The Team House - Navy SEAL and Army SMU Operator | Drew Mullins | Ep. 156

Episode Date: July 31, 2022

Drew served as a Navy SEAL before assessing for an Army Special Mission Unit. He was deployed as a part of the Advanced Force Operations to Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion. Today's Sponsors: SAP Gear (Stately Asset Protection) https://SAPGEAR.com Veteran-owned company, Stately Asset Protection’s retail store specializes in handmade and unique survivability products. Use the code “TEAM” for 15% off your order! https://SAPGEAR.com For all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon! 👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #ArmySpecialMissionUnit #NavySEAL #jsocBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents,

and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Special operations, covert ops, espionage, the team house, with your hosts, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey everyone, welcome to episode 156 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park.

We got D-producing. And we have a special guest tonight, Drew Mullins. And I want to apologize, first off, to Drew for wasting some of his time last night. And also everyone else who tuned in. We take a lot of pride in doing a consistent, well-produced show every Friday, 8 p.m. We're there. And last night, we screwed up. It's not Drew's fault.

It was totally us. We moved into a new studio. We have some technical issues to iron out. But I'm really glad that we did. We did a lot of work today. Got a lot of things accomplished. And I'm just glad we're all here. And I'm really glad that Drew is here with us.

Drew is a former Navy SEAL. He went through Bud's class 156, which coincides with this episode. You see that back there, his helmet back there in his office. And Drew went on to serve in a J-Soc special mission. unit, did some of the AFO mission over in Iraq in 2003 with some other previous guests of the show. So we're really excited to have you here today. Drew, thank you so much for taking some time out of your Saturday. Hey, hey guys. Thanks. Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it. Absolutely, man. And thank you for joining us even after we consistently blamed you for all of our problems

last night. It turned out to be us. I thought it was me. I did. I thought, you know, what a shit show. I was representing, like he said, repeatedly, this has never happened before. So I felt good. Thanks. Yeah. Sorry, man. No, it has. We've never had to reschedule a show like that before.

But hey, shit happens. You made Drew jump through. It was so many hoops last night. It was definitely not on Drew's head. So, Drew, to kick off the show, I'm going to ask you, kick to you the same question we ask, really. Most of our guests is about your origin story. If you can tell us a little bit about your upbringing, how you grew up and sort of what that path was that took you towards military service.

Okay. So having listened to some of your other guests, I won't go through the whole retirement speech type version of what got me here. But grew up in California, on the beach in California. And I was born and raised there. My dad was in the Navy in the 60s for about eight years. so I was born on a on a Navy base, as were three of my other brothers and sister. And I just had a kind of a normal childhood, I guess.

But then my parents got divorced. And so there were four of us. And just as, you know, life would have it, we kind of had to just fend for ourselves. But great, great upbringing, played a lot of sports. And worked in the oil fields for a while. while and in the mid-80s I was a young man and kind of drifting I was playing rugby with uh I started playing rugby after college and uh had a lot had a lot of fun I met some some of the guys on our team just happened to be uh Vietnam era seals so and I didn't really know what a frog man was I mean

back then you didn't know anything about it you DT or any that stuff unless you knew someone and uh except for that book men with green faces or whatever it was And I was kind of, I was had gotten into an early marriage. I had a son kind of out of wedlock. I was feeling pretty much like a deadbeat dad kind of thing. And I was trying to figure out how to how to navigate the waters as a, as a young man. And one of the one of the games we had, we were gone in San Diego and this,

my mentor, the guy who saved my life basically, Eddie Farmer, shout out to Eddie Farmer. He'd get together when we play. the other team and there'd be other guys he knew from Vietnam and they start telling these stories and I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? You know, like crashed heloes with OGA stuff in it that they had to get out and ambushes and all those kind of things and, you know, they tell all these stories. I thought, wow, tell me more about that. Well, it was what it was. And I thought, that's pretty cool. And then one day, Ed pulled me aside and he kind of had the father talked with me because I didn't really have a strong father figure at the time. And I didn't want to

repeat some of the same mistakes that happened to me when my parents broke up. So I figured at least if I joined the Navy, I could take care of my son, you know, pay a child support and all that kind of stuff. So I went to the recruiter and I was a little bit older. It was 24, I think. And he starts, you know, going down the list, hey, so tell me about, you know, what education you have, what you do, what kind of jobs you have? And he gets to the part where it's just like, did you ever do any drugs? And I looked at him like, are you serious? And I, and he said, yeah, I mean, you know, did you? I had to choose a rate at the time, you know, it wasn't the pipeline of this now. So before that, I'd ask him, well, what do the, what do the seals need? And he said, they need Corman really bad and they

need radio men right now. So I said, oh, I'll be a Corman. I get hurt. I can take care of myself. But then when he got to the drug screening party, he's like, he asked me that question. And I said, and then he said, wait, wait, wait, stop. Before you answer that, if you've experimented

with anything more than five times, you might not be eligible for a program. Ah, okay, thanks. yeah, I experimented with pot five times, whatever. And anything else, I'm like, come on, dude, really? And I said, okay, no. Anyway, I joined. I made it through that.

But I was, let me just say that, you know, it was the 80s. And I was kind of sweating the piss test when I went through MEPs. And I made it. And I made a deal with myself, hey, self, you're not going to do that shit anymore. You're not going to jeopardize. Yeah. Your career. Yeah.

for that kind of stuff. And it wasn't a big deal. It was just kind of like the usual West Coast stuff. But I went to Buds or actually I went to Korninay school and then went to Buds. Classed up in the winter of 88 with class 153. That was my Hellweek class. Had 100, you know, the typical numbers, 160 something, 66. I think guys and I think 40 made it through Hell Week or something like that.

and talk more about it later about like, you know, some of the bud stuff. But made it through Hell Week. I got rolled back because I got hurt, but ended up graduating with class 156. And then, you know, start the pipeline, went to airborne school. And I had a funny story is I was the only Corman to graduate from my class. And when orders came out, you know, you probably do the same. same thing in the army. You feel like a dream sheet like where do you want to go right? And I had this girlfriend at the time I was trying to you know, put distance between.

And a nice person. I just just wanted to be free. So I put down every East Coast seal team I could on my dream sheet. And of course, I didn't get orders to the East Coast. I got orders to the West Coast. But the orders were weird because it wasn't like sealed. team three, siltime one, siltime five. It was like some weird name. And, you know, the instructors are looking at me like, hmm, how'd you get those orders? And I'm like, dude, I don't even know what this is. And so I went and talked to the phase master chief and he said, hey, that's, that's the cover

name for Red Cell, right? So I don't know if you know what Red Cell is, but that was the second Marsenko command that he created and they were basically the real world kind of a red team for security for defenses and things like that for bases and that kind of went sideways a little bit right after that but so they sent me down they said hey this is these are pretty awesome orders but uh if you want my advice i mean you'll you'll have a lot of fun you'll get a lot of really high speed schools and you'll get a lot of Qualls and a bunch of things that you'll really enjoy, but you won't get the opportunity to learn how to be a good frogman.

Ah. Okay, good seal. Because, you know, the pipeline was STT, which is now at SQT. I mean, back then, most of us, as you probably know, would go to our team. We'd be on probation for six months or year or a year, sometimes longer depending. And you went through advanced training, seal tactical training. and you're evaluated by your peers, basically. So it was one of those kind of things,

which I think is a really good way of doing it. But anyways, they said, yeah, if you do that, you know, you're not going to get the opportunity to really cut your teeth in the traditional way. And back then the teams were kind of geographically specialized. So I said, okay, sounds like good advice. But then when I talked to the detail, He's like, yeah, you're going to Seal Team 5.

And I'm like, it's like right next door, right? You know, in Coronado. And Seal Team 8 had just come on board. They just commissioned it. And they needed a corpsman. So I swapped with a guy and went out to Seal Team 8, drove my Volkswagen bus all the way across the United States with everything I owned, straight to airborne school. And subsequently to Virginia.

Beach. And did that create the distance with the girlfriend that you needed at the time? Yeah, yeah, I think it did. I don't know how much further I could have went. And to be to be quite honestly, that she was a great person. I just wasn't, you know how women. Sure. You know, you were young, you were a frog. Oh, it's young. Yeah. And hot. Right. Muscular. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. You're like a lot of, like a lot of women deserve all this. Like I, I can't be salvation just. Yeah, deprive them with this little slice of heaven. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah. There was a lot to conquer still. So, but it was, it was good. Yeah, along the way, I had some pretty cool adventures, just Airborne School was one, getting from, getting from there to Virginia Beach was another and et cetera. So that's, that's it. Nothing real outstanding, I guess. Well, that's, that's okay.

I mean, let's, let's hear a little bit. more about what it was like at Steel Team 8. I mean, you said you were one of the plank owners of that team since they were just standing it up when you got there. Yeah, and that's something I didn't really realize at the time because I always thought plank owners were like the people that were on the roster when they actually broke the champagne bottle of ship, right? But technically, if you're one of the first people to go there within a, I guess it's within

a year, first year or whatever, you know, where they're filling out the roster, the billets, your plank owners. So I haven't really pursued that. Like I'd like to get, you know, some certificate or piece of wood or something. But yeah, so I show up at Virginia Beach. And, you know, back then, I don't know if you've ever been to Naval Amphibious Space, Little Creek, but it's changed a lot, of course. But it was just SEAL Team 4, Team 2 and SDV2 were there. Team 8 was brand new.

And I remember going through the gate and asking someone, hey, where's shield teammate and guard said go down here and make a left all the way to the end make another right you'll be right there turn the corner and i see the signs and i see the compound on the left and it's the right it's the teams but on the right is a bunch of like a chain link fence and a bunch of trailers trailer park and that was teammate um went in and um checked in and it was an interesting time back in 89, 90, because a bunch of the guys who were there were, had just

come back from Persian Gulf. So they did the Iranajar and, you know, those ops that certain guy named Malcolm says he did. But he didn't. Yeah, so we had this really kind of a

unique mix of folks there. Basically, it was known as dump eight at the time, right? So that's where you kind of like cast off all your, you know, free agents that you want to get rid of your problem kids. At the same time, there was a bunch of guys who were really solid who volunteered to go because they wanted to be part of creating a new team. So we had this really eclectic mix of folks. And to give you an example of what I mean by eclectic, we're in, we're at ranks for quarters one morning.

Ex-O is up there doing giving them the plan of the day. and all of a sudden you hear some of these guys like yelling and all of a sudden whack i look down the line these guys are in a fist fight right you know like at the end of the line just beating each other up and you know it's over a woman of course you know that's how it works um and i'm like oh wow this is awesome what i get myself into but you know over time um you know being in the first platoons uh it was it was fun you know it was really cool to learn from some really great uh talented guys and started deploying.

Yeah, what were the deployments like back then? I mean, like some of the, I mean, you're talking about 1990s now, late 80s, early 90s. That's when Charlie Sheen was the seal, 1990s. Some of the guys a little bit before that would say that, you know, back in those days, the seal teams were basically,

you know, a mask, a pair of fins, a snorkel, a weight belt, and a K-bar knife, and not a whole lot else. But what was your experience like when you started deploying with SEAL Team 8. Yeah, it, actually, my first platoon was,

uh, was a, a marg. So we actually got spun up to go to desert storm. Desert Shield, Desert Storm. So that was, uh, what, 90, 91, right? 90 was Desert Shield. Yeah.

And meanwhile, um, at the same time, uh, was the invasion of Panama. So some of the other teams were, you know, Siltim 4 was, was doing that. And we had some, some guys get killed down there. My roommate at the time was a 60 gunner and one of the squads that took Batia airfield.

He took a round. Luckyest guy in the world. I mean, he took around, like, imagine you're running and your legs up in the air. And the round went underneath his thigh, missed his balls by an inch, and came out the other end of his ass. and when he came back, of course, I like telling the story because I had to, like, change his

dressings all the time so I could stick my hand in his ass the whole time changing it. But, yeah, so we were, we thought, oh, darn, we missed our chance to go to war because that's what the mindset was back then. It's like, dang, are we ever going to go? You know, that kind of thing, like everyone. And we scrambled, we deployed to go to Turkey, and they started the, they started the, shock and all, I guess it was, you know, the air war part. And by the time we get to Inserlick, it was over. Right. So it was like we handing out

MREs to Kurds and not trying to step on mines and stuff like that. Pretty uneventful. But we had a fun time in the med for the rest of the six months. So you're basically on a marg. You're with a Mew brain expedition area unit. And we got off the ship a lot because we had things bylats and j sets and training set up so uh we had a lot fun we trained a lot with uh other counterparts the french spanish turks um we did bright star in egypt what a shit show that is man um on the sinai yeah yeah it's funny there's a we did a jump you know one of the one of the things you do is that kind of combined thing where you do parachute jumps static line jumps in the desert. And this might have been in another platoon, but I remember we were in a C-130, and the Egyptians

must have just like said on their base, said, hey, go get a parachute. You're going to jump with these guys, right? And so we get up there, everybody snaps in because it wasn't freeball, it was just regular static line. And you could tell none of them had ever jumped before. Oh, boy. And they were literally kicking them out the back of the plane, right? It was hilarious, right um and then of course we went out too and um yeah so we had we know those kind of shenanigans but it was it was good that's when you back then you felt like a sailor which i think is kind of cool yeah it's a lot start these days um you know you we didn't have internet you know the you know mail call was a big deal yeah uh perfume and other things inside yeah packages

and yeah and um selling Copenhagen for 20 dollars a can to ship's cool Stuff like that. Getting a big package of rum cake. You know, it's like doused in rum. Yeah. Or like my sister would send me Listerine. Yeah.

But it had Jim Beam in it. Yeah. So it was Lister Beam, right? You know, that kind of stuff. So, I mean, you know, typical shenanigans, but got to experience part of the part of the world. And maybe a story or two of pop into my head from then.

But I just felt, you know, It was, it was. Yeah, you're living alive. Yeah, it was my first deployment. So, and then, uh, spun right back around, um, and got ready to do another one. And so the second platoon was a strike platoon. Uh, at the time it was, uh, which was, was based on a carrier instead of, um, with the Marines.

Um, and so we all got free fall called. We all, I was a bunch of high. speed guys. I mean, it was stacked platoon of, you know, everybody had two, three, four deployments. And we were on the John F. Kennedy deployed on that. And he probably don't remember this, but the Saratoga was the carrier we were leaving. And they were off station off of Insulik, I believe. No. Yeah, they were off Turkey. And they're doing some kind of exercise. And this is when someone on the Saratoga, like fire control guys shot a missile and hit a Turkish ship, you know, and killed some dudes. And so when we get there to do turnover, we hung this big sign off the side of the Kennedy saying, you know, don't shoot us.

And I think made out of sheets. And just had a blast doing that. We ended up doing some fun stuff in Africa and just tooling around. but living on a carrier was was pretty good life actually considered compared to living on a on a ship that you know a barred yeah and fit in the ship uh Dave do you want to give a shout out to a sap gear absolutely uh once again our sponsors tonight or sap gear you guys know that we like a lot of our their stuff oh what we're uh showing tonight is their mission darkness window Faraday bag now I tested like I don't know if I will again but I've just

tested like these phone like so what a Faraday bag is for those of you who don't know is it is a bag that will shut off all of the communications from your phone your GPS all cell contact because even when especially with like iPhones even when you turn it off people can still access it now you might say hey I'm not far left and I'm not far right and I don't go to these rallies that I don't want people know when I'm at I'm not a KGB agent right I'm not KGB or whatever but the thing is, is it, these are great for when you're going through the airport. They're great for, like, Jack and I are going. Traveling overseas.

Yeah, Jack and I are going to DefCon. We will be carrying our phones in these. They are great from keeping people from accessing your Bluetooth, your wireless, your cell, everything like that. They're great when you travel and you don't actually need your phone. It keeps you from being vulnerable from all the different things, you know, Simjack and Bluejacking, all the different things that people can do. And also every app that you have is tracking you at every single moment. Like this will stop.

It shuts all that down. Yeah, it shuts all that down. So even if you're not involved in nefarious activities, like, it's a good piece of security to have. Check it out. It's $53.com. Yep. Military grade. Yeah, sapgear, sap, g-e-r.com.

And on checkout, use the promo code team to get 15% off. So it's sapgear.com, and then the promo code, it's team to get 15% off. Yeah, and you can keep your GPS units in here, electronic toll collection transponders, key fobs, all the things that people, I mean, at our last place, like I used a flipper zero to basically mimic our electronic key code and gain access that way. Like, everything you have, this transmitting signal can be red. So these are like good options to have when you don't want that signal red. So anyway, check out Sap Gear. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five

with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents, and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting.

Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and family resource network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone is there of someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Drew, kick it back over to you like somewhere around this time,

timeframe, there was, well, we already mentioned Navy SEALs with Charlie Sheen and Michael Bean, but there was another Navy SEAL movie coming out with Demi Moore called GI Jane. And you said that you had a GI Jane story to lay on us. Oh, you're muted. How about that? There you go. I got you. Getting to use this board here.

Well, first, maybe I should tell you my Navy SEAL story first. Okay. Okay. Go for it. Because that was, you know, let's be chronologically accurate. So I'm a new guy, McCormon. A lot to learn and paid for it dearly. A lot of the things I did wrong during STT.

I don't know if you're allowed to say hazing, but that was, rights of passage maybe, you know. Physical correction. Yes, exactly. So I was cocky to. say the least. I had a Jeep, C.J. 7, you know, lifted and everything.

And I thought, I'd be cool to, like, get a personalized license. You know, real, real smart move. E5. And that was E4, I think. So I got this plate that said sealed dock. And I'd go driving into work one day. Didn't last long. I said, I can't have to me.

We were like, hey, Mullen's. Let's have a talk. So about an hour and a half after being in the dip tank, rigors taped up, breathing through a snorkel kind of thing, got the message. I don't know if you've ever seen that or not. But you know, you can dip your rig in a dip tank and see if it's leaking air.

It also works. You can put a guy under there and you just rigor tape a snorkel to his mouth. So you can breathe. Um, yeah, so I, I got rid of that. But, um, so it's, but this would be, I'm going back a little bit. This would be 89. This was, I was, I was, I was in this bar watching the World Series as the A's and the Yankees, I think. And I'm sitting at the bar, just paying attention to the game.

And I looked down at the end and I'm like, fuck, I know that guy from someplace, right? And it turns out it was, uh, trying to rack my brain. It was who he was at the time, but it was Michael Bean. I don't know him or not. Yeah, he was. He played a seal in like, yeah, he was eight different moves.

He was Corporal Hicks and Billy. Yeah, exactly. Come on. The guy's a legend. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So Michael Bean's down there and, uh, rolling like two stools away and we're talking about the game and whatnot. And he says, hey, so what do you do? And I go, I'm in the Navy.

And he goes, oh, really, what do you do? Yeah. I'm in the teams. Oh, oh, really? And I said, yeah. What are you doing?

I said, I said, I'm a corpsman. And he goes, really. And he said, you know, we're talking more. And I just finished, like, the short course 18 Delta at the time, right? So I know how to stick things and, you know, the goal, the GoLab portion. Yeah. Because back then we didn't have the pipeline.

So it was like the trauma medicine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you're carrying around this awesome, you know, med bag and just hoping people have car crashes in front of you. So you can crank them. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Interausius. Oh, you're getting two interruptions. Do a cut down. Yeah. Two large varieties. Yeah.

He's al-Farengio or whatever. Yeah. So he says, you know, after we talked for a while, he says, hey, would you mind like, like meeting us over at our hotel in the coming days? I want you to look at this script we're doing. We're doing a film, a movie. And it's just they had lost their director or changed the writers or something like that. So it was, I said, sure, you know, to do a little, you know, real reality kind of change. check on because what's his name?

Rick Rossovic was playing, played the Corman. Remember Rick was from Top Gun, right? Yeah. And he was Ice Man's. Yeah, he's Ice Man's, yeah. Yeah. So I go there, I remember reading the script and I'm like,

it was just cheesy. Like this is when the chief gets shot or somebody gets shot and they, you know, they do some bullshit stuff and then they close his eyes. He's gone and all the kind of stuff. Like, well, that's not exactly how we do it, right? We do this and this and this. And I kind of demonstrated, you know,

full sweep and airway and all that kind of stuff and made some they made some script changes and and you know that kind of comes out later on in the in the film to a degree i mean some of it got cut but but uh prior to that back to the bar um in comes charlie sheen that's right i forgot this part in comes charlie sheen with his freaking entourage of people and uh they're um you know women and I'm like, yeah, hey, what's up? You know, you know, typical. Like, yeah, who are you? I don't care, right?

You know. And it was, I think, because I didn't like care. I mean, I knew who he was, but, you know, we kind of hit it off. And one thing led to another. Then I went the next couple of days, went over to their thing and rewrote, help him rewrite some of the scenes in the script. And so that's, that's my contribution to Navy Seals. I didn't, you know, when there's a gun, running gun battle and a couple of guys get killed, you know, Rick at least tries to do the right thing, right?

He used the right verbiage and all that kind of stuff. So, so there's that. And I never told anybody about that because I was already kind of on the, on the fence anyways with the seal dock vanity. My own, yeah. Yeah, I was giving enough trouble, you know, you know, bring your belt to fix the ammo home on accident. Right. roommates like what the fuck is this and you know

um sorry for the language um yeah so it's an adult show so don't hold back okay I just gotta let my lips what are you drinking tonight there Drew well I didn't plan on drinking

Sazirac but okay I was gonna do one of those other ones up back there looks good I might still oh you have a nice collection back there yeah that's just that's a tip of the iceberg bro

I mean, this is, this is, this is my wife's office. Okay, I had to like throw shit in props in here, like to, so you wouldn't see all the World Bank development. All the new world order stuff. Yeah. Throw up some pinups. Right. Actually, to be honest with you, she's, she's a rock star at the world back. And I probably shouldn't say that because now, so whatever.

Kill you. But she's an expert in fraud and corruption. anti-money laundering lives an exciting life. I bet. Yeah, so back to that actually happened before second deployment, I think.

And then coming back for the second deployment, G.I.J. That movie came out. I think it was early 90s. Yeah. And we knew that they were shooting some scenes in Virginia Beach, a couple of them. And so every year,

the SEAL community, Naval Special Warfare, including SWIC and everybody who supports them. They do a reunion on both coasts, different times. But it's at, and it's like starts on the meeting house on Friday. You know, it's a chiefs club. That's where everybody meets. And, you know, there's a whole lot of good times there drinking. And then Saturday is, you know, various events like there's a demonstration. There's a run.

There's a swim. you know, we're kids and everybody can run in that, different classes and then categories. Saturday night is a, oh, and we do a KPEX kind of demonstration, you know, where I did a bunch of those where fast rope in and snipers come out of the water and, you know, things like that. For the families. And then in the evening on Saturday is the beach party. So it's at the officer's beach, I think. I don't know if it still is anymore.

I think it's in Fort Story now. so might be different. But, and we'd heard rumors that, that she was going to come, what's her name, Demi. Demi. Demi Moore. To me.

To me. Oh, to me. It's like Kamala. I can't say it right. Right. I can't. Whatever. Demi Moore was coming.

And so, sure enough, you know, at midnight or 1130 or whatever, we're all kind of like hammered anyways. She ends up showing. up and she's got like four older frogmen retired dudes who were escorting her around kind of their bodyguard escort kind of thing so she can navigate the you know the environment and it let's just say it wasn't real popular right i mean people weren't real excited yeah yeah to see her and uh you know so i remember looking arrows with some guys and i said i'm gonna go get her a beer so i went over and Got a beer, a red solo cup.

Brought it over to her. I said, hey, to me. And I was smoking a cigar or something. You're going to be a, if you're going to be a seal here, have a beer. You know, drink a beer with me. And she's like, oh, I don't, I don't drink. And I was like, oh, really. So I just had it.

And I wanted it at her. And I just turned it upside down and dumped it on. her feet. Drop the solar cup and walked away, right? Now, I mean, I don't think I meant to drop it on her feet. I meant to just pour it out there, but I was kind of wobbly. And I walked back to my guys and, you know, that was it. And then later on, you know, I kind of came back years later, a couple years ago

where other guys were talking about that. And they said, you know, yeah, I heard about that. I didn't know if it was true. And yeah, it was true. but you know nothing happened I didn't get in trouble or anything but I just feel like that's you know you're gonna be

you want to be a team guy or team gal or right you got to you gotta play the part man right yeah so you know that like her not drinking was was more was more unbelievable it was more unbelievable than her being

wound thronging her being a non-drinking frog man yeah that's it I wish I could remember more there was more to it But I think I might have even been, I'm probably being kinder now in retelling the story. Kind of, yeah. Kind of yourself, you mean?

To her. Oh, to her. Yeah, yeah. Because there was more dialogue, but, you know. Some sort of language going back and forth. Well, I mean, it was respectful, but, you know, still, you know, what it was. What did you think of the feature film, Drew? You know, I don't remember if I watched the whole thing or not.

because it was so, I mean, at least Sheen and Beans, Navy SEAL, there was things that were accurate. Right, right, right. The thing about that movie that's generally accurate is we pride ourselves on the East Coast. Let's just put it this way. The West Coast Seals, right? And there's a lot of, they're all great. Everybody's the same.

But they like to surf. You talk about hair gel. You know, that's them. Prokeys. Yeah. Yeah. They're, you know, they're, they like to do all that kind of stuff. And they even put out a calendar.

This was hilarious. Back in the like early 90s, this calendar and it had all these beefcake shots of these guys, right? And we just never let them live, live it down, right? Because it was like a fundraiser or a deal. And a bunch of guys I went through Budsworth, were in it. And of course, we made fun like, like, hey, if you're on the East Coast, our calendar would be a picture of a guy jumping out of a second story bedroom window

because the, you know, the boyfriend came home or, you know, up against the wall getting arrested by the cops or pulled over for DUI or something like that. That would be like more of the East Coast stuff. And yeah, so that, I forgot what I was going to say about that. You know, you're your question. That the Navy Seals film. About the Navy Seals movie.

Oh, yeah. Okay. about the yeah seal team are the Navy SEAL movie so you know they do a fairly because that was written by Chuck Farrar I think you know so

who used to be in the Teagues oh I didn't know that yeah because he also he also did uh dark manor no he wrote a bunch of books yeah he did yeah and and it's it's not his fault that the movie turned out the way it did because you know it's always budget it's always

director it's always you know a bunch of other people can can influence things but there were some things that were you know i don't think and a little little you know clip clavin worthless bit of information um the scene where charlie jumps out of the back of the cj 7 going across the bridge to portsmouth into the water if you if you watch that again you can see it the stunt man kind of didn't enter the water the right way and end up getting hurt pretty good oh really um yeah or his back or something like that but uh you know it's just kind of like And then the golf course stuff is classic and all that.

But G.I. Jane just seemed to be just way too contrived. I mean, they couldn't even simulate buds, right? Yeah. You know, it was terrible. Crazy. Vigo Mordinson in that movie. Yeah. Confronting Dummy in the showers.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, yeah. You know, that, that's not. So you've seen the movie, Jack. I have seen the feature film. Yes. Wow.

Oh. There's a whole your school scene in there. but I digress. I digress. Let's get back to... No one wants to hear this stuff. Let's get back to Drew. Drew, what was deployment number three like?

Are we getting towards a point where the Balkans are starting to come up on your radar? Yeah, so let's see. Second platoon, the Balkans, yeah, so it was early 90s. So that was a full-scale war going on. We actually did the G&C, the carrier, did sort. 40s into the war zone at the time, right, into the Balkans while they were still fighting. And we did, you know, a couple of little vanilla kind of recon things, but they were just, they were nothing to speak of thinking, but mostly we were there for trap.

You know, like if a plane went down, we were supposedly going to be the crew to go help get the pilot. And there was a pilot shot down, but the Marines did that mission from us. Oh, what's it called there, right? The Air Force Base. Was that when Scott O'Grady got shot down? Yeah, yeah, Scott O'Grady. And so we didn't get to do that.

But that was like, as your partner can attest to, that was a suitcase full of cash kind of exchange. it you know it the movies say you know do have one version but the oh really yeah i mean i did know that yeah there's more of a more of a greed kind of thing but um you know prior to that actually taking place there was some you know real world stuff going on people looking for them and everything so that second deployment on the carrier we didn't uh we did a lot of that but so balkins was on my Yugoslavia came back then that was still teammate um I screened for damn neck at the time and uh got selected but I was also let's see how let's make sure we get this right um yeah

so I didn't know what I was going to get and the orders came out to go to gray green which would have been the boats but I was on deployment So it was on the carrier and they have a policy at the command not to take guys off mid-deployment to come. You know, so that, you know, just luck in the draw at that point. So I got back, re-screened, and got a positive screening. But at the time I was at E6, Corman, it just kind of retooled the whole pipeline for becoming a chief. you know, I had to have 18 Delta qualification or Navy IDC school, independent duty corpsman school.

So I went out to, actually I went out to DLI first. That's right. And I came back and screamed. But I went out to DLI. I learned French-ish. How amazing is DLI when you're an enlisted spec ops guy? Dude. I tried every way to extend out there.

I could, right? You know, I was like, can I take intermediate French? I take advanced or whatever. Can I break my foot or whatever? But I learned to golf out there and it's just, it's so beautiful. Yeah. You know, it's Monterey and Carmel are just Pacific Grove. Just awesome.

Yeah. That came back and that's when I, I guess that's when Haiti happened. 94. Yeah. 94. Went to Seal Team 5. I'm sorry. Seal Team 2.

So I went from teammate and in the in the process in the meantime teammate had they had a proper compound built you know we we be you know we were normal by then you know by the by the end of our deployments um my deployments there had proper compound established in reputation it was all good um checked into team two and that was like I'm really in the teams now you know it was awesome um the uh it just Rudy Bosch was the command master chief you know and it was like you know he'd walk around and be like uh check the watch bill you know because if your hair wasn't cut right you're you're on weekend duty and stuff like that i mean it didn't matter where you came from even in even a regular team guy i mean they're gentle gentler in welcoming you than than a brand new guy you know with that was always fun at quarters to see a new guy check in and trust blues and it's like the command master chief and the exo would be like say hey so-and-so walk up here and introduce yourself and they say i'm seeing them and they're shut up you know that kind of thing and then they'd walk away

and it was just a game welcome you welcoming them to the command but uh yeah team two was to this day i it's it was the lore and uh you know one of the original two teams They have a great Vietnam history. And I was just stellar performers. It was like the AAA club for Damneck, basically. You know, so they recruited out of there heavily. And they had like a pipeline going. So guys would rotate from Damneck to training and platoons

and then pass the knowledge on. But my first platoon there, Let's see. In between that platoon and after DLI, LI, I did a JCO mission in the Balkans. I don't know if you know what that is, Jack. Way Donnas. Joint Commission Observer. So they had just declared the ceasefire, okay, in Yugoslavia, Serbska and all that.

So NATO, or S-4 was going into, you know, carve it. up and they had that British sector, Italian sector. Oh, yeah. I think Giaconia did one of these. Yeah. So it was really an SF-A-Team mission, right? But they didn't have enough guys. So they would, you know, let us play.

So one or two of us per house would pair up and go living up in a house in the different sectors, Boniluca, everywhere, Tuzla, you know, all the different places. and the SF guys did their SF, you know, IW stuff. And what was cool about it? Well, everybody else in the whole AO was in full battle rattle and Kevlar and helmets and body armor and all that. We were driving around thin skin vehicles with Terps, just wearing camis with no idea on them. And maybe a pistol thing.

And we go anywhere we want. We blew past every checkpoint. in that country, just did whatever we wanted to do. And they did their collection and stuff. And it was basically, the mission was, you know, collect information that might be intel and establish relationships, you know, kind of figure out stuff. And then, you know, a precursor to some stuff that our cousins were already doing.

We, you know, kind of in the open, helped them out with that. But it was a great time. 10th group again. That was my first exposure to those guys. I wish I could remember their names. But we were in the Sarajevo house, which was actually on the Serbska side. So I don't know how familiar you are with conflict or not, but what was telling what was really amazing about Sarajevo,

when I went there, they still had snipers and they still had the occasional stuff going on. But you could really tell who had the most arms by the, the condition of what side of town you were in because it was just destroyed. And being on the Serbian side, you know, they did what the Serbs did is they displaced a lot of people. They just basically came and said, hey, we're taking your house. You can go live in Croatia. Beat it.

You know, that kind of thing. And some family would take it over. But it was a really interesting time, you know, just driving around with those guys and working with them. And at the same time, we, you know, got to move around doing other things. So that was a fun time, the JCO mission. Sometimes I forget about that. But that really kind of opened me up, open my eyes to kind of what was really going on,

the ethnic cleansing and then, you know, the post-Tito world and, you know, the influence, this, you know, the Soviet Union, once the Soviet Union had fallen, just how that affected different parts of the world. So let's see. So back to Team 2, did a deployment there. We actually left early for that. This was when Moboto Seisei Seiko, okay, he was the leader of what used to be called Zaire.

There was a civil war going on. and the embassy in Sierra Leone no in capital of Zaire here oh gosh yeah why can I think of that having a Sazerac moment right now anyway we had to go early because there was that going on it was unstable they were thinking about doing a neo and then also Sierra Leone was was a shit show too So, I mean, that's just like everybody who's been an SF guy or team guy in the in the 90s has been to either Sierra Leone or Liberia, right? You know, because they kept collapsing. So we went early. We got on the USS Kier Sarge, my squad with six, eight other, seven other guys and the LT.

So the way they broke up, a seal platoon is 16 guys. You have an AOIC, who is usually a tenant. 03 and then an AOIC is going to be an O2 or you know usually or a hard charge in O1 and then you have a chief and leading petty officer so I was leading petty officer which is E6 LPO so I pair up with the lieutenant my squad alpha squad and then Bravo squad it was you know they paired up with the chief the chief and the AOCC So my squad leaves two weeks early. We get on the Kyrsarge and steam full speed over to West Africa to Zaire.

And we wait for, you know, what we're going to do. We did an intel mission, which is kind of training. But no one knew where the guy was, right? He had left the country because he was, you know, he was wanted by the Hague and everybody else. but the things were going south the Marines were planning a non-combatant evacuation operation across the river in Brazzaville in Cote d'Ivoire

and the we were wondering what we were going to do so remember divvets for divots the satcom thing where you could go take photos and then blast them back over it was like a very early form of

yeah yeah so we just had to get off the ship So we just convinced, we convinced the ops officer, hey, look, you know, let's go do this thing in, in Point Noir. It's just like this little town right on the Atlantic to this airfield. And we go there and land, you know, we get some, some Marine heloes bring us to this place and drop us off. We're taking pictures, all these old migs, like Meg 15s, Meg 17s or, you know, just rotting away on this airfield. And we were bored. Bored frogman's a dangerous thing.

So my leatherman, I broke into one of those cockpits and took a bunch of gyroscopes and instruments out of their souvenirs. But while we're sitting there, you know, okay, we're going to do our training. We take some pictures. Our Intel specialist guy on the team has got his big camera out. and this 707 I think or 760s I don't know what it was some big plane lands on the other side of the airfield and he's looking through his camera and he sees they open the door and it's like all this gold stuff's inside there like gold handles and you know really ornate well it just turns out that that was the president of the country the dictator of boatos his his sake was plane and

We accidentally found where he was because he, you know, he's leaving the country and they were getting fuel or whatever. We sent it back and so it's happenstance. But that was the extent of what we did there. Marines actually did more. But in the meantime, stuff started going sideways and I always get them mixed up. I apologize. Liberia or Sierra Leone. So we had to zoom up there and evacuate the embassy and brought a bunch of people off to the Nio there.

but the fun part, the interesting part of this whole thing is, right? So the Magtaf, the Mew commander is a Marine, he's 06. And the Navy guy who's running the ship is, you know, obviously in 062 as well. So in the Navy, if you're at sea for more than 30 days, you get a beer ration, right? And we were at sea for 65 days. only people to get off the ship by the time we did get off before that was our squad

and the Marines that actually went to the embassy and we crossed the if you cross the equator in the Navy you're what's known as a shellback if you heard of that ceremony yeah okay well we cross the equator

at the Prime Meridian so we crossed at zero zero zero zero which makes you the most unique shell back in the world, right? So you have a special Neptune. You have a special ceremony. And that's, you know, another fun time. But for whatever reason, they didn't want to give us a beer ration.

So now we're like, hey, we're 02 and a half. What the F, you know? we do all our work, ship cruises north. The first place we're going to pull into port is the Canary Islands. So it's like the way they do it in the Navy, right? They set, I don't know if you guys ever been on a ship, but they set what's called sea and anchor detail. So that's, you know, you have the crews divided it up into two or three ships and

see an anchor. Those are the guys who man the ship and take care of when it comes into port, getting it all tied up. And then they do, you know, they have to have certain manning on the ship and and then embarked company. They get Liberty called. And I thought,

ah, you know, my squad was like, yeah, we're going to go out. I'm like, I'm going to stick around me and a couple of guys are just going to stick around.

We'll go on the next. Liberty. So the canaries are just like sick. You know, that's where everybody goes. You know, that's where all the reality kind of shows are filmed from England.

you know the all that stuff um real destination place and um so i thought i'm gonna go down to the sick bay and work with the junior corpsman down there because i'd already finished independent duty corpsman school which is a year long basically your pa so to speak um yeah it's a course that people don't know about that much but it's they don't like it's it's um it's like the 18 delta course only it's geared more for like civilized medicine and not so much like what you might encounter in a village but it's very comprehensive yeah to that point it's um so i'd done the at the time we didn't know in the teams we didn't know well you know it's all it's all fixed now you go to jfk you know you go to the schoolhouse you know get the same training

but we they sent us the 91 bravo right early because they didn't know it and it was like basically going to cormone's school all over right so i'm in san antonio for that as a young guy with three other, two other frogmen, junior guys. In fact, I don't even know if I had my Trident at that time or not yet. Maybe I did. Anyway, San Antonio is the wrong place to send young seals who, you know, who already know this stuff. Right.

It's a medical campus. Right. Oh, my gosh. Right. But it's also just the most target rich environment in the world because it's like, that's what I meant. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like everything. from med school to every MOS that teaches any kind of medicine in the Air Force and the Army is there, right? And while we were there, it's, I remember, you know, the first couple formations, you know, how they have that, you know how they have that formation for a formation in the morning. It's like, you wake up and you're there and you're like, what's what's going on? They're like, they're just going to tell us when the next formation is and we'll go to child. What the fuck do we get up for? You know, just tell us the time to be ready to go, right? that kind of thing. And then one day it's like, we look outside and it's rain. And so we put on

our Gortex jackets go outside and it's raining. And everybody else is like, doesn't have anything on. I'm like, why don't you have rain gear on? They're like, because no one told us to put our ponchos on. And I'm like, what do you mean? No one told you to put your poncho on. It's raining. You know, it's like, do people have to tell you that? You know, it's a lot of junior guys. So it was just kind of like our introduction to it. So essentially it was like at that point, we figured out, okay, this is how we get around this. We went to the first sergeant of our company, I guess it is. Dave?

Yeah, yeah, probably. Training company, yeah. Because it was basically you were going, you were already a corpsman. Yeah. So you were going to basically the AIT or a school of the army for their medics. And you're like, what is going on here? Like you're not teaching me anything. Right.

Right. So they had this pool, this outdoor pool there. And it was at the wintertime, so it wasn't open. So we convinced that for Sergeant, hey, we have to maintain our swim calls. Right. And he's like, well, okay. Yeah, I say, he was so, well, we're just, what we're going to do is, you know, every morning or we're going to go swim. in the pool and then we'll just meet the company at the chow hall right um which meant we would just

could stay out later and then just you know take a shower and go to chow hall like at you know normal civilized hour we actually tried we actually tried to do it actually for real but it was so damn cold like yeah now we're just going to just milk this thing and uh um the other thing I remember that that I can speak about openly is the one thing about the army back then is there's a lot of smokers right and um so whenever that we take a break you know these guys would rush outside and start smoking and we're like bored you know what are we going to do pushups you know whatever so one weekend we're like let's let's go build some pull-up bars outside the place right so we went to Home Depot and bought four by fours and some cement and some people or some pipe dug holes and

put two different height pull up pull up bars right outside and it was like remember that scene in Planet of the apes when when the monkeys see the apes see the monolith oh that's uh 2001 2001 2001 yeah yeah sorry uh 2001 where they're like looking at like what the you know they're touch it And it was like Monday and people were like looking at these pull-up bars like they'd weren't those comfortable. And so we, you know, on breaks, we'd go out and do pull-ups. You know, we're young, young guys. Still like in the best shape of our lives, just out of buds and everything.

But yeah, that was that was a fun time. Ended up getting out of there. And then anyway, getting back to back to the story. I'm in the Canaries. And I'm an IDC and these quad zeros, you know, that's just a corpsman in the Navy who doesn't have any particular specialty like radiology tech or respiratory therapist or whatever. And I swear to God, we set seeing anchor. We were at the brow, the gangway went down at like 2 o'clock between 2 and 3.

By 6 o'clock, Shore Patrol was bringing drunk Marines and sailors back. Okay, because we've been at sea for 65 days. right. And people just were like, I'm getting hammered, right? So people were coming back and they were passing out. So we just were like, yeah, bring him in a sickbay. And I was teaching these young guys. Okay, what's the unconscious protocol?

I don't know what that is, right? Because you don't know what's wrong with this guy. And he could be a diabetic. You could, you know, he could be on drugs, whatever. So I'm going to teach you the unconscious protocol, which basically was, I'm going to teach a patient not to do that again. Right. Right. So two large bore IVs, nasal, perengel, eryth, catheter, you know, ureth a catheter.

Well, it starts with that sternal rub, right? Oh, yeah, snow rub. Yeah. Right. You do that, you know, assess whatnot. And, you know, of course, they're going to throw up or whatever. Right. So the captain, the surgeon comes in, this 06 naval medical, or Navy officer, his doctor comes in.

He's like, hey, uh. what are you doing? I go, hey, we're just doing some training, sir. What do you mean training? Yeah, well, you know, these guys are coming back and they're unconscious and, you know, they're drunk and whatever. I'm teaching the young guys how to do IVs and, you know,

how to do catheters and nasal firing airways and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And he goes, dude, you can't do that. You can't, you can't do invasive. You know, this is what you do in the teams, right? You do it to each other, right? all the time. But, I mean, I didn't get in trouble or anything, but he was like, yeah, good, good initiative, bad, maybe not quite the best. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, that, that story goes to where like, okay, it's like, you had to be back

depending on your rank at a certain time on the ship. You know, if you're a chief, the chiefs went out, those E-7s, they went out and rented hotel rooms. So, you know, they had, they had a base of operation out there. They did it right. Chiefs of Mass always did it right. Everybody else, else had to be like if you're e6 you had to be back by two or something like that and the next day of course you have to submit a muster muster report for your guys so you know I wake up and like four of the racks four or five of the racks were empty like my guys didn't come back you know but I ran into some chiefs and at breakfast and they're like hey man we ran into your guys you know they're awesome we party with them all night.

You know, they're blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, okay, you know. So I knew they were alive. But I had this dilemma. Do I fill out the, the muster report? Right. That, you know, the guys are here present or not, right? Right.

Yeah. All present and accounted for handed it in, you know, because they, you know, otherwise balloons start going up and everything. and this guy this is a friend of mine Paul who ended up going to the command and doing like 15 years there Paul let's go dude we're going to find those guys and uh went out in town and um found them you know they were still drinking and everything and they could see me coming from from a way down the street and they're like oh and he's pissed um and like motherfuckers man I had to falsify muscle report. And you're lucky you're alive because you wouldn't be if I, you know,

and I said, here's the deal. You're my bitches for the rest of the deployment. Right. That's how it's going to work. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone is there of someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. And, uh, You know, it was all good after that. And they were. I mean, these guys, you know, they paid the man.

I mean, to get some context, it puts you in a predicament because, you know, you don't, you don't want to rat your dudes out for just being out drinking all night. But if one, if one of them got seriously hurt or had gone missing and you say, yeah, he's present and accounted for. And then all of a sudden he ends up like dead in some alley. you know, then it comes back on you. So let's, Drew, I want to ask you, you're making a way through the SEAL teams here. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm rambling. You kind of, I don't want to say it got screwed over, but I mean, as far as like where you were at in your career,

it was very difficult for you to make that transition over to Damneck without really getting kind of screwed over. So you kind of missed that opportunity. When did this thought come into your mind? or this realization that like, hey, there's this entire other endeavor out there in special operations that I could potentially go and assess for. Yeah, I'm glad you reeled me in. Jack, that's a good point, because I don't want to sound like some of the guy who's making people jump off your channel right now.

But when that happened, I had some good senior guys at the command, at the team who had been over to, to, uh, or to. Damnik and they said, hey, you know, there's other places you can go. So just to give context, and then I'll move, I'll jump into that. Sure. My second time after this deployment I'm talking about right now, this is my fourth deployment, fifth actually. When I got back, it was like, hey, I went back to the command and they're like, yeah, you're an E6, you're a corpsman. But here's the thing. If you go through Green Team, we're not going to cut you, loose to go to 18 Delta because even though I was an IDC to get advanced you know you had to check

other blocks because you're competing against every other corpsman in this in this facility. They said we're going to need our two years of use before we can you know and they might put you off cycle for chief right and and that's kind of like when I'm like ah you know and they were you know they're like you know it's one thing to and and you know how it is they like to grow their own enlisted dudes before they become chief because then you're a boat crew leader, you know, and if you've not cut your teeth on, you know, a bunch of deployments as a team member, you know, a unit or squadron member, or troop member, then, you know, you're kind of like not rep, you don't have the corporate knowledge to be troop chief.

So just out of curiosity, I am, I don't mean to derail you, but I'm curious. how did damn neck deal with Corman then at that time because it's really hard to grow your own corpsman especially since you can't really it's tough to make E7 as a Corman

without IDC or whatever like so how did they do that how did they manage that that's a good question you know and a lot of guys didn't care you know some guys are like hey I want to be a sultan you know so it didn't it didn't matter so they wouldn't compete for promotion

in order to go damnac basically I think you definitely got looked at differently by the, because Navy-wide back then, it was the Navy chiefs, senior master chiefs, whatnot who picked people. And for advancement to chief, it still is, but now we have our own special operations,

special operator, MLS. But so those guys, some of them would be like, yeah, I'm just going to be a solter. I don't care. And then at some point, someone would say, hey, you're, you know, you've been in E6 too long. You need to go to punch this ticket and get it. And you can, you know, because we want you to be a chief.

We want you to be a leader. But back then it was just kind of, it was in between the seam, kind of seams of advancement. So it was, you know, you had to kind of make your own decision on that. And yeah, I talked to some guys who told me about this unit back that time. It was called Torn Victor. That was its digraph name or whatever you call it. And, you know, they go back, you know, it goes back to the, I call it the 1980 Operation Eagle Claw.

Eagle Claw, exactly, right. And even, you know, some make the case back to the OSS. So they told me about that. And up into that point, they said, yeah, if you go, because these were guys who were at Damneck and they knew about it because they worked with them. they said you'd be you'd be a good fit up there blah blah blah so i i've made chief that year 98 uh went to so con or to sockier as a j 33 uh chief the seal liaison up there um and then found out

and then i applied before filled out a package for that for that smoo and uh thought i was going to come back to the team and be a platoon chief whatever and they they selected me to go to assessment selection. So I went in 99, early 99. So March went out to, went out to Nevada and did the long walk and stuff. And had a real good assessment selection, got picked up. By that, at that time, there'd only been one other seal who was there before me. there'd been a couple other guys, but they were like liaison guys or, you know,

um, whatnot. So yeah, so 99 went to the, went to the unit and, um, did a year worth of, what we call, um, CQ2, CQT, you know, it's been called a bunch of different acronyms, but it's basically the, you know, a year long tradecraft slash stuff. So you, it, it, it's been, it, it, it's, It was a really, I must say to this day, I love buds. I loved everything about it. It was the hardest thing I ever did at the time. But the assessment selection aspect of screening for the unit was the most rewarding thing I've ever done. Because you don't get any feedback on any decision you make.

you know and a lot of people try to G2 it and you can tell their G2 it because I late years later I ended up being Codry right so you're you're that wizard of Oz guy behind the screen right you know how it all works right and um then you you're able to see you know how people try to game it you know when they're when they are not but yeah it was uh it was uh awesome now did you say that you were the first or the second seal because I also know around that time that they started taking like Rangers and they hadn't in the past it was it at the time had been sort of a kind of an SF pipeline or whatever pipeline do you know did you ever get any insight into why this particular SMU decided to like broaden the the recruiting pool um that's good question uh as to

why they did. I think they realized that, you know, the 10th group mafia was strong in that unit for good reason. But they also realized that they were having a hard time finding the right candidates just in the Army. So they opened it up to the sister services. And, you know, of course, it leaps and bounds after Desert Storm took off. I mean, after 9-11.

And just a lot of Marines and and, but Rangers, yeah. They, you know, and some of the best guys I worked with were former Rangers or Rangers still, you know, at the unit, whatnot. You could see the pedigree in the senior NCO guys where, we're, we're Rangers. So as, yeah, I'm going to speculate on that. But I, but I believe it was just kind of like a manning issue. They wanted to grow more, more troops in the squadron. they have you know they have various levels of

capability you know you know and it's it's interesting because we've also heard of another army SMU that you know used to recruit or like RRD for instance or RRC that used to only recruit Rangers and then started then made it like army wide in the sense of you know sometimes the best people can come from places that we don't necessarily expect them to come from yeah i think so at um especially when you you know you're

dealing with frogmen um because we're pretty nonplussed about a lot of things sometimes you know what i mean like uh yeah whatever you know that kind of attitude and that could be misread you know like you don't care and uh right i wanted i wanted to ask you about that drew like what What was it like for you coming from being a frog man to suddenly learn all this different types of tradecraft? I mean, it sounds like you had a little bit of exposure to clandestine operations, but moving into that and also moving from seal culture to J-Soc culture, was that sort of difficult or interesting to try to navigate that? Yeah, so that's a great question. I felt like, you know, I was always, see, this is the story of my life. I'm always the older guy, the guy who comes in late, the guy who learns things differently,

but I've also have a different level of life experience. So, you know, that is a plus and a minus a lot of times from a perception point of view, it can be negative because people think you'd just, you come across and know it all. But I was also a criminal at heart, right? I mean, a lot of the things I did before I joined the Navy were survival mode stuff, right? You know, just getting getting by. So when I got to the unit, it was still, it wasn't a J-Soc unit or a J-Soc smooth. Then it became one shortly thereafter for a number of reasons.

But definitely had to adapt to a strong army culture. But this was a very unique army culture. Right. right at a long history of things that the country doesn't even know about that they did and they you know great men and women i mean i'm not talking about just men there's some awesome stellar operator women who who've gone through that whole pipeline who've done amazing things but to your question i guess um i did have to adapt to that and then when you realize that suddenly you were an asset and everybody wanted your opinion, except for the fact it was an army manned unit.

Right. When it came to advancement, like I many times was the de facto troop chief or troop sergeant major, for whatever reason. But I'm never going to get selected to be the troop sergeant major because it's an 18 series billet. It's an 18 x-ray billet. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Yeah.

Now, that might have changed over the years. And I imagine it has. But, you know, that's kind of one of the things you have to wrestle with. But the good side of the, the upside of it was to go there, you go to, you're actually covered under a different place in the Navy. Right. So when it came to advancement, I was one of one all the time. And all my OERs or fit reps were signed by CNO.

I mean, I almost busted them out because it's hilarious to read them, you know, you know, Admiral Mullen, Admiral this, Admiral that, you know, promote this guy, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, make him an officer, all this kind of stuff. So, you know, as a time, I was a chief, then I made senior chief there, E8. So on the inside baseball part, I didn't have any problem for advancement. It's just, you know, you kind of discount that because it doesn't really matter. when you're at a tier one element, a tier one organization, it's about performing. Right.

You know, it's not like I need to bank rank, too, so I can, you know, teach people how to blouse their freaking pants or something like that. It's you just want to operate. Right. Okay. And the thing is, is that honestly, like getting, getting promoted is almost like a detriment to that because it has the possibility of taking you out of that operational status. Absolutely.

And the Army guys in particular had to deal with that. Right, because of the upper out type of stuff and everything else. Yeah. Now, what, you know, they fixed that for those guys because they would rotate out, punch their ticket as a fifth group, you know, Sergeant Major, come back, you know, be the S3 or, I mean, whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

So, you're, you know, you're cycling that. You're taking care of your troops. well yeah so the army guys you know they had to do with that but but once you're in you're in you know you just come back and and interestingly if I were to name names in the army right now all the key leader GOs or a big handful of them are guys that I worked with right I went through CTQC with or deployed with, you know, and there's a reason why those guys are leading, you know, two stars and three stars. So you assessed in 99. I go through your training pipeline for a year plus. And I would like to ask you the question that, I mean, I think so many people went through. I assume you were probably focused on the Balkans again,

even though you were in J-Soc. You'd correct me if I'm wrong. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and then how things changed when 9-11 happened. How that changed the, as far as what you can say about operations and also the culture, the orientation of the unit, and how that changed after September 11th? You know, first of all, I want to say, Jack, you're awesome.

you recognize I've got ADD and OCD at the same time. So I appreciate you. But doing this for a while. It's okay. On track here. But yeah. Okay, great question. And so, again, to be fair, to be accurate, prior to 9-11, we were still an Army smoo.

Okay. Sap. I mean, it's, I'm not going to say any more than that. Sure. But the writing was on the wall. Okay. And I'm trying to remember the order whether the other commands created their own

counterpart to what we were doing. You know, I'm talking to the other squadrons. Yeah, yeah. Each particular tier one unit created their own. Everybody, everybody said that they could do that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a thing.

Everybody said they could do it. And I remember going down to Damnack, me and the other guy who's, you know, senior to me, there's seal. And we're like, hey, and Mike, you know, the master chief for that squadron. You know, he was my honor man in my Bud's class. And we said, look, dude, we can tell you how to do this so you don't make the same mistakes. You know, when it comes to all these other things, you've got to do approvals, docs, covers, all that kind of stuff. you know, in typical fashion, like, yeah, we got it.

We don't need your help. Yeah. Even though they were receptive, it was what it was. But so it was an army unit manned by jointly manned. And as far as the Balkans go, so I get out of our advanced, our pipeline training. And this is, this is an interesting little side note. So we started out with 22 dudes, 22 people, because they weren't all dudes. And at the end, there was 10.

We go to the board. I'd had a really good final exercise, I thought. And you probably know what I'm talking about. We do real world stuff. I mean, just the best training in the world, the best exercise is the most realistic stuff. And I went to the board and they cut, they murdered five people right there at the board. Yikes. And I would have been number six because I go into the room and they're all like, yeah, they run down the list of stuff.

But we just don't think, I mean, you did this and that good and blah, blah, blah. And see, right before that, my fact was telling me, like, too, hey, just keep doing what you're doing. You're great. You're fine. Everything's going to be fine. So I'm like, okay. I got one little exercise left. You know, chill.

Go to the board and you're like, yeah, but we're just not sure that you're suitable for the year. I'm like, okay. I got up and walked out. And so I would have been number six. but then the command sergeant major comes out and he goes after a bit and you said like hey they just don't they think you you know they don't understand your you know your affect they think you're like like you don't give a fuck like I don't give a fuck exactly in fact at one point they said at some point during the actual course it's like hey man if you if you don't like it here

we can just send you back to the sill teams I'm like dude send me the fuck back to the SEAL teams. I did that for 14 years. I loved every fucking day I went to work. It didn't matter how hungover I was. I love my job. Okay. Go right ahead. You feel froggy jump. Send me back. I don't care. But, you know, you know, it was a little more frank than that. but, yeah, so it was like, oh, threatened me with sending me back to something I like to do, right? Right. Right. Right. But, you know, he said, hey, you know, I'm going to, you know, anyway, long story short, you know, he basically had the overriding the vote. And I'm glad he did. You know, if I said his name, you probably know who it was.

I just don't want to do it. Sure. He ended up being JSON, sorry, major. But that's interesting that he kind of saw through that. Like, this is just a super laid back guy, but he has his shit under control. Yeah, there's this one, there's this one exercise they do all the time when you're out, out west. And you're, you know, they bring you into this room, you sit in a chair. And then, you know, they got a, you, shoe, what do you call it, horseshoe shaped layout of everybody.

and they ask you, hey, go rank these five priorities. You know, family, God, country, unit, whatever, right? And you do it. And then they tear into you about what your priorities were. And it's, there's no right answer, right? It's like how much do you believe what you're, what you believe, you know? And that was the same kind of carried over to the end, you know, the board. The final thing.

But, but I knew my work was good. So anyway, I don't want to sound like a bragging, but. fortunately for me he was there and it all worked out now that's 99 and we're full bore going looking for you know jaysock blue and green are and oGA are over in the Balkans hunting what persons indicted for war crimes you know carotich and molysevich and all their minions and so we immediately started deploying over there and I did like I think I did four deployments over there from varying degrees of 60 days 90 days you know um 99 2000 and uh that was awesome I mean that was just like the most fun stuff you know you're running around doing tech stuff doing surveillance just

I'm I'm sure your partner can talk more about that if he knows more about that Well, I mean, we've had a number of people on the show who've been over to the Balkans hunting war criminals at this point. And yeah, it's fascinating. Sounds like you're living the life, Drew. Yeah, it was, it was cool. I mean, I wish I could go into, like, kind of details. I mean, I will say this one, this one day. So some of the guys that I were at my team and team two that were my counterparts went over to Damnack.

And one of them was Neil Robert. you know, Roberts Ridge. Yeah. Opera's and a condo. And I'm over there with the unit doing stuff. And a bunch of guys from Red Squadron came over. And they had just come back from there. And they were the unit, the team that was going to like do the hits, you know, go round up dudes.

and one of them was Goody. Do you know Goody? Dave? Yeah. I mean, I know you're not about. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, those guys, you know, were awesome.

So I was getting ready to time for me to rotate out. And we had a bunch of cars. And we just got this new Audi A8 in, right? And I was like, oh, boy, I wanted to drive that thing. So I said, hey, I'm going to take the A&A out. I'm going to see if I can set the record to whatever that town was in Serbska. And I did, zoom, you know, full, full speed blowing through checkpoints and everything. Get there in like 55 minutes.

It's normally an hour and 45 minute drive or whatever it was, right? And I remember driving through town, cruising through town past the Italians or the Dutch or wherever they were. And I look over to the right and I see this car as BMW, a red BMW sitting in a driveway. And there's someone out there barbecue. good. And I call back, I said, hey, you know, you know, texting is, you know, what kind of car does Joe drive? He drives a red. I said, you know, oh, okay. Is it, you know, license plate, blah, blah, blah. It turns out I accidentally found this one guy that was, they were looking for.

and passed it on PID them. We came back. I came back and then it turned out that those guys ended up going and getting them. And it's kind of one of those. Oh, wow. Yeah. They set up with,

you know, they had a set up a place and, you know, it's a classic story where they wait for it because he washed his car every Sunday, right, in his driveway. And so they just rolled up one day and with a van

and did the thing, you know, punch them in, Bons of the mouth, threw in the van. Black hood over the head. Yeah, I don't know if there's a black hood. I don't think they even gave him, you know, they didn't even give the shit, you know,

like this disrupted this family barbecue and took this guy off the street. And I always thought that was pretty satisfying. Yeah. Just like, again, luck, total luck, right? But we did a lot of really fun, cool things that, that, you know, we performed instead of having surrogates to it or whatever. Very satisfying. I went out after that.

I went out to the bundle course, tandem bundle course out west in Tucson and Marana. And while... That must have been a guess of a time. I mean, it's like a 600 pound bundle, right? Yeah. Yeah, we were jumping.

They were doing everything. Motorcycles, cruise boxes, you know, sonot tubes, you know, those things pull up, like you see, full of kit. You know, they've gotten it, you know, you see you're a tandem bundle master

when you get out. But here's the cool thing about 9-11, if you want to know. So me and a buddy back up to 90, this is going to be the year 2000. We go down to this course. We got invited by our cousins to say, hey, if you want to go to this course where we got, where you can learn all these boats, different kind of boats and different kinds of diving. And you can come. come down here and take this course.

It was a month long. So we learned all kinds of different dissimilar vessel driving and whatnot. And then you mix trade crafting with that. So you're using, you know, you're learning how to do that. And then we did mix gas diving, get a little certificate, you know, I made our little diver card. So we, you know, we could do any kind of mixed gas diving and whatnot. And so I made friends with these guys that were down there.

And later on there, they invite me up to this barbecue up in, up in Arlington. And we're sitting outside, you know, if I said their names, I mean, I know you know them. But one thing led to another. And Mick, who was there at the time. Mulroy. Yeah, Mick Mulroy as well as Thomas was the last name. Anyway, they're like, hey, we're getting ready to go do this thing. this thing called the Nile right in Iraq and we're going we're taking these tense group guys

and pilot team dudes and um we got we got extra sluts you know what do you think you want to come you want to do it with us and I'm like yeah sounds good you know what's his name who's the famous CIA guy who wrote the books before that about that um they made serpico you Not sorbical. Anyway. You're talking about like Bob Bear? Bob Bear. Bob Bear.

Yeah, Bob Bear. So Bob Bear was like one of the legacy guys who rotated in and did that stuff prior. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. But it kind of, I don't know the actual, you know, timeline of whatnot, but by this time, it was after 9-11, it was game on, you know, things were going to happen. So, you know, I kind of skipped past 9-11 because I don't even. to talk about there. Everybody knows about that.

Sure. The, the, I just realize I need to plug in power here. Can we take a real short break? Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely. Hey, everybody. Please check out our Patreon. It's listed in the link or underneath the thing. We just moved into new studio. We still drink a lot and we could really use your money to

pay the rent and to buy boots. And I'll just take that segue to say that we really appreciate all of you who support the channel in various different ways. And we have to, like Dave said, we just moved into this new studio. We got really big plans for it. We're in a much better place here. And it's because of you guys, literally. It's a safe space.

It's a safe space for bros to drink some scotch and tell war stories. And even if, you know, you don't contribute to our Patreon, please subscribe to our... channel, YouTube channel, like the video, and get the alerts and share our videos when you can. It really helps us out. We have just hit 50,000 subscribers, which is really a milestone for us. And if you subscribe to the Patreon, you get access to bonus episodes that we do. And also, you'll get access to all these episodes ad-free. So, like, if you listen to the podcast or you watch this on YouTube, you will see some ads.

If you're subscribing to the Patreon, you'll get the episodes completely. absolutely out of free. So when we at 10,000 subscribers, we actually shaved Jack's head during an episode. We said at 50,000 subscribers, like COVID mullet, we would do cosplays. Now, we realize at this point

that doing cosplay during an episode would kind of be insulting to our actual guest, but I don't know, man. I mean, maybe we can be talked into getting done up for a bonus episode on the Patreon, and only if your Patreon subscriber can you see jack and i in cosplay maybe that'll happen i don't know well comic

con is coming up in october right it is comic con every year in october uh yeah we uh i took jack to his first comic con yeah you did yeah my first new york comic con yeah first new york comic con yeah that's a fun time so anyway um and welcome back uh next next i'll also tease uh next episode if you want to grab that book behind you there Dave. Chris Cox, Fire Force. Chris served in the Rhodesian Light Infantry, and he wrote this book, Fire Force. He's going to be on next week's episode. I've read a lot of war memoirs. This is one of the better ones. It's incredibly well written in just a horrific and terrifying account of war. If you haven't read this book, I highly suggest you guys go and check it out. So we'll have Chris on next week's episode. So Chris,

fire force, one man's war in the Rhodesian Light Infantry. I highly suggest you guys go and check this book out. Drew, how are we looking? Can you guys hear me? Yeah, yeah, we hear you. Okay, technical difficulty on my end. Can you see me? Yeah, yeah.

We got you loud and clear. Okay. Lima Charlie. Oh, good. Drew, before we go any further, I just want to say that I was a Navy corpsman. I was a dive med tech. so as a Corman in the dive community, I feel your pain when it came to promotions

in a specialized field when you had to compete against Corman Worldwide. I feel your pain. Well, that makes you feel a lot better, to be honest with you. So I think I'm having an issue with Zoom on my end. We see you like, yeah, it's all good on our end. Dee, did you do something? Break yourself.

Hang on. It's a little attractive, isn't it? Well, yeah, what's the issue? Because it all looks good on our end here. Yeah, it's, I plugged into power and I think I'm okay. Okay. I can continue. I might just see the split screen anymore because I might have disconnected from my version of the Zoom.

Okay. Oh, well, we see you, we hear you. So what's, well, if you could, if you could jump. back into it and pick up a pick up a pick up a pick up a story. Yay, I fixed it. Okay, great. I'm not all aft up. Thanks for, thanks for coming for me. Yeah, no worries. All right. Where were we? What am I telling me now? You were talking about after 9-11, you were talking to Mick Mulroy. He was saying that there's this thing popping off. Do you want to get in on that? Well, because we had a really good relationship with our cousins.

are unit did. We were real tight. He told me about it. They gave me the details. They told me who to talk to and everything. So I ended up scribbling it down on a piece of paper, some numbers and names. And I remember I went back to the command, to the unit. And a friend of mine who is now in charge of the Death Star, he was one of my teammates, but he was also the squadron commander at the time. And I said, hey, sir, here, what do you think of this? Want to do this?

They're asking us if we want to do it. We want to be part of this. Going in before the war, we're going in 2002, right? And long story short, phone calls were made, relationship, you know, things were vetted. And that's the reason why our unit got into, the AFO mission into the into the deal before you know we are part of the Nile team we went in in in October of 2002 and it started doing OPEAFO whatever I call and it was just again you know God loves freaking prongman and lucky right place right time um the rest is kind of

history is why that's how we actually got into the whole war beforehand your your story intersects with some of our previous guests you brought up nick uh mark geoconia with tenth group was out there um who else have we interviewed uh sam phattis was out there i think we've interviewed a number of people who are who are out on that that initial uh you know ope mission into northern iraq um could you tell us about how that went from your point of view um as far as like like infiltration and then what the operation, what the mission was like. Yeah, sorry. I was getting myself one fucked here.

Yeah, no worries. Yeah, so we had a really interesting journey over there to Turkey and then into the, our whole thought process was we were going to be the gateway for the northern front. We were going to set the conditions, do the collection, AFOOP for Fourth ID. was going to come in. Through the north, of course, we know that we got the Heism.

They got the Heism from Turkey. That didn't happen. So it ended up being that it was us, you know, us and the Kurds. And Tenth Group, which, you know, had a role in the initial invasion anyways, but they ended up taking a bigger piece of the pie

because that was it. You know, and then, of course, we all know about Viking Hammer, which what those guys did, we did. planned it. It was Uncle McClandy and some other Nick and some other guys, along with, you know, and then the 10th group guys came in and fine-tuned it to their

order of battle. But it just, it was a good time because for three months, we were, let's see, November, December, October and November of 2002, we were in there by herself, running around doing recons. I mean, I ended up lasing 62 Dimpies for that. Not just myself, but, you know. Sure.

It was, you know. Like, Laysin to get grids or lasin for air strikes? For Tomahawks? Yeah, yeah. Oh, so when they fired those cruise missiles, Mark talked about that when we had him on here. It was like, what, they fired like 120 Tomahawks that night? Yeah, so the 28th of whatever it was. Yeah, so.

There was 62 Tom Ocks far at least 60 something, like two, three, four, whatever. They were launched from subs, ships, and whatnot. And it was just, it was just most awesome because we were at this Ford little place that Mark probably talks about too. I can't remember the near of it. And it was like this light show. You could hear jets flying over, but they weren't jets. They were, you know, Tomahawks.

and then we just watch them hit and just way laid out of these targets. And then within a day or two after that we let's see 10th group might have already been in.

Yeah, they were. They were already in. And we had planned the four prongs for Viking Hammer and then we launched that assault afterwards. But prior to that, we also had this CCTV guy. the true hero of the whole Viking Hammer thing was the Air Force CCT slash combat controller guys.

They just were like composers of an orchestra. It was amazing. Like when we did our assault on Vikinghammer, I will call this guy Jack, he had aircraft stacked up like LAS. from you prior heard the story. And it was poetry emotion. We have talked about the talent of J-Tax and CCT guys before and how they are operating at a level that most of us can't possibly understand

controlling so many different assets at a time and being able to guide them on, like calmly, coolly, collectively, just like rolling, in asset, like, it's just amazing to see them in action. So for folks out there who haven't watched those previous episodes we've done, I hope they will. But Viking Hammer was an operation between U.S. Special Ops and the Kurdish Peshmerga to go and fight Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq in 2003. They're an Islamic terrorist organization. The fear was that this terrorist organization could kind of bog down our invasion of Iraq. So we had to have kind of kind of. of a northern front in that conflict during the invasion.

Drew, could you tell us a little bit about what you did? You sent me some pretty cool pictures, actually, of you out there in the field with the Peshmerga. Can you tell us a little bit about what your role was and what you were helping facilitate at that time? Yeah, so it was broken up by, I wish I knew the actual border battle for 10th group. So I don't want to misrepresent that, but it was evenly divided amongst the, was it 103 or 102 Tobos Battalion and the SF guys

and then various levels of Peshmerga and myself like a counterpart of mine and a combat controller and I was paired up with with Bafel no no with Jalal no Tel Avani

there was a Palat Talabani Lashar Talabani Lahore LaHore Yeah Lahore yeah He became the intelligence chief

I believe Yeah yeah So I spread up with him And Jack and I And we were on the Yellow or Green prong I forgot But we ended up being with the guys

The snipers from 10th group That were taking out They did some great stuff With the Barretts What's that With the 50 cows Yeah with the Barretts Yeah

in fact i think one of the pictures i sent you we were that was taken from that those that day um back both those were but um yeah so we were fought our way uphill through you know we had we had pulverized a bunch of positions with AC130s a night before uh fought our way up hill uh were taking effective fire and in the thing that struck me about that whole thing was these uh Ansar Islam were clearly not just some, forgive my terminology, raghead, you know, just amateurs. These people were, they were trained, right? Yeah, yeah. They actually had defense and depth set up.

So, so as they knew, you know, graduate, you know, obviously we're going to fire our way uphill. So they would just leapfrog back to fortified positions where they had weapons and. And it was suspected they had a chemical weapons facility in that valley, right? Yeah, exactly. So Carmel was a suspected weapons, chemical weapons facility. And that just, we just pummeled that with 20 or 30, freaking Tom Oaks. But I'll leave that up to historians to decide that there was interesting things found. Let's put it down.

Yeah, as we fought our way up hill, these guys leave rock back. And then they rained down scunnion on us. And we had to call in closer support. and I distinctly remember this one episode where we had Navy pilots off of Roosevelt or something. It was a female and Jack's talking to her

and she dropped her bombs and then he's like hey I need you to do some strafing runs along this ridge line and so the ridge line essentially on the other side of it was Iran right so she came in and just fucking late scunn in on took out some machine gun positions and we were able to advance forward.

Yeah, but it was interesting to get shot at all day long. What was it like working amongst, like not everybody had the same, you work with different elements, and not everybody had the same sort of actions on type of maneuver, right? Not everybody had this some sort of TTPs when it came to maneuver and fire. What was it like working with a disparate group in an actual firefight when you're moving, towards target and trying to like coordinate that yeah i got this great picture of uh lohore i know i'm butchering's name um yeah i'm sorry i probably did too we were sure

yeah um both was a brother uh basically um and and so it's like hey you know it was a bomb rush with the kurds but the sf guys and i don't know how it worked out but it just it just worked you know we just, you know, we passed the, past the, you know, we leapfrog up to, you know, some, some cover and, and, you know, those guys were, were charged up. The, the Kurds were charged up. And commands were passed. And, but, but the, the game changers were the air cover and the test group guys. I mean, with, I was, I was so frustrated that day because I decided, because I had brought my SR25 with me and I was like do I want to hump this fucking approce and all these magazines and whatnot or I'll just take my M4 right and I regretted it to this day it's like because

I was like lobbing shots at these guys 400 500 meters away right having to like you know Kentucky yeah yeah yeah and um and of course we're we're fighting uphill So it's like at some point I was like carrying a bunch of shit. So I took my rear plate out and just, you know, toss it on the ground. I'll get it later. So, but yeah, to this day, I was like never go anywhere without a 760 rifle in the open. You know, it's funny because we were just talking about the SR. At lunch today.

We were just talking about it today. And like my experience of it in the late 90s, it didn't have a Ford assist at the time. I don't know if that changed. And I fucking hated it because of that. you know yeah i'll be honest with yeah i you know like everybody else i knew was a sniper i wasn't but i was i'm a real good shot um or was back then and i uh let me put this i got jerry barnhart shirt uh hat oh nice which jerry barnhart was like one of the you know he's an amazing shooter and one of the principal teachers for a lot of the soft unis and you had to shoot first in

his class to do you have to out shoot him or you just had to now you just had to you just had to you You just had to be the best of the group. You just have to be in the best of the group to get the hat, right? Yeah, I probably should be wearing that shit right now. So from what you experienced out there that day, I mean, I reflect back on what J.R. Seeger said when we had him on, thought the combination of U.S. Special Forces, CIA paramilitary and American Air Power was just a very deadly combination. Absolutely. It was.

I just remember, like I said, you know, it was like I was a spectator half the time, right? Other than rounds, you know, and the thing that the interesting part, it I want to sound like there I was and, you know, me deep and grenade pins. But, you know, they were shooting at us and the rounds were hidden, but they were also shooting from far away too. So, you know, it wasn't like, you know, it wasn't like

Lujia or Ramadi or anything like that. But I remember this one occurred, taken around the chest, right back up right next to me, kind of in between me and Jack, and I went to him and pulled open all of his, you know, because they had layers of clothes on, right? Because it's like March, right? I racked of snow on the mountains, right? It was cold. And I pulled all these layers of clothes out. And the round, the 7662 round was like sticking out of his chest. It wasn't even like, it hardly even penetrated. Because it so, it bled off so much velocity. Yeah, exactly, right?

You know, I should have made it more dramatic, you know. It was just kind of funny. But, yeah, it's, you know, we did that. I ended up clearing some caves and didn't get to some guys that were hiding some caves, you know, a couple of curds. And I remember leaving that at the end of that day. I'm like, gosh, am I going to, do I need to write a report on this? Am I going to get, you know, it was like the dilemma.

no, I'm not going to talk about it. Because I don't want to do the paperwork. Right. You know, so I'm going to like, you know, back then it was like, you're going to get in trouble. Why were you put yourself in harm's way kind of thing? Well, it wasn't that. It was more like you just didn't know. I mean, everything was new, right?

Right. Unless you were, Afghanistan, you were, you know, Afghanistan was, was ahead of us by a year, right? Right. Right. So, um, a year or more. yeah yeah so that was that was a really good time that was only the beginning too because then we did other things cook cook we know we had to take cook cook with the Kurds um uh it just kept going and uh it was um a real good time with uh with 10 group um and I'm looking forward to

the reunion you know I think I do a 20 year uh anniversary of that a Viking house are coming up here next year, early early next 23 in 23. Were there, you know, you said that Afghanistan was a year ahead of you at this point in time. Have there been, were there visible changes at your particular unit as a result of 9-11? Did things change? Did they morph, evolve? Yeah, I mean, they did, of course. you know, 9-11 changed everyone's life.

I mean, for me, example, I was on a, on a, my, this one trip I did after doing a bunch of Balkan trips was, um, to a country to Georgia, excellent. And I remember taking off. I just, I, I, I, I'd just gotten married at the time to, to, to, I just got married to sleep that way. Um, the, um, a few weeks before. and was getting ready to leave on September 9th. And so September 9th, I get on the plane, fly to fly out there to the caucuses.

And land, you know, because you lose a day when you're flying that way, right? So check into our place, turn on the TV with another teammate, and they were watching CNN. And he's like, hey, man, check out the TV. There was like, a plane just crashed. one of the towers. I'm like, oh, okay. I'm thinking of, you know, World War II, when that B-25 hit the Empire State Building or whatever.

And, you know, I'm watching it. And then we, like, everybody in America has the story, same story. We watch the second plane hit the towers. So at that point, it was like, holy shit. We're at war with someone. Right. So, you know, we're on the horn. We're talking to the chief at the base, at the station.

And next thing, you know, we're doing so. So from that point on, it was, everything was like laser focused. It was awesome. Great times to be alive. You know, we just got everything we needed. We did a lot of great stuff. I just feel like it was, you know, a blessed time to be an American. So.

What came for you then after, after, Viking Hammer that whole 2003 invasion, what was the next step for you in the, now in your army career, so to speak. Yeah, so biking hammer happened. And, you know, it's kind of like the, you know, you didn't really think of it as Viking Hammer. It was like, it was like, okay, it didn't work. Yeah, another deployment. Right. We did a bunch of SSE, you know, we went to all these different places. And the stuff we pulled off of all these different little villages and, I mean, We took this one particular, I should have sent you the picture, man. It's a kind of famous picture, actually.

It's sitting in a conference room up at another office. It's with myself, Mick, all the guys from our team after we just took this little town. And me and Mick are holding the American flag up. Oh, I think I have seen that one. Yeah, you probably have. It's actually in all the Viking. If you go to Wikipedia and all that kind of stuff, you can see. you know, all the biking.

And you're wearing Oakley's and most of them. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, you're a seal. So, you know, we understand. I'm just kidding. I said you're a seal, so we understand. But I'm honestly, I'm just kidding.

Yeah. You got to be cool, dude. Always look cool. Right. And for our viewers who don't know, SSC is sensitive site exploitation. And it's the phase after an assault where you basically search for evidence. Search for evidence.

But like, search like, like, like the FBI looking for like you search like I would I would I quite call it what the FBI does on a crime scene it's more like it's what a it's what a ranger does on a crime scene well I mean it's not like you're not wearing gloves and dusting for prints but you're ripping yeah ripping everything you're looking for everything you can and you find yeah yeah and you find other porn you know all the uh indeed indeed yeah yeah exactly um Yeah, so we did that SSE staff. I went to the Kermal place and it was just devastated. And then some other folks came in. And we just shifted focus to the Iraqi Republican Guard in Kirkuk. And taking that place with 10th group again. So I ended up getting the third Iraqi Republican Guard division flag

took it down from whatever that base was there. And what's funny is, like, you could see these guys as they left their base. They were like literally taking their clothes off and throwing them off, you know, in the street. Their uniforms and putting on, you know, civilian clothes. And this flag was, it had to be 20 feet long or something like that. I think of giving it to someone in some general. But, yeah, we found a bunch of really interesting. things there are missiles and things that

more interesting to put it mildly it's just it's too bad that the political narrative is what it is as far as the level of evidence but you know there's cases to be made on both sides of WMD

you know finding sarin is one thing finding effective seren rounds is another thing right right right I would say there's you know Right. And, you know, sort of, and again, you know, if the premise is yellow cake, then WMDs may not fit that definition, but finding, you know, uh, UXO. Yeah. Yeah. Finding, finding toxic gases or finding what, you know, chemical weapons does get downplayed in, in, you know, in certain narratives, for sure. yeah i mean there was enough evidence prior to that of you know megs being buried in the desert

um and you know we were we were played too by by a lot of shakes right right so regardless that's that's out of my pay grade yeah what what what what came after that deployment though what was the next step okay so it came back from that um well before i left um um I had to go down. So we were also planning how we're going to get into Bayam, get into Baghdad first, just conditions for the guys who were, you know, first ID or no, one MEP and third ID.

And I ended up going down there with a group of guys that Mark was running. And licking up at Baghdad International stuff, I was seeing airport or it was called. And doing a little bit of stuff in Baghdad before I got shipped up. By that point, I'd been there like six plus months, so I left. Came back home. That's 2003. And at what point in your career, how many years did you have in the military at 2003?

See, that would have been a list in 87. So, what, do the math for me, 15, right? Right. 16, 16 years. So I ended up coming back to the unit and taken, oh, okay, so I'm a senior chief, right? So here's the, here's the, the interesting part of Iraq. I'll off for Master Chief. And at the same time, I was married, so I'm thinking about, yeah, Master Chief, E9, retirement.

after 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, as opposed to like putting in a commissioning package. Right. It's a big pay difference for retirement. Yeah. Any difference, right? So I put in this one, I put in a package for commission,

a Mustang commission. And you can check a block for a warrant officer or just line officer, right? I'm like, fuck, I'll want you to be a warrant officer. Nothing wrong with warrant officers. They're awesome, right? But they didn't want to run a training stuff. Right. So I just thought, yeah, I'll just roll the dice.

line officer. So the message comes out. I'm on an objective overnight. It's, you know, December of 2002 and I'm selected for Master Chief, right,

for you night. Then I might have the order backwards, but I also got selected for LDO for commission. So I come back and I have to make a decision and I went to the boss to the CEO and I said, Hey, man, if I, sir, I'd say, man.

Sir, if I take this commission, can I stay at the unit? And you're like, I don't see why not, right? Because typically if you get commissioned, they send you off to freaking another side of the world, right? I don't know who you are. So you show up as this boot, hence in their officer. And so one day I'm selected. So everybody thinks at the unit I'm going to be an E9.

And then next thing, I'm like, well, I'm going to be in 01, right? We do this ceremony. And I get, you know, go from E9 to, or E8, promotable to, oh, 1. And it was like, people are looking at all right, well, what do we call you now? I mean, you know, you call me Drew, right? So I stayed there for another five years.

And then I've taken one of the other troops, a different kind of troupe that did different atypical stuff. Did some stuff in some places? Say again. Did some stuff in some places? Yeah, it just said it had different flavor to it. And I was the XO for that for a while.

And then I did the pro-deb kind of you know, stuff where you know, I had like punch tickets oh three. I mean, a S3 and I was an L&O for whatnot. But that wasn't the end of my, you know, utility. I actually did some other stuff that was with other folks, other agencies.

So you're still deploying in support of the war on terror, doing your thing there. And you said eventually you became Caddray for the selection course, right? You kind of came full circle. Yeah. So, I mean, what happens is, you know, whether it's once a year or twice a year, it depends on, you know, the year and, you know, the year and the time, typically it's twice a year. They'll do an assessment selection. They bring in candidates from the military.

They do, you know, you do screening, you assess them, and then you put them through a pipeline of tasks. And, you know, they pull from whoever's available within the squadrons, squadrons to be caught. And so, yeah, actually, it was very rewarding, you know, to do that, to teach people tasks and, and assess them. Now you're one of the guys in that horseshoe formation around the candidates that come in. Yeah, actually, I never got to that point. Oh, okay.

Thank you, I mean, I don't think I was, you know, I'm, I'm not that. It was, it was senior, senior folks who did that. But, yeah, yeah, I had feedback, green sheets. pink sheets are really a cult I had to fill out. But in this time frame, after I came back from my rack, that's when I went down

to this special finishing school that Dave probably knows about. And I became a certified operations officer. So that, after that, that's when I started doing, you know, CO stuff in subal.

Yeah. and other other places. So that's when I got to, you know, really do the things that I thought was really my source spot. Like strategic intelligence. Yeah. Run sources. And, you know, that was a dicey, I'm sorry, dicey time in the history of Somalia and the Horn of Africa,

but very rewarding. And Somalia, you mentioned Goody early and that was Somalia, right? Yes. Yeah. that's regrettably that's yeah i mean i just got to tell you there are very i love my brothers but of all the people in the world that i know who are just true superstar rock star heroes who've been everywhere at the right time that's just one guy that uh was the nation owes him was he was he was he the bancroft guy that was killed over there

Okay, I'm thinking of somewhat different. Yeah. Yeah. But just, yeah. Yeah, he, you know, he, you know, he was one of the OPs in Anaconda and everything, everywhere he went, things happened. So. And regrettable, I don't think he had any family or any in children,

but him and his wife were very involved in, in other, you know, mentoring, just, you know, children that had, didn't have parents or, oh, wow. Yeah. That's incredible. Well, I hope his story can be told in further details someday. Sounds like a pretty amazing dude. Yeah.

Yeah, he was. I mean, I feel like I had like an average career. You know, I mean, you kind of wrap. you kind of compare yourself to your peers. And that's just the wrong thing to do because it ends up setting you up for problems later on. Right. You question, could you have done things differently or whatnot? Right.

Yeah, that's a trap because you are comparing. You know, it's sort of like the whole Groucho Marx thing, I would never be a member of any club that would have me as a member. Right. Like we see ourselves in a different light than we see every. everybody around us and so many times you're like, how am I here because of what, you know, and it's even like on this show, we have people who come on who have done incredible, phenomenal things and they say, I don't know if I can be on your show because like you've had some I'm just a guy.

It's like you're a legend too. Like, you know, it's, it's, you know, and I think especially in special operations, which is an area of, you know, high achievers, people who set goals and achieve those goals. And if you're consistently comparing yourself to the people around you, we tend to diminish our achievements and see and go, oh, man, and I could have. Like, look at what they did. I want to ask Drew about his, about post-retirement and, or post-Army, or, geez, post-military and some of the things you did.

Let's get into the viewer questions before we go there. Let me jump over. People actually watch. People very much care. Actually, not only they care, they actually give us money to ask you questions. So, you know. How do I get on that? How do I get in tap into that stream?

We'll talk. Yeah. And you're going to tell us about your upcoming stuff. Yeah, your upcoming podcast. tap into that. That's right. Let's talk about, let's see what your group wants to know. Yeah, let's see what they got.

Yeah. So, let me do my broadcast voice here. There you go. John Pierre, who just donated. Thank you very much. Darren Jones, donated also. Both very generous. We really appreciate it.

Jacob Wall, Drew is like the mirror image of Dale Kahnstock. yet equally if not more imposing. So what? He said that you are like the mirror image of Dale Comstock, another guest of ours, yet equally if not more imposing. And I think what he is saying is it like Dale is very much a large life figure and, you know, in the way he carries himself and deservedly so. like he's, you know, been there, done that.

And you are humble, and yet you are also equally, if not more imposing, is what our, what our. Well, that's very flattering. And thank you for, you know, I feel like, and this is going to sound corny, but I really do believe that I was blessed the fact that I came in when I did and had the fortune to walk amongst folks that were just, just like me who did amazing things. You know, it's sometimes you just wake up one day and you realize I belong here. You know, whether you're a major league baseball player or an actor or pro football player, whatever it is, you just wake up and go, I belong here.

This is, this is where I live. I can do this. I can't perform. I can, and it doesn't mean I'm any more super. man. I'm not a Marvel character. It's just that you just realize, you know, your craftsman. You know, you know what you're doing. Right.

And there's, you know, when you get to that point where you trust your inner self, I think that's what I learned going to the unit. It's like, this is, I've made this decision because I think it's the right decision. And here's why I think it's the right decision. This is why I set the LZ up this way. This is why I aborted this mission. This is why I did this thing. And you're right because it turns out right.

And so when you're fortunate enough to be in that position to repeatedly over years make good decisions or decisions that are productive or, you know, sometimes are decisions where you walk away. You know what? Right. I don't have a good feeling about this. And it takes a mature military unit, which isn't always there to support you. Like some units will make your decision a zero or hero decision. But if the unit trusts you, then they give you the leeway to make a decision and don't like hammer you afterwards. Yeah, to that point, I remember being in Somalia and, you know, we had this certain type of mission we were working with.

with uh proxies whatever and uh I had this certain 06 who I love love him to death

he's like where the fuck is my you know commando force oh I need it now because he's answering to GOs and whatnot I'm like

sir you can't make Somalis in this doesn't have it to command right yeah Right. They don't even know how to read a map.

Right. You know. And so you have that, those kinds of challenges to deal with. But at the end of the day, they trust you and they let you kind of drive the train. Yeah. No, that's important. Hey, just to add to what Dee said, we're at 493 likes. Hey, if you haven't liked this video, please get us to 500.

Yeah. You're wrong. Yeah, you're wrong. You're wrong. straight up um and then uh adam white one of our beloved guests uh thank you for the donation he said great interview we're all very lucky to have you drew we uh and keep making it funky and keeping it spicy y'all go team go yeah drew we are very lucky to have you we deeply appreciate you coming on well it's been my pleasure i wish i could have been more captivating and

Told you some better stories. Next time you come here in studio in New York and we'll sit down. We'll have some Stogeys and some whiskey. You told us some great stories. And look, like, thank God for Jack, because Jack, because you and I are, we're both sort of the ADD. Like, we go off and I would have talked to you about, like, naval sea stories for fucking, you know, two hours. You're having a really bad day if you need me to keep you on the rails. I have a bad day every Friday, Jack.

Thank you. I'll just say that. Yeah, or Saturday. Yeah. See how bad my day is? Does anybody have a pointed question they want to ask? Yeah. So Anatoly Vascovich, thank you very much. Did you guys spend a lot of time on shooting and weapons in CQT? Was it a good shooting program?

Shooting weapons, when? During CQT, like during your training for the SMU. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, yes. but part of the selection criteria was like what you brought to the table, right? So they're not going to teach you what you already know how to do.

You're going to get plenty of opportunity. I'd like to work with guys like Jared Barnhart or Pat McNamara or other folks. But that's just so you can just tweak and fine-tune your skills,

right? mostly, yeah. So we did a lot of foreign weapons stuff. So, but maintaining our qualls was never an issue. We wanted to set up a shooting course with some expert we did it whenever we needed to. How was it? We also wanted to maintain. What I've left out is that we worked oftentimes integrated as part of a combined team with our brothers and sisters.

blue and green. So, you know, we needed to be able to not be a live building in this. Right. And out of curiosity, like, how was that different? Because in the SEAL teams, just like in the Rangers or most spec ops units, you are learning to do things as a team. And while you need to be able to do things as a team and integrate, there are also times when you have to do something as a Singleton or as a payer. And that's not really something that is so often focused on in these other units. So how did you train up for that? Yeah.

So that kind of deftails into one of my last jobs where we had a special group that did kind of those types of things. We had travel around and be by yourself. And notably, for example, we had a particular rock star who went on a trip. And as soon as he landed, his spotty senses went off and he realized that, hey, he thinks he might have coverage. And sure enough, you know, it could have been criminal. I mean, that's one of the things you neglect. We always want to look at things from the standpoint of it, you know, as a hoist. Right.

Or foreign intelligence. Like espionage. Right, right. Right. But a lot of times it's just criminal, like to. Right. Because you're an American in a country that's not, yeah, the likes tourists. Yeah.

And regardless of what it was, you know, he had the awareness, situational awareness to recognize the situation. and sure enough, a van pulls up, guys jump out, someone puts sticks a gun in his chest, and he does the fucking swim move, takes a gun away, takes a round,

you're right, but takes the gun away, shoots back with the guys. Right. Kits, you know, hits a couple of them, and they speed off. Then he's got to do the Jason Bourne shit.

Right. You know. And he, right, and he can have, he could have, like the embassy, X,

X-Fill him, but then he would blow everything. so instead he decides to make his own way. He does the Jason Bourne does, goes to the, you know, gets his supplies from, you know, some pharmacy or whatever, takes care of themselves, does the right thing, notifies, you know, we got a procedure.

And to that, to your point, you know, that's what happened. So, but it was completely below the radar, did the right thing. Yeah. Well, but that's the level of stuff that really does happen. Yeah. And you, you're proud of when your guys. That's super hardcore.

The way that accounts published in the books is that that guy was, you know, mugged in a gas station essentially by crooks. But what you're laying out is like a kind of a pretty different situation. No, it wasn't a gas station. It was, you know, he was always way too from the airport to his return. And these are not criminals. These are people who know who this dude is and they want to bag him up. Yeah.

One can, one could definitely make that assumption. Yeah. Like, no shit, it gets off an airplane. At that moment, he doesn't know that he's just responding to the situation. Exactly. Right. And that's where the crucible and Kelly McCann and all that training, all the combatants. Every freaking day of the week, three times a week, whatever it was, you know, pays off.

Yeah. It's it's muscle memory. It's all that stuff. It's, you know, you fight like you train. and questions. It becomes part of who you are. And then,

you know, the downside of that is it affects you later on. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Post-post retirement, you know,

you got to face your face your demons or face your frailties. Right. Right. And we've talked to, you know, we've talked to a number of other people

who have, you know, talked about, you know, that challenge. of what comes up after because it's easy to sort of subsume or push down or ignore that stuff when you're still going, you know, 100 miles an hour. But then when it all stops, all of it, then what are you left with and what comes up?

And did you, that's kind of it with the question. Did you, did you have to deal, like, were there things for you? working through afterwards? Yeah, I mean, honestly, where I'm at in my life right now, these are the things that are really feel are important. And it surprised me, but yes, I did. Because when I got out, PTSD was a stigma. It was something you didn't.

Of course, you thought, oh, only. Other people have it. Conventional soldiers have it. Right, right. Yeah. Exactly. And, but, you know, the assimilation part of society, you know, everybody has to go through some sort of, well, I shouldn't say it right,

but many of us, high performers, I want to say, you know, it's like we always joke about, it's a performance league, right? You, you know, you either have a good batting average, you drive and runs, or you don't, you know, so, and you constantly measure yourself, based on your peers. You get out and you have to struggle with, you struggle with relevancy. Like I used to always joke about my fresh, my sell-by date, my, you know, when you get out and you've cut away, you've got an amount of relevancy in the community that unless you strap hang on to another organization is going to keep you relevant, you're going to, you know, things are going to

move past you. And fortunately for me, I was able to do that. I ended up working with Mick and some other guys for a little while. And although it wasn't a real long time and I made a personal decision not to, it did keep me relevant. I did get to go do some things that I didn't get to do in the military that were just awesome. You know, I got more trigger time afterwards.

than I did cumulatively, you know, later. But it's just what it was, what it was. But once you leave, you're gone, right? Like the gates close, and you might still have friends, but you're closed off. Yeah. And you know what it is? You think it's, you don't know how to make,

you don't know how to navigate the water or you find yourself. Yeah. For many of us, we wall ourself off. because we feel like I don't want to call. I don't want to talk my buddies. I want to sound like I'm going to say something that sounds dated. Yeah. I don't want to bother them.

You try to stay in touch, but at the same time, you recognize they're still running 100 miles an hour and you're not. So, you know, it can take a tool. And for me, it did,

it snuck up on me. And they're, when I made the, decision to kind of come off the, you know, come off the field and, and focus on a new marriage and having kids, you know, it was a deliberate decision and, but it also forced me to face some things that, you know, what was going to happen in the future. And at some point, you're out for, I feel fortunate that I recognize that I couldn't fix it myself. And I reached out. It, it just turned out it was this weird thing i uh i i got to say it i was walking into weggman's one day and i hadn't

seen rod gonzor this one guy he's an i s guy and intel guy in a few years and he said hey what's up drew and we're shooting the shit in the parking lot and maybe you can just see it must have been written all over my face and he's like uh hey have you ever heard headstrong i'm like no he goes, yeah, well, they got a lot of money. They're helping, helping guys. And just give them a call. And I looked them up. I ended up calling them having this inject with someone, you know,

and just kind of explaining things that I just didn't understand what was going through my head. I never thought about doing anything, you know, drastic. Right. Some people, right, with 22 and suicide and all that kind of stuff. But I realized I just, after 25 years or, or 27 years of doing whatever I was doing. Suddenly I found myself in the waters I couldn't control.

Right. Somebody else. And so I reached out and talked to this guy. I did an inject. Next to the guy now I'm like talking to a psychiatrist. Next thing I know I'm talking to, you know, getting help. And Headstrong was started by a Marine captain or major who a bunch of his major, a bunch of his platoon members after Ramadi and Fallujah,

young guys were killing themselves, suicide, because they came back to the world and they were, you know, they had issues and they were young, young kids. But, you know, the VA just had a bag of pills. Right. And so the stigma of PTSD was this, you know, before NICO was formed. for the guys that the tear one units now where you actually you know get the proper treatment

the proper trend uh transition an assessment um like mark talks about um anyway that was before that that i was worried about my tsse i tk gamma all that kind of stuff right you know i was i was worried about like well if somebody finds out i got you know issues i won't be a case officer or whatever um So this was completely anonymous. They kept, you know, it was all done by big, big, deep pocket donors. You got the help you needed without any kind of stigma. And has strong savings, basically. And that's why, you know, I'm more around today.

Not that not the things would have necessarily been, you know, negative. But I can't do it myself. Right, right. And again, I get what you're saying. You're not saying that maybe there were thoughts of self-harm, but it becomes sort of an isolation and sort of a downward spiral inside of that isolation. That just like, it's not necessarily leading to a path that is physically detrimental, but it's a path where you just sort of isolate and keep, you know, push away family.

friends, whatever. Yeah, when you, when your, when your spouse says something innocent and you cook off, right, you go on this fucking tirade. Right. And you're like, you know, you're just like, you have this out of body experience where like, you don't get it. And then you realize they don't get it. Right.

Why should they get it? Right. Yeah. And thank God they don't get it, right? I mean, yeah. You realize, wow. Well, okay, I'm going to try all these different things. Alcohol, I'll try this, I'll try that. You know, you do, you go down all the different rabbit holes and you realize, okay, you know, this is just an area where I need a subject matter expert. You know, I need somebody else who, you know, I need you, I don't know what I need, but I need something else. Right. And it's good. You know, I mean, there's, there's a lot more. We've really progressed a lot since I went through that. So. Drew, I want to ask you something, and maybe this is somewhat selfish of me, but I'll go ahead and ask anyway.

And I don't want to say more than you maybe want to talk about publicly, but you have told something to me that, like, it kind of resonated and I can relate to it on a personal level. Like, there's a time in your life, like, you decide to set aside this life as an operator or a soldier or something. sale or a badass or whatever it is and like choose to be a father and a husband and like play this sort of other role in life. And I was wondering if you would be willing to like talk a little bit about like that very like kind of conscious decision you made to move from one life to another. Because like that's something that just, it really clicked with me at least. Yeah. Great question. It's like and we all have these preconceived ideas of what our life's going be like, I'm going to get out. I want to work for CIA. I'm going to be a paramilitary

contractor. I'm going to buy land in Montana. I'm going to do this, this and this. I'm going to get my POTS license, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever. And then, you know, life throws you a softball. You think it's a curve, but it's softball. And you swing and miss. And if you just like paid attention to it and hit it the right way, it would have been the best thing. So you, you you have it like for me i i i felt like uh i met my wife uh and at the time um and we were going to go down this path that from dave's old place um and i realized that wasn't the right fit for me because the organization was saying your spouse has to basically stop her career. I'm going to be blunt about it because it needs to be said.

Yeah, I think so. She's a, you know, I look at my, you know, she's a rising rock star in her field. Right. Right. And, you know, within the, the organization was saying, yeah, you know, but she has contacts, all of them. Anyway, whatever. All these foreign contacts.

And I thought, I put myself in her shoes like, what if somebody said that to me when I was in the beginning of my civil career? What do I, what I have today if I had given all that, all of what I've experienced up. Right. And I felt like, that's not fair. I got to live my career. I got to do exactly what I chose to do. And I had a great career. And I wouldn't want to put that on anybody else.

So I decided, hey, you know what? I'm going to decouple. I'm not going to impose that restriction on my significant other and be a support element. In the meantime, so I started doing, you know, I see work, training people, doing whatever. And it was hard. It was really hard. Yeah. It was really hard because, you know, we're talking, things were still very kinetic, very going on.

And we'd be an acquaintance advisor in Afghanistan for a year. And that was very rewarding. with Marines and working for Maristel and Petraeus. We didn't mean to talk about that. That's another podcast probably. But, you know,

you have to, like some, at some point, you just got to make the decision to pull the cutaway pillow. Yeah. Right? And hope your reserve opens.

You pull that reserve pillow and thank God the rigor packed it right. I saved my life, right? You know. And then you have to deal with everything after that. And the transition was a challenge, but I've embraced it. And now I have two wonderful children that I just adore.

And my wife is a rock star. And I'm just glad to be her exo and support structure. And, you know, we've kind of talked about that before that, you know, especially for special office. operations, right? It's a volunteer service. Nobody gets drafted. Then inspect ops. Like, then you're volunteering two times or three times. And people can say, thank you for your service. But at the end of the day, we are all doing what we love. And we are living in a way, a pretty selfish life. We are the dream. We are living our dream. And, you know, and what gets left behind are the wives and the children when we're doing

that. And, you know, they're the ones who, you know, the spouses are the ones who wonder, like, what's going on when we haven't been able to contact them for two or three weeks at a time, right, or whatever. One more question. Okay. And, and for you to make such a, I don't want to say mature because obviously you're a grown man, but, but, it's a mature decision. It's a mature decision to say, like, I've been living my dream. And now, If I, like, if I want to keep living this thing that I'd been living, then I have to sort of ask my wife to stop living her dream, right? Yeah, that was a non-starter.

But that, it's a complex thing, right? I don't think I made it with a clarity. I'm relaying it to you. Okay. It was a lot of unknowns. sure right is it was intuition it was more like instinct it's like I need help right and I didn't even know why because I was like I know guys who did 300 hits lost guys in their arms you know people died in their arms I mean I didn't have that kind of experience right I had a lot of very

interesting experiences I mean stuff I can't talk about right now but but they weren't traumatic So when it came time for me to deal with traumatic, the aspect of like, I don't, I mean, you know, when I'm asking people, when the Sykes asked me the question. So what happened? You know, what was a traumatic episode? I don't know. I don't know. How many people did you kill? Well, I'd give them a number, right?

Yeah, but that doesn't bother me. Right. It's like, I guess I don't have, you know, but at the end of the day, it's like, how many people did I have disappeared because of what I did? Or how many people, you know. And that's the thing. I don't even care about that aspect. The point is we end up at a point at a crossroads. And whether we understand how we got there or not is not important.

What's important is what you do when you get to that Y in the road and the crossroads. And you recognize I'm lost. Okay. Right. And I need, you know, this is the point where, you know, I got to ask for directions or I got to ask for it. Right. And you don't know what that help is. Right.

you've got to at least ask. And, yeah. No, we get that. I mean, I think that, and that's been a common threat, too, that, like, people want to think that, like, whether it's post-traumatic stress or whatever it is, that there's supposed to be this big moment when your best friend died in your arms or whatever. And there's not always that moment, like. It can be a cumulative effect. It can be, exactly, you know. It can be going from 100 miles an hour, always on.

to go always like living on the edge to nothing and all of a sudden like there are these like shockwaves and reverberations that follow that there's there's not a singular event what's yeah so to that point what happens is this this is this is why i'm a big fan of um andrews and some other folks on podcast there's a chemical change that happens in your body when you're constantly used to being in a high stress environment and performing at a high level, your body changes. Your body chemistry changes. Okay. Your cortisol level changes.

You know, your, you know, your heart rate all. There's so many things. I mean, you used to fighting at night and sleeping during the day. You're a vampire. You're taking ambient. You're doing amphetamines to do whatever or whatever on occasion. But at the end of the day, you're just used to a different body chemistry. Your body chemistry, physically, actually changes.

and then you come back to a normal life, so to speak. And you're challenged by that because now all of a sudden everything about you, you know, you look across street, different activity, you walk into a grocery store, you're checking your corners, you know, where's the exits, okay, what's this driver going to do?

You know, all these things that happen that it's part of a chemistry thing. And, you know, we all, we all have to deal with that in some way or another, to some degree or another. And you don't, you think that you're in complete control or command of yourself. And, and then you're faced with these, and you realize one day that, you know, you're barking at your wife. You're, you know, you're doing all this weird shit. You're hypervigilant. Whatever it is.

Alcohol. Pulling people out of their cars on the road, you know. Yeah. Whatever happens. I mean, you know, you're getting angry at folks or you're just thinking, you know, I can go on. But the point is, it's not that you're fucked up. It's that you've also been, if, you know, over 25 years, you've been conditioned. Your body chemistry has changed.

Your neurological aspect of your life. You know, you can't one, you know, the guys who took down, took down, you know, rescued Captain Phillips, you know, 48 hours later, driving through, you know, the drive-through at Taco Bell. Right, right. It's like, right, you just shot some guy in the face. And 40 hours later, you're right. Right. In a world that doesn't, I mean, thankfully, I'm not like putting siblings down for that,

but have no concept of that sort of thing. You went from Baghdad to your living room. Right. Right. Or the Hooters or the, you know, you know, sizzler, whatever. Yeah, exactly. What's the last question here? The last question.

Thank you for Lawrence S for both the donations. Is there any credibility to the rumors of the Kandahar giant? And the Taliban fighters needing eight to nine bullets to go down due to catagon or other substances. Beats. Yeah. I didn't even know how to answer that. I will tell you this, that as far as Afghanistan goes, when a year ago, when things were going sideways in Afghanistan. and I felt very betrayed as a U.S. service member who watched a lot of, who knows of, I mean, I've been to

too many funnels, right? Yeah. And when that happened, I jumped on the, the VEPRO bandwagon to help get folks out. And to speak to the issues of PTSD, I feel like betrayal is something that people need to understand, need to check out. You know, when you're, when you sign up, you're, you're defend the Constitution, carry out the orders of the day, you know, blah, blah, blah. And you want to do your job.

You kind of don't care. but you don't want what you do to be completely meaningless discounted. Right. You know, it's worthless. And as far as that, you know, mean type question goes, people should recognize that when young Americans, I mean the 13 Marines and all of, I share something in common with, 15 Marines that died in K.I. H-Khaf. They did that because they're looking at,

they believed in what they were doing. They believed in their brotherhood. They believed in the United States as a true beacon of hope. And every now that we need to take a reset and recognize that. If we don't have those values, anymore, you know, what's going to fill that boy?

Right. And, you know, it's interesting because our veterans have always sort of led the charging that from Vietnam, like bringing home to Vietnamese, when I say bringing home. Jim Morris was a big part of bringing home. The Vietnamese, the Montaneyards, Nungs that sacrifice so much to work with us. You know, Afghanistan, Iraq, like the Kurds during the first Gulf War, we we completely left them to their own devices after they trusted us so much it it you know it's easy to blame a a a politician for those issues but it seems to be a trend of of the american government like and generally it takes the veterans that worked with with those indigenous forces to to like lead the charge on on getting them

the sanctuary. Drew, could you talk to us a little bit about what you're doing now, some of the things we have planned for the future? What's the next step? What's the next move for you? Yeah. Thanks, Jack, for, again, just being a maestro. Yeah, so I've kind of like tried to, I said, I got out as an imposter, a lieutenant. to be a commissioned officer in the Navy as a Mustang. To retire as an officer, you have to do 10 years as in service, right? Now, I was pretty banged up by the time I got out. I'd had like four-shoulder surgeries, a couple of knee surgeries,

ankle plates, a bunch of other stuff. And when it came time to retire, I was like, I was all thinking about, hey, I'm going to go and work for Wexford, worked for AWG, do this and that, you know, yada, yada, make money. And when it came time to retire, I was doing my out physical and I was pretty effed up. And my squadron surgeon, to his credit, said, hey, you know, you ever thought about a medical retirement? And I'm like, well, that's for guys that got blown up or whatever. That's not for me. He goes, no, you're, you know, the definition is, can you do your job, right? And so anyway, one thing we left with the other.

So he helped me do a med board, medical retirement board. And it just did turn out that I was pretty up. I was. Yeah. I mean, granted, yeah. Yeah. steroids and motron and and and PRP injections yeah let me like another and vitamin M right what's that little vitamin M to get you through your day yeah yeah yeah I was living on

so I did a med board and uh I you know the medical board said yeah you're you're pretty fucked up dude uh we're gonna medical retire I got 22 plus years of returfacing how's that going to work So what I thought was going to happen is because I wasn't going to do the 10 years as an officer, I was going to have to revert back to Master Chief, right? So the poor unit, they're like thinking they're planning my retirement as a master chief. I had to buy the uniform, the whole thing. And then, you know, Bumet comes back and says, oh, no, we're going to retire. When you get medically retired, you retire at the highest pay grade or the highest rank yet, pay grid.

So for like nine months I was at E9 and then all of a sudden it was back to 03. Wow. So I retired as an 03. That was the best thing that could happen. So I retired with 100% disability for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the things we've been talked about amongst the physical stuff. But I went back to school. Got to use my GI Bill. got my degree in history, a bachelor's into history,

and then I got a master's in international affairs. And, you know, turn my life around. So I'm not sure if I'm on track for answering your question. Jack, refresh my memory, but. You're on track and taking care of your kids, being a family man. And you told me that you wanted to start a podcast yourself. Yeah. So the next step was like, what am I going to do with myself? How do I reinvent myself? And I struggled with the whole, you know, IC world, paramilitary world, case officer world, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, meanwhile, I have these two great kids. You know, I'm blessed by God to, you know, meet this woman who's just so intelligent. I mean, and. And, and. And we have two wonderful children.

And then suddenly I realized I had this wonderful opportunity to raise kids and be present. I know so many friends on both sides, Army and Navy, who in their, in there, weren't present, weren't able to be present because they had career conflicts. And then, you know, their families were challenged by that. And if it wasn't for their, you know, a real strong spouse or whatnot, you know, that would that determined the success. But back to, you know, now I've got this opportunity. And very recently I realized that I think what I would like to pursue is, you know, the kind of the vet TV version of what we've all learned from being in special operations and having family. you know how the lessons learned the pros and cons the funny stuff and so i'm going to do some what i call combat dad basically come you know podcast and it's it's to talk to vets you don't

have to be a combat veteran necessarily but what did you you know how did you deal with family issues. How do you do with, you know, the challenges of raising children? Like, my kids don't know know nothing about my past. Like, they're, they're eight and six years old, right? I'm an old man, but, you know, and, and they, I might as well be a World War II veteran. Right, right. Yeah. But, but now they're asking questions, you know. Yeah. And, and I realize all the mistakes I made, All the things I learned, all the things that had I been a good dad before or in the military, I would have been a better leader, right? Right.

And how does it feel as a dad when your kids just won't follow the chain of command? Oh, geez. When you realize this is part of the back story to Headstrong and getting help, right? When you get in the grill, you get your kids grill and you're like, blah, blah, blah, right? And they're like, crime. Can you realize it? Did I not lay out my task conditions and standards for this task? What is the problem?

Yeah, here's the commander's intent. Here you're left and right limits. Get the fuck done. And you try everything, right? Like, okay, if you make your bed, you get to put the green checkmark on the magnetic board. If you do this, you get to put the, at the end of the week, we tally all that shit up. And you get to have, you know, if you do, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, met the standard you get to have a movie night.

That sounds great, right? But it doesn't work, right? And then you realize, all the shit going on is a matter of me not trying to overanalyze it, but just sitting there, grabbing my kid and put my arm around him. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, Drew, have you tried the dunk test? I mean, have you tried a hundred mile out of the and the story? The drought proof The dog test With the amount of our tape in the snorkel

Like maybe that'll get them in line The problem is It's not them, it's me Right, I know Yeah, it's, you realize It's like, you know, garbage and garbage out And when you think you're, they're not paying attention, they are.

You know, so I just, I just wanted to say, I'm blessed to have the opportunity to be present. So the fact that I can, I get to be Mr. Mom. Yeah, yeah. I'm blessed, man. I just, I can't tell you.

I learn more for my kids than, than anything. So I have no complaints. Is coming. The podcast. Do you have a channel for that? Because we want to, like, we want to, like, hook you up.

Like, like, we want our viewers to raid your very first podcast and make you a like, you know, unlike us with our first, with our 10 viewers on our first podcast, us getting drunk and whatnot. Like, how can we help you make it happen? I wish I'd had the combat dads is coming. You know, maybe we can do a like a shorthy in the future. Okay. And I'll give you the links. Also, Ajax shrugged. locals is going to be a link you can post. And that's where I'm going to talk about more serious stuff. Okay, great.

Yeah, let us know when the podcast comes at and I would love to direct people. We will plug the hell out of you. We love you and we, you know, we wish you all the success. And it's an important topic. Drew, I know we kind of just sort of like hit like the waftops of your career here. And there's so much more to talk about. but we've kept you for like three hours here at this point. And I really appreciate you being so patient with us and coming back on a Saturday to do this show.

It's been great. This has been a great conversation, man. My pleasure, dude. We have one last question that came in. And it's from Love Star and thank you very much. And guys, please, we're not accepting anymore. Like, we don't want you to like give us, we'll take your money. But we won't be able to ask you for this.

many new school labor unions are using UW unconventional warfare tactics to conduct collective bargaining how do you feel about homegrown submers homegrown subversives challenge authority with an asymmetrical mindset I don't know sorry late question what to make it and that could be like any from from any angle in homegrown

subverses, but also challenging authority, which, you know, so go ahead, please. Okay, so one of the things I learned, you know, we all come into the military. We all have our preconceived ideas of what we want to accomplish and then reality sets in over time. I did 14 deployments, right? not every one of them was combat but but at least you know many of them 10 of them were you know high threat slash you know whatever what you learn from that kind of repetition is to recognize not what you think but what you see you know get to give the ground truth and sometimes the ground truth doesn't dovetail with the commander's intent

so I would say maybe to answer this question you've got to dig deeper than the surface level of you know how that applies to domestic aspects again I'm inferring I'm assuming that's what we're talking about right I don't even know yeah I'm assuming that because it's homegrown subversive yeah so I'm assuming we're speaking domestically. Yeah. So having seen what an insurgency is, having seen what counter, you know,

what terrorist cells look like, having seen all that stuff, we're not seeing any of that level of stuff in the United States. Confidently, I can tell you, there is not that level of concern in the United States. There are people that are disgruntled. They're upset. and you know they're making their their note but but the actual scale or scope of folks that need to be dealt with on the on you know that are being compared to you know other other elements is is incorrect right it's unfortunate that that narrative is being in my opinion being promoted it's it's a propaganda slash

political type disinformation as far as I'm concerned. Now, are there people that that have those intents or those thoughts? Absolutely. Right. But is it, but is it a wide scale enough to be considered prevalent to be considered, you know, an insurgency or or something to be concerned about? Yeah, it's not, it's not like a QI in America. Yeah. Right. And I mean, I was a coin advisor in Afghanistan. Right. And at the day, it's like, I know counterinsurgency stuff like, you know, as well as I know how to kill that guys. Right. And coin and coin is counterinsurgency for, for our people who may not know. And so like what people may see whether their, you know, whether their viewpoint is from the left or the right, like they see the far right or they see the far

left and they see sort of this propaganda and this information that is sort of being put out there. But what you're saying is that that's more of an information war that it's not, that the effort or the ground gained is not similar to what you would actually see in a counter uncertainty from either side. Yeah. Is that fair? I'm asked, yeah.

Absolutely. I mean, there's just, we could do a whole podcast on counter uncertainty aspects. but at the end of the day, this is garbage in garbage up. If someone's telling you something and you choose to believe it without challenging the source or doing your own due diligence, then you're just, you're just, you know, a sheep at the end, you know, in my opinion. Are we at a difficult time in our country? Absolutely.

We're polarized. We need to go back to civil. we need to work hard on, you know, taking care of our neighbors, our neighborhood, our cities, right, or counties. Right. And finding common ground because we all share 90% of the same common ground. Right. So.

Most people are just trying to put in their table and make sure their kids are safe in schools. Like, like they're trying to live a normal life while a small minority on each side is sort of controlling the dialogue in a way. Right. Yeah. You know, I want to, you know, be fair to your audience too. So, you know, I could tell war stories all day. Right.

You know, there I was. And maybe that's, maybe that's better. But we're all Americans and we need to like look for common ground. I mean, take care of your neighbors. You know, pay attention to who lives next door to you. You know, you know, know what's going on and just be a good person. Yeah. Drew, I really appreciate your time tonight, man.

And I hope we can do this again sometime. I hope we can talk you into joining us in Brooklyn sometime. If you care to join the evil empire at some point. My wife just took my son. She's taking my daughter and my son up to New York twice now. She does these getaways, right? Yeah, yeah. There's a one-on-one.

Let us know, Drew. We'll talk. Yeah, and I keep saying, I don't fucking want to go to Manhattan again. You don't have to. You don't have to. You don't have to. That's the beauty of it. Yeah, yeah. I don't want my car broken into, right?

No, you know, yeah. Well, we'll get you an Uber. Yeah, yeah. Leave your car in a secure garage. We'll get you an Uber. And, yeah. So, folks, next Friday, Chris Cox, author of Fire Force, served the Rhodesian Light Infantry. We'll have them on the show.

Drew, thank you so much. Thank you, everyone for being patient with us. We deeply, deeply appreciate you coming on. Everybody will keep in the lookout for combat dads and Atlas, not Shrug. Ajax Shrug. Ajax Shrard. All right. Hey, thanks, guys.

It's been my pleasure. And we'll see you next Friday. All right, brother. Thanks, everybody.