The Team House - Navy SEAL, Homicide Detective, & Secret Service Agent | Frank Larkin | Ep. 377

Episode Date: October 25, 2025

Frank Larkin recounts his long career path from Navy SEAL and Secret Service agent to Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, including a gripping personal account of his actions at the World Trade Center on 9/11. However, the central theme is the tragic story of his son, Navy SEAL Ryan Larkin, who took his own life after years of struggling with undiagnosed symptoms. This led to the discovery of severe microscopic brain injury (TBI) from repeated blast exposure, which had been misdiagnosed as PTSD. Larkin now advocates to force the DoD and VA to prioritize TBI research and unite biological injury diagnosis with mental health treatment to protect the "thinking warrior brain."LINKS⬇️Troop's First Foundation to assist active duty and veterans and National Warrior Call "Defeat Isolation" campaignwww.troopsfirstfoundation.orgwww.warriorcall.orgVets 4 Warriors veteran helpline staffed by vets 24/7www.vets4warriors.comHome Base veteran diagnostic treatment program www.homebase.orgBoulder Crest - Warrior Path post-traumatic growth programwww.bouldercrest.orgTragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) addressing the impact of suicidewww.taps.orgMarcus Institute for Brain Health diagnostic treatment programwww.medschool.cuanschutz.edu/mibhCohen Veterans Network for mental health carewww.cohenveteransnetwork.orgCenter for Brain Health - University of Texas at Dallaswww.centerforbrainhealth.orgInvisible Wounds Foundation (IWF)www.invisiblewounds.orgHeadStong Project treating PTSD and other veteran mental health challengeswww.theheadstrongproject.orgToday's sponsors GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 25% off! CovePure ⬇️use link https://covepure.com/teamFor $200 off!For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured__________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 Start13:26 Career shift: from Navy SEALs to law enforcement.21:25 Career shift: joining the Secret Service (federal service).30:01 Focus on the Secret Service's financial crimes and intelligence mission.33:51 Detailed account begins: Frank's experience at the World Trade Center on 9/11.58:56 End of 9/11 crisis: struggle to contact his family.1:05:10 Ryan Larkin's pivotal decision to enlist and pursue SEAL training.1:33:32 Shift to Ryan's struggle with mental and cognitive symptoms (misdiagnosed as PTSD).1:52:14 Definitive diagnosis: severe microscopic brain injury (IAS) from blast exposure.2:03:19 Call for fundamental change: unifying biological (TBI) and mental health treatment.2:10:12 Discussion shifts to immediate prevention efforts and training changes.2:22:19 Conclusion on solutions: why private sector/academia must lead the TBI solution.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

The Team House with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, guys, welcome to episode 377 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy, here with our guest today, Frank Larkin. Frank served in many different capacities. Navy SEAL, paramedic, police officer, secret service, worked presidential protection details, financial crimes. You were the sergeant at arms at the Senate. That was. And you're also the father of a Navy SEAL, Ryan Larkin, who struggled with traumatic brain injury.

And you've been a big advocate for helping soldiers who are afflicted with this. Something will get into in depth, I hope. Yeah, thanks, Jack. Thanks for having me on. And, you know, to your listening and viewing audience, glad to be here and talk about some of these issues that are certainly affecting our active duty and veteran populations. So I'm going to take you back in time. Tell us a little bit about sort of like your origin story. Like where did you grow up and how did that sort of take you towards governmental service? I grew up in the Philadelphia area. Went to high school there. Pretty routine, you know, routine, you know, family environment.

Had five brothers and sisters, went to public school. I started working pretty much at an early age, you know, delivering new. newspapers, you know, around the community at about 11, 12 years old, and then mowing lawns, and then on to my first, I guess, paycheck job was working in a grocery store, you know, for a local chain supermarket. And I also volunteered as on the local ambulance squad, which kind of started, you know, wetting my appetite for emergency medicine. And from there, graduated. from high school and enlisted in the Navy. What year was that? That was 1973 when I entered the Navy

and right after graduating high school. And so what was it like going through Bud? So this is right after Vietnam, actually. Yeah, so it really was, you know, the exodus was going on. There was a lot of refugees that were being evacuated to the United States. I got involved in some of that,

my assignment before going, on down to training, seal training was camp Pendleton where they were taking refugees in and had a number of refugee camps there that, you know, they were trying to house. You know, a lot of these folks have been displaced, quite a sight. And then, you know, once I was able to get to the teams following training, you know, dealing with a lot of the guys that had come, you know, out of Vietnam and certainly their experience there. a number of them who, you know, were manifesting invisible wounds that we kind of see today in our G-WAT operators.

I'd be interested to, like, do a little bit of, like, even though it's anecdotal across comparison, like, what were you seeing in some of those guys that had served in Vietnam? And, like, did those symptoms resonate with you down the line? Yeah, you know, at first, you know, you just assumed that they had been through a lot. You know, they were proud of, you know, their time in Vietnam, you know, and certainly some of the accomplishments that they had. It was a new mission for the SEAL teams and, again, the predecessor, UDT teams, to operate in a riverine, more of an inland environment. There certainly was enough work to go around for everybody in considering all the special operations groups. Their focus was more of a direct action as opposed to SF that was, you know, trying to get in to help the indigenous population deal with the threat.

But they came back. A number of them, you know, had some visible wounds, you know, from enemy contact, while others, you know, wrestled with, you know, not being able to sleep. I believe a lot of moral pain, emotional pain, whether they would openly admit it or not, but certainly I think the signs were there that they were wrestling with something because of the alcohol was the go-to. A lot of heavy drinking. You know, guys kind of falling off the grid for weeks, months at a time. You know, a lot of fights were, you know, pen up energy, whether it was. was, you know, in a bar, whether it was at home with a spouse. But you could see the struggle that a number of these guys were weighted down with.

And really not a lot of answers at the time as to what might be going on. And very often, I would say back then the difference is that, you know, they kind of, the system kind of dealt with it. You know, absent somebody doing something egregious, you know, you know, a crime or some type of a serious act of violence, the teams tried to, the best way they could, take care and and shepherd. Keep them around. And keep them around, you know, not kick them to the curb, not, you know, demean them,

not, you know, hang labels on them, but, you know, work with them. And sometimes it was a challenge, you know, it would ebb and flow, you know, guys would, you know, kind of get back up on step, and then the next thing you know, they're down again. So it was an interesting time. Beyond just that, I mean, some of the folks you were working with at the time, what was it like being a seal in 1973? Like, I remember I talked to a guy who served around that time frame,

And he's like, man, back in those days, we had snorkel, fins, K-bar knife. That was about it. Yeah, it was pretty Spartan back then. Yeah. You know, I joke, you know, it was back before we got outboard motors. You know, our motors were invented. You know, and the reason I say that is because I then compared it to my son and the kit that he had, it was night and day difference. Yeah, yeah.

You know, just the technical advances, the quality of the gear. But, you know, back then we did what we could. We, you know, made the most out of what we had. You know, towards at the end of Vietnam, special operations was not very well supported by the military enterprise. In some cases, they very much were looked down on. And so we didn't get the care in feeding that a lot of the other traditional service components, got you know if you were you know big hull navy or or aviation or infantry or you know one of the the conventional you know components of the services you know

special operations was was not well you know regarded and now and I think a lot of that was because it wasn't well understood and and when when I think you know the the system doesn't understand something they tend to fear it they They tend to, you know, create narratives that kind of, you know, ensure that comfort zone about how to deal with, you know, groups that are non-traditional. These ruffians. Roughians. You know, those rogues, those, you know, outlaws. It was also a time when the Army or the military in general was trying to, like, put the Vietnam experience behind them.

And in their minds, the future was mechanized warfare, tanks across Europe and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it was a big order about. battle. That's what they were thinking, you know, a doctrinal war. And so when you get into an asymmetric irregular war environment, as you know, you need flexibility, adaptability, you need people that can make, you know, decisions on the edge. And we'll talk about this a little bit later, but that is a fundamental distinguishing discriminator for our military compared to a lot of other militaries around the world. Oh, yeah. You know, the thinking warrior, brain that can overcome, they can act, they can decide, they can make a difference right to the

tip of the spear. And that has proven, you know, invaluable so many times in our military history in the conflicts that we've had, you know, in the past as a nation. So that's an important point that I'll elaborate on a little bit later. And so how long were you in the teams for? About eight years. Any notable deployments or anything you'd like to mention before we go on? No, about that time, you know, Demo Dick Marsenko was a CEO of Team 2, quite a character.

I like to work in for him. I mean, you know, it was one of those dynamics that, you know. You want them or hated him? Yeah, that's right. You know, he was, he definitely was out on the edge. And I understand that there were, you know, some issues that I really did not have any contact with. So I really can't speak. But, you know, from what I saw, you know, he was all about his operators and doing what he could do to make sure that they had, they had the best equipment and certainly, you know, the best missions.

I think that, you know, back in that time, you know, Europe was dealing with the Red Army faction, the Red Brigade. You had a number of high-profile kidnappings that were going on. So you could see some of this, you know, terrorist, extremist, you know, kind of percolations that were starting to come to the surface. not well understood. You know, was it a military responsibility? Was a law enforcement responsibility or a combination thereof? Also, we had some activity down in Central America with the Cubans, particularly around the Panama Canal.

And, again, that as a strategic, you know, cut through, you know, both North and South America. You know, not sure what they were up to at the time, but it was a level of concern that maybe they would try to impact the operations to the canal. Not so much drugs back then were at the top of the list. And then certainly you had some other activities going on in the Middle East that weren't as high profile as they are now. But definitely, you know, you could see that there was some instability that was starting to brew. And so you spend a lot of time in Central America and like Lebanon, those areas? No, pretty much Europe and then really kind of Central America for the most part at the time.

Did not have any Asia deployments. So it was, but the training was constant. I mean, always, I think that they were at a period post-Vietnamist, okay, what are we going to be? What are we going to do? And this was in an environment where, you know, you had big Navy, you know, the Pentagon and so forth, not really sure about how to use their special operations forces. And again, everybody was licking their wounds. The budgets has been cut.

So, I mean, we were putting together jeeps and other vehicles by taking parts off the, you know, gunnery ranges. We would go out there and kind of strip out vehicles and build new vehicles. and build new vehicles, you know, by virtue of the fact that we weren't getting any new vehicles. So it was kind of an interesting time. Correct me if my memory is misfiring. The seals have like a semi-permanent thing going on in Crete at the time? Yes, they did. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, and that was kind of at the tail end of that. But, you know, to talk to the guys that had been to Crete, you know, in that assignment, they loved it. I bet. It was a garden spot. Diving, Mediterranean. Yeah. Okay, so what led to your decision of sort of leave the SEAL teams or leave the Navy after eight years and go and try something else?

Basically, go to school. Okay. You know, I had the intention of going to school and then flipping back in. Mm-hmm. And I had gotten, you know, bitten, you know, while in undergraduate by the law enforcement bug. I met acute nurse in the emergency department, one of the hospitals. that I would transport patients to as a paramedic. I worked as a paramedic on a hospital-based unit in the Philadelphia area.

So one thing led to another, you know, and I kind of vectored towards law enforcement. And, you know, I didn't have any regrets about not coming back into the teams because I had other experiences and other directions that, you know, proved to be, you know, challenging. So, but yet I also still had that, that tug going on of, you know, what would have been like if I had come back in, especially at the doorstep of, you know, the creation of a dev group. Right. And some of the special activities that were coming about at that time. So what was your first job as a cop? I was a B cop in the Philadelphia area.

walking, you know, all this. 1980. Yeah. Must have been fun. Yeah, it was. You know, a white cop and predominantly black, you know, neighborhoods. You know, they hadn't had a beat cop in a long, long time. So it was an experience, you know, coming out of the teams, you know, with the training that you get there and the experience, you would think, oh, yeah,

I've got everything I need to survive. And I found out pretty quick that unless I figured it out, I was going to go home, lumped up every night, you know, and with a lot of visible bruises and, you know, wounds to remind me that, you know, I still had a long way to go. Clean drinking water is one of the best investments you can make for your family's health. That's exactly why I started using Cove Pure, a countertop water purifier that filters out all the things you don't want in your water so you can feel good about what your family's drinking. Here's something you might not realize.

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and for a limited time, you'll get a special discount of $200 off from your cove purifier. That's C-O-V-E-P-U-R-E dot com slash T-E-A-M. What were some of those like changes in approach that you had to make as you became a law enforcement officer? You know, you kind of go in with a mindset, hey, you're looking for crime. You know, it's locking people up. Yeah, yeah, trying to, you know.

But really what I found is just trying to be, you know, a good person within those neighborhoods to see how you can, you know, a lot of these folks were just really good people. I mean, they didn't have a lot of money, you know, on the social economic scale, they, you know, they were kind of at the lower end. But it did not, you know, in no way did it mean that they didn't have pride. Yeah. And one of the things that I tried to, The lessons I learned, I mean, three basic points that I try to pass on to new officers and public servants. It's one that, you know, something, all our mothers told us, you know, treat people the way you want to be treated. But you've got to ask that question in reverse.

How do you think they want to be treated? You know, and that, and sometimes we fail to ask that question. You know, we look at it through our lens, but we don't look, pick up their lens and look back at the same thing. The second is treat everybody with respect no matter where they come from. You know, everybody has got a different story, has got a different route to how they got to where they are. But treat them with respect. Third thing is never take their dignity away. You do that, you got to fight on your hands.

And so those three principles, those three legs of a stool that have served me well, you know, through life. But that experience walking the beat was formidable. I mean, just something as simple as you see an elderly woman struggling with bags, you know, walking up the sidewalk, just going up and, you know, picking up those bags. Even though she's protesting, no, no, no, I can do it, I can do it. it's just and walk at her home or or getting a bike for a kid that doesn't have one. I mean, we certainly had collected a lot of bikes, you know, in the department that had been abandoned or recovered. And, you know, so to be able to take one of those and get it to a kid that didn't have one

so that he could be part of, you know, a group of other kids that had bikes, you know, somebody that maybe had a little too much to drink, you know, instead of locking them up, just, you know, how can we get them someplace where they're going to be safe until they sleep it off? Things like that that start to build trust and relationships with the community that ultimately, you know, can watch your back as you're also doing your job of, you know, enforcing the laws and protecting them. And I imagine when you have that kind of relationship, relationship with the community that when something bad does happen, you know, we're looking for this rapist, this murderer, the community would be like, yeah, that guy right there, go get them.

Yeah. And they had their own code. I mean, I can remember eventually I went and worked homicide and we'd have somebody, you know, that would be shot broad daylight, middle of the street, you know, body, everybody could see it. No doubt that somebody, you know, had to see something. and nobody would talk. And, you know, you're, you know, you scour the block.

You try to find that person that, you know, could give you some information. Nobody's talking. And then maybe two weeks later, same block. Again, another homicide, but this time, you know, they're not only shot, but they're stabbed, you know, set on fire or whatever. And you can't stock people from talking. and you just wonder what's the difference and so within their code within their their their kind of moral

baseline or whatever you know it's one thing if somebody gets shot over a dispute it's another thing when someone gets absolutely abused and you know shot stabbed burned desecrate the body that yeah that yeah that that's over the

top that's something that that you know cross their their red line so if that makes sense it and that's something that i mean i got to tell you as a gringo you know you know operating in a neighborhoods like that that's something i had to learn and but i grew to respect it and it all just like anything comes down to relationships and i met some wonderful people that um you know while i was in the area I had stayed in contact with and and you know I just a lot of respect for them and and I think maybe around this time because I imagine your son Ryan would be about my age was he he born while you were working for the Metro Police Department no no oh he's a little later yeah a little bit later okay we uh we didn't have kids until we were about 30 you know almost 30

So it wasn't until I was in federal service. Okay. You know, with the Secret Service that we started our family. How did you make the jump from beat cop to Secret Service? It was pretty interesting. I applied to both the Bureau and the Secret Service at the same time. I had a good buddy that was also a detective. We decided, well, let's, let's, you know, take the test, see where it goes.

I wanted a little bit more of a challenge. It's kind of been a theme of my life. I always want to kind of experience new things. So Secret Service called first. Wound up taking their test, scored very well on it. And then eventually the Bureau called. But I gravitated towards a Secret Service because it was smaller than the Bureau. It had a pretty unique mission.

no fail mission and it was to me more of a had more of a special operations feel than the Bureau did and then my buddy he wound up going to the Bureau and the two of us would

eventually come together years later down in Waco Texas he he was a member of HRT the hostage rescue team and and as an agent paramedic, I was, along with a number of other agent paramedics, brought in to assist the bureau. Gotcha.

With fortifying their emergency medical response, it was a large operation, and they had limited resources, but we had a very close relationship. So what year did you get to the Secret Service? 84. Okay. So you go through all the training. How many presidential protection details do you think you've done? So I started when Reagan was in office, not on the permanent detail, but during his time, all the way up through Bush 43. And I mean, we've had maybe one, at least one Secret Service guy on this show who is during the George W. Bush,

Obama years. He had some great stories. I mean, do you have any stories about like traveling overseas with the Secret Service protecting the president, like everything that has to go into making that happen? Well, we call it the show. I mean, it's quite an operation. You're, you're, depending on where you're going and what kind of threat vectors need to be considered, really dictate the load out that you're going to take on a trip like that. They send it an advanced team to deal with the host countries in order to, you know, develop the visit. And you're working with the White House staff. You're also working, you know, because it's foreign, you're working with the Department of State.

And then you're working with the host government, which could be a challenge. Sometimes it gets to be a little bit of, you know, chest bumping exercise. you know, we go in with certain expectations that the host country may not, you know, line up on those expectations, but the bottom line has had the ultimate responsibility of protecting the most powerful leader in the world. So, you know, we take our full-up kit with us. You know, we don't rely on their vehicles or their, you know, limousines. We fly everything to the site of the visit.

to include all the support entities that come in in order to ensure that protective environment. So it's quite an operation. It's, you know, we have a saying that, you know, it's all about attention to detail. And, you know, you only got one chance to get it right. There's no do-overs. So some of the venues that we would go to that are, you know, pretty hostile. We had bad intelligence. We would go in and work quite closely with the agency in addition to the State Department.

We'd also rely heavily on our trusted allies to feed us information on potential threats. And then we would have the visible presence, protective presence, and then we would have the invisible, what we'd call our – you know, quick response or our backup, and very often that would be our military special operations forces or agency elements that would be in a ready response position to come in, in the event that, you know, we dealt with an assault or some type of crisis that we needed to get out of a place very quickly. Ever have any kind of sketchy close calls happen on those trips?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, at times, it really came down to a decision of breaking off a motorcade route because of threat intelligence, reports of explosives underneath the bridge, unresolved, you know, threat that they had not been able to run down, that yet the last minute would change the direction of that visit. we've had situations where, you know, things have been thrown at events. I think it was Tbilisi. We had a hand grenade, a couple hand grenades that were thrown. While the president was like speaking?

Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. So it was, fortunately, it went low water. And, but again, and every time something like that happens, you know, in a foreign venue, you try to have a level of control and protective umbrella that, you know, we would expect here domestically. But the reality is that we don't control all that environment. Right.

So sometimes there are vulnerabilities that are created because host governments drop the ball or don't come through on things that, you know, they promise to come through on. And that's where, you know, having that situational awareness and being able to close those gaps quickly or to mitigate a vulnerability is really what makes the difference sometimes with, you know, a disaster versus, you know, a successful visit. I mean, you guys have your work cut out for you. Like, I think, especially didn't Biden visit Ukraine during the war. I mean, like trips like that, like you have to worry about a foreign country attacking the president. you have to worry about a terrorist organization attacking the president or just some lunatic pulling out a pistol in the crowd and shooting at. I mean, just the amount of potential threats you have to guard against is kind of off the wall.

Yeah, and most of the public generally doesn't hear about them. They're kept pretty much on the lowdown. That's getting harder and harder these days because there's so many leaks that are coming out. But, you know, back in my day, we were pretty successful. We were very dependent on working with the interagencies. You know, the Secret Service can't do it all alone. For instance, you know, coming up to a place like New York, there's no way the Secret Service has the organic resources within the agency to protect the president or, you know, even the UN activities, General Assembly and other high-profile activities without the support of NYPD, the Bureau, other agencies. that, again, are all part of that collective effort.

And it really comes back to relationships. And you don't want to build a relationship in the heat of the crisis. Right. You want to kind of, you want to go out, you want to break bread with these guys and gals ahead of time. You want to understand each other's capabilities and have that level of trust that, you know, when you pick up the phone or you call on the radio,

that they're going to be there. And after doing the presidential protection details, you went into financial crimes? So the Secret Service is a multimodal responsibilities. It is responsible for protecting the financial infrastructure of our nation, which involves everything from, you know, hard currency, which is the old, you know, counterfeit days, you know, especially with younger generations, we're getting less and less in our, you know, carrying of hard cash. You know, most of it's either plastic or electronic, you know, transfer.

So the services had to adapt to all that. And then now you're talking about the, you know, digital, you know, financing or Bitcoin and other platforms that, that, you know, facilitate the movement of wealth or value. All are kind of interconnected. And one of the reasons that the service has always tried to hold on to that is because it has a tremendous relationship to other things. You know, it's not only about the financial stability of our nation, but nothing is free. So if you follow the money, you get a whole different.

perspective on X, you know, whether it's, you know, a crime organization, whether it's, you know, terrorist threat financing, whether it's, you know, another country's activities, and especially here in New York City, you know, you have, it's such a major intersection for the movement of, you know, financial wealth. So the Secret Service has that responsibility. And then you have the out front high publicity you know you know you know responsibilities around you know protection of the president the vice president foreign leaders and other does folks that are designated and then there's there's a protective intelligence responsibility that goes along with with all that so and

that's kind of a unique like a counterintelligence kind of thing both counterintelligence and and protective intelligence where you're interacting with your interagency partners, with foreign governments in order to maintain a level of situational awareness of threats that may be potentially affecting the president, the office of the presidency, the vice presidency, others to include, you know, the Congress in many cases. That, again, the Secret Service takes very seriously. And I remember being sent out on protective intelligence cases because someone's made a threat or they've got a group that has showed some negative interest or threatening interest in, you know, maybe a visit or some type of movement.

And essentially it was don't come home until you have it on a hook. It was, you would run this thing to the ground no matter how long it would take. And with, you know, just whatever resources you needed, I mean, it was a, they took it very, very seriously. So I know the service has been through some tough times recently. I'm sure there's a variety of different explanations for that. But the bottom line is that they have a no-fail mission and, you know, things have changed over the years, but they have a no-fail mission. You don't get a second chance. If you're in the market for a new mattress, you've probably seen all the brands out there vying for your attention. Big names, splashy ads, all promising the same thing.

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Yeah, I was a supervisor. and at the time I was running the financial crime squad and I was also in charge of the training for the office and so had a fairly sizable cadre of agents everything from brand new boot agents up to season agents you know we were the biggest office in the Secret Service a lot of responsibilities here in New York you get a lot of foreign heads of state coming in

certainly do you have the UN it's the you know you know the financial center so you know again a lot of activities so in addition to our criminal investigative responsibilities a lot of protection and certainly with that you know protective intelligence and some of the other you know threads that go along with that on 9-11 you know it's it's almost 25 years it's hard to believe yeah it is you know i i i had a routine i would come literally get up at five in the morning and leave the house, you know, the whole goal was trying to get through the Holland Tunnel by 6 o'clock. If you didn't get through by 6 o'clock, you were screwed.

I mean, it was almost like, you know, like, you know, a man-eating flour that just would just close up, you know, and you would be stuck. And there's no predictability of how fast you would move. But I would get in before 6 o'clock in the morning in the office. office and then I was a big runner. I would run along the Westside Highway along the Hudson. And I remember that day I was on coming back from my run, you know, looking at the two towers. It was a beautiful day. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. It's just a crystal blue background, you know, backdrop on the two towers. And I just remember it saying and thinking, and I don't know why,

But I said, you know, we're just so lucky that, you know, you know, here in the city and in the World Trade Center that we haven't had anything major occur. I had been at the on site at the first attack in 93. I was down in Washington. I came up within hours of that attack, which almost brought down, you know, Tower 1 when that car bomb went off in the basement. We had a number of agents that were injured. It was a very close call for the World Trade Center at the time. And then, you know, here we are in 2001. I get back off my run.

I'm in the shower and I'm coming out of the shower. And we got a bunch of sinks, you know, outside the showers. And, you know, secret service agents being secret service agents, they're using hair dryers that, you know, kind of. dry their hair after their workout and and i always would say to them hey you guys gonna watch you know watch out you're gonna light yourselves up you know with all that water and those hair dryers and just then the light started to flicker and uh within seconds somebody came across the the uh the the pa hey there's been a massive explosion at tower one and then maybe a minute or two

later later they came back and they said uh uh You know, this is a, this is a, there's been an actual explosion in Tower 1, evacuate the building immediately. You know, all personnel evacuate the building immediately. You were in Tower 7, right? Yeah, we were in Tower 7. You know, we had a number of other agencies and so forth in Tower 7 to include the Mayor's Emergency Command Post. That was a 49-story tower or high-rise. the newest one in the complex.

And, you know, I remember going back to my locker and everybody's running out and, you know, and they're, you know, all sorts of attire, you know, everything from, you know, boxer shorts to, you know, just half dressed to fully dressed. And I remember going back to my locker and I just, you know, I put my stuff back on. I was wearing a suit that day. I was supposed to go to the U.N. I was a supervisor up there for the U.N. General Assembly, we had a bunch of meetings. So I put, you know, all my stuff on, you know, took

my time. Meanwhile, I'm like the last one in the locker room and I go down to my office, which is a floor below and I run into the agent in charge and he says, hey, I'm, you know, relocating everybody out to a park that was alongside the Hudson River to try to kind of reconstitute the office and get some accountability. I said, okay, fine. I said, I'll, because of my background having you know been involved in law enforcement and you know from the emergency medical side and so forth I said look I'll go down a liaison with police and fire command and then I'll I'll pass on you whatever you know I hear from that he says a good two thumbs up so I went into my office got every

piece of communications that I could get you know our secret service radio I got flip phone back then you know there's two little digital two-way pagers oh yeah actually proved to be the most valuable piece of communications that day. That worked. That was the only thing that worked. Because the cell lines were like jammed up. Yeah, they all kind of shit the bed. And then I had NYPD radio because we worked so closely with NYPD.

We had their radios too. And I remember going to the emergency stairwell and I opened up the door and it was just clogged with people. And they were just like, their eyes were like this. and so I said, shit, I'm not getting in the middle of that. So I went to the elevators, which they tell you is the last thing you should do. And I pushed the down button. And the door opened up, nobody's on it, hit the, you know, G for ground, took me all the way down, opened up, and I was on the ground floor. But then I walked out into a lobby of hundreds of people.

And as I'm walking out to try to get out of the building, I could hear him screaming, and I couldn't understand why. And, but periodically they would just let out these blood-curdling screams. And I'm trying to, you know, I'm not outside, so I can't see what's going on. And I step outside and I go across the street towards Tower 1. And I'm looking up and it's just boiling fire at this point. You know, we're starting to get some emergency equipment to arrive on the scene. A lot of our agents who are medically trained, at least at the first responder level, you know, a few at the EMT level, and I think I was the only paramedic trained individual.

But as I'm walking towards Tower One, something caught my eye, and I stopped. And just then, this just a nerving thud right in front of me, and it was somebody that had jumped from the upper floors. And literally, if I had not stopped and turned, I would have been crushed. A number of people had been crushed that day or killed or seriously injured from folks that unfortunately had, you know, made that ultimate decision to, to, how can he explain that? Yeah, you can't. I mean, that's why it shocked the whole country because no one could. And it was, you know, when I finally found. did look up it was almost like as if the sky was raining people I mean that

it's it's a it's a it's a site that will never leave me and and and I just I can't imagine those folks in that position making that final decision and you know and it was a final decision and and Because everybody came to work that day, you know, there was no warning. Yeah. I mean, it was a beautiful day. How could this be happen? And, you know, everything has gone to shit like instantly.

And every time you, you know, you turned right or left, something was changing. I mean, you could, you know, even the police and fire command were struggling to try to get a handle. I mean, this was just an unprecedented event. And I remember at that point, rallying up with, uh, uh, The mayor was there, the police commissioner, fire commissioner. We were on the street when the second plane hit. And it hit on the opposite side of Tower 2. And it was like a shotgun blast coming at us.

I mean, Volkswagen sized chunks of, you know, what plane Tower 2 were coming at us. And all I can remember is, you know, yelling, you know, get cover, get cover. and next thing you know that stuff is just raining down all around us. And as things kind of settled out, I stood up and I'm laying on top of a guy. And he's a sizable guy, and he's face down. And so I just let like your adrenaline's going.

I just picked them up, you know, and he turns to me and he says, you know, hey, you know, for a little guy, you're pretty, you're pretty powerful, you know, and it was Bernie Carrick, who is the, who is the police commissioner. Yeah, yeah. So, and he was a character, too. I mean, I know he had, he hit some speed bumps, but he was, he was a street guy. You know, he was, he wasn't afraid to make a decision, but it was interesting. I was also able to facilitate a phone call down to the White House, which I think the mayor eventually was able to get on that line to talk to somebody at the other end about what was going on.

A pay phone, back then, you know, pay phones were, for your listeners or people that, we used to have these, you know, phones that were on, on calls. Or we put quarters into it to make phone calls. But it really came down to that. And at that point, before the second, plane hit, it's kind of hard to believe, but we were still trying to figure out what happened. What happened to Tower 1? Now, some people had a better, you know, sense or at least seeing the

plane fly in, or, but I can tell you in those early minutes, there was, you know, because things always happen in New York. I mean, there's, New York has a lot of stuff that, always goes on and high profile events or incidents. So we were just wondering, is this a gas explosion? Is this what's going on up here? And then when the second plane hit, there was no doubt that we were under attack. And following that, I took a crew of guys.

After the second plane hit, the police and fire command kind of split operation. And I went with the police side, which was going up near Vizian Church Street, up by the old church. Yep, yep. And as they were kind of forming up there, you know, it was the challenge was, you know, as far as command and control, it was really still trying to understand the scale of what's going on. and you have multiple things happening at the same time. And as you're going through that whole sifting process, and you've got resources coming in,

all of a sudden you start hearing this very unnatural rumbling and people yelling, take cover, take cover. I could not see the top of the two buildings because all the smoke and the debris were blown over the top of us. We were on the leeward side. Something, the old church, you're like a little south of the World Trade Center. Yeah, yeah. South and east.

Yeah. So I think it was next to the Millennium Hotel. They used to be kind of a... Before my time. Yeah. I don't think it's called that anymore. But it's... I remember diving under a fire truck and all of a sudden the ground just started to vibrate.

And all of a sudden everything went black to the point where I had to, you know, stuffed my face into my suit jacket and just to breathe. And remember crawling out over a body. And it turned out to be a guy who I just talked to right before all that. You got killed by debris. Yeah. Well, debris or heart attack. He was an elderly gentleman carrying a suitcase, well-dressed.

looked like a Wall Streeter or somebody, you know, coming from that financial sector. And it just took a number of minutes where that debris started to settle down, where you could start making out shapes. And there were fires that were starting on the ground from the jet fuel. At that point, I didn't realize the buildings had come down. I thought maybe there had been a partial collapse. Right, right. Anything that was later than air was kind of, you know, pushed out.

And then with a jet fuel subsequently caught on fire, we had vehicles that were on fire on the street. And then my biggest worry at that point was, where are my people? You know, I had a handful of people that were with me, all just great agents, you know, about, everybody was focused on the same. thing. How can we get in and help, you know, the injured get out? How can we, you know,

be a value in this crisis that, again, we're still trying to figure out what's going on. You could hear jets flying over, you know, fighter jets. Again, not sure whether, you know, something else is coming at us. We didn't know if they were ours or, it was a very confusing, chaotic time. to the point where you had no communications, and the only thing that you could affect was literally what was in your visual range. What you could yell to somebody, what you could physically go and touch, you know, see.

That was your area of control. And eventually reconstituted our guys. We started grabbing equipment off of some of the, the police emergency services and fire equipment that were there, when all of a sudden somebody said, hey, you know, run for cover, Tower One's, Tower One. And all I remember was looking up at Tower One. By then some of this smoke and basically the smoke had cleared,

I could see the antenna up on Tower One. And as I was looking at it, I could start seeing it starting to lean. And then, you know, someone yelled, hey, run, run, get cover. I remember going around the corner of the post office building and hunkering down. The same thing happened. You know, everything went black, terrible rumble, and just this force of energy that hit us. And then once, again, like the first time, once that settled out, Um, we started, there were more fires because now there was more debris that had been pushed out.

Still didn't know that both towers had come down. And we, we had, there was a whole, there was a circle of fire that literally, you know, from, from where we were that kind of, you know, enveloped that, that area of the World Trade Center complex. And we could see that there were people trying to get out from within and they look like zombies. Yeah. I mean, you saw the pictures. There's all, there's all. all, you know, dusted up and literally they were just in a catatotic state. And so there was an old fire truck that was hooked up to a hydrant right on the corner of church, I think in Vizi,

where the old church is. And there was fires that had started in some of the storefronts of the buildings there on the corner. There was fire that was getting close to the church. And I remember myself and another agent who had some basic fire training. We got to this pump panel on this fire truck and we figured out how to get the water flowing. We kicked the pump in. It had a big deluge gun on top of the fire truck and then we stretched some hoses with some nozzles and a number of the guys, you know, went forward and started attacking the wall of flames. And it was interesting because The fire, as these cars, as this paper and so forth, called on fire, it then, you know, worked its way underneath vehicles that then exploded the gas tanks.

And that then led to, you know, fiery rivers of gasoline, moving down the street, lighting off other cars and trucks. And, you know, you got burning tires. I mean, there was, it was quite a sight. And there was no firemen around later to find out why. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we got water. We started, you know, knocking some of this fire down to get some of these people ushered out.

I can remember I was up on top of this, the engine working the deluge gun and pointing it towards the, you know, the buildings that were on the corner through their, you know, their, you know, their. or play glass windows and everything else and trying to knock down the fire there and then swinging it over to the church to try to slow the fire down there. I don't know how long we were doing this. But then all of a sudden, you know, it was if, you know,

somebody blew a bugle and you started seeing these legions of firefighters coming down the street. And I remember this, I didn't know where this firefighter was from. You know, he comes up and he says, hey, what are you doing? What are you doing up on that?

that truck, you know, that engine, you know, and I turned to them and I said, what does it look like we're doing? You guys want to take over? Have at it. You know, and so they came in and started manning a lot of the equipment that had been banned on the street or crushed. We went in and started looking for people that were trapped and we found a firefighter that was down. We found a It turned out to be a World Trade Center, a maintenance guy that was severely injured, a couple other people that needed immediate evacuation. I mean, two of them were very critical, a number of others that were serious. So our guys wound up getting a couple Stokes baskets off of the fire trucks. We brought him in, got these guys loaded up.

And then there was an abandoned New York Presbyterre. I'll never forget it. Banned in New York Presbyterian ambulance on the street with most of its windows blown out. There was a Port Authority police officer off duty. They had come to the, I don't know whether he was in proximity of the World Trade Center when this all went down.

He joined up with us. A couple NYPD detectives, and we started to move in these injured folks to this ambulance. And it was the first time that I physically came in contact and touched somebody that day. I was trying to, you know, discipline myself not to get involved in any medical care. There's certainly, you know, a significant number of injuries, but trying to direct my folks to be those first point of contact to get people out to triage, you know, locations.

But this, we were in such a remote distress condition and these folks were, we were not in good shape. They were circling the drain. We said, look, let's get them loaded. Port Authority officer says, I think they got some type of collection point down at the battery. So got them load, you know, the two serious ones loaded on the stretcher and on the big bench in the back and then packed as many as we could in there with another agent and he headed off.

And we're going down towards the battery. and like I said the windows are blown out all this dust and debris is just blown through this unit I've I've put a tube down into the throat of one of the guys that that was barely breathing in order to to kind of you know breathe for them the other one was writhing in pain from burns and we get down to the battery and the you know they open up the back doors and it was like we were in a whole different world. You know, everything was clean. You know, the people that, you know, opened up the back doors are all in, you know, pristine uniforms and so forth. And they look in at us. And the eyes, the expression that they had was, you know, WTF, what is going on here? And so they, at that point,

had set up some triage areas. And they had the ferries there to shuttle people over in the New Jersey, I think, to, you know, to the hospitals over there because, you know, the downtown, I think it was the downtown Beakman at the time. And then you had St. Vincent's with the two closest hospitals to the downtown area where people were actually walking there to get care. And it was just, it was just, you know, you had to be there to appreciate it. And I remember once we got everybody unloaded, I hop back into the driver's seat of this ambulance because I was going to take it back up because I had my guys up there. And some guy comes up and basically drags me out and says, this is my ambulance.

You're not going anywhere in this thing. And I said, but I've got to get up back. You're not taking this. This is my ambulance. And I said, well, I'm not going to sit here and argue with you. I got out. And just then there was an NYPD motor coming by a scooter cop. and I jumped out in front of them.

And again, I'm all dusted up and, you know, and he stops, you know, and I said, you're taking me up to the site. I need to get back to my guys. He looks at me, he says, hop on the pack. And we scootered our way all the way up. I was able to, you know, get together with my guys. But by then, I think it was like 3 o'clock in the afternoon. And we weren't finding anybody else.

And then we were on site, you know, Building 7 came down around 5 o'clock. That happened because when Tower 1 leaned over, it kind of carved out the front of Building 7, the fire got in there. And because we had lost so many firefighters and equipment and so forth, there was nobody to really kind of battle that. So eventually the weight of the building just came down. and I had, you know, initially been reported as missing. We eventually left the scene, and I forgot what time it was, that we wound up going, I think, up to around Pier 57,

they had set up some decon up there, and I had not had any real communications with my family to let them know I was okay. And we were subsequently moved back over New Jersey on one of the water taxis. Our Newark office, a group of heroes over there, basically were shuttling guys back home because I was a supervisor, I got a car, and wound up, I think, it was close to midnight

when I walked through the front door in my house and just, you know, you know, looked in the eyes of my family. You were just in a state of just, you know, emotional turmoil and, and shocked. You didn't know where you were. Yeah. We hugged and cried. My wife told me my eyes were as red as beats.

I was just, you know, it was just a surreal feeling. My kids were just, you know, everyone was in shape. And it wasn't until then that I was able to sit down in front of the TV and for the first time, realized that both towers had come down. It's funny how that hits you after the facts watching it. Yeah. And so, but I wound up being a Ground Zero supervisor, interagency supervisor, working with other folks like agencies.

that were in our building. We had, you know, it was interesting, we had to secure presence at Ground Zero, especially around Building 7. We had some sensitive agencies that occupied that building, and there was sensitive documents that were on the ground. And a lot of people don't know that side of the story, but we really had to try to protect the area

and why they brought in teams to try to... Because there was a CIA station in the building. That's correct. Yeah. And then, you know, between our stuff, their stuff, you know, we... And there were some foreign individuals that were subsequently arrested for... Picking stuff up. Picking stuff up.

Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. The one incident and I got involved in were two Libyans. So, but yeah, yeah, it was, so you had a lot of things going on. And at that time, you know, they said they was safe to breathe the air and, you know. I was going to ask if you had respiratory problems.

Yeah, so I coughed. I was coughing for about three months, you know, initially coughing up some blood, not a lot, but, you know, it's definitely some irritation, you know. It wasn't until almost two weeks later that they said, hey, the air is not good to breathe. You got to wear respirators. Thanks. Thanks, you know. But the significance of that is that, you know, my son, Ryan, at the time was about 14 years old, high school. My daughter, Kelly, was a couple years ahead of him.

I think a little, I think she might have been 11th grade or 10th grade. But he particularly had witnessed this from the hillside west of the city where we lived. In Jersey. Yeah. A pretty unobstructed view of. you know what was going on and then he he wasn't handling it too well and uh we had lost a lot of people around us in our town that had worked firefighters and cops and well not so much but the wall streeters like a lot of them who worked for canter fissgerald who grew up in tower one and other

places that you know they didn't come home parents of his classmates yeah exactly you know and and a lot of the firefighters and and uh cops were staten island and out, you know, in the peninsula, Long Island Peninsula. But out my way, it was a lot of the Wall Streeters and downtown financial district folks. And, you know, he said,

hey, I want to, I need to go down there and understand what happened. And I said, it's not a good idea. You can imagine two weeks afterwards. It was pretty, you know, it was a horrible place to, I mean, you know, they finally had gone from, rescue to recovery operations. They had brought in heavy equipment. Still fires burning.

But, you know, I said, your mom's not going to like this. She's not going to go for it whatsoever. And I remember saying to her something in my gut tells me he needs to do this. So I took him down there. And by then, like I said, they were, you know, you had to wear respirators. So it was pretty easy to disguise them. I put him in a police jacket, respirator helmet. And went down there with the understanding or at least the agreement that if I see anything that you're not handling it, we're out of there, no questions asked. Okay, Dad. We walked around, it took us about three hours or so because it's just an immense. And I try to point out where things were and what happened.

And at the end, I said, you've seen enough. And he said, yeah, I appreciate you bringing me down here. The reason I tell that is because we get transferred back down to Washington. I go back to the White House responsible for security operations there in that post-9-11 environment. You know, and I've, you know, just been through this up in New York. So, you know, I am not in the mood of, you know, playing games. Right. Changes need to be made.

You know, we're a nation that is essentially under distract at war. And we've got to do business completely different. But he finishes up. high school and then comes home and announces that he enlisted in the Navy and oh by the way I'm I volunteer for the SEAL program where do you get that from well you know I never pushed him in that direction but I did believe that he you know this is a choice that he was making I wanted to make sure that he understood what that choice was I said said why and he said this is what happened on 9-11 can't ever happen to us again I'm going to be part

of the solution and like so many other men and women who dropped everything stepped up on the line and raised the right hand to go yourself others they were going to be part of the solution so it never happened again and so he went in the Navy went to buds, broke his back in Hell Week. Oh, how do you do that? Well, he went into Hell Week with a stress fracture in his leg. I babbled the log one day right before Hell Week started. And then I said, he calls me and he says, you know, I got a lot of pain in my leg, my left leg.

And, you know, this is what happened. I said, well, you're going to get it looked at? He says, nope. And he goes into Hell Week. Well, through the course and going through a Hell Week, he's, trying to shift his weight and everything else to compensate for the pain in his leg. You know, he's taking some abuse from his teammates, you know, you know, he's kind of, you know, all kind of contorted, you know, trying to deal his pain. He gets all the way through Hell

Week. They get secured on a Friday, actually by Admiral Mullen, who became the senior for the, who became the chairman. And he couldn't get off the beach. He just, which is not unusual. You collapse after you've been through all that. And so they wind up. you know, helping him back to his room. But he's not getting up. And so they come and check on him. They decided, hey, you need to go to Balboa, the hospital, see what's going on.

And they put him through a bunch of x-rays and this whole back lit up stress fractures. Oh, man. So they came back and said, hey, you know, you've got to go, you know, heal up. And it's going to, you know, kind of go into a late-duty status for three months. well then, you know, they were going to, they were going to bump, you know, push him out.

Three months? You've got to be kidding me, you know. But as they were assessing that, I got to give credit to the commanding officer of the center, the training center who came back and said, so what you're telling me, guys, is that you got a guy here that went all the way through Hellweek with a broken back. enduring that amount of pain makes it to the end

and you want to kick them out and it's also what are we talking 2004 or 2005 around that time frame? I think we know I think we need all the people we can get yeah so they all kind of looked at each other

and said yeah you're right so they kept them in he classed up a couple of classes later and then finished up training went down to Sockham, the 18 Delta training, down in Bragg. And as soon as he got his diploma, graduated at the top of his class. You know, immediately deployed to Iraq and went out to the Ambar, Fulia, Ramadi area,

and was in contact almost immediately, kind of seeing a whole. different side of a whole different part of the world and experiencing you know things that you know you just you you know you got to be there to do it uh it's uh it's amazing like hear that story from a father to like taking your teenage son to ground zero and then he surprises you hey i joined the navy dad and he's mixing it up with some bad actors and uh in this what do they call the Sunni triangle of death. Yeah, yeah, exactly. What was this sort of like, you know, for you and your wife and your daughter, I mean,

like it affects the family, of course, your son is now going back and forth between these war zones and you must be like very proud of them, but at the same time, like, super worried. Yeah, and by that time, you know, I had retired out of the Secret Service. And then I spent a little touch and go out in industry, but I was pulled back in the into DOD to work the counter IED threat problem set with the joint IED organization. It was called Jaieto. Yep.

And I ran the Opsi-Intel platform called the COIC. It was the counter-IED ops intel center. And so what's interesting about that is that as he's now in theater, I've got visibility. of all his, you know, missions, because we're supporting a lot of, not only conventional, but special operations. We had a lot of ODAs and task units and so forth, omega teams that were out, you know,

in various parts of the battle space, and the IED was a major, you know, condition of the battlefield. I mean, it literally had paralyzed our movements in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think you can attest that Iraq was not, Afghanistan, Afghanistan was not Iraq. And that was the biggest mistake somebody could make was thinking, okay, yeah, I've got multiple deployments in Iraq, now I'm going to Afghanistan, I got this all figured out. Nope. And the IEDs got bigger

and bigger and bigger. Yeah, yeah. And so I think we learned some really serious lessons that you know you can't underestimate your enemy and what they're able to do as far as their level of ingenuity, improvisation, and so forth, because they inflicted a lot of pain on us. And we spend a lot of money to try to counter a threat that basically they can make a bomb for 10 bucks, you know, pressure plate or for, you know, their ability to plant an underbelly, you know, explosive in the road. roadway that would flip a, you know, armored Humvee, no problem. Yeah, like, you know, 30, 40, 50 feet in the air.

And I have to imagine that included part of it is countermeasures, the jammers and all that stuff. But part of it was also like supply chain compromise too, right? Like what can we do to stop them from getting these materials? Yeah, great point, great point. And that's where, you know, my head was at. You know, I, you know, from, from, you know, from, you know, from, you know, day one, we were never going to defeat this at the point of the blast. Right.

But yet we had to increase our ability to maneuver on the battlefield because they had, you know, they had caught us with our pants down. We lost all, we lost all our lessons learned from Vietnam, you know. Oh, this will never happen again. It goes back to your point about, you know, doctrinal battle, you know, big army against big army on a- United States of amnesia. Yeah, it's exactly right.

You know, we're our own worst enemy. We have such short memories. And, but, you know, for me, it was about understanding the enemy networks and where we could poke them, where they least expected. And I go back to follow the money. You know, once we understood how they were moving their money. And, of course, they used a lot of hollas and so forth to kind of, their own financial network to kind of move money and value around.

But once we understood how they were doing that and who. potentially was behind financing because a lot of a lot of that financing came out of the opium trade you know you know especially in Afghanistan and Iraq it was oil and some other commodity but once we understand how that that was moving and Iraq was a lot more sophisticated I mean they actually had records they had some infrastructure you know they had you know things that were more, you know, akin to first world as opposed to Afghanistan, which was going back into the dark ages, you know, the, you know, the, you know, time stood still there. So really kind of a, trying to adapt to that. But we started looking at, you know, especially in

Afghanistan, the, the, the, what was going into the IEDs, a lot of it was ampho, ammonia nitrate. coming from Pakistan. So we started dissecting, with the help of some very savvy business people, I started, along with my team, overlaying business models over the threat networks. Again, following the money. What are their motivations?

What's their transportation? What's their recruitment? What's their, you know, what does the supply chain look like? And then by virtue, understanding that we started seeing opportunities where we could poke the system further upstream and affect the flow of ammonium nitrate and start getting the attention of people that you know for instance if their ammonium nitrate shipments were not making it to where they

wanted it to go they were not going to get paid so we would find ways of how we could interrupt that And it was an interagency process, which was unique in and of itself. Yeah. Based on relationships, very often by people who did not want to come to the table because they had never done anything like that before and others that wanted to maintain control over the whole ecosystem. So this was kind of a new approach, but one that we all learned a lot, learned a lot from each other.

And we learned that we could be pretty effective when we want to be. once we take our blinders off and park our egos at the door. Because it was all about preventing that point of blast. The point of blast that very much was responsible for the majority of the KIAs and the horrific injuries that a lot of our guys and gals came along with. In the process of all this analysis, what were sort of your conclusions about, like, who's funding this, who's moving the explosives?

Like, are they doing it for money or for ideological reasons? you know, were there any kind of like big conclusions that you came to from that? Yeah, you know, and so what you bring up is a good point. You have to really characterize the backdrop of where all this is occurring to understand that. So if you're down to the Hellman area or the southern, you know, the Canada, you know, it's about drugs down there. It's preservation of, you know, their opium and they're, you know, what they're growing down there. I mean, this is a big cash cow. you go further up north, it's different motivation.

It's some of us, you know, where you get more of the al-Qaeda extremist strongholds is more ideology. And other parts of it was, hey, we don't want you here. Right. You know, like Iraq. You know, we- Why are you guys here? Yeah. Yeah.

We went in and did a leg sweep on their whole freaking infrastructure and economy. Instead of just saying, maybe we should just take the top level. dudes out and walk away. Yeah, walk away or or and then help them reconstitute and restabilize. Instead, we, we completely threw everybody into unemployment and, and, and, and I, I would, whether you agree or not, I would submit that, hey, if somebody did that to me and I had a family to feed and, and my goal is to try to, you know, keep a roof over the head, you know, you know, you know, provide, you know, the food and shelter and a sense of security,

if that's jeopardized, you better believe I'm going to do whatever I have to do to maintain that for my family. And I think that was a lot of, you know, were some of the basic, you know, issues with Iraq. I had even heard a story about Afghanistan where the Iranians were giving IEDs to the Taliban in exchange for raw opium. They had some sort of literally a drug deal going for that, which had to be shut down. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Iranians had a significant kind of subsurface kind of, you know, the evil that was, you know, flowing from Iran. especially with the more sophisticated IEDs that we saw in Iraq.

And, you know, I can't get into it, but it's still some sensitive, you know, source, you know, connections. But there was definitely some outside influences in both war theaters that complicated, you know, you know, despite what we were doing to ourselves in some of our, you know, political interventions and so forth, you know, there definitely was outside influences that were trying to destabilize and, um, affect the outcome of, of those two conflicts. So tell me about how you became the sergeant at arms, which is, as I understand it, it's like the police. officer over the Senate in this case? Well, that's one job. So I left DOD in the 2014 time frame,

kind of did another touch and go, support in the intelligence community and defense with large data. And then my phone rang one day. I didn't look at who was calling. And next thing you know it's it's the hill that you know the administrations are changing you know because of the election they had a they were looking for a sergeant-at-arms in the Senate somebody had handed up my name and I'm still looking for you know who did that but I answered my phone and it wound up being you know leader McConnell's office hey we got your name we want we'd like you to come up and we like to talk to you about this sergeant arms position so i went up met with met with them met with the uh the minority leader at the time was

harry reed um and uh basically said you know they told me what what the job was all about and and it was you know you're you were multiple hats so the the most public one is where you're the chief protocol officer. So anytime you have the president, foreign has a state, whatever, you're there beating them, escorting them around and so forth. The second is your chief operating officers.

So everything's short of legislative action on the floor. You're responsible for. The administrative side of things. Yeah. You know, the parking, the IDs, you know, setting up their regional offices to include their security of those offices. the furniture that is in their offices, you know, the, just, you know, maintenance, you name it.

It was everything other than the legislative, you know, to keep the wheels turning, you know, the belts moving in the institution. And the third component is the law enforcement, the security side, where, together with the House Sergeant in arms, You have oversight of the chief of the police, the Capitol Police. It's 22, probably even larger now, you know, post-January 6th, where, you know, you ensure the safety and security of the 275 acres that, you know, the capital, you know, resides on. In addition to providing physical security, protective security,

to the succession to the president. So a number of the leaders in the house get physical protection, almost like Secret Service protection. And then case by case, you have to at times put protection on individuals that draw a lot of attention or have significant threat. So you have all three of those things moving at the same time. time and fortunately I had a great staff. They've been up there a long time. It's a very political

environment. It's an antibody experience, I got to tell you, because, you know, coming in as an outsider, I had done some detailed time up there earlier in my Secret Service career where I got detailed up on the hill for two years. So I had it, it was not like it was totally foreign to me, but, but this role as Sergeant at Arms was a significant role up there. You got to to see a lot of what was going on behind the curtains. The fat man behind the curtain. Yeah, yeah, you know, dealing with all, you know, every little problem that comes up there. You know, you know, we had a number of incidents, you know, we, we had the ball field attack.

We had, oh, yeah. We had shootings at the visitor center. We had, you know, just a number of, you know, a train, major train accident, you know, a lot of things that, you know, some knucklehead landing on the, you know, the west side and a helicopter. You know, a little homemade helicopter, if you remember that. He was the disgruntled postal employee. It was, I'll tell you, it was challenging. I liked the challenge. I did not like the politics.

Every decision that is made up there is made based on not practicality, largely not on common sense, but on political implication. what are the political consequences of any decision? And to me, at time that was a hard pill to swallow. Yeah, because you're like, I'm just trying to organize the parking for this event. And they're like, oh, well. Yeah, yeah. Or you're trying to make decisions and choreograph things

and the best interests of the institution, you know, to keep, you know, really the people safe. People safe to keep the distractions to a minimum so they can do the nation's business. and sometimes it was a tough uphill climb. But, you know, a lot of great people up there trying to do good things. You know, I really can't comment on their state of dysfunction right now. I've heard from Secret Service guys that the Capitol police are actually kind of like used and abused in a lot of ways. Yeah. Like morale is not great.

Yeah. I mean, some fine people in a department, but there's definitely some dynamics to go on with the department that are not traditional in other departments. And so, yeah, we'll just leave it at that. Sure. So as you're doing all this, what does Ryan's journey look like? So, as I said, he came out of training at a buds, went to 18 Delta, which is, you know, special operations. combat medical course really I you know I'd gone through it years years before and really a top-notch school down at Fort Prague I think it really you know

prepares a lot of the medics for what they are potentially going to get involved in but it's nothing like real-world conditions that really kind of bring that you know to reality does his first pump to Iraqis They set out to the western areas. Six months there, comes back. There's a couple J-sets. I think he went to Honduras, where he wound up, you know, experiencing intestinal parasites, you know, not a pleasant. The water.

The water. Yeah. It's great that you don't drink the water, but if you're drinking other stuff with the ice cubes made from the water, you kind of set yourself. seal maybe you can't avoid the water that that that's right so but he comes back he does a second pump into Iraq up in the northern area on an hv i mission uh he's augmented to a um special mission unit uh army special mission unit up there and uh i wonder if i crossed paths with them what year was that about 2010 11 okay maybe just after i was there like 2009 like Missoule area yep it's exactly where they were operating had come across some pretty

nasty stuff up there some torture chambers and other oh yeah you know so you probably saw some of that nasty place you know and that's that's actually where he was actually awarded a Bronze Star working for that unit also out of brag kind of unusual that they would you know put a frogman in for but he

he really enjoyed his time with them gave him a whole new experience sure to the point where he was almost considering hey I wonder would be like to maybe you know jump to the yeah he's going to be a lifer

yeah so uh but But he finished that tour and we started, you know, you're going to see changes in your son going through those experiences. And we saw those changes maturing, kind of become a lot more serious. They had a need for an experience medic in Afghanistan, so they put a call out. And he was single. He says, I'll make the jump. So he did literally back-to-back deployments.

He came home for two weeks, reset, went to Arousgon, to Taryn Calp, partnered up with the Australians there. And again, pretty hot area. Got his first taste of mountain sickness, you know, working at altitudes. And he came home from that, and that's when we started seeing some changes that were not what I would say you know normal he started complaining about

you know not being able to sleep and you know he a little bit more short-fused he stopped you know he wasn't as gregarious as he was which was significant because he was always kind of a

you know he's a quiet guy but when he spoke he you know people listen He had some substantive stuff to say, you know, important stuff. You know, he liked to joke around and be a little bit of a prankster, but we saw all that kind of change. And then his, you know, his living girlfriend for like five years, they wound up breaking up. He wound up going to sniper school.

You know, again, came out on the top of his class there. and then deployed to his second pump into Afghanistan, which is in Helmand Province. He went to some Fort Apache outpost way up near the Kajaki Dam, where they were constantly getting... Yeah, Helmand was crazy. Yeah. And then eventually they shut that fob down, and then they got pulled back to Leatherneck where they operated out of there. a lot of counter drug stuff. They were working with DEA. Fast teams.

Yeah, fast teams. And then he had a couple near-Missed helicopter insurgents near crashes, which really kind of rattled them. You know, he said to me, I don't know why I'm still alive right now. We should be dead. but came home from that and then he left team seven and then went into their training unit and became the lead petty officer for the special operations urban combat training we call it salk and from there he continued you know to simulate real-world conditions and you know for urban operations you know breaching charges you know concussion grenades flash

bangs you know doing dynamic entries and then they would have their range time with the rockets mortars you know times with the helicopters and again experienced almost a new near crash out you know in the training environment you know they normally work with the 160th but but they had brought in a different unit that had never done anything like that before. And they almost, you know, the kind of overzealous, you know, pilots that wound up almost.

Wiping out. Wiping out with him and others aboard. So helicopters are not, we're not a favorite sorts of transportation for him. And of course, As you know, we've lost more seals to, in combat operations, more seals to helicopter-related incense. Oh, because of extortion 17. 17, yeah, red wings.

And then we've had a number of 60s to go down. But, yeah, he was not a fan of helicopters. He, after about a year at Salk, again, the issues with sleep and so forth became worse. started a complaint of anxiety, you know, you know, he just stopped smiling, you know, had, you know, issues with some depression. Again, I think a lot of that was from lack of sleep. And, you know, he started having, you know, memory issues, balance, you know, issues. And it started questioning, you know, hey, what's happening to me.

Would he also struggling with making that transition from the teams to the training cell? Was that something that kind of like threw him for a curveball? You know, I'm not sure. He really liked doing the training stuff. I mean, the reason they put him in there because he was experience, and he had a knack of kind of, you know, delivering the message, either positively or, or, you know, taking him to the woodshed, you know, were but you know he was really into you know sharing his his experience and

insight you know about the the conditions you know in the war zones and how to prepare them you know the deploying platoons but I think that what really got to him was when he started feeling these other things that he was struggling with that he felt like he was losing control right you didn't feel like himself. Yeah, and then it got to the point where, you know, am I becoming a safety, you know, risk? You know, am I, you know, am I able to do my job? And, you know, the worst thing in a team dynamic that we've been involved in is you don't want to fail your brothers. Yeah. And he's used to operating at such a high level. Yes. Being so high functioning. Yeah. And now he's having

trouble with basic stuff. Yeah. And then you were, how are they viewing me? I mean, am I holding my? Am I letting them down? Yeah. You know, and so, you know, we wound up getting them to NICO here, you know, the National Trebitt Center of Excellence in Bethesda, Walter Reed.

You know, they freaking looked at them from, you know, stem the stern, you know, top to bottom. basically had diagnosed PTSD and hearing loss and, you know, anxiety, depression, alcohol played a role. Sure. You know, because, you know, every one of these folks you talk to are dealing with pain. Whether it's physical pain, you know, moral injury, spiritual pain, whatever. they're trying to numb that pain. Right.

Some of them are using alcohol to try to get to sleep. You say that, you know, when I get to sleep, then I have nightmares, you know, see some pretty nasty stuff over there. That's where the moral entry comes in. And then I also think there's a unique dynamic with the medics. You know, on one side of the brain, they're trained to heal people. people, you know, they try to stop the badness from happening. And especially if they lose a teammate, that has a huge impact.

And then on the other side, they're a shooter. You know, and, you know, one minute, you know, you're taking somebody down. On the other minute, that same individual you may be trying to, you know. There's a lot of pressure and a lot of anxiety for the medics, I think, that I've come to appreciate. more from interviewing people. Because of that dynamic you mentioned that you're so afraid of letting your boys down and the medic's job is to keep everyone alive. And so you'll have a soldier who like lost a leg and he gets over it and moves on with his life.

But the medic is like traumatized by the event. Was that my fault? Did I do it right? Yeah. There's a lot of pressure on those guys. Yeah. And you know, you go through 18 Delta and, you know, generally you're saving your, you know, your, your patience you know i mean because you know but you know when the reality haven't been a paramedic for almost 50 years you know you don't save all your patience and sometimes your actions

unintentionally may contribute to their demise because there's a lot of things going on and right you know you might miss something or you know uh distractions yeah some of it's in god's hands you know it's not all up to you yeah you're you're exactly right it's stuff that's out of your control but you still take it you still internalize it to your point yeah it's my fault yeah and so I think that's a an extra burden that the medics carry that I've seen you know the medics carry and but he you know he just you got to the point where it was almost hard to recognize him as her son he just started to unravel and he went to

go get help and and one of the things that drove him to go get help is that he was seeing his is a lot of his brothers teammates have you know suffering some of the same stuff and he was trying to draw attention to it and I remember telling him hey Ryan just be careful you know they tend to shoot the messenger oh no no dad I know what I'm doing I know what I'm doing and unfortunately you know the low-hanging solutions didn't work and they focused on alcohol as opposed to, hey, what's the root issue? What's the root issue? And then the labels come.

And depending on who you have and the command elements, you know, are they truly going to look out for their guys and do what they have said that they would do is take care of them and not leave somebody behind? Or are they more worried about their careers and not dealing with issues? And unfortunately, you know, he was in that dynamic where he had some leadership that I don't have time for this. You know, I don't want this. So it was, you know, if the low-hanging fruit, you know, solutions didn't work, then let's get rid of the problem. And that's what happened. He wound up, you know, he wanted to make it a career. He loved the teams.

but it got to the point where he felt that, you know, he was, you know, being kind of kicked to the curve. You know. Feeling ostracized by the unit? You know, we call it institutional betrayal. Right. You know, it's a term that's really gaining some traction when, you know, you've got, especially these high-performing, you know, these racehorses, you know, that have put it all in the line. I mean, everything on the line to be the best that they can be, to be part of a team dynamic,

you know, just mission profiles that are just incredibly important for the safety and security of this nation. Suddenly, you know, when they, you know, start having issues, the system turns on. And there's nothing. worse than feeling that your reputation is being kind of chewed up bit by bit. And I think that that just adds a bunch of additional wounds. And especially now as we're learning that largely the focus in a lot of these conditions

and assessment has been psychiatric and mental health focused. But we're now learning that, and this is what I tell a lot of guys and gals that, hey, how could you not be banged up? Yeah. With everything you've done in training and operations, what this nation's asked you to do, how could you not be injured? Dude that's deployed 12 times. Like, yeah. Yeah. How could you not be? Yeah. And so, you know, you're not crazy. You may very well be injured. Unfortunately, everything's defaulted almost since World War I towards a psychiatric mental health diagnosis. We've been calling it Soldier's Heart, battlefield psychosis, combat neurosis, and now we call it like PTSD.

And it's only too recently, and a large part to Ryan's story that we're finding out that there may be underlying, you know, undiagnosed traumatic brain injury. Was Ryan medically discharged from the Navy? Well, not initially. He was honorably discharged. And then subsequently medically discharged on appeal because they had not done the right thing. Yeah. And I mean, I don't want to dwell on it too much,

but what happened with Ryan after he left the Navy? Well, you know, they basically said, hey you know we've done everything for him that we can you know the VA's a better a better place for him to be you know okay that's debatable yeah and he uh he uh by that that point he was you know they basically were treating him like he was broken you know not injured not i mean you know the possibility of of having, you know, a TBI was casually mentioned, but by then the command, like I said, was, to me, you know, they were violating our core ethos of not leaving somebody behind,

and the expediency of getting rid of the problem by saying that this broken fraud man could no longer, you know, operate and do his job. You know, let's kick him to the VA. And, you know, when he left the Navy, he was almost unrecognizable. And so we got him into the VA, and the VA was a shit show. You know, so they weren't prepared to deal with that, I don't think, at that time. No, they weren't. And they didn't have the right people. They were trying to, some novel programs that deal with the post-traumatic stress issues,

but still you know we were in that space and we didn't know what we didn't know and I mean there were some really good people at the VA that we met but you know they were almost as equally frustrated with their bureaucracy as we were and so his experience at the VA was not the not the greatest yeah and and to your point you're spot-on they just didn't they weren't prepared they just didn't how to deal with what they were seeing and very much relied on kind of that one size fits all instead of one size fits one um and when was it that this tBI issue finally comes to a head and you start to realize oh this is what this was yeah he uh in the first year that he was

discharged out of the Navy under VA care we used into a number of programs he went down to the brain treatment center down in Dallas oh good went through that program got it some insight went out did some transcranial stimulation magnetic stimulation out in Long Beach California it was also getting some you know counseling locally in the Washington DC Indianapolis area where we live and but he you know he he would feel a little bit better and then you know he kind of kind of kind of go into a slump right and then they come back up again you know it he was he was not the easiest guy to deal with he felt like he said like I said before

you know that he had been he had abandoned his boys you know he had a sense of guilt shame and he got a raw deal he didn't leave the teams the way he wanted to no and and and never really had the closure nor did they have closure with him which is important right i mean he he left so fast that uh people his own teammates didn't even know he was gone um and there's a backstory to that but i don't I don't want to get into that. And it's command related. But they, you know, we're sitting around a fire one night.

This is like March at 2017. And he says to me, you know, Dad, you know, something's wrong with my head, but nobody's listening. And he was saying that all along. And that's important to understand that nobody was listening. They were just hanging labels on them. By that time, you know, he had an endless flow of medications that were coming in the mail. You sent, you told me, I think, in the things you sent me that they prescribed him over 40 different medications.

Yeah, yeah, over the course, everything from over the counter, potions, lotions, the creams, a high-end psychotropic. And none of that, none of that shit has to do with what he actually had going on. No, no, it made it worse. Yeah, yeah. As we come to find out, it made it worse. We sit around this fire and he says, look, I'm broken up inside. and I don't think I'm going to live all that long. You know, and of course, you know, I said, you know, I'm here.

Yeah. We're going to get through this. I mean, we're going to figure this out. Yeah, I just, I'm just broken up inside. And I don't even feel like I'm in my own body anymore. And I said, you know, I asked him, I said, you think about hurting yourself. No, no, I never go that way. Never go that way.

Well, look, you know, look, we just kind of hang together. I'm here for you. And a month later, my wife and I came home from an overnight trip, and we found that, you know, he had taken his life in the basement of our home. Oh, my God. He was dressed in a SEAL Team 7 t-shirt, wearing a pair of red, white, and blue board shorts, and had illuminated a shadow box with his,

all his medals and, you know, ribbons, insignia, you name it, things that I'd made for him the Christmas before, just to kind of... Yeah, give him that closure a little bit. Yeah, you know, kind of tell him how proud we were of them, and I still was of him. You know, he just, he was a great guy. He had a great ability to abstract. And like I said, you know, he was like E. Hutton, you know, when he spoke, you know, people listened. You know, he had that type of, you know,

personality and he was good at what he did, you know, he not only as a medic, but as a sniper, and then, you know, as a trainer and, but when we found him, I'll tell you what, it just, it just ripped our hearts in half. I mean, that was a wound and pain that I, all the stuff that I had been through, I had never experienced anything so instantly horrific as that. And before his death, you know, he says to us, look, if anything happens to me, I want you to donate my body, my brain for traumatic brain injury research, for Breacher Syndrome research. He heard something was going on. And, you know, the morning that we found them, and the word gets out pretty quick, you know.

I mean, within hours, Jaysock had it, you know, and had mentioned the loss. And it was just, it literally just, you know, spread like wildfire from east coast to west coast. And next thing you know, we're getting a call from a gal, Jen Collins. who about a year before, almost two years before, had lost her, the Navy SEAL husband, David Collins, to suicide. And she says to me that when he was lost, she donated his brain to a research effort that was looking at the connection of military blast exposure

to brain injury. and she gave me some backgrounds and some points of contact and and I called them and they were just wonderful they were based out of you know uh Bethesda Walter Reed but they were they were in a satellite location in Rockville just outside of the the big medical complex and and so we satisfied his wish and donated his brain And about two months later, they called us in and said, we've got some things that we like to share. So I sat down with the neuropathology.

She's a world-renowned, you know, expert in just, you know, examining the brain and his original focus was chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the CTE that you hear about with the sports players and so forth. go forward. But now he was into a whole new pattern of injury and he said, Ryan, we found an undiagnosed level of severe microscopic brain injury uniquely, and he emphasized, uniquely related to blast exposure. We're only seeing it in those warriors that have been exposed to blast, whether it's one big blast or repeated low-level blasts.

And he says, you know, Ryan had this interface acetylchle scarring where scar tissue following this explosion, the movement up last way through the brain, you got the white matter and the gray matter. There are two different densities. It's almost like lemon meringue pie. You know, you got the white... Thanks for that metaphor. But there are two different kind of consistencies. But if you shake it hard enough, that meringue and that lemon gel will separate.

And that's what happens apparently in the brain is that where these white gray matter borders interface where blood vessels come through the brain anatomy and where the brain bumps up against a fluid border, that's where they were seeing the scarring. It's like micro lesions, right? Micro lesions, right? It's almost like a, when you look at it, it's almost like a shading. Yeah, I've heard it described as like brown dust. Yes, absolutely.

And as opposed to the CTE, which are more of these impact-related, but very localized lesions. So we can actually see kind of a, like a, you know, these little dot, not dots, but, you know, literally lesions in the brain. And if you get enough of them, it starts affecting the brain's ability to communicate. And that's what they've been finding out with these football players and others that have played contact sports. But the blast exposure injury is something that goes all the way through the brain. And what we're finding out now through, uh, some recent studies is a lot of that exposure is coming in through the eye sockets,

through the nasal passages, through the mouth, and then up underneath the chin into the foramen magnum that is getting to the base of the brain. But the real area that they're finding that is kind of the concentration of where this damage occurring is right behind the eyes and the frontal lobe that is responsible for all our executive functions, our go-no-go, our regulatory decision-making. Base of the brain really regulates your sleep patterns and so forth. So when you start seeing where this damage is occurring and you crosswalk it over on what that part of the brain does

as far as controlling body functions, you start getting answers as to why somebody is projecting certain signs and symptoms and certain, you know, voicing certain struggles. But the problem is that we can't see this yet in a living person, much like the CTE that they're dealing with with the contact sports players. And we see very little, and that's the other thing, we see very little CTE in the military,

unless they have played contact sports before they've come in. So this interfaced astroglyle scarring, this IAS, is unique to be. blast exposure and so the challenge now is how do we how do we make visible the invisible and and that's where a lot of my efforts are now to help you know elevate this narrative so that we get a level of research priority develop the capabilities to see this in a living person which then will take this out of this gray zone it will it will be undeniable for somebody that may be injured as a result of blast exposure. When you zoom out a little bit and you start to look at multiple cases, multiple soldiers and

soldier suicides, you see some of those indicators over and over again. We've had Kate Rockline on this show a few times to talk about Michael Frody. She's the mother of Michael's children and Michael was an Army intelligence guy who took his own life. like your son, marriage fell apart, relationships deteriorating, not able to find his own vehicle in the parking lot anymore. Right. Guy who is high functioning is now low functioning. You know, post-it notes everywhere to keep track of what the hell he's doing. We've talked about Bill Mulder. His late, or his wife at the time, Sydney, has been on the show also. Their relationship dissolved. and the run up to him taking his own life. I mean, you see these things over and over and over again.

The tragedy of it is, as you were describing, you can only see the injury after the person has passed as of now. Otherwise, we're just trying to treat symptoms, right? That's right. And again, we don't know what we don't know. So, as he said, since World War I, when we first introduced explosives at the battlefield, this is, you know, they've come up with different.

different names to explain shell shock yeah yeah and the reason we call it invisible wounds because you know you look at these these warriors and they look okay you know it's not like they have you know disfiguring wounds you know it's not like they have you know an amputation or or some other you know visible indicator that they're hurt it's but they're banged like Ryan said around that fire I'm banged up on the inside you know and it's interesting he intuited what was what the problem was well what was what's also interesting and and in in but i'm going to address something you said about the wives sure the wives are the first they're they're the front

they're the closest to it sensor when you every one of these wives pick this up before anybody else before the teammates and in many cases the teammates themselves are struggling so you as a senior Chief once said to me, this is the bent measuring stick analogy, you know, where everything has bent so far off of the normal. Yeah, yeah. You know. They don't know what normal is. That's right.

Yeah. That's right. And so it's, you know, we, we have to figure this out. This is an insidious threat to our fighting force. It's not that we can stop the operations, but we have to do things smarter. And this is where we need the science to help us, you know, find the path forward. Tell us a bit about, I believe you worked on some legislation with Kate. Was that in the NDAA?

Yeah. So, and she's a force within herself. One thing I did want to adjust before I get into that, and kind of, I know we've been talking a while, but something that's significant about Ryan's passing, he knew all along what was going on. You know, something's wrong with my head, nobody's listening. He wanted his body donated for research,

but we were able to get into his computer afterwards, and he had downloaded dozens of research studies and articles, on traumatic brain injury and different conditions within the brain and subsequent second, third order effects of neurological disease. He was in the process of self-diagnosis. Right. And also was looking up all these freaking horrible medications that they had put him on. And afterwards, you know, I had asked a number of neurologists, you know, in view of an undiagnosed

brain injury and and this this list of medications that they you know what what what what's your assessment and they said did more harm than good yeah so it was again we were in that space we didn't know what we didn't know and aside from some of my heartburn and scar tissue with some of his command leadership um i do believe that there are a lot of people you know, in his command of the community, they were trying to do the right thing for the right reason all the wrong way. Now, when this happened, you know,

I come in contact with Dr. Kate Rockland, and she is like, you've had her on here. I mean, she's not a bashful woman. No. She just, she goes, you know, she goes right for the jugular. She's very smart. She's a great researcher

with a respected reputation. But she's focused on, you know, what's going on here specifically in the soft community. And so we got talking and we just could start finishing each other's sentences. Let's just like I could finish Cindy Mulder sentences. And, you know, same with Jen Collins, who really I give great credit to, you know, kind of helping move the ball and exposing us to some of these options. But Kate really, I think she's trying to, you know, in her approach, is try to knit together that, hey, there may be a biological injury here that also requires a level of mental health support. And right now, those communities kind of operate separate from each other.

And a lot of this goes back to the early 1900s when psychiatry kind of split off from clinical medicine and they've been operating in separate paths. And that's why a lot of this has defaulted towards psychiatric mental health is because it was kind of the only explanation they could come up with as to why people were coming off the battlefield all kind of changed. We didn't have the hard evidence that there's an injury, underlying injury. Now that body of evidence is growing to a point where it's undeniable. And we're putting a lot of pressure on Congress, on the Department of Defense, and the VA to start prioritizing this.

The past couple of years, we've been able to successfully lobby and get NDAA, National Defense Authorization, language in to start directing the Department of Defense and the VA to look at this and look at this with a sense of urgency. We're recognizing that over 80% of this exposure may be happening in the training environment. So our heavy, our heavy, you know, long barrel weapons, our 50 cows, maybe even our 762 caliber weapons. We just don't know yet. And here's part of the challenge. We don't know what the threshold is yet.

You know, the pounds per square inch of force. Firing 30 Carl Gustav rounds can't be good for you. Absolutely. And that's exactly what we're finding is that, you know, so is this, the department put out a 4 PSI memo, which was basically based on research that had occurred back. We've been able to track it back to the 60s, where they were concerned about ear drum ruptures.

And so they determined that at 5 PSI, you were susceptible to an ear drum rupture. So the department in its effort to try to at least put a line in the sand a couple years ago came up with a four PSI to at least give a starting point. But we have yet to characterize this mechanism of injury. And this is one of the biggest frustrations I have with the Department of Defense is that, hey, you have, you spend billions and billions of dollars on, you know, trying to deal with stuff like this, mental health, suicide prevention, all this. But you still haven't spent, you spent almost no money on trying to characterize what's actually happening, which is kind of like a fundamental start point for anything.

You got to understand what the enemy is, you know. And so Kate and I have been able to, and some others, Jane or Sarie Brooks, a few other just dedicated folks, have been trying to get the ear of Congress, try to paint a picture of that, look, this is a threat to our total force readiness and resistance. It's an insidious threat to our national security. And as we talked at the front end of this interview,

it's about preserving the thinking warrior brain. That thinking warrior brain gives us the edge against our near peers and our adversaries. So if this repeated blast exposure, you know, bit by bit is tearing that brain circuitry apart. part, tearing apart our ability to really to be flexible, adaptive, innovative, to make decisions on the battlefield to act, then we need to figure this out. I think, you know, Ryan and Michael Frody and Bill Mulder are all examples of guys.

They wanted to stay in the forest. That's right. They wanted to stay. They wanted to continue serving, but they had to separate or leave it behind. earlier than they wanted to because of this particular issue. And one of the biggest, and I got to give, you know, General Brian Fenton just left as command. Yesterday I saw Tony Thomas at an event. We've got, you know, Bill McCraven, Tim Somansky, who was the decomm down at SOCOM and led the NSW community.

He and I are tied to the hip on this. We've got other leaders that are grabbing onto this and recognizing this is a threat to our special operations force, but it's just not to them. It's to our conventional forces too. We're seeing this in our mortiman. Artillery guys, yeah.

New York Times had done a number of profiles on these exposures. Now we're seeing in our fast boat operators with the shaking, almost like a shaken baby syndrome, where the brain is being rattled, you know, by vibration and impact to the point where it's like turning the jelly and we're trying to understand this. So we're almost at a point where the stuff that we're building to fight with is exceeding the human factors. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

And so we need to find that balance. We can't stop fighting. We can't stop being effective on the battlefield. and we can't challenge our ability to be lethal in the battlefield, but we've got to try to do this smarter, especially if it's 80% of this is occurring in the training environment. And to your point, going out and firing 30 Carl G's, I mean, and then coming back with your freaking head, you know, about to explode.

You know, you've got blood dripping out of your nose, you've blown ear drums. These are all signs of head injury. And I would, people want to go deeper on the explosive side. I'd encourage folks to go back and find the interview we did with Chuck O'Connor, who was the SEAL Team 6. I think he was their first master breacher. And he talks about this a lot. And, you know, it talks about, you know, also if you're a special operator,

maybe once or twice during your career, there are times where you're going to have to be close to the charge because it's like, hijacked aircraft. Right. You know, it's something high priority. But we don't need to be exposing guys to that over and over and over again in a training environment. No.

No. And again, there's ways through this. You're already starting at the deck plate, dirt level, seeing range safety officers and others starting to take some new approaches through their training. You know, standing further back where we've got some measurements now where we're starting to see what these blasts over pressure values. are coming off the weapons. And in some cases, for example, the 120 millimeter mortar, if you drop, just drop your head down a foot from the opening of that tube, you reduce your

exposure by 50%. I mean, things like that, you're standing off at a certain angle by a certain distance. They're looking to come up with a decimeter-like device to kind of, you know, give you a sense of how much exposure that you've had. But if we're able to come up, with new imaging and diagnostic blood markers to qualify that somebody has been injured, that's gonna take this out of the gray area. But I predict this, Jack, we have already had the telltales in front of us.

When you look at somebody's training and operational profile, when you look at their symptom presentation, you know, there's a number of things that we have right now that we can test, you know, test, you know, cognitive function, you know, changes in your physical stability that are absolute indicators that says, hey, maybe this person may be injured, you know, they're not crazy, but the diagnostics will absolutely, you know, be a definitive qualification that they're injured. Are the biomarkers, like, see, I've run into this subject actually reporting on Havana

syndrome as well. Don't get me going about that. So the biomarkers has to do with the proteins that are secreted. That's right. Brain is injured. But you have to test the blood within like how many hours, four hours. And that's what they're trying to find. So it may be a presumptive test that says so it turns positive, it at least puts into that clinician's mind, hey, based on this event, I may have a brain injury here. You know, whereas now it's like, well, you know, you You know, we'll send them imaging. They don't see anything. And so, you know, the clinician says, well, okay, I'll refer you for a psychiatric or a mental health, you know, referral.

When, in fact, they have a brain injury. We just can't see it yet. So I think we're going to, we're getting there. You know, it's real important. The Havana syndrome. So I told you my, I had time with Jayato, you know, the cold counter. So the fielding of jammers and so forth. My big concern is that, as we've heard.

about burn pits and the exposure to, you know, potentially all... World Trade Center, respiratory issues. Burn pits and everything else we were burning and that stuff. We're finding out now that some of those metals and contaminants were crossing the blood-brain brain barrier could be factored into this calculus. The other is that we never would leave the wire without those jammers lit up. And whether it was vehicle mounted, whether it was backpack mounted, whether it was stationary to protect a fob or whatever.

whatever, all those things did, all those jammers did was project energy out. High volumes of energy to try to defeat the enemy's ability to remotely detonate an IED. And you got to ask yourself, so what's it doing to the brain that's within inches or feet of that antenna? I mean, I think we always thought, you know, what happens if I get my go-nads in front of this thing? we probably should have been thinking about our brain. Some roasted chestnuts. But yeah, so I mean this is a complex issue, but the brain health piece is something that we've got to get on top of

because I do think it's an insidious threat to our fighting force. And it's just not special operations. Conventional forces, we work hand in glove. It's just that special operations right now is leading the charge on this. And with complete, my discussion at the Pentagon, with a complete view on how can we quickly get this in the conventional forces to buy down the risk on the front end. So as far as getting to the right place on this issue, tell us a little bit about some of the endeavors that are going on, some of the foundations that you work with. What are sort of these lanes of influence that you're working on? So a couple things right now, very much in support of a new study that's going on.

They call it reblast precision, which is occurring up in Harvard Mass General, supported by SOCOM. It's looking at 100 to 200 special operators, putting them through live scans now. We've kind of figured they've got some brilliant folks up there that kind of figured out the formula to be able to see this injury in a living person. So now we're going to test this out by running a number of operators through it. There's going to be a cadre that operators, they're just fresh out of the, you know, fresh out of the, you know, know the production, so to speak, you know, training. And then there's going to be the cadre of operators that have had their, you know, 10, 15 year, 20 year, you know, careers, certainly with exposures.

And see what they see between those two cadres and tried to calibrate, you know, the diagnostic equipment and also the development of the blood markers to your point. They've got to get the baseline. Is there any protein, spillage, enzymes, whatever. And again, that is all, you know, goes hand and glove with this whole baseline effort that you hear about, where they're trying to kind of establish a reflective baseline early in somebody's career that periodically they can reflect against to look for changes. So there's a lot of things going on. The other thing that came out of legislation last year, and I got to claim credit for putting this in the idea in their heads, and that is, let's get the skin through the appropriations, the acquisition process, get the weapons manufacturers and the ammunition manufacturers, get their skin in the game.

Help, you know, before we buy their weapon, before we buy their ammunition, they've got. got to come up with measurements, blast overpressure measurements. Yeah, the bop charts are bullshit. Yeah. And so, you know, let's get them involved. Otherwise, we don't buy their shit. Yeah. You know, and then, so there's a lot of things going on on the preventative side.

But hopefully with the diagnostics, we get better at the precision treatment and care on the warrior side. Last night, I just attended an event with Headstrong. A great organization, the Headstrong Project, is really looking at the mental health side of the PTSD, recognizing that there may be, you know, with the new information coming about, about the blast over pressure, there may be an underlying injury. So combining those two together. I also am affiliated with the Invisible Wounds Foundation.

I'm on their board with some really top-notch people, you know, a neurologist, neuropathologists, neurosurgeons, other researchers that are looking at this and focusing. And then finally, affiliated with the Troops First Foundation, and we're sponsoring for a number of years now, a campaign called Warrior Call. And it's simple, it's grassroots, it's focused on defeating isolation. Simply, you make a call to somebody that's served in uniform, you take a call from them, you have an honest conversation. You sense that they're having some issues and we help get them connected to resources.

Resources like Headstrong, resources like the Cohen Veterans Network to the Marcus Institute, home base up in Boston. So there are options for these warriors. But when they get to a place of isolation, especially if they're, wrestling with some of these mental health and potentially, you know, undiagnosed traumatic brain injury issues, which, according to DOD and VA estimates could be well over half a million warriors that may have been exposed and may have some level of, you know, brain injury. There is hope. We got people working on it. There's hope. These folks are not alone.

We've got some great organizations that can help. You know, this is kind of an iterative march forward. I know that there's a lot of other options out there allied to, you know, stella ganglion block, you know, transcranial magnetic stimulation, H-Bot, you hear a lot about, the psychedelic assisted therapy. All these have to be looked at. have to be looked at not only individually but in concert and you know once we understand what we're dealing with and I go back to mechanism of injury I think

we're going to be in a better position to find out what combinations of therapies help somebody get to a better place and I'm not ruling out you know medicines you know but we got to be a little bit more and appropriate with what medications we're using, depending on what conditions that we're dealing with. Have you seen anything promising as far as protective gear, like helmets, face masks and things like that that might help? Yeah, great question. I mean, one of the concerns is helmets. We built these ballistic helmets, but now we're finding out that they're actually trapping, maybe trapping the blast wave up. So they're looking at new designs now that would help the vent or at least reduce the impacts

and also potentially build in some sensors that, again, we could help track, you know, exposures. Maybe going back to floppy hats. You know, there's talk about some of that too. I think that also some of the kit, as we see the changes over time, has become, you know, much more efficient. I think we have, you know, again, I think

by elevating the narrative, making people aware of what's going on drives a level of innovation and certainly a motivation to solve some of these challenges. So there are changes happening I think that they're looking at greater reset times because if you if you

you know the body keeps score the great book out the body keeps score but if you don't give the body a chance to heal it just keep it becomes more and more vulnerable to their further injury and it's hard to come back as you get to a point where it's hard to come back yeah so you know with all these organizations and and I will make this statement this is this problem is not going to be solved within the Department of Defense or the VA or HHS I really believe that a lot of the insight and the solutions are going to come from you know the private sector is going to come from these academic centers of

excellence these other programs that are, I think, really chipping away at this iceberg. And at some point, the Department of Defense, the VA and HHS are going to have to, you know, get on board with it. Otherwise, they're going to be viewed as negligent and absolutely violate that core ethos of not leaving any more behind.

Before we get going today, is there anything else that I didn't ask that you'd really like to talk about and tell the audience about? No, I think that one of the, like I said, if I would say, another area that we just have to improve on is, and I know this culturally has not been, you know, something that we have done, but it is a missed opportunity. We kind of covered it, but the first sensor

that tends to become aware of the change in an operator, is their spouse or significant other. And we've got to figure out a way to integrate them into this whole kind of monitoring kind of development or con-up that hopefully is starting to come together. It really is about the preservation of the operator and the ability for them to have a quality of life once they leave service. I mean, we've invested millions of dollars in each one of these folks. Why would we not do whatever we can to maintain, retain that investment?

And once they've done their duty, and once they made the decision to leave to ensure that they've got a quality of life, I absolutely you know we're obligated to ensure that happens makes sense anything you or anywhere do you want to direct people if they want to get involved with these issues they want to learn more about it or get involved in some of these foundations anything they should go and check out yeah just the one site just briefly there's boulder crest which is a great organization you've got headstrong project You've got Troops First Foundation, Marcus Institute. There's Warriors Path, home base up in Boston, as I mentioned.

And then there's a great kind of a hotline. It's vets for Warriors. It's out of Rutgers University. It's a phone 24-hour, seven-day-a-week phone line that's manned by veterans to talk to veterans. And so if you're at a point where you're in a bad place, it's a great starting point to give them a call. And they've got connections to a lot of these other organizations we've been talking about. But there are a lot of folks out there that are in position to help. and so for somebody that may be in a bad place today,

you know, you're not alone. We care. And there's hope. Well, Frank, thank you so much for this interview and stopping by the office today on this beautiful full morning to talk to us and take some of your time out of your day. Well, thanks. Hey, I gave my wife the experience of riding the New York subway today,

you know, coming from, you know, midtown, Manhattan over to Brooklyn. She's been a great partner in this, but there's not a day that goes by that we don't think about Ryan. At some point, I'm going to see him again. I don't want to disappoint. Matter of fact, he's here with us today, and he keeps poking me, you know, to make the points that, you know, come out of my mouth, but I think are really come from from him. You know, he was all about his boys, and if it wasn't for his story, And I think what he did try to prove that something was wrong with his head, I don't know if we would be where we are.

And also the gratitude that I have in respect for people like Kate Rockland, Sidney, Mulder, Jen Collins, others that are just on the front end of this fight. And thank you for the opportunity to come in here and talk about this today. You've got a great platform here. And whatever help you can give us to get this out, we'd be grateful. Yeah, I appreciate you guys carrying the torch for all of these guys, not just your loved ones, but all these other service members who are going through this. And, you know, interview like this, you never, like, I never know, like, how is it going to impact somebody? But they're like 16-year-old kids that watch these things because they're interested in becoming a Navy SEAL. If we can plant some of those ideas in their head, like, hey, this is a real issue 10 years from now, when they start seeing it, they'll know what they're looking at. That's my hope anyway. Well, hey, it's, you know, we still need to train them to be badasses, but we also need to take care of them. And train them to be smart.

That's right. And they are smart. Yeah, they are. Well, thank you again, Frank. And thank you everyone for joining us today. And we'll see you guys next week. Hey, guys, I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Teamhouse podcast, the Eyes On podcast, and the high side news. outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come

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