The Team House - Navy SEAL Makes Shocking Claims About Prominent SEALs | Eric Deming | Ep. 281

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseEric served in the Navy for 27 years. First as a diver then as a Navy SEAL.————————————————————���—To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#navysealsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to and we really appreciate that so go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house special operations covert ops espionage the team house with your host jack murphy and david park the episode 281 of the team house i'm jack murphy here with Dave Park. Our guest on tonight's episode is Eric Deming. Eric served as a diver in the Navy and then went on to also serve as a seal afterwards, almost I think 27 years in the Navy, all told, 20 of them as a seal. And he's also a bit of a whistleblower. So we'll talk about that as well. Before we jump into the interview, I just want to tell folks about our Patreon. There's a link down in the

description. And you can subscribe for just $5 a month and you get access to all of these team house episodes ad free. Also our eyes on episodes, our other podcast with Andy Milburn and Jason Lyons. So yeah, if you guys will support the channel and get access to all these episodes ad free, we really appreciate it. So thank you. Eric, welcome to the show, man. Jack Dave, thanks for having me on. And I like the introduction a little bit. because he went to the Navy diver side a little bit, which it was a great time of my career also. It wasn't that long,

but it was long enough for me to really enjoy it. And then as a seal, and then here recently, yeah, a whistleblower. Actually, even when I was in the time, you know,

active, there was, I filed an IG complaint against some of these, you know, guys that were doing some things wrong in my community. And I'll get into that, you know, here.

Yeah, yeah, I'd like to start off first off. If you tell us a little bit about, like, how you grew up and how that took you, into the Navy and what your your path was there. Yeah, so I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but grew up most of my life in Florida.

When fifth grade, my parents got divorced, I moved back up to the Boston area. Right outside of Boston, it's called Chelsea. It's a, it was, I was a minority being a white guy there. And so it was a lot of street fighting things along those lines in the inner city, because I, you know, I came from Florida. a little bit different than them. So I kind of stood out. So there's a lot of, you know,

fighting that got involved as a kid growing up. So I was kind of a little bit roughy and my dad wasn't the best example of a father. So I learned a lot of what not to do. But then at a point in my life, I go back down to Florida and my stepfather had a good friend. His name was Buck Buck Buckles. And he kind of took me under like a grandson. And this was the first person.

that in my life that I considered a mentor, somebody that I looked up to, he had a perfect family life, somebody that just stood out, did everything right, and I wanted to emulate somebody like him, and he was the one that encouraged me the whole military and was the example. And, you know, his whole family, just great people, one of the best, you know, families that I could ever say in America is, you know, the Buckles family and all his kids and grandkids. So that's who encouraged me and I think put me on the right path. And what was that path? So I joined the Navy.

Coming from a small town in Florida, when I say my graduating class was 100, right at 100. When I say we were agricultural, we were out in the middle of the sticks and we were pretty much redneck you know, as far as, but it really, you know, taught me how to fix my own stuff, how to shoot, how to swim, how to, you know, do a lot of different things to survive. And so I appreciate it. And he, my, I call my grandfather Buck, he grew up during the Depression. So he taught me a lot of these skills and a lot of these different things. So it was a great time in my life, you know, learning all that stuff.

So when it was time for me to graduate high school, I was this, like, like, okay, college wasn't probably the right thing for me. And he said, well, maybe you should think about, you know, the military. And that's what encouraged me. I had an uncle that was in the Navy. So I joined the Navy. And I end up, he talked me into the electronics, which was, you know, avionics electronics, which was not something that I took to very well.

But I got to work up on a flight deck, sending aircraft off as far as, but, you know, you start off as a plane cap. and up there in a squadron, then you get to work on your aircraft, and then you get to be the guy, if you're doing everything right, and you get your head on the swivel, and you can operate up on the flight deck

with a lot of dangerous stuff kind of happening, you can be the final checker, which is a guy that wears a white shirt, and it's checkered, and you basically, as it's up on the catapult, getting ready to launch off, you go into it, and you check certain things

and make sure everything looks like it's going to go off the front of the, the pointy end and actually fly. Are you the guy that gets to squat there and do like this? this. That's the guy that you tell him that he can do that. So I tell him that I give him the thumbs up like, you know, on my side of the aircraft. Another guy on the other side, they tell that that guy like, hey, this plane's good to go. And then he, he sends it off. So he gets all the glory, but they didn't do it work. Yeah, that's the guy you see in Top Gun. You don't see the supervisor. Yeah. Well,

we're running in there while this thing's under full throttle, you know, as far as it's, you know, things can happen or whatever, but it was exciting time. I enjoyed it. But then I got into the diving navy after that. And so in 90, I joined in 87. In 91, I go to dive school, second class dive school and become a Navy diver. And that was another great part of my career that I really loved and enjoyed. And if I didn't get accepted into the seal teams or if I didn't make it through buds, I would have been happy just doing that the rest of my life, even though I had, as a diver, worked at an EOD command as far as, and I got in, I was in reserve for a short period of time also, and I went through an EOD reserve course that they had. And, you know, during that time,

I was there sale of the year and it kind of advanced up a little bit further to different levels. And when it was time for me to decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life, I wanted to go back into the Navy active duty, but I had already screened positive to go to Buds, I had all the screening tests done. But the diving detailer at the time said, nope, if you're coming back in the Navy because I was in reserves, I was a first class petty officer. And I said, hey, I'm ruling to come in.

I'm ready to go down to E5. I'll sign whatever contract you want me to sign. I just want, I get the chance to go to butts. And the diving detailer was just like, nope, if you're coming in, you're going to a junk boat, which is a salvage recovery boat, which is a, it's a rough duty. And I was just like, no, the only reason I'm coming in is because I've screened, you know, and Buds is willing to take me. And, uh, and luckily that command as far as Mark

Verado and some other great challenge, some great, you know, people there said that they would send me to Buds and basically as an activated reservist. So I got, you know, instead of going down one rank, you know, which I was willing to do and I was willing to sign a contract for four years or whatever they wanted me to sign it for, um, I got to go to Buds as an activated activated reservist. And if I failed out, you know, I could go back to being a reservist. And so I didn't have any, like, real weight over my shoulders other than not letting my grandfather down as far as Buck or my family down. So that's when I got there, you know, I classed up with Bud's class 215. Shortly at now, sort of to end of Hell Week, a Hellweek area.

I took over as the LPO. And we almost had the biggest class graduate as far as we were just a tight class, great group of guys. And a lot of successful team guys came, you know, out of that class and done great things. To back up a little bit, Eric, could you talk to our audience a little bit more about the Navy diver profession? Because I think there's a lot of people out there who don't understand, you know, there's different types of Navy divers, right? Even within that career field, right? Oh, correct. So you start off as a second class diver, and you're able to dive down to 165 feet with just, you know, with air, not mixed gas. and once you get a little bit experienced,

then you can go to first class dive school, and that's when you can get into, you can go deeper, and I can get into mixed gas. There's more responsibilities. Come a dive supervisor, and you do more technical diving. You're just not, you know,

a guy on the end of an umbilical anymore. You're kind of more technical, you know, background and dealing with the mixed gases and all that type stuff, and running chambers and that type stuff. Then from there, you can come a saturation diver where you can stay down for you know much longer period of time and that's where it gets a lot more dangerous um you know you end up with long-term effects from that

sometimes and uh you can come a master diver once you get to you hold so many qualifications you make chief and you become a master diver so it's kind of the progression of different things and you got special project you got a lot of different things you can do as a navy diver i ended up at an eOD mobile unit Six command and we you know at that they were training sea lions they were training dolphins you know as far as all those programs you know that that divers and eOD guys do um were some of the stuff that i got to be around and participate in and got to do a lot of diving a lot of bounce diving off the coast of charleston also did a lot of spear fishing and you know artifact diving which was you know pretty beneficial too i enjoyed that the correct me if I wrong Eric but like from top

talking to people in the past, my understanding of the marine mammal program and then going on with that, what the EOD divers do, is that they kind of act as like the pathfinders, so to speak, go out there and find the obstacles that the Navy is going to have to take their ships through and then you guys go out and destroy them? There's different programs. So the sea lions were mainly used for things that were on the bottom that we knew were down there, that we wanted them go down to attach a rope to it so we can pull it up because they could dive down to like 500 feet, be down there a couple of minutes and come back, where for the send a diver down that deep was, you know, pretty difficult to do. Then, you know, with the dolphin programs, there's ones that do cameras, there's guys that are, you know, There's dolphins that are anti-swimmer, which, you know, those things will kick your ass.

Assault dolphins. And my EOD buddies, you know, after I made it through buds, of course, they present me with the, it's basically got a dolphin who's got like a frog in his hand squishing it, you know, the Mark 7 program, because he's just like, because we were trying to swim against these dolphins all the time. And, yeah, it's. I've heard there, I've heard there, I've heard there, there's no joke. and they find you every single time.

Yeah, it's like a no-win situation. Yeah, it's a no-win situation that gets running against those things. And the dolphins get pretty smart because they're wearing like a harness with like a bang stick on it. They get pretty smart. You're down there with a helmet and pat it up

and you know, these things, all of a sudden you hear the click, click, and all of a sudden it comes in there and it just knocks the shit out. And it's just like, you're coming. You ball up a little bit, But they get, they know where they hit the soft spots and everything else. You're just like, adult thing can get up to like five, six hundred pounds, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, at least that size. That's no joke. Considering that like a pot of dogs, it'll fuck up a great white, like it's, yeah, it's like, oh, people. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, yeah, this is easy for them. Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty funny. But yeah, it was a great time in my career.

I really enjoyed it, you know, got to, you know, do that. And, you know, and I just felt like I had to, you know, do another challenge, something more, you know, I was looking for. And that's when I decided to go to Bud's. So, no offense, Eric, I don't want to hear about how hard your Bud's class was. I've been told it's very difficult and that you guys were very cold. We all know that. No, I'm just kidding. I know it's a very challenging course.

But what year did you graduate, Budz? 97. Oh, boy, I went in 97. 98 is when I graduated. Okay. So when in, you know, it was basically going through the winter. It was like Bud's class 215 February, shit, I shouldn't know this date.

But it was like February 21st or 28 or something like that when I graduated. Did you, just to ask a question about Buzz that is unique to you, did they make you because you had been a diver? Did they make you like maintain the dive locker or do do some stupid bullshit because like, your previous experience? Okay, so, you know, you first thing, luckily I had other divers that were in my class. So there was, I think we started off with like four divers that were, you start off with like 160, whatever, what our number was.

And most of the divers got through. So just good on the divers, you know, for getting through it because it was challenging. But since I was kind of senior guy showing up there, already, you know, in E6, which is high, you know, pretty high ranking, you know, at the time in the community. The instructors were mainly E5s and, you know, E6s and chiefs and stuff like that. And so if you don't realize that you don't know shit about being a seal and you come in there and you try to throw your rank around as far as, you know, so I was just like, and I consider myself a humble guy. I think they read me correctly.

Did any other E6th has graduated my class? No, they all got rolled out at some point. No, there was one other E6 in my class I graduated. So long story short, a lot of E6s don't make it through. And because of they're not sure if you can handle not, your rank doesn't represent who you are because you don't have the experience. So if you can't basically put your rank to the side and basically say, hey, I'm a FNG, I'm willing to learn.

I'm coming in with a lot of experience, you know, different aspects and everything else, but I don't know what it is to be a seal yet. So, you know, and they could see that I was willing to learn and that I wasn't, you know, relying on my rank for respect or whatever. I was going to earn it. And so that's, I guess, you know, if I had to say something, you know, as far as, you know, getting through buds. That's when it was, you know, for me. So as, well, I'm getting off on a tangent, but as any six, as the LPO of the class, you're the guy with the watch.

And so you're the, and if whatever, you know, so me and Clay Tippins, you know, he's a class leader. We have to make sure that the class is on time to all the different events. We're running all over the base all the time for these different things, whether it's going to the pool, going to a dive tower, going wherever, you know. It's our responsibility to make sure that the class is there on time. and I got the watch to do it. Well, on my watch, I had a dive helmet on it,

and I was just like, so you don't want to stand out in buds. But now I'm forced into the role of the LPO, which I wouldn't have been happy not being that job also because that added attention or whatever. But whenever the class made a mistake, it was always mine and the class leader's responsibility, to unfuck it. Sorry if I use the language.

Don't screw it. And so we end up doing lots and lots of push-ups for the class all the time. And so we got really good at doing a lot of push-ups for making up mistakes that we might have caused and or guys in the class did it. And so anyway, as far as they gave me extra attention going through pull comp and going through the dive phase of it because they were just wanted to make sure. sure that I was comfortable in the water. And it was, it was challenging. Trust me. Even as a diver, with, you know, at that time, probably had close to 700 dives, you know, honestly. And so when I went through pool comp, you know, with a double hose regulator and the instructors wanted to make sure I was comfortable in the water. And luckily I got through it. You got some extra attention.

Yeah. So you get to the teams, and something I'd love to ask you about that not a lot of people, I think, know about is that you guys did have a real world mission going on prior to 9-11, which was the oil smuggling in the Persian Gulf. Yeah, great point. So because I was the LPO of the class, they said, hey, you get to pick a team. And they said, you know, just like, so I chose SEAL Team 2, which was the most operational command at the time that I knew about from what, from the little bit of knowledge I had. It was the next challenge trying to get there. Luckily, I was able to get SEAL Team 2. Steel Team 2 had a great reputation.

Now that I'm at SEAL Team 2, you go through SEAL tactical training. That's where you actually learn how to do your job as a seal buds is a weeding out process. make sure that you have the mental fortitude to get through and you won't quit and you'll persevere through whatever you know obstacles are thrown in front of it seal tactical training which got changed to seal qualification training later on but seal tactical training is where you learn your job as a seal I was the honor man for that class so then because of that you know you go into like a a draft or you know something along the platoons you're trying to pick the guys coming out at STT. I got selected for a winter warfare platoon, which is a very, you know,

another hard, challenging, you know, environment, you know, that we're going to go to. We got to go up to Alaska and train. And that was, you know, a guy from Florida, you know, basically going up there and surviving was pretty interesting and learn all the, you know, telemark skiing and all that type stuff took to it. It was great, loved it. So I did that deployment. Then we, I come back off of that deployment. I get into a strike platoon and that platoon basically gets deployed to the Persian Gulf when Saddam Hussein was smuggling this all prior 9-11. And that platoon, we start taking down oil smuggling coming out of Tigris River. There was a small little window where they hit international waters. Because if they went into Iranian waters, you know, then there's an international

incident. You were basically, you were not supposed to be in their waters and, you know, get into a gunfight, you know, with guys with bigger guns, and maybe not so much. Anyway, but as far as it can be challenging. And so we did five or six real world boardings, took control these ships. And that was pretty exciting because they were welded it. They had bob wire on the outside of it. They had, they were welded into these things. It was all blacked out. You basically, it was hard to find them. You know, they had, you know, helicopters flying around with radar, just trying to locate them, trying to, then you had a small window to get on it. And you had to cut into it with quickies and Broco torches and that type stuff.

So you got sparks flying all over the place in the middle of the night. And just getting on board the ship was challenging. And, you know, we just had a great time doing it. It was ridiculously hot as far as it was 120 during the day and 110 at night. and you got your flotation on, you got your body armor, you got all this equipment on, then you're climbing up there, then you get into the engine room

or trying to go through the ship and most of them didn't have AC, or it wasn't like a Navy ship, you know, comfortable, you know, environment to be in. We're wrong. You had to get control of it and not get, you know, hopefully into shot or get hurt

or something along those lines. And then get control of the ship and then move it to a safe area that was controlled. controlled by the big Navy. And were you guys roping onto the deck or a climb in the caving ladder? It was mainly a cave in the ladder as far as we were hooking in Poland. We had snipers that were circling around, you know, in the helicopters,

but we were using a hook and caving ladder to get on board most of the time. This is the old school days of like OD green coveralls, Nomex gloves, the Oakley goggles and MP5s. Oh yeah. Perfect. Yeah, we're all in flight suits at the time. So there is actually, well, there's, there's a picture floating around on the internet with a bunch of guys on the back of a Mark 5 with their shirts off. And I'm in that picture with those guys as far as, that was that platoon that we're doing it. It was just, that was really before the internet really took, that was somewhat taken off.

But we didn't realize if you sent the picture to somebody, it could get posted all over the place. Yeah. So you know, like we're getting shipped. from the command like you guys are fucking all over the internet and you know we're just like didn't you know the guy that did it didn't mean to do it yeah anyway it was just like so that picture floated around for a long you know for a period of time how would some of your guys um like qualified to pilot like these larger ships or would you get a pilot on there in order to help you get like how did that happen once you so you do the bbss right and um and for

people who don't know it's visit board search and seizure is it's that's exactly it yep and so you do the vbss you take over the ship and then who steers the damn thing after that yeah it matters what size of the ship it is because you know the real big ones have an engine room and a control room down and they're the ones that are actually they're just getting relayed information down to them these ones were mainly smaller ones so the helm was up there on the bridge. And so we had, you know, naval officers that were seals also. And slow qualified or, you know, and then if they were small enough.

And plus, we, you know, we just got control of the crew and told them get on this heading. And we just make sure they were on the right heading and, you know, and didn't do anything shady. Most of them were pretty compliant, scared shitless. Yeah. They were just, you know, a lot of them weren't even Iraqi or Afghani. or Iranian or anything who were just guys that were contracted beyond there. Okay. And then 9-11 happens while you're over there.

Tell us about what that experience was like and then leading us into, you know, you ended up doing three deployments to Iraq and three to Afghanistan. Yeah, so we just get finished up, you know, with all the boardings. We have already, you know, we were a strike bulletin, so we had all our stuff in what we call drywall boxes and they was all getting ready to be flown back home on c17 or whatever it was going to get you know onto our deployment was pretty much done the aircraft carrier and the whole battle group was already going down around the horn of africa then all of a sudden the towers get hit we're in bahrain enjoying liberty for a little while and um the next thing you know the towers

get hit the battle route gets turned around comes back up there we get thrown onto a frigate or you know, a couple of small ships before we can get to the aircraft carrier. Then we get on the aircraft carrier, waiting for the bombing campaign to start off, and we're a C-SAR package on top, you know, on the aircraft carrier. But unfortunately, they couldn't refuel in flight, so the helicopters couldn't go, you know, like as far as the army helicopters could go into, you know, into country, into Afghanistan. And so we were limited on what we could do. So we sat out in the Persian Gulf thinking we're going to the show,

and pretty much all we did was do circles out there. And, you know, board team guys is not a good thing. And just because we got some of our stuff on the ship, and we stopped in France for a period of time. So we had a bunch of French wine. And some of our guys decided to drink some of that while they're on there and getting a little bit of trouble as far as in. Anyways, so board team guys is not a good thing.

And luckily, it didn't have, you know, it didn't really affect. to too many guys, but we did get in a little bit of trouble for that, for having a little bit alcohol on the ship that we shouldn't have had on there at the time. So anyway, we come to, not to get on a tangent there, but we come back off that deployment. That's when they did the whole force re-org as far as they went from seal teams to squadrons, the whole force 21. So all the guys coming back from, I was at SEAL Team 2, next thing you know, we're all go into because you know the war kicked off and they reorded how we're going to basically deploy so all those guys that came back off that deployment whether it was the arc or the strike platoon all

went to seal team four so now you got most of the seal team two is now at seal team four and so we we start the whole workup process and i'm doing my lPO now i've got two platoons underneath my belt some experience. I'm a dive supervisor. I'm a free fall jump master. I get, you know, different qualifications that I can be an LPO. Now I'm the LPO of that platoon. So we deploy to Germany, you know, as far as we still had those commitments going on with, you know, Bosnia and, you know, and all that type stuff kind of happening. And then Liberia, as far as the rebel forces over Iran, the capital of Monerovia in Liberia. And so we get on the hook to do this, the Neo in Liberia.

And honestly, you know, so after three deployments to Iraq and three deployments to Afghanistan, the most scared, you know, is I was, is in Liberia. Really? Because we flew in, the first thing, you know, we had three different ways of the insert. you know, at the time because big army couldn't get down there. They closed off the airport, so we were going to have to come from the sea. So we're either going to do an MCADS, which we were an MCADS platoon. And we'd already been in the air one time before ready to do an MCADS drop on an Iranian ship

that was doing some stuff or bringing some stuff that they shouldn't have been bringing to it, or a ship that was going to bring stuff there. And basically they turned at the last minute. Well, as we were at the end of the ramp ready to jump out, before doing free fall with the MCADs, you know, 11 meter ribs. And now we're getting right now we're down in Liberia doing a Neo, you know, basically one of our insertion methods was MCADs and they were going to just sink those things after we swam to the beach. And you know, those things aren't, you know, cheap things.

Or we're going to do rubber ducks as far as that was somewhat limited to. And then the last thing there's so we hit free town is just like we. might be able to get some contracted aircraft from other agencies. And luckily, they were able to fly us in there with some of those. Well, one of those helicopters flew in a small group first. And, you know, I think eight or, there's probably 10 of us on that first flight. And when we hit the ground there, the French embassy had already been overrun. They had all the people that were in the American embassy.

I don't know if you've ever been to the American embassy in, you know, in Monrovia. the walls are only maybe 70 foot tall, just a single block wall, not very well fortified. And you can see the terror on everybody's face when we showed up there, how scared they were. And we didn't know what we're getting into. We go up to the front and there's thousands and thousands of people

just trying to get into the embassy. And some of them saying they're American citizens, some of them, then you've got the rebel forces that are driving by with AK-47s and RPGs and giving you the stink eye. You're just like, shit, they're going to,

you know, they're just probing us the whole time trying to, you know, see what kind of weakness we had. To the point where the second helicopter coming in was supposed to bring in food, water,

plus the rest of the guys. We said, forget the food, forget the water, bring ammo. It was just, it was good, we didn't have enough ammo if it,

if it came over to a bad situation. So for, you know, a little over a week, we stayed, we were awake and we had to, keep from rotating from one position to another position, changed our looks a little bit, make it look like we had a much bigger force. We only had 18 guys, and but we had to make it look,

and we had to cover a lot of property as far as the embassy where they could attack us from. And so we had to make ourselves look a lot bigger than what we were, more intimidating what we were. So we're constantly changing how we looked and what we looked like. So it was a fresh face every two hours somewhere else. But we didn't sleep for. honestly, very little sleep for about a week until finally other guys got in there to help us out. We had a state department official on the show recently, Dante Paradiso, who is here. He actually wrote a whole book about the evacuation. He was there when it happened. But I also know there were like six or seven evacuations at the time of Liberia, right?

Yeah. I'm not sure which one was which. Yeah, this was 2003. Okay. 2003, I think, as far as I remember correctly, I'm pretty sure it was right around 2003, yeah. So after, I was just going to ask you, had the, you had mentioned that the French embassy had already been overrun. Do you know if the French civilians that were there, had they had they made it to the American embassy or were they caught up by the Liberians? No, they were, yeah, they were in the American embassy. You had all the missionary type people that were, I mean, there was.

I mean, they would, you know, the rebel forces would roll by just throw bodies, you know, on the ground, basically trying to intimidate us, you know, as far as human life isn't worth very much over there in their eyes. And so it was, you know, it was an eye-opening experience for me. And so that was when I was just like at this, you know, and the ROEs was anybody comes over the wall, you could shoot them where I was just like, man, some of these people are just scared trying, or just, you know, they might be, you know, an American who's trying to get into the embassy. So just because they're on the wall, just like, hey, realize what a real threat is, you know, it's overwhelming.

And we got to, you know, we have to make a point, make a point, you know, but if you don't have to, let's not do it. And luckily, we didn't have to fire any shots. Everything went super smooth. It was, you know, I was very proud of how the guys, how professional they were. with that overwhelming force in front of them and that guys didn't get triggered itchy or try to do something stupid that causes the situation for us and so all the guys were super professional and did great things so then from there now I just

finished up my OPO and and I was able to stay you know I pick up chief you know so E7 you know I have a successful combat you know or a tour and we did anyway so now I'm a chief I stay at still team four I pick up a platoon and now we're doing a new workup we're deploying to this will be my first time going to Iraq and at that time the number one strategic mission was protecting the interim government of Iraq so we're all doing we're all getting trained up in PSD as far as personal protection you know details and and so we're all in competition as far as trying to do that job correctly on top of the diving, the jumping, and everything

else you're doing now. We've got a new tasking kind of somewhat. We're getting up the speed on it. I had already done a couple of potish trips on that last platoon that I was just talking about. When he went to Africa, I went with George Bush all over that. We had, you know, that was another great story when we can get into another time. But because of the experience and how well the platoon was doing. We got the number one guy in Iraq, Dr. Alawi, the prime minister of Iraq. So we were, my platoon was protecting him. And he was a busy guy, you know, as far as lots of people coming to see him and things long ago, but he would also go out of country from time to time. And whenever he went out of the country, we could go up and help out, you know, Danny and Bill's

platoon who were doing direct action. So our guys were getting, doing PSD missions, and they were going out and helping with direct action missions at night or, you know, be up there for a week or two. And, and that's where, you know, that's where, you know, you really got to hone your skills a little bit better and got experience on direct action missions up there. And the guys were, we're doing, having great time doing that type stuff up there also. That's where, you know, and we'll get into this later on, but my, where the CQD starts come into effect for me, close quarters of defense. and I was talking to you guys a little bit about it earlier, but that's when it all kind of came to, you know,

oh, I got it now as far as why we're doing that training and why prisoner control and why we're, you know, why it's operation and focus and things along those lines. So now that, you know, great success on that deployment, come back off of that. That's my fourth platoon workup in deployment. They said, Eric, you've got to go to training. You can't, you know, you can't stay here.

You can't do another platoon chief, which honestly, most guys in the teams, that's where they'd like to stay. Right. Because that's when you're directly with your guys and your decisions, you know, and how you have a direct effect on guys' lives that, you know, and they on yours too. And so you're the closest. And so platoon chief is kind of the sweet spot within the seal community. finish that up. They got people in the pipeline that need to do it, you know, also the next leadership block or whatever.

They said, you got to go to training. I had the CQD course, close quarters defense course, had a great reputation. If you wanted to get operationally focused, better qualified, understand how to operate as an operator, trying to become a CQD instructor. So I put my name in the hat. I got selected to basically to be an instructor.

Shortly after that, I pick up E8. My mentor, Noel Harris, leaves, and I take over as a course manager on the East Coast for close quarters defense. Now, this is in the middle of war, and you're sending, you know, the guys that you're training are going, you know, could be leaving in a week to go over there. So what you teach them can either save their lives or get them killed. So that's the amount of responsibility that's thrown on to the CQD instructors. and it's you know the cqd instructors most of them all came from a mixed martial arts background of some sort or boxing or grappling or wrestling so it wasn't like um you know when jaco on his podcast he said hey there was this system for a little while that was in the pipeline um you know he misleads to the public

because that system has been in the seal community for at that for over 20 or 22 years so longer than Jocko was actually in the Navy, CQD has been one of our most important courses that we could go through. Whenever we did a dog and pony show for Congress or anybody coming over, that's what they would go show them, would be the CQD course. That's how well respected and how operationally focused it was. So to become an instructor, you know, was an honor, you know, it was something that it wasn't easy. You had to go through this. And, you know, this instructor forging process. And Dwayne Dieter, who came up with the system,

he would train the instructors directly for Seal CQD level one and two. You go through this forging thing. And to be honest with you, like log PT at Buds was like the hardest thing I had ever done up until that point. Fighting for your life going through CQD forging and how, you know, as far as your mistakes and things you did right, but fighting until

you were totally exhausted and then fighting for another five minutes more because you're about to get your head cut off, you know, and, you know, if you didn't basically, you would, and so you knew how important the training was because it was making you operationally focused, but it was also physically demanding because when you get exhausted, that's when you could, your mistakes started coming out and that they could correct. So the instructors would, yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry, I'm just going to ask you, can you, can you walk us through who Deeter was, how CQD came about, and what, what CQD in sort of its breadth was, and then how it came to

the seal teams? Okay, yeah, it's a great point. So Dwayne Deere was working with the DEA task force up in Maryland, Baltimore area, He was taking down big drug houses that were happening up there. There's a lot of drugs being run up in that area at the time. He had a roommate when he was in college that was a team guy. And Dwayne comes from a huge mixed martial arts background. He was high level, fifth or sixth degree black belts and multiple different things.

And so he had that background. His seal buddy was getting trained in some mixed martial arts type stuff. I thought Dwayne would be kind of happy to kind of guess what we're learning type situation. well, Duane's been developing CQD on the side because his stuff wasn't working when he was taken down DEA drug houses. And a person that he called him his teacher, but he was a master. He said, your purpose was to come up with his system. And so when Duane couldn't get trained at any higher level on that side, his teacher said, what you want doesn't exist.

You have to develop this. And so that's when Duane started developing close forward. his defense and he was only doing it for himself and for you know maybe his select buddies that were doing the d8 you know task force type stuff but his seal buddy basically said hey this is something that we probably could use too so he did a demonstration for him and next thing you know at seal team six he's down there teaching they gave him an office down there he was such a well-respected guy down there he was made an honorary frog man he does deployments you know he goes to iraq in Afghanistan. I mean, this is, he's embedded, you know, really deeply with us. And as enough guys

leave Damneck, at the time, we had the combat fighting courses, we had scars, we had a conglomeration of mixed martial art type stuff that didn't really mesh well together. It wasn't operationally focused. And it was sports based. And so even though we got a lot of our guys that come from martial arts background that are CQD instructors, we all understood that that, that was one was sports base, which is one-on-one in a ring. The environment in the ring is not very dangerous. You don't have to worry about somebody shooting you from a distance. You don't have to worry about multiple adversaries.

You don't have to worry about a guy pulling a knife in the middle of your boxing match and trying to stab you. So all these things that you train into this false environment, you know, as far as a sports ring, doesn't really correspond to what's operationally out here. So it was very tight hold. You know, CQD is, you know, why you guys don't really know much about it, why it's interesting to you is because Dwayne is the ultimate, you know, quiet professional. He just wanted to give it to us and so that we could, you know, after 9-11, you know, things were dynamic for the United States.

And we wanted, we needed to, we needed guys with that training out there on the battlefield. And so he was having a great time. We were having a great time. And CQD was just. you know, crushing it overseas. That's why when I was doing the DAs and, you know, and my guys were doing it, I realized, you know, Tom Bosnick was up there training the guys.

And I was just like, that's where I wanted to get to, if I had to go to training and get myself to be a better operator. So that's how it ends up in the SEAL teams. So Dwayne was teaching down at Dev Group. And when it went to the rest of the teams, that's when he started training the team. trainer. So when Jocko says, I wanted seals training seals, you know, that was already happening. He was misleading the public like, you know, contractors were training seals. And that's why we had

Dwayne train, you know, at the higher levels as far as, you know, entry and, you know, vehicle take down and, you know, much, you know, a broader spectrum of different things that he could train. and the SEAL instructors were doing level one and two, which was basically, you know, mainly direct action, prisoner control, and you go from unarmed to arm to shooting to prisoner control to operational physical training. And the one unique thing that no other training system had was the internal warrior. The internal warrior was after you got trained in all these different things, you got these skills and basically you validated.

You went through a hood and box drill to validate. You knew that these skills are what you needed to. learn. That's why I was having so much success in the SEAL teams. But after you went through validation of that hooded box drill, that's when you come clear to you what you need to be doing as an operator. And so, yeah, so now that you got all these training and you've got this the internal warrior, the ethical part of the training, that you could use these skills for a lot of bad things if you wanted to. You could, you know, take advantage and, you know, do different things along just like, what's the purpose of your fight? And so it was our, it was our escalation of

force. It was our force control. It was, you know, and it helped guys personally ID what the higher threats are, make right decisions, shoot, no shoot, held them accountable because if they didn't do things right underneath the hood, the role players, we had role players, some of these, some of these exercises we did, we had like hundreds of role players that were attacking guys, shooting guys. Some guys were compliant, some guys not compliant. It was just a time in the SEAL community where we were just excelling. And that's why we had made such a good name, you know, on the battlefield early, you know, in our, you know, kind of, in beginning of 9-11, after 9-11 in the war. That's why we had such a solid reputation.

So we got that going on, but then on the side note, so you got Roberts Ridge. And why I bring that up, because that comes into a conflict here in a little bit, and I'm going to connect some dots for people that don't understand it. And even some seals don't understand it. This is going to educate them on some things. So you got Roberts Ridge,

you got Tim Samansky, who pushes slab to basically land on the X to do a reckey up top of there. He thinks he's going to get those. Osama bin Laden. He doesn't give a shit about the guys in the helicopter. Tim Samansky says, no, don't abort, land that thing up there. And that's when they start getting shot up and they have to, Neil Roberts falls out of the back of it. And the helicopter does a control crash landing a couple clicks away.

Another helicopter comes in. They convince that helicopter and go back up there to try to get Neil Roberts. They didn't know that Neil Roberts had been fighting valiantly up there by himself for a period of time, but he'd been, they'd been able to kill him. They think they're going up there to save them. And, you know, great, you know, guys willing to step up there and do that. They just like, that's, that should have been the story. And, you know, that, you know, the great things could happen to sort of tactical mess up. You shouldn't have landed on the X at that point.

You know, Tim Samansky pushed him in there, said, you know, shitty leader, you should have been shit canned and got rid of, you know, at that time. They land up there. Chapman basically starts going forward because slab falls, you know, going out of the helicopter, whatever, there's five foot of snow. It's, you know, it's a, it's a harsh environment. Chapman basically goes up and starts taking down a machine gun bunker, you know, as far as a bunker one or whatever it's called. And, you know, if you watch on, there's a pred feed on YouTube, you can watch it.

It explains the whole thing. In my community, you know, as a Seal, you know, a CQD instructor, you get guys cycling through. And, you know, and first thing, you're, you get an after-action reports of exactly what's happening in Afghanistan, happening in Iraq, and you're trying to create these scenarios when the guys go through what the guys are running into on the battlegrounds up there right now. So you've got guys that are telling you their stories, you know, that are over in country and you just come back. But you also got guys that are on these different platoons. And so when we start talking about Roberts Ridge and, you know, some of the damn, that guy started rolled their eyes and like, what's the way you're rolling your eyes about, you know, and they start telling me the real story about what kind of happened. Just like, yeah, slab left a guy, you know, left Chapman up there. I'm just like, so I'm kind of hearing it, you know, as far as on the side of, but, you know, it doesn't come public for a long period of time.

Well, Tim Samansky's, instead of them holding him accountable for that debacle, and then all the lies. that they tried to cover up later on as far as that he does. He advances his career and he ends up at Group 2 as a Commodore. So now I'm a CQD instructor. I'm at, you know, which my CEO is over at the center on the West Coast, even though I'm on the East Coast. But I got Tim Samansky, who is the Commodore of Group 2. And next thing you know, as far as, and I didn't know that he had failed so miserably as a leader

at Damnack and was kind of a guy. kind of pushed out of damn neck and pretty much said you can go away you don't really fit our need here and um we didn't know that slab had left chapman behind you know that he was on the wall of the rock of shame at you know over there that for all what he had done wrong over at dev group so who does tim samansky pick up to be his command master chief slab so now you got two guys that are covering up what actually happened at roberts ridge You know, and now, you know, at that time, they're trying to stop Chapman from getting a congressional medal of honor. And as far as, and they're basically trying to cover up.

They're changing their stories of what actually happened, you know, from what their original statements were. And so now, you know, in my community, you're just like, they didn't, we didn't realize these guys had messed up so much. It was kind of just a dev group secret up until that point for the most part because we didn't, you know, have firsthand information. When that information comes, finally gets to be public, you know, as far as I was just like, well, shit, no wonder I was having such a hard time with this guy. Because he was, he had tried to bribe Dwayne Dieter because he wanted Dwayne Deter to basically teach CQD or mixed martial arts and put a seal tried in on it and say, hey, you're the seal martial arts trainer and or CQD trainer or whatever.

He wanted to sell DVDs and go out to the due franchise and schools and stuff like that. When you say he, who are you talking about? Tim Samansky basically tries to bribe Dwayne Dieter to basically franchise his schools and try to put this out to the public. And Duane says, hey, that's not why I'm doing this. That's not what I'm about. You know, these skills, you know, need to stay close-knit for the good guys. If we put it out like you're talking about the bad guys are going to get it and they're

going to use it against us. So he doesn't take the bride. he doesn't, you know, he doesn't get in bed with Tim Samansky, which he kind of knew he was kind of shady, but didn't know to how level of the shadiness he was. So that's when they have to work to get rid of Dwayne out of there because everybody would talk to Dwayne and come clean with everything. He worked with all the squadrons, whether it's gold, red, you know, blue, gray. And so he cross-pollinated everybody and made everybody, you know, a cohesive. you know, kind of a group. And because Dwayne wouldn't take the bride, you know, Tim Samastity tries to put it, basically tries to get rid of them out of damn neck. But at that point,

it was, it was already spread to the teams. It was already going everywhere. And so why that's important to me or why I'm bringing it up is because now I'm the course manager of CQD. And I got guys that are going to combat tomorrow. And I got everybody that's going to do the course, writes a critique and they say great stuff. I wish we need two more weeks of it. You know, we should have gotten this early. We need to do this right before we deploy. And just thousands and thousands are seal operators saying nothing but great things.

And all of a sudden I got Tim Samansky, who's the Commodore and some of his cronies underneath them saying, oh, you know, that's, you know, it's not operation. It doesn't work. It doesn't do this. I'm just like, what are you talking about as far as this is, here's a thousand critiques. all the afteraction reports of guys saying how they used it, how effective it was, how they're going to get more of it, how I used it when I was deployed. Just like, what the hell you guys talking about? I had no clue that he tried to bribe Dwayne Deter. They didn't know anything, you know, really

about it. And so I'm running into some heat from the, from the guys that under group two, as far as trade at, who basically assault cell. And some of those guys have gotten in trouble that damn neck, and now they're over an assault cell. So they're in the timeout box because they've gotten in trouble. And now since Tim Samansky saved them from getting maybe kicked out totally, they're going to do his bidding, whatever he wants them to do. So they're putting a smear campaign against Dwayne Dieter saying that he sued the teams, which he never did.

That's all bullshit. He tried to say that, you know, Duane Dieter or CQD won't let us do mixed martial arts. We have no say-so on what they did as far as Trade Act could do whatever they want. We were just, we were part of the center teaching CQD, which everybody wanted. So they kind of put this, they tried to make it like there was a fight between ex-martial arts guys and CQD, which there wasn't. Right. All of our instructors were mainly come from that same background already.

And we all knew the difference between what was operational and what wasn't operational. One was sports base and one wasn't. So all of our guys, you know, they tried to, you know, so for the unwitting person, you got a captain, you know, level officer who is basically putting out this smear campaign against, you know, a very highly successful course. It was the most sought after. We had more instructor of the years come out of CQD. And it was like I said, it was one of the courses that they used as a sample for whenever they did

a dog and pony and things along those lines. They had congressional level people. if they wanted to show how awesome seals were, they showed them CQD and a small little thing. So now that, so I'm running into problems here on the East Coast with CQD, with Tim Samansky, who I didn't know was a turd at the time. I didn't know how bad he was at the time. I just didn't understand why he was basically doing this. So I'm talking with Dwayne.

Dwayne said, yeah, I didn't take a bribe. Duane tells me of that stuff. And he says, he says, really kind of don't worry. We weren't really worried about it because Tim Samansky wasn't really, I didn't, not a lot of respect, you know, through the community. I don't know how he ended up in that position after he screwed up Roberts Ridge so bad. So I'm running into problems with it. The West Coast guy started running the problems over there.

And so I was just like, you know, having similar issues kind of going with some of their trade at guys. Well, it just happens to be that the guy that's in trade, you know, in charge of that trade at is Jock. So now, so I got Tim Samanski and I got Jock, you know, as far as, and they're teamed up trying to get rid of close quarters defense. So I'm just like, so Jock I'm just like, okay, why is he going against CQD? So I pull up his critiques, which I can, I can put those all over the internet right now. I got access to all those critiques. I was a course manager. I got all the after-action reports. And so I look at, you know, Jocko's, um, his critique when he went through training. Great stuff. Highly recommended.

The good stuff. Now, Jock, you know, comes from a jujitsu background or whatever. He does that, but he understood the operationally focused in the training. All his guys that went through in task force, Bruiser, as far as Lafabin, for Sergeant, all those guys that, I got their critiques. They said great things about it when they went through the training. Now, Jocko is in charge of training on, you know, trade at. And so I'm just like, well, you know, he was at team too with me, you know, for a period of time before they did the whole force tournament. Before he became an officer. So I knew a little bit of his background.

I'm trying to figure out exactly what's going on. Then I start hearing about Task Force Bruiser and everything that kind of went on with Task Force Bruiser. And at the time, I didn't know was Jock and those guys down there in Ramadi. I just knew that, you know, the SEALs doing daylight patrols and daylight raids. and they're getting good seals killed and we're just like, what the fuck is going on with these guys down in Ramadi? And so at the time, I didn't know exactly who it was or what was going on. The West Coast instructors, you know, as far as, you know,

they're getting those guys that went through their training, they came back off that deployment. They're telling all the stories about Chris Kyle shooting people that he shouldn't have been shooting as far as people off of bikes. He was trying to get a body count. So Chris Kyle goes off the rails. He works directly under John. Jaco. Jock was basically pushing him out there because Jocko, the platoon that Jocko relieved, you know, had great success doing D.A. mission, night raids and basically, you know, Ramadi was a much safer place when they were there. Jocko comes in and he has to try to beat their record. So the only way that he thinks he can beat their record is basically getting a body count.

So he tells Chris Kyle basically get a body count. So Chris Kyle starts going out there in, in, to get the numbers that Chris Kyle ended up with, he shot a lot of people he shouldn't have shot. And his platoon starts reporting that type stuff up. And Jocko wasn't a short period of time before Jock was just like, you can't approve an op. You can only approve logistical runs. Eric, when you say people started reporting it up, do you mean that people started reporting his numbers up or people started reporting up that he was shooting people that he probably should not have been shooting? So when Mark Lee, yeah, it's good, great points and I can, I can jump around a little bit.

But so Jocko's in country. Before Mark Lee gets shot or, you know, before that situation happens, um, C-L Team 6 operator goes to Jocco says, hey, they know that you're leaving the, when you're leaving the wire. You've got your punisher patch, you know, thing on your body armor. but they know who you are. They're IDing you when you leave. They're following where you're going to. Your guys are putting up a huge American flag, you know, when you get out there

because you're supposed to be in a sniper hide. You're exposing who you are. And you're going to get guys killed doing what you're doing. And Jocko tells us senior SEAL Team 6 operator, fuck you. I'm taking it to the enemy. And so Jock basically, so this SEAL Team 6 operator basically warns them. and I don't know if Jocko told his guys before they went out that, hey, they already know who you are. They're watching when you leave the wire.

They know what your vehicles look like and everything else. I don't know if Jocko told his guys that, but since I've done my last podcast, more and more guys are talking to me from there. So I'm getting more and more information as that kind of happens. So most of them didn't know that he was warned, the guys that I'm talking to so far right now. So Jock was warned. he sends him out anyway still doing daylight patrols and you know and that type stuff as far as trying to get into gun fights trying to basically cause situations that don't need to kill mark lee ends up getting killed some of those guys in the platoon come back with the body go to the funeral and they're complaining basically letting everybody know hey jaco is basically Chris cow is killing innocent people and jaco is basically just sending us out on daylight patrol stuff that we didn't do during the workup and just kind of just putting us out there.

And they're starting to call him a coward. They're saying, Jocko, you're a coward because you're making a, and most of the time, our task unit commanders, you know, went out with us as far as a lot of different time. Because you're going, you know, you had a ground, you had, you know, anyway, you had those guys route on the battlefield with us most of time. Jock wasn't going out. So another senior guy that he goes to him says,

hey, your guys are calling you a coward because you're sending him out and you're not going out with him. So Jaco said, well, I'll go out. He goes, and I'm going to shoot the first. And he said, sand, and you use the N-word, that I see. And he just shows you what his intent was. So he basically tells that. Go ahead.

I just like, I know you were getting this information somewhere, but I also want to be very cautious about sort of like, like he said, she said, because you didn't hear him say that, correct? So, like, I just want to be very. another guy in the office with him at the time. Yeah. Or there was other people that were in the talk that, you know, knew it too. But as far as, so yeah, as far as these are all, what's great about it, because, you know,

as a person who is not on the, you know, the internet and does podcast, I can over-extend myself and say something that get myself in trouble with slander or something along those lines. Luckily, I got the truth. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's, I'm not concerned. Yeah. So, Eric, I'm real quick because, you know, this, this has come up when you've been on other shows and, and I want to ask you, do you hate seals? No, no, I'm just, do you hate seals?

No. No. And the reason why, no, it brings up a great point because the reason why I'm doing this is because, you know, If you let leaders like Jocko who got guys killed and you don't expose them for what they did and who they are, because we knew it in our community. That's why he, that's why he ended up in training. He didn't,

you know, he should have been going to an exo position to, if they wanted him to be in charge of men in combat, he should have progressed his career in another manner instead of going to training. And so he went to, he says he went to training, but he was, the writing was on the wall that,

You were not going to put up your life next rank. I get it, Eric. I mean, if you hated the SEAL teams, you would disappear, and there's no reason for you to be public in putting this pressure on yourself. And I get it that you're doing it because this is something that you care deeply about. Right. This is something that, you know, like we talked about for the show, that certain things within the community are the things that everybody points at as SEALs,

are bad, but seals aren't bad. And seals have done amazing things. And unfortunately, a lot of the amazing things that seals have done get overlooked by the things that, you know, we've, you know, before the show we talked about Melger and I'm sure we'll get to that. But, you know, we talk about Chris Kiler. We talk about other things that not taking away from maybe the good things that Chris Kyle did do, but there were things that maybe he didn't do that were not so great. What happened on that patrol that you started to mention that he went out on? Jocko decides he gets shamed into going out. And of course he doesn't go out on a daylight that.

He goes on a helo insertion at night. And so when you, you know, you guys know, you land. You got a brownout situation. And, you know, you're waiting for the dust to settle. Seeking what, who you have learned. You're not landing on the X. you're meeting up with somebody a source you know c is a source that's going to take you to do to target where the bad guys are at so the dust the dust settles our sources there and jaco sees a guy with a slung a k and he shoots him in that face basically

well that just happens to be our source and we're basically supposed to take us on target so so that's what happens you know how he you know because he that's why he had that's why he's why he's why he got the term a murderous soul because he shot somebody because he said he was going to do it not that he was a threat not that he was somebody he was just trying to make a name for himself and so it was just ridiculous that he you know that he did it of course you know you can you can say well he had a weapon you know i was felt you know threatened you know just that jaco doesn't didn't go out very often didn't know exactly what the protocols were link up procedures were yeah Yeah, and so he makes a huge mistake and, you know, and a guy dies because of it.

And so they have to catch the entire operation because of that, I imagine. I'd have to ask exactly what happened. More likely, I'm pretty sure that's what happened. Yeah, where are you going? Yeah, exactly. So it's not a, it doesn't paint us in a good light. And that's just kind of, that's not normal. I mean, our guys before him had huge,

success on that same exact battle space. And, you know, so Jocko, that's why he gets pushed to training. And that's why now that he's pushed to training and he's just like, you're not going to make your next advancement. And he goes, well, shit, I got to start lining up something for when I get out of the Navy. So that's when he starts Victory Gym. He teams up with a known drug felon, you know, as far as him. And he gets in trouble because he teams up with the enlisted guys.

And they start trying to push contracts to his own gym. that's when I get involved with CQD. I'm just like, who the fuck is this Jock guy on the West Coast? And why is he trying to get rid of CQD? You know, as far as when his critiques are saying all these great things and all his guys are saying great things, well, it's because Jocco started up a gym and he wants contracts. And him and Tim Samanski,

so now we've got East Coast and West Coast guys teaming up against putting a smear campaign against CQD and Dwayne Dieter. And just like, and a lot of guys don't. know where you know unless they talk to me personally or they talk to the security instructors they don't know the whole background and what's going on so they're just like the team guys are just like what direction are we going what are we doing it reminds me it reminds me a little bit of like the element was it i think it was element one out at damn neck and that that resulted in a huge like IG complaint where they it was in an insider

baseball kind of deal where people within the unit were selling stuff you know private back to their users. Yeah, and that's, that's, you know, as far as, so Tim Samanski was trying to push contracts to his guy, you know, on the East Coast, which was another gym, Lynx Academy, as far as Frank Cucci, another turn that tried to sell DVDs, like learn the secret fighting techniques of Navy Seals and, you know, all this stupid, ridiculous stuff. This is who he teams up with on the West Coast, Jocko at his gym on the West Coast, and they're just put on this smear campaign against.

it's a true quiet professional who is done who's you know at that time probably 18 19 years of already training us and with thousands and thousands of critiques of nothing but positive great things one of the most successful forces NSW ever had so how did it all pan out these guys were leadership positions in training they really had a lot of you know basically pull on which way contracts went or who they went to and so the guys are just busy operating going overseas, they're not really worried about what's kind of happening on in the training side of it. So a lot of them didn't even know that they were doing this.

And so at some point, I run into the corruption so bad. And the CEO on the West Coast, who was my CEO, Spence, he goes, hey, it's, you know, Deeter's won the contract every time. I mean, he's, every time he's gone up for bid, you know, every couple of years or whatever, and he competes against these other people. it won by 50 plus points over the closest competitor. Tim Samansky's guy, as far as the lowest ranking one, as far as Jocko, because he was trying to push contracts to his gym,

got found out and got exposed, and that's why he got the contract ethics fraud. So, you know, he's still, now that we basically, he's failed on the battlefield as a seal leader, as, you know, out there. Now he's failing as a training guy. Yeah, unpack a little bit how that happened. You said that there was an ethical violation came up within NSW or Warcom.

I mean, could you tell us a little bit about how that came about? Yeah, so I, you know, at that point when, you know, Spence says, hey, this is kind of going above him and the contracts were already won. He says there's some corruption. He didn't say corruption. He goes, I don't know what's going on above me, but if I were you guys, I'd file a fraud, waste, and abuse. claim. So that's when, you know, the CEO basically, you know, even though CQD had won all the

contracts, they had to, you know, they were still trying to get rid of it. Even though it, when it went up for evaluation, you had still seem six, you had every team put somebody in there to evaluate all these different things and make sure we're doing the right thing, even though we'd already been using it for like 18 years at that point. And everybody was already validated and super and we're just getting further and further skill sets because Duane was training us to a higher and higher level it goes up to 10 and so as we got more and more experience with CQD we could get higher and higher levels they tried to get this since they didn't win the contract they tried to do away with all contracts as far as within NSW and so they tried to at that point that's when

I file an IG complain against it and that's where I and I named Tim Samansky and I named Jock not knowing how screwed up they were at Roberts Ridge or Bruiser at the time. I just knew that these guys were pushing contracts to their buddies who, and they were selling a product that was going to get guys killed or they weren't going to be as successful on the battlefield. They also didn't have any ethics as far as these guys that were training them, you know, as far as Jock was teamed up with a known drug film.

We were having drug issues in the teams. Tim Samansky was teamed up with already a guy who sold the seal trite him brand to learn the secret fighting techniques of a Navy SEAL. So not very good quality people that these guys were. Was that Frank. That was Frankucci? Frankucci. Yeah, I remember.

Okay. And so, I mean, first off, I have to throw out. I would love to read a copy of that IG complaint if you still have it, Eric. Oh, yeah, I got it. Yeah, I'd love to read that. But so what was the result of that IG complaint? when the investigators got involved? So at that point, so I had pushed out the IG complaint.

It came back, you know, as far as people in that chain of command as far as it went to, I had to deploy to Iraq, so I went to immediately to Iraq shortly after I filed it. And pretty much it went, it stayed within NSW. And since it stayed within NSW, nothing really happened as far as with the, I say, nothing really happened. Jocko ends up having to get basically, you retire at 20 or you're going to be court-martial, pretty much was his options as far as- They actually told them that. You were going to be court-martialed. Well, that's what I was told he was told. From the knowledge I have is basically he retires at 20. What kind of, you know, if he's such a stand-up

seal and wants to operate and just like, you know, extreme ownership or whatever crappy book is, you know, whatever, you know, a seal wants to operate. A seal wants to deploy. Sure. A seal wants to basically, to get out at 20, the only reason you do that is because you're not happy with what's going on in the SEAL community and you're saying, I'm getting the fuck out of this canoe club. Me, I loved it.

Would go back in and do it all over again exactly the same, except for I would fight harder against Tim Samanski and Jocko as far as because they, they were able to have success, you know, and getting rid of the CQD, you know, and it's going to come back around. It's got to because it's the most operationally effective training that we've ever had. And once they do, because they'll bring in the ethics, and we won't end up with the Melvars situation. We won't end up with Joccos.

We won't end up with Tim Samansky because that system exposes those guys. And when it exposes them because they can't hide from the hood. And, you know, they can't, they find out what their sport-based stuff doesn't really have, and a positive effect in the operational world. And so those guys would be found out to either be psychopaths or a guy that can't control his anger correctly because he end up with guys on steroids that shoot everybody in the room. And the amount of stress that CQD brings when you're doing the hooded box drill, it's as real as you can get as close to combat as anything I experienced.

I've had some hoods where I was more stressed out than getting any target. you know, in Iraq or Afghanistan. There was a lot of ethics incorporated into Deiter's program, correct? Exactly. The last part of, so you got, you had unarmed, so you had to handle yourself unarmed first, then that went into arms. Now you got a gun and you got your kid on, how to properly, you know, respond it. Then it got into prisoner control.

Now that you've detained somebody or you've got somebody in your sights and they're being compliant, Listen, now you've got to cuff them, search them and transport them. Then it got into operation, you know, got into shooting in some tactics as far as house entry and that type stuff. Then it got into operational physical training, which is now that you, if you're going to use, these are up, you know, these are, you know, how how do you explain it as far as, you know, how like CrossFit is functional fitness. Yeah. Well, before CrossFit, we had, before CrossFit, we had OPTs, operational physical training. So that was those skills, those physical exercise we did directly correlated to how you would perform, striking, shooting, and you know, do prisoner control, all that stuff as far as was incorporated into operational physical training. Then now you've got all these different skills.

Now you hit the, what we call the internal warrior. What are you going to do with these skills that you have? You're a frigging Navy SEAL and you're getting ready to go on the battlefield. field. And you can shoot and get away with it a lot of times, but is that the right thing to do? Are you shooting the right person? Are you shooting one of our own sources? So if you're trained at to a high enough level, you can sit there and let the situation kind of evolve a little bit without shooting first because you're that confident in your skills of what you can take that shot when you need to and remove somebody from the planet that needs to, but you could sit there

and let it develop to where you're just like, okay, this guy's being somewhat compliant. Yeah, and just like, okay, now he's actually being fully compliant. Now we're going to, you know, we can get a lot of good intel off this guy. So when you have these skill set, the ethical side of it is, yeah, you can go out there and shoot everybody you want, but or you can sit there and do the, you know, because you're going to live with that baggage the rest of your life. When you ask a warrior, just like, well, how many people have you killed? I hate it when somebody asks those questions to a green beret, ranger, seal,

because what they're going to remember is the one that they wish they didn't do. And so when you're trained to a lower level, you shoot sooner than you need to sometimes. And so what Duane's system did for us is that allowed us to basically have more success on the battlefield because we could let the, we were more mature. We could, we had the internal warrior. We could dial it up as fast as we needed to protect ourselves and our buddies, but we could also let it mature to make sure we're making the right decision.

And making those right decisions, when you come home five, six years later and you've got all this baggage, you're just like of what happened on the vital field as far as that's when the internal warrior really becomes an important part. That's why we got the suicide situation that we have within the teams because a lot of guys got mentored by Joccos or Tim Samanski's and did some things or slab on the battlefield did stupid things on the battlefield that they're not happy about. Or saw some things that they're not happy about. Go ahead. I was just saying or they saw some things that they're not happy. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And that puts them in. And that gets to a good point because, you know, for why am I coming so hard against these guys, they're exposing them? Why am I like, you know, it's embarrassing to the sale community. It really is that these guys, you know, have been able to progress their careers and that they're put on such a pedestal. But if we allow these things to go unchecked and we go let these guys get away with it, it produces other guys that do very similar stuff.

And they think they can get away with even more different things. That's why you're talking about contracts going to their own buddies that had a, you know, within our community, you know, it was who can, who's got the most dirt on who so that they could get a contract or get something, you know, special to themselves. So your, your IG complaint didn't really go very far is what you're telling me. Not as far as I wish it would have went. But Jocko does go away, you know, as far as, and he was named in it.

Tim Samansky doesn't go away right away. But, you know, one of the great things as far as when Matt Cole's book came out, you know, Code Over Country, and I highly recommend, and I have nothing to do with that book. I wasn't down at Damneck. All his sources are frigging are stellar team house. I highly recommend watching his team house interview, by the way. Yeah. And actually, when I did my research,

on you guys. That was one of the ones I watched. And it was interesting because he talked about the hooded box drill a little bit. And he says that, you know, it was funny because the guys that basically failed in the hooded box drill, or they wouldn't go through it. They're afraid to go, you know, and I had guys that would avoid it. Jocko on his second time going through CQD, I got to go to dental, you know, just like, and that's the, the hood of box drill was what every team guy just loved doing. It was just like it was testing your skills. Then we did a video review right at, you know, of all the,

because you go through individual first and you go unarmed. Then we do a video review of it of how, what success you had, all your teammates watch you against all the role players, how you perform going through, you know, that drill. And you get all these like, you know, let's say anywhere from 11 to 15 scenarios of being attacked. how you handle it. So you get the valid with this, you know, the one eye that tells no lie, the video camera, and which is great because that's why the predator feed is so important to Marcus Latrell's story and slab and all that stuff because when those videos come out,

it's just like it points, it tells the real picture and there's no hiding anymore. So just like the hooded box, you can't hide. And the video review slows it down so that you know exactly what mistakes you made so that you don't make them again. And everybody loved it because it made them such a better operator. And the guys that made mistakes that pointed them out. It's like, okay, maybe that guy needs to be basically not the first guy in the train or maybe he might be outside security or something because he's shooting everybody in the room. Or you remediate them and you basically say, hey, why, you know,

and so the ethical part comes into, you know, play. Or if you're prisoner abuse, if you're, you know, mishandling the role players, because you feel like they got one over on you or something along those lines, you know, you were able to ID those guys. And because you could ID them, you could point them out to the leadership, say, hey, keep an eye on them, you know, or this. Or they understood, you talked to them, we talked to them directly first, just like, hey, you know, understand, right, why that's bad and why this doesn't, you know, can have a negative

effect, not only on your team, but it might be, you know, you should just shot the guy that we needed, but it had the information or something, because you were just overwhelmed by all these different threats are in the room and you decide to shoot more than you needed to shoot. You see that guy didn't have a gun. You know, in the video review, you can easily see who's a threat and who's not. And they're just, anyway. And that, so the hooded box drill does a great job of pointing out some of our psychopaths. And it makes us way better operators.

And, you know, and the instructors that were CPD instructors took their job so seriously because what we were teaching those guys, they might use it tomorrow, out in town, you know, basically on a subway or, you know, or downrange in Iraq or Afghanistan. And you better make sure what you're teaching these guys is they've got the best chances of succeeding and saving them and their buddies' lives. Eric, you mentioned it briefly, and I would like to kind of put more of a point on it and talk about it a bit more is Operation Red Wings.

and you know you mentioned it in regards to Tim Samanski I have to just preface the conversation a little bit to say that I do have some empathy for Marcus Latrell as a junior guy in a firefight and I'm hesitant I mean we do our after action reviews right but it's professional not personal and I do have some empathy for a guy who is in that moment and dealing with that but there's this whole higher level of essentially cover-ups that we've been talking about. And there was a cover-up around Operation Red Wings. And that's something that I really just find kind of reprehensible. Yeah, 100%. So let me just, I'll get to those points too. Sure. We'll back up a little bit because Marcus is going through Buds and he's got a twin brother.

as he's going through buds and his twin brother is you know so when you're in first phase of buds if you get a day if you get even like eight hours of sleep you know or you know or more sleep because you got to be there so early and everything that just basically to recover is you know is a chore that's why the attrition rate so high because you never really get a chance to recover a lot of times you're just basically grinding and grinding every day is just the times you're getting less is getting harder. And so if you got four days to recover, that's huge. So his brother comes in and fills in for four days. And those instructors, if they would have known that Marcus was going to quit on the battlefield the way he did, and I understand as far as you think he's a junior guy and, you know,

but the problem is, is that all his magazines were full. He ran down the hill and left his buddies. So I have a hard time forgiving him for that. He didn't respond as a guy that that didn't get through buds correctly, in my opinion. And if those guys would have known that he would have quit on the battlefield the way they did, they probably wouldn't have let him graduate or get out of phase. They would have probably made him redo that whole phase. He might not be a seal today. Wait, wait. Okay. I had to get that out. Now I'll get, oh, go ahead. Oh, Hold on. Marcus Detral had an identical twin brother who filled in for him. Yeah, you didn't know this?

I did not. His brother's in Congress. I did not. I don't keep up with... He's a seal, too. And was he already a seal when... No, he was a civilian going through college, came down to visit his brother, and his brother was having a hard time. Marcus was having a hard time.

And so he basically... And his brother's in great shape, identical twin. What was funny about it was, you know, Marcus was in the Goon Squad in the back. He was a slow runner, big guy. And all of a sudden his brother shows up and he's running up there where the instructors were at. And his, you know, Marcus's budd class is basically, hey, get back here. You know, you're doing too good because you're fresh and got fresh legs and you're not injured or whatever. So the instructors never knew about it until almost the end of first phase.

And so when it got exposed, they were just like, holy shit. You know, they were embarrassed that it happened. They were just like, okay, we use a term if you're not cheating, you're not trying. Yeah. And that's, it's a bad saying. What they're trying to say is, hey, think outside the box. Right, right, right. It's not have your brother fill in for a period of time or cheat, you know,

or do something that's not ethical or not correct. We want you to get through buds. you get through buds without steroids. We want you to get through buds, you know, on your own merit. And every instructor when I went through wanted as many seals, you know, guys to get through it. But they wanted to make sure that, you know, you were the right mental fortitude to get through. And so when they found out about it, they had, they were kind of put in this weird position. Do we expose it or not? And I decided to kind of keep it under wraps. It's funny because that is like the if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying, which is, which is, if you get caught, you're not trying to.

And that's, that's the second part of that saying, though, is it, is it, it's only cheating if you don't get caught. And, and if you get caught, then, oh, well, like, that's, that's the second part of that saying, you know, that's, it's both admirable and also, and also, he got caught. hot, that should have been... That's not a huge issue for me per se. Per se. I just wanted to get... But I just... But I wanted to, you know, before he said, because he's a junior guy out on the battlefield,

he'd already had an incident before that one that you guys don't know about where he kind of ran, did some stuff. And he was... And he wasn't fitting in well with his platoon. He was out chasing ass at the... at the on-base hospital or whatever, because he was a corpsman. And so instead of prepping, and their team also failed multiple what they call, you know, final training exercise or, you know, for SDV guys, it might be a little bit different. But they had failed it like three times and they weren't, they weren't taking their job seriously, you know, for the most part.

Marcus definitely wasn't. And now they're in Afghanistan. They get basically put on the side of a mountain. They get in their first firefight. And Marcus does exactly what, you know, somebody who really wasn't really tested. you know, and didn't really apply himself. He runs away from it with pretty much with a fully loaded doubt, you know, chest, you know, harness and everything else and leaves his guys behind.

The situation might have been different if there was a solid team guy up there writing with him. It might be a whole different story. Right. So it happens, you're right. So it happens. And then then it's called for, you know, a QRF, the Red Wings, you know, gets launched in there. They get shot down by an SA7 for some.

some reason the leadership didn't want, you know, they were saying it was an RPG when it was all just like, no, eyewitnesses counts on multiple different people from different helicopters and different, you know, said no, it friggin, it wasn't an RPG. But for some reason, they have to basically, the other team guys that were on the other helicopter have to basically say it was an RPG, you know, it was an RPG. And they, you know, or anyway, so I don't know why they held that information, covered that up. They shouldn't know because that just exposed other helicopters that didn't know what they were doing or that they were running into that situation. I think that is the thing. You know, you talk about

this cover-up and, you know, there are a lot of very heroic and very capable seals. And and I wonder at what level in the leadership, though, these cover-ups or these desires to hide the mistakes and hide these things, dishonor um, dishonor everybody else because even with Chapman, I could be wrong and you, you guys can probably correct me if I am, but I thought that Slabinsky originally

said that you know, he originally told the story that put Chapman in a good light or that I didn't know or whatever and then then special warfare command basically came down on him and his story changed. No. So what originally happened was they talked highly about Chapman. He got whatever, the Air Force, like a Silver Star or something, pretty high metal or whatever. He fought valiantly. He was just like awesome. But what Slab says is that he checked him. He said he was dead. That's why he left him behind. And well, he doesn't even get close to the body. He never checked, you know, gets it. And so, you know, Chapman might have been, you know, so here's another thing.

Chapman had gone through CQD training. All those guys have gone through CQD training. So he was well, you know, trained as far as operating with us. He takes that machine gun bunker thinking those guys are going to be on his left and shoulders. Right. He's done entry. He's expecting them to respond with the training that he has had. And so he might have been just laying quietly trying to snipe somebody and didn't realize the seals were basically, you know, a couple of them gotten hit and that they're escaping down the mountain.

But later on, for whatever reason, Chapman basically starts fighting again. Some people said he might have been knocked out. But in my opinion, he was probably just laying almost ready to sniping somebody. And when he finally got the shot, he probably did it. So he fought for hours, you know, after the guys escaped down the mountain. And it wasn't until the third helicopter came in where he exposed trying to protect that helicopter is when he finally gets shot and killed. So he's on the... the first insertion with a helicopter crashes.

Then he's basically on the second one where he takes machine gun bunkers, kills, goes hand-to-hand, fighting multiple different people because Slab convinced him not to take a pistol for whatever reason. Or that's what I was told, you know, as far as things that, you know, that we learned after the fact that we, you know, you're going to take with you. Oh, he didn't have a pistol? So Slab leaves them. Slab leaves them.

and Chapman fights by himself and that's what, and we didn't, a lot of us knew bits and pieces of the story. Yeah. You know the full detail. Yeah. Until the pred feed comes out and exposes it. And Chapman's, you know, sister, you know, basically gets with a PJ,

writes the book. And there's a whole other chapter that wasn't in the original book that I, and I want to say it's chapter 17 or 27. There's a whole other chapter that you should read about how Tim Samansky tries to stop this congressional. his congressional medal. Like in a revised edition of the book? Yep.

Interesting. They left. So they didn't want to be a seal bashing book. They just wanted to recognize their guy. Right. They didn't realize that they're, you know, slab and Tim Samansky were going to put this, you know, try to stop it and to be a,

so they were trying to do the honorable thing by not exposing the part of it. They were just like, well, shit. If you guys are going to do that, you know, as far as I wish they would have had it in there because they would have exposed our guys. It wasn't until Code Over Country exposes Tim Samansky that he doesn't advance anymore.

He might be in charge of J-Soc today and you'd have the super turn in charge of the most elite fighting forces in, you know, on the world. I'll tell you. All because of...

Yeah, the whole... The whole, if you read the actual like administrative procedures that Naval Special Work, warfare tick, and I'm not even talking about Slavinsky, and Slavinsky's testimony. Because, yeah, because his testimony about Chapman changed from, you know, Chapman was this to Chapman was, eh. But when the Air Force re-looked or looked at Chapman's award and went for the upgrade, the fact that the Navy, a Navy, Navy Special Warfare, and I don't, and this isn't

Slavinsky, this is above him. But the fact that they, you probably know more than I do. But the fact that the Navy initially blocked, they tried to block Chapman's upgrade after the facts came out of what he actually went through. They tried, who tries to block the upgrade of somebody's award, a different service?

And then they said, we will give it to you if Slavinsky also gets it. to me that was like that discredits the entire neighbor no naval special warfare community and there are a lot of good operators in the naval special warfare community but but it's it's a blight yeah and that's what and you're 100% correct everything you just said is exactly spot on exactly what happened and that's why i'm on here saying hey there's a bunch of us in our seal community that have been fighting these guys i filed my i g complaint back in 2008 you know calling out this turn back then guys down at damn neck should have held him accountable he should have gotten shit canned right after that off and then because he was able to stay in then he messes up NSW even more because he tries to stop a Chapman award because he's going to expose him for a shitty leader that he was and so instead of us holding our guys accountable and I'm just like, this is like a warning order to, you know, all active duty seals.

Don't be a fucking turn. Don't do these things like Chapman and Jocko because it's going to come out. The truth is always going to come out eventually. And if you're going to do these things, you're going to get exposed. And I hope these guys, you know, they look at, I feel sorry for him. Yeah. I feel sorry for Marcus. I feel sorry for Jocco.

I feel sorry for Tim Samanth. to be that shallow and put your personal prestige or money above your teammates is as low as you can possibly go. And they got to look at themselves in the mirror. And they can't be happy with what they see. They can't be. Do you think, though, because I don't watch Jocko. I don't know Jock. I don't know anything about Jock other than what people say.

I do know that there are people who say that, you know, who he is now. has like changed their lives, help them out, things like that. Do you think that there's a redemption arc for, for people, regardless of mistakes that they have made during service or whether it's mistakes or shitty behavior?

Like, I don't know, but do you think that there's a redemption arc for people? Of course. If you make a mistake, you know, as far as trying to keep it in-house, mistakes are made. made guys learn from it and they move on and they don't do the same thing over. My problem with like Jocko and like Tim Samanski is that after the fact, you know, it got exposed.

They've been, you know, they've been lying for years to the public of what actually happened as far as, so like Chris Kyle. Chris Kyle worked directly under Jocko. He said he shot Juba. He said that he killed guys, you know, looters in the, you know, the, the dome in, Louisiana said he's he's he's got all these false claims that have been found out to be well you don't have Chris Kyle without jaco you don't have jaco without Chris Kyle so when when Chris Kyle says he he's not making a name for himself he's got a book out there so he has to

basically say yeah he's on a book speaking things says yeah I knocked out Jesse Venturer and just like total bullshit right you know he said yeah he did these things so now Jesse Venture is like a way and And because Jesse Ventura was one of the most well-recognized, well-respected seals, you know, as far as congressmen in Minnesota, doing great things, represented us well. And so Chris Kyle hits him saying, I knocked him out. It tries to make a name for himself. Right. It's embarrassing.

The same thing with Jocko and Tim Samansky against, you know, Dwayne Dieter. Dwayne Deere is the quiet professional that they wish they could be. Right. And so they have to attack guys like that to. try to make a name for themselves. And Jesse had to basically defend themselves in court. And then he had other team guys piling on saying, oh, you know, because Chris Kyle gets killed by a Marine and karma, you know,

I don't know. It's very sad. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's very sad regardless, you know. Yeah. Very sad. Yeah. Just like the situation. But Jesse, you know, as far as he's got to clear his name, he's already in court.

And it's really him fighting against the. media corporation that basically sold American sniper, which we all find out that story's all bullshit. Right. So the media is trying to protect Chris Kyle, even though he's dead because it's going to

tarnish their book and their name and the movie and all that other type. You know, and Jesse's just trying to clear his name. He's not going after the widow. He's going after the people that basically that supported Chris Kyle to do this in the first place. That kind of gets back to yours, Jack, as far as the people like with Marcus

Littrell. Marcus Lattrell fails and does some bad things on the battlefield and, you know, could have recovered from it just like, hey, this is what I did wrong. But he gets the option is like, hey, it was over $3 million if you sign off on this book that was written for you. He didn't write it. And he's just like, do you want to be known as the guy who ran away and left his buddies or do you want to be known as a lone survivor that, you know, basically the story and represents a look that makes NSW look better. And so he chooses to do that. So he has to sit there and go to these speaking engagements.

He has to lie, lie, lie, lie. And he got some bad, you know, senior leaders within NSW basically pushed him to do this. And to write that book. And that's where the story really needs to go. All these investigative reporters, there's a target, rich, in the SEAL community to expose all this stuff. And the only reason I wanted exposed is because, so it doesn't happen again and it cleans us up.

The reason why guys are talking to Matt Cole, Alpha, you know, with, you know, David Phillips, yeah, all these books that are out there, Dave Phillips. The reason why all these guys are talking to those guys is because they've been trying to do it internal for a long period of time. And they're getting no result. and the corruption keeps going. And so the only way to clean it, unfortunately, is for us to go outside of it.

And so that's why I'm talking with you guys tonight. And that's why I've been on the Green Beret Chronicles and anti-hero podcast. And I've been offered to go on, not on the Joccos. And if you wanted to come on to yours and talk to me on yours, that'd be great. So I'm not going to go on to, but I'm not going to go on to theirs, you know, on these other ones that are out there. And there's a lot of guys that found religion all of a sudden. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And paint a picture like, I'm redeemed and, you know, and all this stuff. It's like, well, how many team guys do you fuck up in the first place? You know, now that you've come out that I was a drug dealer and, you know, all this other things that kind of, or things that you did, you know, while you're active. But now you found Jesus all of a sudden, which, hey, I'm a, I'm a religious guy. I'm not, I don't go to church. I just live by a moral compass that my grandfather taught me. And, you know, and I say grandfather, but buck buck buck, is what I told you guys about,

made me who I am stand up for what's right. And I was only encouraged more and more by the CQD instructors and, you know, Duane Deeter himself to do stand up and, you know, have a purpose behind your fight. You had mentioned earlier about, like if we say that 95, 99% of the SEAL community are just solid stand-up dudes. But you were talking earlier about this culture, this small subset, but this culture of sort of, not necessarily blackmail,

but I've got dirt on you, you've got dirt on me type of thing that happens amongst these individuals. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, so, So when we got into the ASOT world, well, first thing, it kind of started down at Damneck with Tim Samansky and, you know, and who he basically kept promoting down there. So it's like Andy Stolp says on one of his podcasts that he didn't see any of this

corruption, he didn't see anything negative or whatever. But the one thing he said that he's where he saw corruption was the advancement and the awards. So if you control who gets the awards and you control who advances, As far as who do you think, are you going to put it, if you're a Tim Samansky or a Jocko, are you going to put it, are you going to advance somebody who's got an ethical moral compass? No, you're going to promote somebody who's a turd that's like you, that's not going to basically say anything. Or that you know you can control.

Right. So with the ASOP world of stuff, as far as you learn how to get leverage over people. Eric, for the viewers who don't know, ASOT, advanced special operations tactics, is teaching special ops guys, how to do source handling and skills that are more associated with the CIA. Spook shit, basically. Yeah. Yeah. But you learn how to basically get guys to do what you need them to do, whether they do it because you motivate them or you do it because you've got leverage over them in some sort. And so it's, it's, you know, it could be, we're all in the same fight together. We're all fighting the same cause, great stuff. Or it could be, it could be like,

hey, I'm going to tell everybody about, so just like with the Melgar situation. what they were going to do to him was fucking disgusting. And I just like, and I can't imagine anybody ever doing that to somebody. And those, anyway, it bothers me that those guys did something like that and they thought they could get away with it. So that's the corruption. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, so they use these ASOT type, you know, tech, you know, skill sets and try to manipulate and try to get leverage over people.

And so a lot of guys don't want to lose their trident. They don't want to get kicked out of the teams. So if you do something, you know, bad, you're glad to get a lifeline and you're going to do whatever that person kind of needs for you. The problem is that the lifelines that they send, you know, that they'll give something. Let's say you've got a young guy that gets a DUI. And he's definitely learned from his mistake and kind of move on from. but if they didn't think that they could control you as far as they thought that you're at the moral compass like oh sorry you got to go you shit can sorry you made a mistake but if we got master chiefs over at damn neck that's got like four or five DUIs so how many times do you get a DUI before you realize that hey you're you're just making mistake after mistake after mistake and you know when it comes to tactical decisions you know, bad things happen, like extortion 17.

Yeah. So as far as the same guys that basically make these, are the problems for the command that some people save end up causing huge problems like extortion 17, Red Wings, Roderidge, Melgar. So I hear you say in a couple things. One, like, guys like Stump wouldn't have seen it because they weren't in the bad boys club.

Like they were kept out of that sort of, loop where they would see the effects of it in the awards or whatever and the promotions but but they wouldn't necessarily yeah i can't say that he didn't see it okay and i i don't know how i can't i i don't know how he would have missed it and um so honestly yeah i can't say and then we have other situations like a source and some team where these these you know confident like like you know heroes end up dying because of a poor leadership decision. And then that leadership doesn't get punished for it.

They get promoted. Exactly. So to hide their mistakes, the guys that are there that might basically tell on them, they give them high awards with V's and basically just like, yeah, it was a bad mistake. We learned from it. And, you know, they covered up with awards. So our biggest mess ups are.

biggest failures have got some of our highest awards. Congressional Medal of Honor for somebody, come on. I mean, it's ridiculous. So you imagine if it's at that level, can you imagine all the smaller, you know, bronze stars with bees that are out there? And that's another target rich environment for the investigative reporters to figure out it's like, well, how many awards did the Naval Special War get? Because if you got it, you wanted to earn it.

And you basically, and I think. you should fucking wear it proudly. But if you didn't, you know, it's something, and you did it just keep your mouth shut. It's something that needs to be, you know. So what? Because of that situation ends up to other guys not, you know, same things happen to them.

Red Wings turns into extortion 17. Right. So what is like, first off, I think you're very bright because I don't know, like I never saw any of this stuff when I was in the range of retaliation or when I was deployed or stuff like that. Like I never saw. Had I seen it, I don't know if I would have,

I don't know if it's the moral fortitude. I don't know, uh, I don't know if I would be like, well, shit went down. Stuff happened. And I'm going to cross that.

You know, in the cops, it's the thin blue line. Like, I'm going to cross that. Because, because there is, because you don't want to,

at least for me I'll say like it's tough to throw the entire brotherhood to the wolves when you know it was just a few people and what's an operator who's still on the job who's still doing it supposed to do when they want to keep operating but they know that if they do come forward

that it'll probably be the end of their career Yeah, so I think it could be. You know, in 2008, you know, I did my IG complaint. Right. But I didn't retire into 2016. Right. I made multiple deployments after that. So I got, for me, getting the truth out there, knowing where you stand, basically encourages other people basically to do the right day and get out there.

Retaliation is also illegal, by the way. Yeah, and just like, here's another thing. And how did I get here? Because I never had a platform and I don't have a platform. I'm on your platform. But I was watching, somebody told me and said, hey, this guy, Matt Kubler, who basically did a thing on Joe Price. Joe Price was my task unit commander before he became the SEAL Team 4 commander.

You know, he did XO and didn't commander there. So I know Joe Price personally. I worked for him directly. And there's no way when I was told, you know, in Afghanistan that he killed himself. I'm just like that is there's no way Joe Price would ever commit suicide. It doesn't make any sense. This is all bullshit. What's the real story here?

Knowing that, you know, there's a little bit of, you know, some guys in our community. And then I would listen to Matt Kubler's, you know, podcast that he did on, I don't know if his Green Beret Chronicles or Anti-Hero, whatever one it was on, I watched it. And I was just like, I fucking knew it. And this is a civilian who is just his high school buddy, who is basically their parents know that Job didn't kill himself. And they're trying to get to the real story. Matt Kubler just happens to be a marshal who investigated suicides and knew a lot about it.

It just happened to be Joe Price's high school buddy. And Joe, so he goes through the investigation and shows how there's no way Joe Price could have killed himself. And I'm just like, I fucking. knew it and here's a civilian that's basically, you know, calling it out. He's got more mental fortitude than a lot of team guys that basically, I was just like, how can I stand by and not basically? And I said, hey, really appreciate what you're doing, Matt. I think you're, you hit the, you know, the nail on the head there. It goes, well, because if you want to do a podcast and, you know, expose any stuff, it goes, I just happen to know the anti-hero, you know, you know, Tyler and

Brent and then, you know, then Jay later on and Jay's been, you know, they've all been great. Jay's been phenomenal. And so that's how the ball got rolling. And it's not that I'm that I'm that I'm happy I'm doing it, not that I'm, you know, as soon as I can go back into, you know, going away into the sideline, that's why I'm not going to do my own stuff. I'm not trying to brand myself. I'm not trying to do anything other than exposed to America that we got some turd.

don't put him in the leadership positions, don't follow them, you know, for these reasons. And be aware that, you know, like when Jocko does a podcast, he sits there and reads from a script, when he did one rebuttal against me, like 434.5 or whatever, him and the other guy are sitting here. They're flipping the page at the same time, reading the same script.

They don't even address, you know, they don't, Jocko didn't address that he warned his guys that the SEAL Team 6 operator came in there before Mark Lee got killed. Before Mark Lee got killed, he said, hey, don't do this stupid shit. Then Mark Lee gets killed. And then he says, a guy goes in there and says, you should be fucking court-martialed and shit can. He says, fuck it, I'm taking it to the enemy.

He has, he got no empathy for his guys. He didn't give a shit about his guys. And so for people to put him up on a pedestal and think that this is a leader that we should follow or get behind. I bet you if, you know, investigative reporter, and this is my, you know, because I don't know how to do it. If you look, if you could figure out if his books are plagiarized, I bet you they're all plagiarized.

I bet you would be, I don't know that for sure, but my opinion is because he's, he's not a good leader. He was never a good leader. He's never been a good business operator. You know, he teams up with a drug dealer, you know, to open up his gym. He starts, you know, echelon front trying to teach businessman how to. run a business he's never run a business all he does the only thing that he's done is being able to scam the public on his persona and he's he's got a great voice talks like batman you know blah blah blah

he's a big meat head and so anyway eric i um though i would like to get into the the death of melgar because i feel like you know like you i suppose i've been telling people about some of this stuff for like 10 years. And I'll tell you, 10 years ago, people looked at me like I had a dick growing out of my forehead when I talked about this. They're like, you are crazy. Like, you are just that shit delusional. Here we are a decade later, and a lot of stuff has come out, and I think people are much more primed. They're much more open to understanding that, yeah, we have a problem. And even the Chief of Naval Special Warfare, I think, said in a memo, we have a problem. So we've at least gotten to that point.

And Melgar, I mean, one of the frustrations I encountered in the veteran community was that a lot of people when I would bring up some of the war crimes, you know, it's this sort of like racist attitude of like, well, fuck them, they're Muslims, they're brown people, whatever, which is pretty angering. But then, okay, we start tracing the ethical and moral lapses. And that goes on and on and on. and that gets us to the point where we as special operators are murdering one of our own, which is Melgar and Mali. And I don't know, I mean, if that's something you're going to defend, you are just a despicable, reprehensible person. I mean, I don't even know what to say to that.

So I would like to hear what you know about Melgar's death and what happened there. Unfortunately, I don't know much about that one. So that was, you know, some guys down at Danneck. And so I'll tell you if I know more information, but other than they were found guilty and that they, you know, did something they shouldn't have done. And anyway, I wish I had more information. But I am as equally disgusted by it, especially finding out what they intended to do to him before they actually, you know, they killed him, you know, accidentally or whatever you want to say it.

It definitely wasn't, that's not a fucking hazing when you do. What I've read, and I also don't have like inside information per se, but what I've read about it is that Melgar became aware that some of the other guys were using the op fund to pay sources. They were embezzling some of that money. And he was not happy with it. And these other guys concocted this scenario where they're going to essentially sexually assault him in his barracks room. and in the process of them Tapping him up and choking, holding him down.

Yeah, they choked him out until he killed him on accident. Yeah. And that's, you know, doing a rear naked choke as far as inappropriately, not doing, because this guy was a mixed martial arts guy that, you know, anyway, when you're in that type of a fight for your life, you fight for your, if you know that's going to happen to you, you're going to fight so fucking hard to make sure that doesn't happen to you. So Melgar fought fucking valiantly as long as he could.

But there was two seals and multiple Marines that were basically, you know, that was in that situation. And then what's bad about it is that those Marines were probably honorable guys thinking that, you know, didn't know to the extreme that they were going to take this to. I would hope they would never. Yeah. Yeah. And they were just like maybe, you know, hey, these are seals and, you know, thinking that they're. And I. We do haze each other quite a bit.

Yeah. But there are limits, right? There are lines. And this clearly crossed some big ones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anything penetrating is fucking...

I was going to say the same thing. Paint or markers and tape are fine. But penetration of any type is probably... We'll just say it's a step too far. Yeah. It's a way... It's... Yeah.

It's criminal. Yeah. Yeah. And I would kill somebody. Yeah. I would fight that hard to make sure that didn't happen. Yeah. I'm sorry.

So I'm apologizing to you guys because that should never happen. These guys should have, you know, that stuff should have been IDed. They should never been put in those positions, you know, to where they had those funds that they felt like they would basically could take advantage of that situation. and they weren't mature enough to handle that responsibility, representing the United States in a foreign country with, you know, with U.S. taxpayer dollars thinking that they could buy hookers and drugs and do whatever. And then when they get exposed, they're like, oh, shit,

I'm just going to do something really extreme and, you know, sickening on top of this. There's a challenge in the special operations community, and this isn't just seals. This is all special operations. That we all love, and I'm making a general statement here but I think that we all to some degree embrace the hooligans and brigands type of

mentality and label but there's also when it's just outright theft and crime and fraud and you know like hooligans and brigands we mean it in a very sort of I think lighthearted manner you know

that yes the lines aren't always so clear yes but if it's for personal enrichment like everybody steals like a hundred mile an hour tape from supply for their squad or for you know for for their team if you mess something up on target you may have been 100 mile an hour tape to a stretcher or something like that right but but there's this idea of being hooligans and brigands but but i think that it is when it's for when it's not like like morally reprehensible and it's for the team

but the idea when it's for personal enrichment is when that idea goes too far so when you're taking ops funds when you're trying to like finagle contracts you know through you know dubious means you know

when when you're stealing shit from you know from the supply Locker and selling it on eBay, that is not the hooligans and Briggins mentality that goes along with special operations. 100% agree. Yeah. And again, it's like hazing. I think hazing is an important part of sort of the special operations legacy because it's

sort of like it's in a way of right of passage. It's also like it's also like seeing if a guy can take the stress. and pressure of it and still like and not because there's a lot of stress and pressure in combat and if you can't take the stress and pressure of hazing can you trust him in combat which is also why hazing

really for a lot of units sort of went away during the GWAT because now it's like everybody's going to be in the stress and pressure of combat anyway so what's the point of taping them to a tree and pulling down his shorts you know do we want to take some pictures

questions for we'll take pictures too um but yeah i bet i got a bunch of questions um i can only imagine we covered a lot of times i've got to pull some up too so so eric with this because i know you've gotten a lot of criticism about you know being a jaco hater or being a seal hater or being this or being that um from talking to you it seems as though you're you're just trying to bring light to these situations for a small percentage Yes. For small percentage in the community.

I've got a lot of hate mail within my community, which I didn't. As far as a lot of guys are just like, thank God you're doing this. And thank God you're coming out. As far as I know it's embarrassing and it kind of hurts us as this. But everybody knows it already. It's already out there. You guys all know, this. There's little information that I've been amplified for you.

But everybody knows it. And so we got to own it our. and this is us owning it. And they're just like, and a lot of them, you know, they're in the military contracting thing. There's just a lot of them wish they could come out and do exactly what I'm doing. I don't have to rely on anything, you know, for my living from NSW or military or anything else like that. I'm living, I'm living my best life and having a great time. Eric, this.

I'm not happy I have to do this, but I think it's important to do it. And I got to look at myself in the mirror. And all the good team guys, well, you know, the group of us that are calling us the true brotherhood or want this to come out and we want to expose it. That's why Cote d'O of a country is so successful. That's why Alfa, all these, it's a cry for help. And if NSW is not going to do it themselves, then us prior frogmen and active duty frogmen, we're going to go to investigative reporters to get it cleaned up.

And I encourage it to happen because until that happens, we're not going to be the seal teams that we use to be. And I want the SEAL teams to be the SEAL teams that used to be because we're solid professional guys. And there's 90% of the SEALs are just great fucking dudes crushing it out there. And we've got a 10% that's just fucking destroying us. And unfortunately, a lot of being leadership positions. Eric, this question we got in, it kind of speaks directly to this. Christian asks, I would like to know what your objectives are by spreading this. message? Is it that you simply, one, want to prevent Jocko's book sales, two, want to state that Jock's message is wrong, or three, is it that Jocko is simply the wrong messenger? And he says,

I'm not a Jock fan in the slightest, but Jock did come back with a 20-hour response, so I just wanted Eric's thoughts. Yeah, so my, I could care less about his books and what he does and all that type stuff. My thing is that I just wanted to expose him for what he is because when he does go off the rails or he does do something here in the future, that's because it's his tendency. He failed multiple different time. He's going to do something. Once I come out with this, I bet there's going to be like 20 people that work for him are going to say, well, go, guess what? Jocko did this. Jocko did this. So it just, it's going to come out eventually. It's just that I'm, you know, getting in front of it and saying, hey, he doesn't represent the SEAL community.

He never has represented the SEAL community correctly. And just because you guys got duped doesn't mean that, you know, it happens to the best of us. And if you just watch them, you'll find out like, holy shit, Eric's, Eric's kind of spot on on this, you know, calling them out the way I am. I got another question here. This one is actually a very in-depth question about Iran. Is that a particular focus for you or something that you're prepared to, like, speak to? Iran? Yeah.

Not, yeah. I wouldn't know much to tell you truth. Okay. And then we did. Well, never mind. I won't get into it on the boardings. A funny story? Come on.

Well, we accidentally took down an Iranian ship one of those operations and we had to get off of it really quick. But I do have the flag from it. yeah no i'm i'm sorry md who asked this question this is like a super specific in-depth question about iran and i don't think eric's prepared to answer that um what do we got on uh on the youtube so um corbin thank you very much uh he says you're a sexual tyronosaurus rex sir thanks uh corbin i'm not i'm not sure who that was you talking to you or i i think it's for D. I'm not sure, but thanks. Thanks, I'm

I'm sorry. I'm I mean, I'm just imagining the small arms trying to get it on. You know what the, no, seriously, paleontologists, they think the little arms, no one knows what they were for. But there's a theory that it was for mounting the female. Oh, just to hook on. There you go.

True story. Yeah, there you go. Fun fact for you out there. I heard it here today. Anonymous, thank you very much. What advice would you give to women that want to be Navy SEALs? A woman made it to day four of Bud's first phase this year, but she quits. So I'm a little conflicted because it does change the dynamic of the guys around you when you got a female around you. So we had the female engagement teams, which were, you know, they did, they crushed it.

on the battlefield. They did great things. And we had solid operators. I just don't know if it should be the same pipeline, you know, as far as, you know, going along the side of the guys. I think they can make it, you know, a women's side of it, you know, equally as challenging as demanding, but be all-around women. I'm kind of conflicted on it because I think there's a huge positive to having them along with you on a lot of operations. And, but I don't know how the interaction with the guys around her you know, going through training would be. Would you say, though, for women, like, I mean, the advice would be to get through a selection, the advice would be the same for the guys.

Like, be in shape and don't quit. Like, suck it up. Yeah, well, you could, and honestly, I think anybody that wants it bad enough can get through buds as far as this matters, how bad you want it. You know, when I was going through buds and we had to sit there and tread water with the, the double, you know, aluminum 80s on my back as far as, and now it was an experienced diver. I'm just like, I said,

fuck it, I'm just going to drown. I'm not going to quit because we're treading water and got guys pulling you under water. And, you know, it's a beehive situation. Everybody's kind of panicking a little bit because everybody wants to, but you've been tread water for now 15, 20 minutes with these huge fucking tanks on your back. And you're just like, I'm exhausted. I can't. I'm just like, so I had made decisions.

I said, screw it. I'm just going to drown. to go under water and the instructors are going to come in and save me i'm not quitting though but that was the dedication that i was willing to drown myself not that you have to do that it was just that's i don't recommend it luckily it didn't happen you know i got to the bottom of the pool and i was i didn't like it down there either so i came back up one more time and that's when they secured us yeah but i was willing to drown so i don't it was like in high school i was a little better than an average athlete. I broke my high school record for the most tackles or what we had a great,

you know, I peaked in high school because I had a great high school, you know, football career. But, but I'm saying I wasn't, you know, when I showed up to do the first diving screening test or whatever and the seal motivator was basically said, all right, you got to swim this, you know, distance and you got to use the side stroke or the breaststroke and he goes, if I see your hands come out of the water and I'd point to you to get out of the pool because you failed. I'm like, how in hell do you swim without your hands coming out of water? That's how kind of stupid I was or ignorant I was. And so you can learn all that stuff as far as to get better at it, get better running, better. That's all that's trainable. It's the mental side of it that you're just

like, you're going to do what it takes. You're going to prep yourself. You're going to prepare. You've got to do all the drownproofing stuff. It's going to be second nature to you because you've done it a hundred times. It is not like the first time you do it is when you're out at buds. So all this stuff is known what you should do to prep for it and it should be to get through. And we should have huge success getting through because everybody knows what you need to do to get through. Somebody asked, I don't know, like I don't follow sort of military, like the drama and what I don't know anybody. but somebody asked, somebody said that Don Shepley had a response to you. Do you have, what did you think of his response?

I don't know what that is. Yeah, I don't know what that is. I'd say a response. Okay. I think what I have heard is there's a lot of, because he calls out phony seals. Right. And so you've got a lot of guys out there. So what's, what's, what's,

What's worse to me is you got a guy claiming that he's a seal that's in this, you know, small little bar somewhere or doing, you know, somehow he's got some accolades saying he's a seal and he's not. And he's somehow he's been able to benefit from it. But it's on a small thing. What's worse to me is a Tim Samansky, who is a Navy SEAL, and he uses his rank and he uses his position to try to stop Chapman from getting a fucking congressional medal of honor. Yeah. So what's worse? Tim Samansky or a guy claiming him is a seal over here. And a bar to get a free drink.

Yeah. Yeah. Or to get laying, you know, as far as it's just, it's childish. You know, it's like, okay, this day and age, you know, it's the global war on terms and we're actually in war. That shit doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. Most guys aren't going to out there doing it or whatever.

And if they do, it's another person I feel sorry for. Yeah. It's like, oh, my God. You got to look yourself in the mirror. Magnus Red, thank you very much, is Regiment. on a reconnaissance company officially a part of JSON. I'd have to ask. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You check Wikipedia. I'll tell you what, the Marines were awesome. Yeah.

Every time I've worked with them, I've been around him, as far as some of the most stand-up, solid guys, the two Marines that came on, you know, that spoke, you know, what they saw from Tass Unit Bruiser while they were there, you know, just, you know, just solid. and great guys and they did it because they were just doing the right thing. And those are just two of the Marines of the many that basically have spoken to me since then. And since I've done these podcasts, there's people reaching out to our network of not only me, but multiple other seals and exposing more and more stuff. So if you're a team guy and you don't like what I'm saying,

it's probably because you're one of the turds that need to go away. if you're not and you're just like in a expose you just like I'm helping you out by basically trying to make sure this stuff these guys like Tim Samansky and Jock don't get in charge of men they get them killed

both those guys got good seals killed because of their poor leadership and their poor decision and they didn't care about their guys' lives that they put out there. Joe's gotcha. Thank you very much. Do you think because of how big and successful the seal brand has become that it's attracting the wrong type of candidates into the teams.

100% well somewhat yes because a lot of people don't know that the ones that the branders the people that are out there branding it aren't the it's not our quiet professional good guys the ones that are willing to go out and to do this type stuff and now me being one you know kind of out there doing it but I'm not doing it for any personal benefit. I'm not trying to brand myself. All I'm trying to do is expose the branders that are doing it so that other people don't do it. So yes, we got guys that are getting into the teams thinking that they can become a movie star or do podcast or write books, do one platoon and then write a book about being a Navy SEAL. And just like, and so that's what, you know, the investigative reporters need. Just like all these books that came out, seal books, who backed them?

Who backed lone survivor? Who backed, you know, American sniper? Who, you know, these, who are the puppet masters that are controlling Marcus LaTrell right now doing a podcast team never quit? I mean, the worst slap on the face is the guy that quit on the battlefield is now got a podcast who is, you know, and you know Marcus isn't capable of running that himself. There's puppet masters that are controlling Marcus and making him make some bad decisions.

and not expose what he's doing, trying to make money. And then you got all the, you know, all the false awards, and these guys do speaking engagements. You know, if you get Congressional Medal of Honor and come speak at your event, it brings some clout that you could bring in somebody of that. Well, if it's a false award that this guy is getting money for, just like who promoted that award and who's getting a kickback

from promoting that award? Well, then you have the majority of the guys who, the guys who, you know, people like Red, who, you know, you will probably, you know, hopefully we hear from him someday. Hopefully he comes out and tells his story. But he's drinking my tiths on the beach somewhere. But, yeah, or, you know, or growing wheat or doing, doing whatever, you know, whatever he wants to do, you know, like he's, you know, you have people. And there are so many of those guys out there. And look, there's nothing wrong with developing a public I mean, Jack and I both have public personas.

You know, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just there's so many guys out there who are just content to live their life and not. Or you have somebody like, what's that podcaster? Is it Mr. Ballin? Who,

he was a seal. He was a seal, but he just does weird shit videos like creepy stuff or cool stuff. You know, and it's not about that. I don't know who it is. Yeah, yeah, but I'm saying that, you know. Sounds like he's not representing us too well, though.

No, no, no, no, he's great. He's great. You know, what I'm saying, though, is that, is that, you know, it is interesting, for instance, I think the people that really build their brand on what they did. And not taking anything away from that, because if you did it, you deserve it, and you have to make a living. And if you went to Harvard, you're going to tell people you went to Harvard, right? Like, there's nothing long.

If it's true, it was all accurate information. I supported 100%. If you're not giving away TTPs or SOPs, and you're not exposing, you know, people that you're not supposed to be exposing, as far as you're just telling a story that's interesting that we need heroes. We need guys that basically that represent the community correctly. And did the right thing on the battlefield, did the right thing in life, did the right thing in training.

And those guys, you know, I got, no problem with them doing and capitalizing on their experience in the team. So that, that's great. And if they wrote a book and it's accurate, great, good on them. Like Kyle Mullins, uh, the seal wrote a great book. He's probably, not Kyle Mullins. That's, I'm sorry, he was the seal, or the candidate got killed. I'm mixing up things.

Milligan and, uh, sorry about, Ben, Ben Mulligan, sorry, Kyle, Kyle, Kyle should have been a, we've had, we've had Ben on, you know, and he's a great. Okay. I mean, we wouldn't have a show if people weren't willing to share their stories. And sharing their stories is an important part because, you know, it's like these histories need to be told. They need to be remembered. They need to be accessible, you know. And he was pretty sure he was at Team 4 wouldn't he.

And he was a good operator. So as far as, you know, on top of being a good author, you know, he was a good operator. So he's a good dude. So I'm glad that he's having success. We love that. Shout out, Ben. We love you, man. Yeah.

We'll even let you come back even though you were a seal. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, since this podcast. That brings up a great point. There are great guys out there doing, that are still doing great stuff. There are. I know I'm bashing, I'm bashing some of them, but it's a small percentage. And that's what, you know, unfortunately, the public has put these small percentage

because they're willing to brand themselves in a false way. And I'm just bringing light to, hey, they didn't do what they said. they did when they were active duty. It's also interesting what like people pick up on or when they pick a side because like when, you know, when we talked about Eddie Gallagher, right? And people like, oh, you know, you guys are bashing seals. It's like, well, but there were seals who testified against them. So which, which side are we on?

Which veterans are we supporting? Which veterans are we supporting, you know? Which seals do we hate? You know, do we hate it? the Gallagher, do we hate the seals that were testifying against him? Like, you know, we don't hate any veterans. You know, it's like we just want to explore the truth. So for that many guys to band together and to call out their leadership as far as Eddie Gallagher,

that speaks volumes to me. Right. And so one guy's word over this many, you know, many other guys. And then knowing what it takes to call out your own, you've actually gone down that trail. Yeah. I know how hard it is. Yeah.

And I know that it ruined their careers, you know, as far as that, you know, a lot of them got out because they were just like, screw this. You know, I'm an honorable guy and you guys are bashing me for standing up and doing what's right. Right. And just like, and you guys are taking this guy's word over mine and just like, it just like not taking Jesse Ventura's word over Chris Kyle. Now everybody knows what a liar Chris Kyle was, but at the time there was so many team guys bashing Jesse and it was unjust, uncalled for it and it was sick, you know, it's bullshit. Right, right. He's a, you know, it was an honorable frogman that basically did great things for us.

I got no, I got no, you know, after reading Alpha, I kind of have to, and when, when they end the book and it's well-soluble. or he would have been sued, you know, as far as it would be, you know. So it's a well-sourced book, in my opinion. And when the EOD guy gets shot and, you know, and can die, and they instead of calling for a medevac to that spot, they basically hide where they're at. They basically transport them all the way back with a chance of him dying. Right.

It's like over because he doesn't want to get exposed for doing something that he wasn't supposed. That's where the line was drawn for. me. That was when they left their blue force trackers behind, right? So that they didn't know what they were. Yeah. And you're just like, especially with close in air support and you're just like how easy it is to misidentify

a group and just like it. So those guys could have gotten blown up you know, by our front of fire easily. Yeah. That happened even on Jacco's deployment. They got you know, blue on blue situations because they're doing stupid shit. Not telling everybody what they're doing. And those guys are all talking about that stuff

too. Breddie Good, thank you very much. Has Eric seen Men of Honor with Cuba Gooding Jr. And is it his favorite or second favorite Navy Diver movie? It's my, I don't know of any other Navy Diver movies, but it's an awesome one. You have the abyss, but that was Seals, yeah. Say again? I said you have the Abyss, but I think that was more Navy Seals.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Navy Seal would. Charlie Sheen or, you know, the Diver movie with, you know, Cuba, yeah. I would go with the Divero. No, Carl Brashears was a true hero.

And I think, I think he died recently, like, within the last, like, 15 or 20 years, I think, out in New Jersey, right? I think it was, yeah, like, no, he was a true hero, for sure. And if you have not seen Men of Honor, you definitely need to because it's an amazing movie. And it's a true story. It's funny, because I got a, um, it's a, it's a real hero. I'm a couple of cup, but I got a Mark 5 dive helmet because I love my Navy diving career, you know, as far as you should see. I'll purposely don't put all the paddles and plaques and I do it with this thing behind me.

But I got a lot of cool memorabilia stuff that I just cherish. Yeah. My Mark V dive helmet, you know, is one of them and it's, you know, I'm pretty proud of. I unfortunately lost my plaque with the old Mark five dive knife. I had a, I had a plaque, you know, when I left with one of those. And those are like almost impossible. fine now. Yeah, I got one of those too. And I got it, you know, so I was telling you earlier about my Navy dive buddy, Ted, and we were both high school buddies.

He became a Navy diver. I became a Navy diver. And, but he gave it to me because, you know, when I was telling you, he did a lot of stuff with subs and they would be inside subs sometimes and some of the lockout things so you could bang on. Yeah. This is a screw motion. It's like in this heavy brass. It's a heavy brass.

It's a heavy brass. It's a heavy brass. It's a kind of crass. kind of corkscrew. It's a heavy brass round sheaf with like, with a knife. You got your story down, Dave. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a solid. Yeah. It's a cool night to have. Yeah. Yeah. Kyle P, thank you very much. Has the relationship between NSW and AFSOC improved after the Chapman Medal of Honor?

Probably not. I mean, I think the way we handled. that and didn't call out our guys as far as, and I'm hoping this will start to repair that situation because I'm telling you right now, it should never have happened. And unfortunately, we didn't weed out people that we should have earlier to make sure that stuff didn't happen. It's embarrassing to our community 100%. And I apologize for my community. That is, if we don't have anything else on. No, I think that's all we got. questions. There's more?

Patriot. I asked them. Yeah. I think we might have one more. Well, God damn it. Oh, okay. I got it. Okay, from the outside, it seems like soft attracts the most true believers in service. In addition to weeding out psychopaths, etc., did you spot an excess of patriotism or however you would describe it and try to correct it? Thank you for sharing these insights. Yeah, I'm not sure how to answer that one. Yeah, I don't know what an excess of patriotism is other than if, you know, you get so far out over your skis that you're losing track of reality.

But, yeah, I'm not entirely sure what he was. I don't know how you could have too much patriotism. You know, as long as you're justified in your actions, your escalation of force, you're doing things correctly to the threat that's presented. and you're doing it for America, you know, as far as I can't think of it. I've been to a lot of other countries in the world and by far we're the best. And I love America. And I would go through everything I've gone through exactly almost identical seal community. I think it's the greatest community out there.

It's just the most solid guys that you ever want to be in a wartime situation, have on your shoulders left and right behind you. is that I never had to work. The guys that I did platoons with, the guys that I were in tasking, I never had to worry about what they were doing. I knew they controlled their zone of responsibility. They knew I had mine and that we could,

you know, we did great things and we were all solid guys. And so, you know, all the platoons I did were great. And I loved them. Do you want to tease out Friday's episode? Yes. So on Friday, we are having we're

Pat O'Donnell Yeah we're having Pat O'Donnell back thanks With his book and Vanquish Which is about special operations During the Civil War You know President Lincoln's Attempt to like Yeah the special operations

The attempt to find Most of these Rangers Like a lot of very cool stuff I haven't finished the book yet But I will It's getting a ton of great reviews And I know Pat was researching this We've had Pat on

before. He's a historian author, and I know he was researching this book for a really long time. So if you want to hear about like spec ops way back in the day. We haven't had Pat on the show in like three years or something, three and a half years. Check them out on Friday. Eric, thank you so much for spending your Friday night or Monday night with us. We really appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on.

And I hope so for the people out there that, especially if you're people that are going to start bashing me because of this, it happens as far as you, I read the comments. I respond to a lot of them, especially if they're just kind of pissing me off. But and I, and they shouldn't bother me, but, you know, some of them are just so childish and so whatever. And those ones I'll ignore. But ones that come from, I can tell comes from a team guy who was trying to paint, you know, picture. at least don't be a pansy ass motherfucker and put your name on it. I'm putting my face out there. And I'm willing to stand behind what I'm saying.

Don't be a piece of shit and basically make a comment as being like coming from, you're an operational team guy, you know, as far as without putting your name on it. And it, you know, so anyway, you know, I'll stand behind what I'm saying, stand behind what you're saying. And that's when most of them won't do it. So, you know, if you're, if you're, uh, open to it, maybe on our Patreon, if you, we could put the ID complaint and, and, and I don't, I'd be happy to, you know, and, you know, maybe some of the, some of the course reviews. If, if, if you're open to it. Yeah, yeah. No, I'll put some stuff together as far as, uh, some after action. Okay. As far as the, the critiques of, you know, some of the key guys that, you know, basically that talks to. you know, or that might say something negative.

I'll shoot you my email. I'll tell you honestly, the biggest Travis D that, you know, is happened because of Jocko and Tim Samaski is when they got rid of CQD. Yeah. And just so everybody, so just so that everybody out there as far as that's active duty right now, Dwayne is still training everybody and everybody, not, he's selective, you know, and is still quite a professional. But he's got a training site that would kill houses and 300, whatever you,

acres of property of long ranges and he's still busy as a as he can possibly be he does a lot of great stuff for kids and you know a hero's program he's he's still crushing it up there and we need those ethics brought back into NSW and he he doesn't give a shit he'll he'll start training tomorrow if you know people reach out to him like ourselves that need that training and I'll tell you right now it is life-changing, life-saving training. And that's why it was for 22 years and why these two terms had to get rid of it because it exposed them for being turns.

Well, it's interesting because what was that old video? Because when you mentioned like Frank Cucci, like I know the teams trained under like Vernack, VUNAC or the JKD stuff and, you know, and then Frank Coochee, but a lot of those guys were coming out with those, was it Panther videos? What was the video company that you'd see in Soldier of Fortune

and Black Belt magazine? There were a few. But they would always have those huge, like, page ads about the secret hand-to-hand, you know, techniques and Navy SEALs. And they'd be, like, armed with only a knife. And I'd be like, why would they go into combat armed with only a knife, you know?

Yeah. But... The tactical failures of just, like, how did you end up in that situation? in the first place. Yeah. He's just like to, and so it's, it's,

when you, when you get into the operational world and you start understanding what's operational and what's not, you quickly find out that, yeah, why in the hell would I be doing, why would I be carrying a hatchet,

you know, going on target, you know, as far as it doesn't, no technical sense. There's a lot of not, you know, it looks cool. And,

and I don't know if you, But you quickly realize there's no tactic. When we are trying to shred ounces on our body armor, and we're trying to make us, because we've got to carry all this stuff. And you're carrying a one or two pound frigging something that's not tactically sound to use. When you would ever have to use it would probably, you've made so many tactical infractions that you probably shouldn't have a gun in the first place,

in my opinion. So I'll tell you that I, I carried a Tomahawk my first few ops because I grew up idolizing the LERP guys. And, you know, the guys in Vietnam that carried stuff like that because there was an operational use for it in Vietnam for those guys. But in my mind, I had it, you know, that was what I thought. I also have mentioned before that I had a magazine full of tracers because they did. The tracers got me almost shot the fuck up because it told the enemy exactly where I was. And it's unnecessary in a time when you have IR lasers.

And the Tomahawk went away after I figured out it was really hard getting over a wall with shit hanging all over your gear. And the fact that once your primary goes down and your secondary goes down, it's probably not time to pull. you know first off if your primary aunt secretary you've gone down there's something wrong and by the time you get a tomahawk out like things are really things are really out of control yeah yeah now it brings up a good point because when we when i first started at n s w you know every 10th round was you know a tracer round because we didn't have the you know the MVGs and stuff like that so as far as you know as we evolved we get better and we start we all did we all did stupid things when we were young and then we weren't really in a war situation as drastically.

And you start to realize that thing, you know, white light compromises you. Yeah. As far as not having a suppressor, you know, basically muzzle flash. You, when you, when you get to ID the bad guy because of the muzzle flash, you appreciate that you don't have muzzle flesh. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Eric, thank you so much for coming and spending a few hours of your time on the show with us

and spitting some truth, some tough pill. to swallow, but I think it's important for people to hear them. Yeah, and to my community out there, I'm just trying to help us. So I hope this helps. I really do. Thank you, man. I appreciate, you know, the integrity. And we'll see all of you guys on Friday with Pat O'Donnell.

Be there, be square. Thank you. Thanks for having me on.