that, they burn themselves out and they work extremely hard. I mean, it's really no different than a special operations team. I mean, they work really hard. So being able to focus on the team, trying to make their lives easier, that is very meaningful to me. And if I can get little wins for them to make their lives easier, like that's, I'm still really enjoying that. So I kind of don't see myself leaving any time soon.

It's awesome. Yeah. Well, Mike, I mean, I really appreciate you coming on the show. And I really appreciate what you're doing today and what the honor foundation's up to. I'd actually never heard of them until tonight. So I'm going to have to push that out to people when people ask me and friends are transitioning out of the military. I'm going to have to make sure to mention this to them. Yeah, I appreciate you put it up on the screen too.

If anybody wants to learn more, we have a ton more information on there. I literally touch like the snowflakes at the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more to it. And I'm hoping in May of this year we're going to have a big announcement. Do you want to give the website for the listeners who check out the podcast? Absolutely. N-O-N-R-O-R-G. That's honor.org.

Hopefully it's up on your screen right now. If you go check that out, it gives a lot more information on the program. And if you're interested in get involved, there's a lot of different ways to get involved. There's some easy ways to sign up as a volunteer if that's interesting to you. If you've been working in corporate, if you're an entrepreneur, if you've been working in finance, if you've managed a hedge fund, those are all things and opportunities and industries that guys and gals who are transitioning are looking at, and they would love to have a conversation with an individual like you

so they can understand that. And it's one of the big things we push is, don't just research it online, which is also important, but go have a conversation with somebody who's doing it nine to five and find out what they're actually doing each day before you say you want to be at SpaceX, because you might get yourself into something you're not ready for with your three kids and all the rest.

So if you're out there, you're a great American and you've been working hard in the private sector. And if you're a veteran and you've been doing the same, love to have you come contribute as a volunteer. Yeah, and you can find the links down in the description and the show notes if you're listening or watching. Definitely. It's right there for you. Thank you. Mike, any final thoughts? Is there anything I failed to ask that you really want to talk about?

No, I really appreciate this opportunity. I mean, I see the caliber of people that you have on here, so I'm a little bit shocked. You allowed me on here, so I just really appreciate it. Yeah, no, you're welcome anytime. And like I said earlier, if, you know, the Honor Foundation's having an event and some of the guys are coming through New York City, we'd love to have you guys here. That'd be awesome. Absolutely. We'll get together and smoke some of those cigars.

Yeah, hell yeah, absolutely. And next episode, next Friday, we're going to have a, Travis, who served as a special operations weatherman, weather technician. Jack's dream come true finally. Yeah, we've been talking about it. You know, it always comes up, you know, and usually there's a joke being made about special ops weathermen. And I figured, instead of making the joke, let's actually have one of these people on here and talk about their profession and what they do. Quick story, I will not make a joke about those guys ever because my very last jump was into the yellow sea on the border between,

North and South, obviously pretty far south of the border, but it was in the Yellow Sea. This guy figured out the weather, like calling six years of data, and he called the weather to a T. It was exactly what he said it was going to be, and we were able to jump. It was amazing.

That's awesome. That's the kind of stuff I want to hear. Like I said, it's interesting to learn about career fields that you knew nothing about before. So I will never talk trash about them. Yeah, good dudes. Awesome.

All right. So, Mike, thank you. Thank you everyone who joined us tonight. And we will see you next Friday. Take care out there and have a nice weekend. Thank you.