The Team House - Operation Red Wings & Saving Marcus Luttrell (From Different Perspectives)

Episode Date: July 6, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOver the Years we've had many guests on from different branches of the military who were involved in Operation Red Wings and the rescue of Marcus Luttrell. This is a compilation of those episodes.Todays sponsor :Cayman Cigar Companyhttps://www.caymancigars.com/TEAMHOUSEfor 10% off.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] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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The Team House with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Park. Afghanistan targeting was, you know, still in its infancy, is still a lot of human-based at that point in time in Afghanistan. So there really wasn't a great targeting platform to go on. You know, we look for, you know, legacy targets and plan out some of that stuff. And as far as what the Rangers were doing, a lot of it, We were just on TSTs, time sensitive target manning for one platoon, and then the other was on CISAR, combat search and rescue.

It was the basic standard range or taskings at that point in time. And we had just rotated off of the Csar tasking onto the time sensitive target tasking. So we had just finished all the standups for running through timelines and checks on all that stuff and got the word that, you know, Marcus LaTrell's team was going to go out and do this, Operation Red Wings. And, you know, as Rangers always do, you know, we get enough information to have a conversation about it at Chowhall table. And so started talking with some of the recky guys. And, you know, they're, you know, they're briefing us because they've been following this a lot closer than like a rifle platoon has.

It wasn't kind of in our wheelhouse as far as talking. targets we were looking at, but stuff that Recky had been looking at in areas to do, to do some of their stuff. And they were like, yeah, we wouldn't do it this way, not four guys. No, we'd take a whole reccy section, you know, 12 guys and then, but we wouldn't do it without a rifle tune and support, you know, even if it was a, you know, 5K standoff between the two because they can fight to us and we can fight to them and it's a bigger footprint on the ground. Yeah, Do we run the risk of spoiling the target? Yes, but on the other side of it, you know, we as Rangers, you know,

we're always going to bring everything in the kitchen sink to bear on an objective and turn the, you know, the odds in our favor. And, you know, did they do anything wrong the way they did it? No. They made judgment calls along the way. And, you know, we can armchair quarterback this. Right. you know, years

later and say, well, I wouldn't have done that and I wouldn't have done this, but, you know, they did what they do. Right. So, you know, that led us into, you know, you know, them losing comms and them getting in the fight and, you know, as the movie portrays it out. And, you know, and then we've got to go in and

do the combat search and rescue on the turbine 3-3 crash site. and then figure out what the question mark is. What was going on on your base with your platoon? I mean, are you getting word that this team is compromised? There are guys who are MIA. We might have to go look for them. Then you find out a bird went down.

I mean, can you take us through a little bit of that? So that morning, so June 28th, that morning, you know, we got up and we just did what Rangers do. You know, we got up, did PT, went ate breakfast, going on with our training cycle. We were going to go out to East River Range, which is just outside of. Bogram, the little town of Boggroom, so we left the base, got outside there. We're going to go

do some shooting drills and just, you know, have a good session on the range. We get out there and start throwing the target stands off the trucks, and that's about the time that, you know, we find out that the burst been shot down, and, you know, it was, hey, don't worry about what you've thrown off the trucks, get back on the trucks. We've got to get back. And There was a lot of guys were like, what are we doing? And, you know, we didn't have any of the answers at the leadership level of what was going on. We just knew that, you know, we had to be back for something that was going to get briefed, you know, to us. And as the situation was developing, and so then as we were rolling back in, you know, we'd find out that the aircraft has been shot down, that teams in the fight.

And, you know, we're just on standby at that point. So I wouldn't really kind of understand the whole situation for, you know, probably another six years as I progress through through leadership. But, you know, as I tell people, it's, you know, as a young guy, you know, it's not that we're not going to get in there and we're not going to be a part of this and we're not going to, but we're going to turn the tables. So that way when we do recommit forces into this area, we've got so many assets to bear on the objective that nobody would be in their right mind to want to play. So, you know, it was probably, you know, about 10 hours or so after the initial shootdown that, you know, that night as we're getting ready to launch.

And then, you know, finally got the green light that we're going to go. And we load up everybody that's going to fit on the aircraft at altitude and launch. And then we hit mountain weather on that night and have to divert infill and go sit at Jolabad for a day. and then wait to get infilled the next night. What was your understanding at that time of the situation on the ground? So the understanding was that the 47 had been shot down. There was no movement on that. You know, ISR feeds were terrible at the time.

I, you know, don't even understand how people could understand, you know, what they're seeing on that screen. It was such a bad quality feed. even then, you know. And so we knew that the aircraft been shot down. We were going in to do combat search and rescue on the crash. You know, Murphy's team was still a question mark as to what's going on because there had been no radio comms with them since Murphy's sat phone call.

So the priority tasking was to recover the crash because we knew where it was. and then after that it would just be to figure it out, if you will. So we interviewed Tony Brooks on the show before. Was he in your platoon? Tony was in one Charlie. So he was the other half of the element that went up. So it was a third platoon led the way because we weren't on the C-Sar. So we didn't have all the recovery and crash axes and all the stuff.

to do that. So we kind of plowed the way, if you will, and we were there to kind of take the brunt of any contact that was going to be made because we were just there to add security to what they were going to come in and do as far as recovery. That was, you know, one Charlie's tasking at the time. So that was, that was where Tony was. And, um, okay, cool. Yeah, no, it's cool to get like some different perspectives on it. So, so then what was your platoon? I mean, just explained what your platoon's role was, but then walk us through infill and getting on the ground. So infill, we infilled somewhere about, probably about 8,000 feet, you know, is what we could get to

with the package size that we had on the aircraft. And so we knew there wasn't a way to land anywhere up there. So we knew it was going to be a rope and it was going to be at least a minimum of 40 footer. And it ended up 40. And then as a rope drifts, you know, it kind of goes 40, to 60 to you know as it works out and then when one Charlie came in I know their rope started at 60 and it ended somewhere around 80 Tony said they just roped down into fog

with like no idea of where the bottom was yeah yeah it was well I mean the fog came in after we were already on the ground I know what he's talking about because you know it is just the way the weather was working and you know it's just it was it was you know one of those points where I never really you know after a private I never roped with with leather gloves you know fast rope you know the working work gloves anymore I always did it in a Monex shooting gloves the hamburger helpers

yeah I never tried like trying to take those gloves off and always felt like my hands got so much hotter and you know I had a teen sergeant said hey just just rope in your shooting gloves because you don't have to grip the rope is tight you dissipates the heat just as well And he said, just try it on the fast rope tower. So I did. And that's a 40 foot rope. And, you know, it wasn't terrible. And then I was watching guys carrying 240s and stuff roping in.

And they've got the big thick gloves on. And they're squeezing extra tight just to have a feeling on the rope. Right. And so then they're burning in, you know, and their hands are getting so hot that, you know, they're blistering at, you know, still 10 or 15 feet above ground. And they're just letting go. They're like, I'll just deal with it when to hit the ground. And, you know, when one Charlie came in, you know, they had the,

the same problem and guys were falling off and then they were just ending up in a big pile and I know their RTO had had his arm broken because he got stepped on. Yeah. That's, and so, you know, he got guys that need to get medevac, but you ain't getting medevac. Yeah. Yeah. So what was it like for your platoon roping in and getting on the ground? Uh, it wasn't, we didn't have any contact or anything. And it was it was quiet, you know, and then when you, when the, the brownout cleared and all the, you know, the wash of everything and, you know, you kind of look up the mountain, you know, you, you can see the crash because it's still on fire. Still burning. And it's just kind of one of those ominous moments, if you will, you just kind of, you know, the gravity of what you're doing has

finally set in because you're seeing it with your own eyes and not on a TV screen. And then, you know, just becomes the all-night walk uphill through the nettles and, you know, the Scotchburn, or not the Scotchburn, but, you know, the pines and all the ground cover that's up there in the mountains. And it's just, were you guys, was there any intelligence that there were enemies on the objective or around the objective? We had, you know, any eyes around the area, but it wasn't anything like, on the objective. There wasn't any movement on there throughout the day or anything,

and there wasn't any, you know, people coming and going from it. I think, you know, looking back at it now, they realized what they had done and what was about to happen. And so they just kind of got a little bit of standoff. And they really were, it was to observe, you know, how we were going to take care of it. yeah and so you know as the the the that day turned into you know a week to two weeks you know at night you know you see little fires on the mountain and you know get eyes on it as best you can

and then AC130s dropping you know 105s on it yeah so what was that first movement that first night what was the movement like for you guys how long did it take it took all night we didn't get to the top until about an hour hour before, you know, sunrise and then we're sitting there on it and then kind of listening to one Charlie, you know, suck their way up the mountain. And then one Bravo was still about halfway up the mountain because they had driven in from Jolalabad the night or the morning that it happened. They drove up the 90K in their trucks. And then they started walking from the base of the mountain up. And they didn't make it until the next day. And, you know,

only about half the guys that started to climb up the mountain made it up. The rest of them had to go back down and get picked up by the trucks. And, you know, because they're just either heat exhaustion or, you know, twisted ankles and whatnot. Yeah. Yeah. And so what did that, what was the next like week to, what did that set in motion for you guys in particular? So what it set in motion for us was,

You know, priority tasking was to accountability and recovery of all, you know, members of that aircraft crew and then the QRF team that was on there. So that totaled 16. And so we got those numbers, you know, kind of early afternoon. And there was a small clearing on top of the mountain. You could put a small helicopter, like a little bird on it. But it was, you know, CDS drops for demolitions. and, you know, basically had to create an HLZ to be able to get everybody off that mountain that, you know, the remains for those guys. And so it was kind of a good distraction, if you will, to do timber charges and clear that space to be able to make enough room to bring, you know, a helicopter in.

And so we just finished our regimental breaches course. And so all that old stuff, you know, that timber stuff was still fresh in everybody's mind. So it was, you know, we're all sitting there trying to do the math and the first arms. They're like, use the P method. Yeah. So we're sending tree stumps and everything up, you know, like Roman candles. It was, you know, just pack as much explosives in these little burrow holes underneath and launch it. And so that was fun.

We cleared that. We got the tasking for, you know, what would turn out to be go down the mountain and find Marcus. And so that started the fun of the mountain weather moved in that night and dumped on us. And we're trying to walk downhill and, you know, the trail's a little streambed at the time. And so guys are slipping and falling and guys are trying to not fall off the ridge. And then we end up just for safety reasons, you know, we end up spending the last few hours. kind of huddled under pine trees waiting for the sun to come up so that we don't lose anybody. How many guys did you have left in your platoon at this point?

We had split the four, so we had two squads in the PLs package. So, you know, the platoon leader, RTO, FO were with us. And then the platoon sergeant had his, you know, one squad, two machine guns, you know, on still on the top. on the top of the mountain. Close to the crash side. We knew we were, yeah, they were still up there with one Charlie and reinforcing them. And we're just kind of the maneuver element, if you will, going down and trying to confirm or deny what this push to talk signal was that we were getting being triangulated down into this. I always forget the name of the village, so I can't ever remember it.

So you guys had to kind of like hide out, not hide out, but, you know, take cover under the pine trees until dawn and then continue to move down to where this, you know, ostensibly there was a SIGGIT hit that you had to go investigate. Right. And so that was basically confirm or deny, you know, was it enemy recovered American equipment or was it actually, in fact, you know, Murphy's team or, you know, you know, what the question mark was still for that. And that was kind of where we were at for the tasking. You know, the crash had been accounted for us. And now we're just trying to figure out, you know, the fate of, you know, this four-man SEAL team. And so, you know, finally put you down in there.

Was it a consistent signal that you guys were going off of? Or was it just like a single, a couple of hits? And they're like, okay, around this general area. No, it wasn't like a consistent, but you know it's like somebody just key in the key in the push to talk you know intermittently enough to get a you know an orbital transmission to triangulate you know where it was and so it's kind of confirm or deny what that was so you know there was an s f team that was walking up that we tied in with okay and then push back down into this this little village and then you know as we're doing the ranger smash through all the doors and clearing the village you know you know as we're doing the ranger smash through all the doors and clearing the village you know, here comes Marcus, you know, up from where they had him hidden and kind of stashed. And so, you know, confirm that and then start, you know, doing the. So they actually brought Marcus out to meet you guys.

Right. And they knew why we were there. They knew what we were looking for. And so it was to, you know, hand him over and then do the, you know, kind of the whole SF thing where they do the, you know, let's drink some tea and talk and, you know. what was that moment like what was that moment like when you first got face to face with marcus and confirmed this guy's alive and what what was your your perception of all that um i don't know the big question you know that we you know the first thing that we asked was once you know you went through the whole challenge and and kind of confirmed that it is him you know through the whole you know m i p o w m i cards that you know we all fill out and going through that it was you know dude where's everybody else you know, and then, you know, he's like, they're dead. Well, okay, great.

Not great, but, you know, it's like, okay, but where? They're on the mountain. That's it. You know, it's kind of that you can't give me anything more. The CEO has just started kind of a frustration thing, and I get it. You know, he'd been, you know, that probably wouldn't have been fun to come down that mountain the way he says he came down that mountain. but you know I

I would like to hope to think that you know my friends were dead on that mountain I could at least remember some kind of terrain feature that I could at least tell somebody that they're you know they're up here in this area and so what was the next step after that initial you had that initial questioning of Marcus

what happened next so what happened next was you know we just kind of secured the little village that we were at and you know, confirmed that it was him, passed up, you know, over SAP that, you know, we had him and we were in control of him, and then we just had to sit and wait for nightfall to come so that we could bring in the middle back bird and get him out. And then it just started, you know, days and days and days of sweeping and searching

this mountainside for the rest of the team. For the rest of the team. I mean, did you guys eventually find, find, the remains of those three other guys? Yeah, we exiled Marcus in the next day. You know, we were sweeping the lower portion of this, of this spur. And the other half of our platoon was coming from the top of the ridge down. We were just kind of meeting in the middle.

And so after we had met in the middle and, you know, kind of traded information, and they got a break. You know, they started to climb back up for the night. And we turned around and it started coming back down to finish our swing. They stumbled on on two of the remains just by happenstance. Somebody lost their footing and slipped into a little wash and ended up, you know, face first with two of them. Do you want to talk about, because I think it sounded like you're somewhat involved or on the periphery of it, of the Operation Red Wings when that bird went down.

Yeah. So in Afghanistan there basically, there were basically three different types of missions. for Apache pilots. And so the first is ring route security. And as we were talking before, pretty much everything in Afghanistan or much of everything moved by helicopter. And so when the Blackhawks or Chinooks would transport people or equipment, you'd always have Apaches with them that were escorting. And that mission was usually long and fairly boring for the most part. Because again, the Taliban are pretty smart. They're not going to pick a fight with an Apache or a Black Hawk that has an Apache. And so it's long hours of flying and not really doing much.

On the other extreme, you would have the direct action missions where you're, you know, a customer on the ground is going to go hit a compound. And so you're going to provide covering as they're flying in. You're going to escort them. You're going to clear the landing zone. And then you're going to transition to providing over the shoulder support for the folks on the ground as they're kicking indoors and doing what they do. And So that was, those types of missions were usually planned weeks in advance. You do a lot of rehearsals. Most of them, I think almost all of the ones I was slotted on were canceled.

It wasn't uncommon. You know, you'd get through, you'd do the rehearsal. Something would change. The guy would be there and you wouldn't do it. And so those were the opposite, usually very short in duration, but had a tendency to be very exciting. And then the middle of those, which was Red Wings for me, are the QRF for the quick reactionary force missions. And so the way that that worked is that you would do a shift usually from four in the morning, I think it was, till four in the afternoon or the reverse of that if you were on the night shift.

And you would come in in the morning, you'd run the bird up, you'd get the brief from at the talk, the tactical operations center for the day. And they would tell you if there were any scheduled missions and those missions were usually, you know, some VIP escorts or things like that or maybe if there had been, if there were. was an ongoing fight, you'd say, hey, there's, there's a tick, a troops in contact right now. You might get release authority for that, so be ready for it. And then you would go about your day with a walkie-talkie, and if the walkie-talkie went off, you had 30 minutes to be airborne.

And so most of the time, like I said, those were either Medevac escorts or a VIP escort, but every now and then it would be a tick. And it was part of our squadron was in Salerno. and those folks did a whole lot more on QRF than we did because we were the Bogram QRF. So to get release authority for the Apaches was hard because the powers that be were always weighing. If we let the Apaches go and something bad happens, what do we do? Right? Where the folks in Salerno were much, didn't have the flagpole there with them were co-located with the customer.

It was much easier for them to get release authority. And so for me on June 28, 2005, I knew that Red Wings was an operation that was getting planned. It was not one that I was slotted to be on. And it was originally a conventional mission that the Marines were going to do. And for a bunch of different reasons, they ended up pulling in the seals who then that night. So June 27th, the four-man seal team was inserted. And so when I came on duty that morning, I remember that. the battle captain or whatever saying, hey, there was a seal team that was inserted last night.

We've lost comms with them. There might be something going on today. Just kind of be ready. And that wasn't all that much different from a lot of briefs during the day, right? Not usually that intense where we've lost contact, but there were a lot of kind of just be ready, something might go on. And so a couple hours later, my radio went off. And the way it worked is that my front cedar, I flew with quite a big.

you kind of your battle crewed with another pilot a lot of the times. And he would run for the talk and get the update. And I would jump in the back and get the engines run up and the bird ready to go. And so he came running back and jumped in the front seat and said, it's the SEAL team. They're in contact. And we basically had a call sign, a radio frequency, and a last known grid. And that was about it.

And so I took off with my wingman, who was my EXO, was in the front seat, and then the maintenance test pilot. And we flew from Bogran down to Jalalabad because there was, there were a pair of Blackhawks in Jalalabad that had the Marine Infantry Battalion QRF loaded up. And so we were going to link up with them and then go to literally just the last known grid that we had and see if we could raise these seals. And so as I was coming into land at Jalalabad, I remember seeing Chinook taken off. And I knew it was a 160th Chinook because it had that big old fuel boom on it. and they're the only ones that have those, the refueling probe. And so, you know, I remember thinking, I wonder where he's going.

And then I did the air mission brief, got ready. We took off towards that last known location. And so at the time, the Apaches, we didn't have SATCOM. And so there was no way to talk back to our higher headquarters and everything. It was literally just go there, see if you can raise the seals, and then start doing what Apaches are supposed to do. And so as we're flying to this, it's really, really high in the mountains. And weather's starting to come down a little bit.

There's an A10 that's overhead that's trying to provide a little bit of situational awareness that we don't have because we're so underpowered that it's taken a lot to be able to get to the altitude where that little grid coordinate was. And as I'm flying, traditionally what you would do, like I said, the black talks would stay in front of you until you'd hit what's called the release point, which was, I don't know, like maybe eight or nine kilometers, maybe more than that, away from the landing zone. You would pass them at that point. The Apaches would go to the landing zone first, do an LZ reconnaissance, and then call it either cherry or ice. Say the landing zers cold.

You can come in. The landing zone's hot, and you're going to continue to work it. And so as I was trying to pass them, I had to call the Blackhawks and say, you've got to slow down because you're leaving me. I'm so power limited. I can't maintain the airspeed. got to slow down. And so as we did that, I saw two Chinooks come in and join the flight ahead of us. And I can't remember, like I said, it was a long time ago. And so I can't remember if we could talk to them directly or we had to talk to them through the A10 because the 160th operated with slightly

different fills than we did. And so for your users, the fill is the portion that makes the radio secure the crypto crypto. Crypto, thank you. And so you reload it every day. And so if you're not on the same crypto as the person, even if you're on the same frequency, you can't talk to them or it was close enough that it was kind of intermittent. And so I saw them and we either got from the A10s or got from them that they were the 160th Chinooks and they had the rest of that SEAL team as their quick reactionary force in there.

And so I remember calling to either the Chinook or the A10 and saying, hey, you got to tell that Chinook to wait for me to clear the landing zone because I'm so power limited, you know, I'm barely edging past the Black Hawk right now. And I remember the Chinook responding back saying, you know, negative, we're going to the LZ. You can clear it once you get here. And then the next thing I remember is the A10, either the A10 or one of the Blackhawks that was ahead of me because I was trying to pass the Black Hawk at that time saying the MH is down, the MH is down, the MH's down. And so what had happened is the Chinook had come to a hover. The seals were about to fast rope and a Taliban hit him with the RPG. Shunuch kind of tried to fly away and then ended up

going down and tumbling down the side of the mountain. But from my perspective, the way it worked, I was just passing the Blackhawks as it happened. So they turned away from the landing zone, which turned them into my flight of two helicopters. And it was just grace of God that we did and have a midair. It was kind of the starburst of helicopters flying everywhere. And to make things a little more interesting, as the Chinook went into the ground, the A-10 turned and started firing white phosphorus rockets on either side of it. And when I talked to him later, saw the deep reef. In his mind, what he was trying to do is keep people off the crash site. But from my perspective, all as I could see was stuff burning

everywhere and blowing up everywhere. And so for the first couple minutes, I couldn't, had turned down one blind draw. My wingman had turned down another and I couldn't even find him. And so it took a while for us to link back together. And then when we turned inbound, all that I could see was everything on fire everywhere. And I remember arguing with the A10. I'm like, this can't be the crash site. Like there were at the wrong spot. And so he literally had to talk us onto the crash site where you're saying start turn, stop turn, start turn, until we're flew over and there wasn't anything there that looked like a helicopter anymore just looked like sheets of fire between what he had shot up with the with the Chinook did and so we just did a whole bunch of low passes over and over again because we and there were at one point I had my my wingman was incredibly brave guy and would fly super low over the crash site and I would fly above him with the thought process of if he can draw fire,

I can at least see where it's going and try and shoot back at it because we were definitely afraid of hitting an American, that the four seals were somewhere around there, that we would accidentally cause fracture side. And every time we got shot at during one of the points, it was so high that like I told you before, if you're going 110 knots or 120 knots, it's really hard to hit a helicopter,

we were barely doing 50 or 40 as we're coming. to the top of this ridge line and my front cedar yelled out, you know, we're taking fire. It's an RPG and he had the gun slave to his eye. And so we turned to shoot. But what happens is the gun will only turn so far and then it's limited so you don't accidentally hit the helicopter. And so he, we couldn't, we couldn't shoot. And then when I came back around, we still couldn't figure out where it was coming from.

And so it was awful. It was, you know, I'd spent my entire career. training for that moment to come, you know, if there is a mission for the cavalry, it's that one. Your job is to come over to Hill, to save the good guys. And we not only did we not save the good guys, but until the extortion shoot down years later, the most seals and the history of the seals were killed on that day, and it happened in my watch, and I couldn't stop it. And so you, you know, not to trivialize it, but for somebody who isn't in the military, the closest

this analogy I could think of is that if you're a professional football player and you spend your entire career trying to get to the Super Bowl and you get to that moment and then you walk on the field and the first play of the game, you fumble and that's it. That's it. And that's what it felt like because when we flew over that crash site over and over again, trying to draw fire, trying to find survivors until we ran out of gas and had to leave. And the only thing I could think of is is if anybody's still alive, they're watching us leave us on that mountain right now. And there's nothing that we can do about it. And it was, it was awful.

And it took me a long time to come to terms with that because it wasn't, it wasn't how, it wasn't how it was supposed to happen, right? It wasn't the way that you trained for it to happen. And it was, and I couldn't stop it. And so, yeah, that is, that is my version of the, the lone survivor story. You see yourself, as everyone else does out there, as somebody who can put their hands on the situation and take action. And, I mean, that must have been such a feeling of, like, powerlessness at that moment. Yep.

It was. And when I met Marcus Lettrell once briefly, I met and got to be better friends with Mike Murphy, who was awarded the posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. And I met his mom and dad and his brother. And his dad, his whole family is great. But his dad was a Vietnam-era infantry platoon leader, Purple Heart guy. And so he knew what the deal was. Like he knew, and they, he ended up inviting my wife and I to come to the christening for the Michael Murphy ship when it was done. But it was, you know, when I read Marcus, and so I met Marcus once, but never really talked to him or whatever.

And when I read his book in the part where he talks about watching the Apaches fly away, it just gutted me. And I was like, that was exactly what I was afraid of. Like, that dude sat on the mountain and watched us leave him. And, you know, and, and, and, and, and we couldn't stop it, you know, and we couldn't. And so it was, it was bad. Did, uh, did you guys have fuel up and they sent you back out there looking for people? I mean, how, what was the next? No, that's the worst part is that you came.

So the first, one of the first things you, you learn as a young cavalry officer is the fundamental, fundamental, fundamentals of, reconnaissance in the fundamentals of the cavalry. The first one is the gain and maintain contact with the enemy, right? And so we were the only ones who knew what that crash site looked like. The A10 that was overhead had to break station and come back. So a new guy was on. We went back to Sadabad to refuel with the intention of going back there. And that was the first time we could talk with our higher headquarters because

Asadabad had Satcom and they came back and said, no, you guys can't go back in. And you're like, what are you talking about? Like, what are you? We're the only ones. And then like, the weather's too bad. You can't go back in the mountains. And the weather was coming down. It was starting to cloud over.

And we were kind of dodging clouds as we were trying to find that guy. But then that made it even worse. It's like, not only did I not stop it. Not only did I not fire a single shot in anger. But now you're telling me I got to go home. And that was how it ended for me. It was awful. You rotate.

We're in the Sadaabad. And dude, I'm on my way. home, which is beautiful. All my kids packed up. I'm sitting on the porch and the Sadaabad of our house. We have rocking chairs. Like, you know, Charlotte Airport, you know, the rocking chair. I don't know how we got the rocking chairs. I'm sitting there in the rocking chair, and I'm like, I'm going home. This is great. Family had this huge vacation plan to go to France. My mother had just gotten through a bout of cancer. We were going to have. We were going to had this beautiful family thing

and I'm like you know I'm checked out right man I'm done shit's loaded ready to go home all I'm waiting to do is to get on the helicopter that night fly back to where are we in Afghanistan so I'm flying back to Kabul right yeah and then flying home

and I see there's a special forces A team across the street from us that we were was running another force like I forgot what they called Kandak yeah I wanted one of those things and I knew the team leader and I just see this frantic activity going on this is probably like four o'clock trying to get four o'clock in the afternoon and I go down there and I talk to the team leader Christian Sessam's like what's going on course I can't tell you

southern guy great guy it's like no problem if you need anything let me know because something bad really happened it's like we're here for you go back I can sit down and I'm just watching. Finally, I can't stand it anymore. So I just walked over and went into their team room and realized that special reconnaissance team that the Navy SEALs put in had been compromised. The reaction force had been shot down.

I think they lost one helicopter, had crashed, and nobody knows what's going on. And I was like, oh, shit. Okay. you know, selfish voice is like, I really want to go home. That's one of those kind of, that's kind of one of those weird ones. And I'm just a normal dude. So don't like take this like egotistical.

But I had to do some thinking on that one because we talk about like, should I go or should I not go? Like no one left behind, right? Like we have an obligation. If there's an American soldier or American service member in need, like you don't bail on it. But I got to tell you, I might have thought about it. Right. Because I know how this ends

You know in the movie How's the movie end? The guy who's on his way home Goes on one final mission Right Yeah And you know how it ends It's a recovery

It's not a rescue Well yeah But the thing is It's like The cop who's on his last day Before he retires Or the... Who answers the call

The soldier who just had a baby Yeah That's what I'm thinking Because I have a hyperactive imagination man And I'm like, this is like, this is, I know how this ends. And I walk back and I tell the head Afghan that was my partner. I said, get everybody up, get everything out in the street, get all our trucks lined up, get ready, we're going to move out on an operation.

I can't tell you what it is. You know, what they do, they're getting paid. Yes. Mr. Chris. Yes, Mr. Chris. Fucking shit gets fired. Yeah. Man, what a great bunch of people, you know.

There's trucks we had. We just so, oh, my God. I went in and this was, I'm finally now older and mature and had a lot, a lot of lessons learned, a lot of scar tissue from doing things wrong. And that A team is doing the best they can, but I can just see that it's disjointed. And I said, it's frantic. And so I just said, I didn't say anything.

I pulled out a butcher block board. Because you know where I'm going with this. Let's just do mission planning the way we've been trained. So I just put that butcher block up and I said, let's do mission analysis. Step one is what's the enemy situation. And everybody just snapped in at that point. I was like, my job here is done, you know. I'm not

I'm being a little facetious And then The biggest thing We talked about Escape and Evasion earlier And the warrant officer Is always in charge of escape invasion planning

And I don't know about Jack, you're better than I'm You probably paid attention I hated that shit Like chief would be like Eh You know like Eh

We gotta do this, this This You'd like leave it alone and they would always talk about command and control and I would just like chief leave it alone we don't give it we don't care the problem was it was it was the Navy SEALs were in there seventh group was in charge of special forces special operations they were being uh ripped they were being relief in place by third group was coming in it was the worst possible moment anything could ever happens so who's in charge right who's in charge and we finally get that worked out and let's be

on counterterrorism task force took over jacea just said we got this but that took a long long time and um so we we decide they put in a restricted what's a razz restricted airspace where they shut down the airspace yeah forgot didn't it where you can't fly anything because they thought that the Taliban, they weren't Taliban, but the insurgents, the enemy had shot down the helicopter with surfaced airmen. You've had some of those guys you've had on,

there's a lot more coming out about this, so we couldn't fly in. Like the most powerful military in the world, all this extra high-end equipment, and you know what we're going to do? We're going to walk our ass up there. And you've been to Colorado Springs. you look up at Pikes Peak

Yep yeah It was like that You're like holy shit We gotta get up there But this isn't Pike's Peak Like very There's trails and roads Built into it

So we all move out that morning And we just like Anybody that wants to show up Be at the vehicle drop-off point At the base of this mountain Dude you're just looking up there And we're like We can see the

press, but they're not there. They're behind it. And it's like, what I remember most was the sun came up really, really early. Like, I swear it was like five o'clock sun's out. Dude, it's like, I'd like to look at the weather. It seemed like it was 80 degrees Fahrenheit at the time and just going up, no clouds. And have you ever seen those pictures of like World War II in going over the hump? Or you'd see people going where they're walking up these hills and you had these switchbacks like that. That's what we're doing.

And it's a combined force. It's CTPTs, special forces. And you guys had an RRD team with you? RRD shows up. I didn't even know what RRD was, man. Those are the toughest dudes I have ever met in my life, the most professional soldiers. I was sewing off. We had a Ranger platoon.

So you got this like first lieutenant. He was great with his 40 Rangers. You guys can appreciate this. Got RRD. Then the Navy SEALs, like anybody that could get there, showed up. We had two Special Forces A teams. We had a Special Forces B team, a company headquarters. And then I got 50.

I didn't take all of our force. I just took 50 of our Counterterrorism Pursuit team, our mercenary force. It was like, here's the plan. Movement to contact, which we all know. is not all the technology. Why would you ever do a movement to contact? Movement to contact for those that don't know this is, like you just walk until you run into the end.

They start shooting at you. You're like, we found them. Yeah, right. I was like, oh, man, this is going to suck. This is going to suck so bad. It's funny because I think it was Tony Brooks who said, like, they were the guys that roped in from the 47s, the Rangers.

That night. And he was like, we ran into an RRD team up in the mountains. It was just like one of the mystique around them. We were like, how did you guys get up here? You want to know how that got there? Yeah. So we walk our ass up there.

People are falling out. Like Green Berets, because they're wearing 140 pounds. You know what I took? An LCE, basically load of ammunition. Yeah. Rangers were great. You'll love this. You two Rangers.

I was leaving, so I forgot to take money. Thank goodness there was a Green Beret that had money and they rented like every donkey or you could find and the Carl Gustav gunner from the Rangers how much is that thing way it's a big fucking it's like uh that's my first job I think it's like 27 pounds yeah plus the rounds the rounds are yeah he's got that thing and I'm like hey I didn't call him son that would have been like you know I felt like son I said hey man why didn't you put your Carl Gustav on the donkey and he's like because he's His platoon, sorry.

Squad leader. He was like, you will never be on one step. Right, right? And it was so cute, right? I was like, oh, man, poor guy. By the time we got going, that thing was on the donkey. Here's what happens. It's so hot the donkeys quit.

I didn't know they're allowed to quit. Like when they're done, they're done. Yeah, yeah. And they're not. I was like, like, like there's a reason they say stubborn as a mule, right? I couldn't believe that. Yeah. I didn't even know.

I didn't even know that happened. you know so now we're just walking we walk up we run out of water right away it goes from bad to worse we're just combat ineffective and the decision is made to put together what's called a flying column of the r d because these guys are these are like this isn't even this is easier than pt i know what you guys and the indage who grew up there and don't yeah right rd and a couple stellar green berets Kent Solheim and some other people decide pool all the water we're going to give all our water to like these 20 dudes and they're going to haul ass and can I talk about me a second? Oh yeah yeah indeed I was like I so want to be part of that like I've been training for this

moment all my life a desperate mission right you know where it is success cataclysmic success or cataclysmic failure and I It was like, I am the leader of the mercenary force. I have to stay with them and do my job. Were they doing all right? Or were they falling out? Indige is doing fine because we didn't carry body arm. Yeah, yeah. Everybody else is wearing body armor.

I was like, we're all dead. Yeah. So they got their clash over their shoulder by the barrel. Yeah. Running shoes. And basic load. Yeah. And that's it.

And then so they take off the flying collars. takes off. I was like, envious tears. I was with them. We keep moving for the night. The indage, out of nowhere, there's a village, and they like, blah, blah, la, la. And we get all this food and shit comes up to us.

And that's, at that night, is when the Rangers fast-ropped in. And the reason I know this is, because we're on this, like, Knife's Edge, you know, the classic Knife's Edge, Ridge line. I knew that we were quite expendable when the Green Beret major said, Cruz.

He didn't know I was a lieutenant colonel. He found out later. But I was just Chris at the time. And I was trying to be helpful. Because his show, he's the officer in charge, the ground force commander. He goes, why don't you take the Afghans out and, you know, pull security closest to the enemy? I was like, oh, I know how this is going to work. We're just cannon fodder.

I'm like, fine, whatever. And that was, I made a mental decision that if the Rangers got in to the crash site successfully, we would, I would take the mercenary force out because I knew we were, like, we were beyond fourth class citizens. Like, like, Rangers still were like, we got Afghans with us. We ought to kill them all. You know Rangers. That changed later in the war, but at this point, it's still the, it's still. that way. And I just remember trying to sleep and it was so humid your clothes weren't dry, but you know how it is at elevation, it plummeted the temperature. I'm just lying there, freezing and I hear we needed water resupply. So when the MH47s brought in the Rangers, they brought in a resupply bird and started kicking five-gallon cans and MRE boxes on.

off the back because the good idea of airdropping stuff didn't work. Long story won't bore you with that. What the fuck were they thinking about? And there's the surrealistic moment of the MH 47 hovering

directly over me lying there in the fetal position in some sort of like feverish dream and five gallon water cans and MRI boxes to start like landing around me. I'm like this is ironic that I'm going to be killed

by my own side with five gallon kids dropping on me Rangers got in that night fast roped in patrolled in got to the crash site at this point I'm like the major comes up with this great idea that we're going to leap frog forces forward blah blah blah and I'm like

oh we're going to be the last move oh yes you are it's like I have an idea. We're going to reposition the reaction force, the mercenary force I was in charge of, back to Assadabad, so we can more rapidly respond. You could just see him like, oh, thank God. But now I'm concerned because I'm abandoning Americans, right? Right. So I try to call back. I get on Satcom. It doesn't work. I get on Arridium to call back to base, to my higher headquarters to get permission can't talk to anybody so that's another one of those moments where you're like okay here we go back to the indage they were absolutely smoked by the end of this yeah

there's this legend like oh my god they can walk in the mountain forever no they can't they got done and they were absolutely gasped it was hilarious it was hilarious yeah yeah yeah so uh at that point rangers secured a crash site start leaping forward forward Marcus Latrell's on the run. We don't know this. Now remember, this area was the most, all of our intelligence assets from satellites on down were focused on that piece of terrain.

And it wasn't that big. And we had no idea where Marcus Latrell was. Anybody that says differently is fully shit. Yeah. And that was another eye-opener, Jack, where I'm like, oh, gosh, we've been promised all this stuff. And this comes down to hard,

Yeah, hard, controlling people physically fit that are willing to close with and engage the enemy and won't quit. And that was like one of those eye-opening moments. It's so, it's so like, no duh, you know, it's so obvious. But we had been trained to think that we're going to have all these assets available. Like, but it just came down to being really, really tough. That was my takeaway. And then, you know, you know, the rest of the story, Mark, I was on the other end when when Marcus was recovered, but we don't want to bore everybody with that. There's a great story that hasn't been told about that.

Okay, well, you can... It's one of your ranger. You can slide into my inbox with that story. Okay. And we'll work on that. That's where we got ready. And we got back and we got word that the helicopter had gone down and that was the Navy SEALs that had been shot down.

So this was Operation Red Wings. And I didn't know it. I'm just some dumb private. It's time. You know, my job was a Gustav Gunner. So thankfully, I was lucky enough to be chosen to go on this mission. So we gear up and all that stuff, get all of our stuff ready, and got the Carl Gustav and some rounds and all that. We fly out. We get kanked the first night. We go out. We land in J-Bed and we stay in some, like, airport.

And then we go downstairs to, like, the jail cell or something like that. We're all just kind of hanging out in the jail cell, sleeping there waiting until we go in the next period of darkness. And so, yeah, that was pretty sketch. So going out, you know, my first mission in the Army. So it's like, you know, what the fuck is going on right now? I'm pretty scared, you know, pretty freaking scared. And not to mention, I got a lot of weight in our fast rope site, I don't know, 60, 80, whatever, 90 feet long. and that bitch is like barely touching the ground.

And so thankfully, we all make it to the ground off of these, you know, 60 plus ropes, 65 plus foot ropes. And so we're actually not on a flat part of the mountain. We're kind of, you know, on a hill, basically. Did you rope in with Tony Brooks or with Nick Moore's platoon? we were we were in we ended up at the same spot i don't i want to say i was in probably in nick moors i honestly don't remember which because i man i may have been with tony um i just remember going down the rope and it taking forever and i actually had both my gloves were the same ones so i didn't

have, I think I've had two left-handed gloves. So I had to like, yeah, yeah. So I had to like wrench that on there and put the strength of a tiger, you know, on there and just slide down that rope and pray that Jesus take the wheel at some point. But I didn't die, John Kelly. My squad leader at the time had put his foot on me as I was rolling down the mountain. So that helped a little bit from dying. But we had one guy, the RTO. He ended up breaking his own. arm, a dude came in and smashed his arm and I think like two days later they came and got him. But strong, he was, that dude was hard as woodpecker dick. And so he was helping, you know,

drag bodies up the hill that night when they were putting him in the body bags and everything. And our job was, since I was in the weapon squad, we were all just, you know, pulling security. We were, you know, setting up basically a big patrol base around there. Yeah. And, or as best as we could. And, because it was just a. shit situation and we just you know posted up the best where we could and so we built some little shacks try to you know have some some sort of concealment not much cover because that dead dead dry wood right there doesn't really provide a whole lot of cover bullets will run right through that so

it's more for concealment and some shade but uh yeah we roped in and and and um it was really cold that night because it was like i don't know 10 10 10 2 or something like that uh 10 10 10 thousand feet and uh even though it's july it's it's fucking cold it's not it's not warm and we didn't bring it we we brought stuff for a 12 hour mission not for 12 days because that's how long i was there and so i barely i thankfully had a t-shirt on most guys didn't have a t-shirt on or nothing like and we're up there nut to butt like trying to crawl inside of each other because it's so damn cold and it's raining on us and so we we break protocol and we're just like you know what fuck it we're burning the stump right here. So we just sat there and whatever we could find, we burned. And we were

burning the stump and just huddling close to it because nobody's moving in that. There's no way. Nobody's going to maneuver on you. It's not happening. And so you're, I mean, your combat ineffective at that point. Right. And so you had to stay warm. Thankfully, we stayed warm enough to make it through the night and everything. And then, but yeah, we had zero, basically zero rations. And I had like two bottles of water. So they quickly realized that we were going to be there for a minute. And so, you know, we had to start establishing, you know, some sort of, like I said, concealment of some sort because we had many nights where we had, because we had constant air presence.

So whether it be A10s, F-15s, Apaches, whatever, fast-movers, whatever you want to call it, it was there constantly. And you could, like, just nonstop around, like around. because they're, you know, trying to come up and they're trying to find LaTrell and whatnot. And thankfully, we never had anything crazy happen up top on us because we had so much eyes on us because that was, you know, we were part of the main show there. But yeah, that was, that was 12 days of just like, you know, your first, you're just kind of wondering, like, is this what, is this what we always do? Because you see different units coming through. we saw some RRC RRD guys coming up.

I remember turning around and seeing like a, you know, four or five of them come walking up. And they were going to go look for LaTrell as well. And so, you know, it was all hands on deck. And so it was just like, this is crazy. I thought we were going to do raids and ambushes and like Ranger School stuff. And like, you know, all this crazy stuff I was learning before we came out here. So now we're out here looking for our own.

But it was a good learning experience. You know, kind of went hungry there for a little while. I had to run up and down the mountains and chasing pallets that had broken because, you know, when you try to drop a pallet on something like this, it's kind of hard. Right, right. And so it's like, do you just get it stuck in the tree and say, fuck it, let's try to get it down from the tree and, you know, figure it out when it comes down. So, yeah, we chased a lot of bundles down and we made a lot of little canopy. and shelters with those canvases and

parachutes and all that stuff. So, yeah, we still had a good time up there, even though, you know, you're sitting up there just kind of wondering what the fuck is going on. And so, but no, it was cool. Our first aren't, you know, he's known for blowing up stumps and whatnot. He's pulling apart C4, Claymore. You know, Claymore is pulling the C4 out and everything

and packing them under the stumps and whatnot and blowing these stumps sky high and just laughing his ass And so that way we can get more 47s in there to ex-fill us to relieve us because we're actually on the end of our deployment. And so 375 comes in and relieves us. And so, yeah, that was number one. And so, you know, that's kind of significant to me, I guess, just because it's a very significant time in history. And thankfully, at least we had one guy survived. So, and we were able to find them.

And this was the time, you know, you're the squadron commander, you had told me earlier, when Operation Red Wings happened. And you were the ground force commander for the squadron when that happened? Yeah, on one of the deployments, we were over there. And again, you know, in the, as you guys know, but there were multiple chains of command, right? The white side guys worked for Siege of Sotom, who worked for the two-star or three-star Army guys. that was the overall battle space owner. We worked for a different chain of command. So we kind of watched the planning going on for Red Wings,

and they needed some helicopters. So they came over and requested permission to use the helicopter. So I kind of watched the planning going on, but we weren't directly involved. So, you know, we had zero skin in the game besides just, you know, giving them advice on where not to go and what not to do, which is what they did. But like they,

so we watched the planning. And I remember, you know, they, like I didn't think of it, anything of it. And we were working nights, so we'd wake up around lunchtime. And remember the day, June 28th, 2005, like our beep, we were still using pagers. The beepers went off, you know, right before lunch.

Like, hey, you know, we worked to the jock immediately. and we mustering the jock and like what's going on. And like, hey, a bird has just been shot down, one of our task force assets. Like, like not tracking any of it. Like, holy shit. Like, how does that happen? You know, and come to realize that they had inserted the night before,

they got compromised, big firefight. And this is the four-man recid team, which is a pretty light rookie team. And then they had launched the QRF in the middle of the day. And that's when we kind of got notified because although we were all one task force, you know, the aviators were tracking what was going on, but the C2 was over at C and SOTA. And so like we just weren't tracking it.

So then it became, okay, we need to send a QRF up there. And it became a fairly interesting thing to watch for me, because we could have gone right away. But after having a Seed of Sotom, launched in the middle of the day and get shot down, nobody was really keen on sending anybody else right back in there, especially during the day. Right.

And so we waited a long time until the C, And at the time, the task force and Cesar SOTA for both those sixes. And then you went straight to the, you know, either CETCOM or or the conventional battle space owner. And so there was a lot of fighting and politicking going on there. We waited around for quite a while. And finally my boss said, hey, how long would it take for you guys to get up there? And we have pre-positioned an entity up closer earlier in the day.

And it's like, wait, we can be airborne in 45 minutes. He's like, Roger that. You're now the ground force commander. Go. And so really what we wanted to do the first night was just get a smaller element of Rangers. So we had this joint strike force entity. And it was most of my squadron and a company minus of Rangers from 275. And so my, you know, I had a troop basically plus company commander with most of his company,

whatever birds we needed. And, you know, pre-states get closer and get to the crash site. It was pretty cool because, you know, you talk about operating with commander's intent. Like the mission brief was they rescue any survivors, recover any remains, feel as many bad guys as you can. Any questions? No sir, we can work with that. So, you know, we flew up to Jabad and sent the first guys up, got weathered out.

So they had to come back. So now we're on the ground, like, what do we do? We had everybody coming out of the woodwork. We had assets along the border. Other guys had some assets. We basically said, hey, can anybody get there on foot? And so, you know, it was, you know, it was. you know, where the crash site was, was in a valley.

But to get there, like if we drove north from Jabad to Assadabad, to get to the crash site, you'd have to cross, like, two ridge lines. So it wasn't an easy traverse. And so, but we said, hey, we've got to figure this out, like, hedge our bet. So we will send entities to walk. And then we will fly in the next night. And so they started the journey. A lot of guys had to turn back because it was so manky.

They all ran out, a bunch of them ran out of water. And then we flew in the next day, about five clicks south, you know, kind of back into the same area, but not the exact area. And we had, I don't know, we had about 60 guys, 70 guys combined force of Rangers and Seals. And we had brought a couple of the guys from the troop, the white side troop. with us because they were itching to get into the fight and we needed some more manpower. So we had about a 90-foot fast rope, you know, I think it was high. I think Sierra Nevada's, you know, high, tall pine trees, beautiful country. But probably some people with some nerves, like it was the highest rope I've ever done in my life.

Yeah. And I just remember like, you know, I was up near the cockpit talking to the pilots. and so I'm the second to last guy to come out of the bird. I had a dog guy behind me. You know, it was fast open with his dog. And man, it just kept going and going and going and going. It's going faster, faster and faster. I remember hitting like a sack of shit and just like a little daze remembering,

oh, God, the dog guy is right behind me. So I'd roll it out of the way and he comes fucking plowing in. And then we had to, you know, walk about, we kind of linked up to everybody did this monster patrol up to the crash site. and sent the PJs and some other guys from the Ranger entity down there to secure the crash site. We set up C2 node and started looking for survivors. And they did a really good job. And it was really significant terrain and steep.

And so we probably set up our C2 node around probably 9,000 feet when the crash site was probably 1,000 feet below us. because I think the way it happened, the RPG had hit the back of it and it kind of rolled down this hill that didn't look like much on video, but when you get there, you're like, oh, my God, like just getting there and back is going to be significant. But the guys got down there to the Krasse site while we were sending out patrols trying to find the Reki team because at the time we had no idea where they were, you know, kind of doing the forensic analysis of like, okay, a firefight happened here.

We can see all the shells from both sides, which way did they go? But couldn't really determine that and a lot of SIGA and other things are coming in, indicating that maybe they were over in Pakistan at the time because several of the radios had been taken. Some people, what I think happened is people are like clicking the mic and things like that. And we weren't exactly sure where it was coming from. But, you know, first order business, get the guys. Unfortunately, there were no survivors from the helicopter. You know, all 16 of the, there were eight crewmen and eight seals had perished.

We couldn't determine one guy because his remains were pretty burned and mangled. There was a fire down at the crash site. But got all their remains, had to blow. an HLZ so they could come in. So we had had to get resupplied. It was another issue. So we fastrobed in with like minimal kit because we thought we were gonna get into it.

And we were at 9,000 feet. So you weigh mobility versus like security. Right. And if you were kidded down with body armor and things like that, you would, you would have been spent before you even got there. So we, most of us didn't have body armor on. In fact, some of the guys was pretty funny on the rope thought they were going to do a typical 10 foot rope onto the, you know, a roof of a building.

And when they did a 90 foot rope wearing just like flight gloves or batter's gloves. Oh, yeah. I saw a young ranger his entire hand. Yeah. Was double the size the next day. It was just a blister. That's insane. And, but he pressed on.

Another kid had a broken arm. He, you know, hit real hard. He pressed on. Nobody asked to get medevac, not that they could have anyways. But we got everybody out, I think, all the remains out the next day and continued looking for, you know, whoever was, you know, still alive. We didn't know if any of them were alive of the four reckey elements. And we didn't know where they were. So we looked and looked and looked and going on wild goose chases for several. days and then you probably read the story that a guy who was housing Markle-Suchel walked to Assadabad and basically said hey I have this American in in my

home in whatever village it was and so you know that was like day seven or eight I forget exactly what it was and and that lined up with some other intel that we were receiving. And so then we had a pretty idea that yeah, he's probably there and we need to go rescue him now. And again, we don't know what's going on. We had seen goat herders and, you know, and not a lot of enemy contacts, some harassing fire, things like that, that we would just kind of suppress with AC130s or, you know, mortars. And so we launched a rescue. And it was a little interesting. The way it went down is we had a small, small team of SF guys and Afghans.

Kind of in the area, a couple clicks away. Like, hey, this is the grid of where we need to go. Can you go do this? And they said, no. Like, we have five Americans, five Afghanis who are wearing like four Frams and, you know, you know, pajamas. and they have one magazine piece, like, okay. And so we took a pause, sent a Ranger element up there.

They went up, took charge, and led the rescue into the ground, while we kind of set up a suppression of enemy air defense, you know, kind of plan to precede the rescue helicopter that came in there. So they went in there. They secured Marcus. We knew he was there. Then we launched everybody else in to get him and did that whole. suppress a suppression fire which was pretty pretty cool and they could only take out like two people

you know Marcus and like one other because we wanted to bring the guys family that they were going to get killed and like sorry can't do it but you can walk out with with our elements so once Marcus got back and you know debrief then we started figuring out hey this is what happened here's where we were and right away we went out and found two of the other guys guys, Murphy and Danny Deeds, but we couldn't find the last of the Rekke element, I think was Matt Axelson. So we actually had been up there for eight or nine days and we're supposed to go home, not that that is going to drive anything, but we did a relief in place because we could not find the last of that four men reclety element. So we

did a relief in place with another squad and some other Rangers came in. And by that time, we had some other conventional forces helping us out too. So they found him, I think, two days later, and then Exfield, and we were mission complete. And yeah, it was a, I'll tell you what, a couple of the guys that walked in, like from the battalion reconnaissance detachment of 275, like those guys were some tough, tough dudes. We had a lot of people quit on that hump, including some of, you know,

some people from my community. A lot of the Afghans quit, but those guys showed up, I think like two days after we were there, out of water, out of food, stumbling in. I'm like, oh my God, you guys are the biggest badasses on the planet.

It was pretty cool. And I gained a lot of respect for, you know, again, there was always this stupid kind of rivalry. Even when we're working together, like mutual respect, but, you know, after that, It's like we truly are the same.

Like, these guys are awesome. Yeah, yeah. Our guys are awesome. It's also one of those moments where it was all these different units working together, working together to repatriate Americans. You know, I mean, it's kind of an incredible moment in that sense. It was. You know, it's always we're going to just dominate and it's going to be done.

But sometimes it's not that way. Yeah, we didn't do a dang thing until Operation Revenue. Red Wings hit. We were close to going home with, you know, I called it pitching a shutout on that deployment. So tell us then about the run-up to Red Wings. Like did you guys, were you designated as a QRF for that mission? Did you even know that mission was going on? I mean, how did this come up on your radar initially? Yeah, we actually didn't know anything about the mission. About two weeks prior, my squad was designated as primary. combat search and recovery for the entire country of Afghanistan. Basically, they were trying to find jobs for us that were combat related because they weren't going to send a range of platoon out to win hearts and minds.

That's like the dumbest thing ever. Thankfully, they got that right. But, yeah, that was one of our jobs and we trained up for it. And we never really thought we would actually do anything. I think it was one of those like just go through the motions, learn the job. We know how to dismantle a helicopter. We know how to work with the PJs. And lo and behold, two weeks later, right after that training,

we get at the call that a Chinook helicopter just went down. And you guys are going to go recover it. And that's basically all we knew. We later found out it was a 160th bird, which we were all confused because it was middle of the day. And come to find out, yeah, it was the middle of the day. And that might have been one of the reasons why. Right.

It ended the way it did. It was, I mean, obviously it was a lucky shot. I mean, I was right at the crash site, and there's not many places they could have shot from to get a good view. So whoever it was got really lucky. Now, granted, those guys have a lot of fighting skills. I mean, I don't want to discount their skills because, I mean, look at right now. they are taking over a country in weeks. Well, I mean, loring helicopters into valley systems

and shooting them down is something that the Afghans excel at, right? Yeah, well, this was at the peak. This was at the top of the mountain. So a little bit different than their usual MO of getting them into a place where they could shoot down at them. This guy had to shoot up. There was no doubt about it. So you guys hear about this, get spun up for this. bird that went down. What's the process like then for, is it just your squad or is it the entire platoon that is designated to go in?

Yeah, our whole platoon got spun up on that one. You know, we were getting word that this is like similar to Roberts Ridge. So obviously Roberts Ridge happened a couple years prior to that. And we knew all about it. We had learned, you know, we had some lessons learned from that. So we thought we were going into the same thing again. So that was our mindset going into it was this is going to be a hellacious firefight when we get there. You know, we're putting our gear together.

And Rangers being Rangers, we don't need water. We don't need food. Right. More ammo. Right. So we just loaded up on ammo and we were ready to go. We had basically no intel. We didn't know anything about the seals on the ground.

All we knew was that there was. It was a Chinook helicopter down. It was a 160th bird. It had some seals on board, and we were going to get it. And, you know, they sent us out. And with that intel, that was it. So for the people who might not be familiar with this story, this actually all started with Latrell, Pete, Murphy, and...

Axelson. Axelson. A four-man seal team. RETI team, a SEAL RECI team that went out, I believe was it for Ahmed Shah to like find his IED factories or to do the Racki on those. They got compromised by a shepherd or a goat herder or, you know, somebody. They let him go. He reported on them and then they, and then forces converged on them.

And so they called, you know, they called for a quick reaction force. and that's why the Chinook, the one-sic-dish-ish-Shunuch, launched during the day with the seals on it, was as a, you know, forced to save these. And then DeVurd get shot down. Do they know what it was shot down by? We didn't at the time.

We had suspicions that it was a stinger, is what we initially thought. The evidence is still not 100% on it, but I think what we've come to the conclusion It was probably an RPG 7. And, you know, it was, if you've ever shot an RPG, you know, they're not super accurate. So he hit the directly at the rotor mass. And it just went spinning out of control at that point.

So at this point, do you guys know anything about Latrell and his team? Or do you only know about the downshund? Do you know that there are other Americans out there? Yeah, we knew there were someone out there. but we didn't know it was a SEAL team. We didn't know it was a recon team. We just knew that it was a quick reaction for us going to help somebody. Okay.

We didn't find out about the recon team until we were on the ground, at least at my level. I was a private. So I had to do a lot of interviews to kind of get all this information. But, yeah, we didn't get that trickled down to us. Yeah. So talk to us about the infiltration then. Yeah, that was a fun one. The initial one was the night after.

the bird was shot down. And the weather was just absolutely awful. It was, you know, raining and it was windy, and we were flying up into the mountains, and you couldn't see a thing out of the bird, not one thing. And it was struggling to get up into the mountains. So by the time we got pretty close to the mountain, we were starting to head up the mountain,

they actually pulled us out. They were worried about losing another bird. So we went to Jabad or Jalabad, and we stayed the night, And we were going to try again the next night. And as you could imagine, you know, a platoon full of Rangers who was told that you're going to help your buddies, but we're going to pull you because of weather. There was a little bit of anger in that bird. All of us were pissed off. Like, are you kidding me, weather?

Drop us here. We'll walk in. But, you know, commanders do what commanders do. And they were not willing to lose our bird. I mean, at this point, you don't know if Americans survive the crash, if they're fighting off hostiles. Like, you have no idea what's going on the ground right now with this bird and the people on it. Is that correct? No, not at all.

We did get some word that there was a strobe on the crash site and that it was moving around. So, you know, there could be a couple things. That could be someone who survived. That could be the enemy gathering gear. It could be a lot of things. So we didn't really think much of it other than, hey, we might have some people alive on the crash site. So the next night is when we actually did our actual infill. And that was something that it's tough to explain.

I mean, I wrote about it and I tried to explain as best I could. but we did 110 foot rope through some fog and trees to the point where when we were going to get on the rope and you looked down, there was no chemlight. So normally you would look down and you'd see kimlights. Right. But it was so foggy and we were so high up, you couldn't see a thing. So I didn't even know how high we were. I got on the rope and just held on for dear life and was waiting to hit the ground. So for some of the civilians out there,

This is a fast rope we're talking about, like a braided nylon rope that you grip like a fire hose sort of coming off at one of those, back of one of the MH47s that you can see behind Tony there on his screen. And you're saying the rope was 110 feet long, which is much longer than we usually would use. And that rope is just descending into the fog below and disappearing. You have no idea where the bottom is. No, no one did. I mean, even the rope master, when he got to the rope,

you know, they'd go and they give us the thumbs up. He looked at us and did one of these. Oh, my God. No one knew what that meant. We're like, what do you mean? No. And then he went. Wow.

Balls. Brass balls. Yeah. That's amazing because, again, you don't know. You can't see it. You have no idea what's at the end of that road. If it's a big hole, if it's a lake. I mean, you just don't know.

Or it just empty space. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The side, the edge of a cliff where he's like, ah. What was at the bottom when you got down there? It was a logged. It was a logged area. So there were a bunch of trees laying down on their sides. Because when I landed, I, you know, there was nothing to put my feet on.

So I just flopped over. I was laying on the ground in between trees that were down because, you know, the Afghans do a lot of logging up in those parts. And, you know, obviously that had recently been logged because we were tree stumps and everything else down there. But, yeah, you got to remember that's foggy and you have your night vision up. Right. Out of the way. You don't flip it down until you get to the bottom. So I couldn't see a thing.

So if there's timber or logs down there, I mean, was there a pile up? because guys, obviously, if you're falling, you can't get out of the way and guys just start stacking. Yeah, it was like nothing. I mean, it would be like watching a circus. I mean, I'm rolling around, and I hear guys trying to get up next to me and people trying to run to the perimeter

and obviously got senior guys, like, running up there and grabbing people out of the way because we're just coming down, one after the other, after the other, landing on each other. And we actually did have one. had one guy, our radio operator who was, you know, came burning in like he can't really imagine with his radio.

Yeah. And I don't know if he was unconscious or not, but the next guy landed right on him and compound fracture to his arm. Oh, my God. Thank God you guys didn't have a mortar team with you. You know, yeah, thank God. We did have mortars out there, but I don't know if they, I don't think they may have had they're 60 to be honest.

Oof. I imagine that. But, you know, we were, we were loaded. We were loaded down. I mean, our Chinook was at weight with like 25 guys. And if you've, you've ever been on a Chinook, you can get a lot more than 25 guys on one and still fly easily. Yeah. Well, we were at weight, partly because the elevation was so high.

Right. But also because we had, I mean, we had to carry enough body bags. I don't know if you ever carried a body bag, a military body bag, but they weigh about 20 pounds. They are not light. I couldn't believe it the first time I held it. I'm like, what the heck is this lead? But it's a really thick canvas, very large bag. I didn't know that.

Yeah, it was news to me, and we had to carry these things. Yeah, that's morbid, man. And, you know, I'm sorry you guys had to deal with all of that. I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit. How far was your route position from the crash site? You know, I've been able to look at it on a map, and I actually laughed because it was like two miles. But it was two miles on the map. Right.

With elevation change, it was about six miles. And it felt like 20. Yeah. Because, you know, you walk 100 meters, and you've only on the map gone 10. Right. Because you're going up. Yeah, yeah. Going straight up.

Yeah. And another issue with this whole mission was the area we were, we didn't even have proper maps. We were using satellite imagery to get to our location. And, you know, obviously the point man is trying to make a route because they didn't tell us exactly where they were going to land. It was, we're going to get as close to this point as we can get, but we're going to put you where we find an opening or where something looks safe. and we're just going to put you down. Right. And they didn't put us on exactly where they said they were going to put us.

Right. So it took us a little bit to get oriented. And thank goodness we had a good point, man, because he led us directly to the crash site, like spot on. Well, then I imagine that they were worried about another ambush. It's just like, hey, we were down one bird. There will be another one coming. So, you know, they've got to put you on the wire or even, you know, further out,

you know, a good terrain feature or two away. So it's two miles straight line distance on the map. You guys start moving during the day or you can start moving at night? Middle of the night. So it was, it was, you know, around midnight that we hit the ground. And your squad leader or team leader, that was the point man, was Johnny on the spot, took you right to the crash site? Yeah, there were two point guys that basically worked together.

One of them was Sergeant Condi of third platoon that we linked up with. and he's just known for his land-nav skills. So thank you, Condi, for putting us on point. I know you're probably going to watch us at some point. So, yeah, it's unbelievable that, I mean, I've learned land-nav, obviously. I went to Ranger's School, and I was a team leader, so I'm pretty good at land-nav, but this was something else. This is a different world out there.

And how long did it take you to move? those two miles. You know, we hit the crash light at sunrise. So you can imagine that that's a lot of several hours. Five to six hours. Yeah. Yeah. No, Afghanistan is brutal terrain.

Brutal. And carrying all that gear. I mean, the ever-present question, were you guys wearing body armor on top of all that? We were. Yeah. So that was another kind of lesson learned about that is. You don't bring your plates.

Yeah, so we had body armor, which is, we did drop our body armor the next day. When we, after we recovered the Chinook and they came in for the recovery, we dropped our plates. Because we were only wearing the front plate. We weren't wearing the back one, thankfully. So let's get into that then. You know, Vaughn comes. You find yourselves at the crash site. Ranger Platoon arrives.

What ended up happening that morning? So the first thing was to determine, well, the PJs were the first ones exactly on the crash site, and they've kind of led the charge on the recovery. But they basically quickly came back after they saw the crash site and said, you know, there's no one alive. So this is not a rescue anymore. It's now a recovery.

And that was like, you might as well have just taken a, you know, a K bar and slammed it in the side of my sidewall of my car. You know, let out the, let out the air for sure. And then basically from there, it was we need to recover everybody and find all their equipment. So we kind of staged and started that little sweep. And you found there were 16 personnel and you found 15 of them like fairly quickly, right? Correct. And then it was, I'd say within the first hour or so, we had 15 of the 16 accounted for.

But we were having a really tough time finding that last person. Right. And at that point. I don't remember how big a Chinook is, right? You see it behind me. Yeah. Those are, I mean, those are bigger than a city school bus or a city bus, right? Yeah.

And on the ground, there wasn't. much left. And there's a good photo in my book that shows a few of the guys at the remnants of Turbin 33. And the three guys cover the amount of bird that was left. So it's it was a definitely a site that you just couldn't believe it. Like how is this a Chinook? How is this a Chinook? Unbelievable. It looked like the whole like side of the mountain was basically burned up. correct yeah it was a huge fire obviously a huge force fire had occurred and yeah everything was burned and and you're not for the people who might not be familiar with like a Csar like you're not just looking for the body in the sense that you don't know if this person is out there trying to escape and evade right now

you don't know if they've been captured you you have no like if you can't find the body then it changes the entire equation for what the next steps are. Yeah, we were definitely worried that someone was on the run. And so we're just like, if he's not here, where is he? Did they capture him? Is he, you know, e- and-ing right now in the mountains? So they said, all right, guys, this is it. We've gone much more time.

We've got to find the 16th guy. And it took it took some new eyes from from the third platoon of Charlie Company. And I'll be damned if within like 30 minutes one of the guys finds them in one of the burnt areas. It was actually a down tree that obviously fell after the forest fire. And it was he was hidden kind of under the tree. Yeah. And I don't want to like get too gruesome. or like, you know, or anything, you know, make the gory.

But it must have been an experience for you guys, you know, recovering these people that had been in a shnit crash with a fire, like, it must not have been easy for everybody involved. I mean, no, I would say you'd be surprised at how well you would perform when you know these are your buddies. Right. You're moving pretty fast and you don't have time to process your emotions really. So you're really just working, work and working. Now, after it's all done, that's a different story.

But in the moment, actually, you know, I think we were so motivated to find these guys and get them home that it's hard to explain how you just get into this robot mode. But I think a lot of combat veterans watching understand. But for the civilians, it's one of those things that you try really hard to not show your emotions when you're on the battlefield. Because you know how it affects your buddies and everyone around you. So the harder you work, the less chance you have for any emotions to come out. So I think that's kind of how a lot of the spec ops guys operate. If you just keep working, there's nothing to think about. but I mean

it also as hard as difficult as that is I mean you guys did the honorable thing and recovered all 16 of those personnel and got it back home and you know I don't think you or any of the other guys out there as hard as that is to deal with you know you all did the right thing

yeah and I think a lot what made it really easy at least for me was you know looking at these guys and they were not much different than myself right there were most special operators right there in front of us and what I kept telling myself was if this was me,

they'd be out doing the same damn thing. Right. They'd be out there helping us, getting us home to our family. So I made it easy. Plus, you think about the families back home, like they deserve their loved one to come home.

Right. So there's a lot of motivation, like, to get them home. Now, during this time, do you guys have sufficient, like, ISR and coverage to make sure that you're not

attacked while you're doing this? Yeah, I don't think I've ever been on a mission with more assets in the air. You've got to remember, and a lot of people don't recognize this or know this, but this was the largest search and recovery operation since Vietnam, and I think it still, to this day is. I think it was larger than extortion. So we had multiple air assets. I mean, I think we had three at one point, and that's unheard of.

I mean, you're lucky to have one thing on station most of the time. Right. But having three different, I mean, plus we had fighters in the sky. I mean, it was intense. You knew it was a big deal when you could pick and choose which air asset you wanted to use. Yeah. And you guys had, I guess the 8-10s were kind of smacking dudes down as they were trying to move towards you. So they didn't even basically have a chance.

Correct. Yeah, we were actually recovering the crash site. We had removed all of our gear, had our weapons set on the ground, because when you're doing a recovery, you don't really, you can't have any other extra weight on you. You know, people are heavy. Yeah. So we had all that stuff down, and we hear cracking of an AK and an airburst of an RPG. And we're like, oh, here we go. They're here.

So all of us run over to our gear, throw it on and get ready, like getting ready to maneuver. and it was looking back on it, it happened so fast, like within minutes, you hear the A10s, you hear them fire their rockets, and then you hear over the radio, yeah, they're gone. Go back to work. They're not going to be a problem. You guys are good. Yeah, those A10s, when you hear that burp, that's one of the greatest sounds in the world. Yeah, I mean, they were used.

using not only their canons, but they were using rockets. They were using a 2-75 millimeter. And those things are, you know, the flichette rounds are, they're huge. And, yeah, they basically littered that side of the mountain. And I don't know why these guys were firing at us, to be honest. They were like a mile away. So we probably wouldn't have seen them if they didn't start shooting from too far. Yeah.

So you get the remains of. the seals and the pilots recovered. What's the next step? Evac, the bodies, the remains out. When do you start hearing about this other patrol that's out there, an American that's MIA? What's the next step for your platoon out there? It was almost immediately when we finished recovery

that we were told we need to investigate some transponder hits that were not, you know, a few like a mile away so we quickly got our gear on and and headed out on patrol but um you know we didn't know exactly still at that point we knew there were seals but we didn't know that they were the recon element that was out there prior we eventually learned that i think the next morning we learned that um on our next patrol but uh this is vietnam style patrolling that uh we joke that we trained this way, you know, during the Global War on Terror. And then we actually did it. We had a, we had a Ranger School patrol base on my very first mission, on my first deployment.

And so when I got the Ranger school, it's actually kind of funny. When I got to Ranger school, I was like, oh, so this is why we did this. Yeah. You know, but yeah, we quickly, right after recovery, we were out moving again. So for the recovery, did a bird, did a bird come in to do the recovery? How did you guys manage that? Yeah, essentially, the first sergeant created an HLZ with a bunch of explosives. And we waited until nightfall to bring in another Chinook to X-fill them that night. And you and you guys are like, well, you're not getting on the bird. You have a follow-on mission to go check out these transponders.

Yeah, we knew we weren't leaving. because we knew that there were, we hit the transponder patrol before the X-Fill, actually. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, so it was right after we basically lined them up for X-Fill, and it was still daytime. It was middle of the day. So then we did our follow-on patrol shortly thereafter, and we were beat.

We were beat up. I bet. I couldn't believe it. When they told us were going on patrol, I was thinking to myself, I don't know about this. You know, all of us are dehydrated. Yeah. We're exhausted.

We walked all night. We, you know, recovered bodies all day. Yeah. And now we're going on a patrol. Yeah. And so you guys are fanning out through the mountains and the forests looking for transponders. You initiated movement that night? Yeah, it was actually middle of the day.

Right after the recovery, we headed out on this patrol. And CLE Team 10 joined us. They linked up with us and we patrolled together. And when I say patrol, this was not your traditional type patrol. It was like, you know, we had two guys on the side of a goat trail and we were bocking it. We were just running, basically. There was no tactical movement here. Yeah, we were asking for it, essentially.

And we were told, you know, the way we're moving, pretty likely we're going to get in some bad. firefights, so be ready. Because we're moving fast and we're moving loud and we're not, you know, in a proper, this is how you shouldn't move. But speed was our tool at the time because we thought we might have guys that are alive still. Right. You're moving to potentially rescue other Americans that are out. Yeah. So we're, I mean, it's crazy. I mean, we don't, we wouldn't even do this in a training environment. Right. This was like an old road march where you're on the side of the road. Right.

And you're just booking down, but it's a goat trail. Yeah. And, yeah, the security was, you know, you did the best you could, right? But really, for me, I was trying to keep up the guy in front of me. Yeah. So if they start shooting at us, we'll fight. How far did you have to move to that first transponder hit? It was about a little over a mile, but it was like straight downhill into a valley.

Okay. So the movement down wasn't too bad. Yeah. Coming back, that's a different story. And was the transponder still there when you arrived? Nothing. There was nothing. We found nothing. We got to, yeah, it was just an empty space where obviously they probably made a radio transmission from that spot or near it. Or a sat phone. We don't know exactly what,

what caused this intel, but. But no bootprints in the mud, no expended brass, nothing? Nothing. We came up completely empty. Then it was obviously a huge disappointment. You know, we just walked for nothing. We didn't find our guys. So we were told, hurry up and get back.

We got to X-fill these guys. And CLT-10 is going to go with them. so they got to get back before the bird does. So obviously at that point, you know, we were, again, basically running up the mountain at that point. And I was beat. I was carrying the litter, the skedko. And it's not that heavy,

but it is when you're going up a mountain. Well, yeah, everything adds up. And you guys, I mean, how are you doing on water by this point in time? Because even wearing, like, what is it, a two-gallon or five-gown? the camelbacks, I don't know how, you know, two, three liters. Yeah, even when I know. Yeah, two minutes later. Like, I would have burned it through that on the first movement to the site and then

working all day recovering bodies. Do you guys have water left? No, we were most, I think almost everyone was out of water. I had like a little bit just to wet my mouth. And it was freaking me out because, you know, the one thing that you don't want to happen is to run out of water. Yeah. And being, I was the new private, right?

I'm the young guy. And I'm about to run out of water. I'm like, oh, shit. Yeah. I'm going to have to ask my team leader or the Tabaspect Four for water now. And you don't know that everybody else is already out too, though. Just about everybody was out. Yeah.

I don't think anyone had anything more than like half a bottle of water. Yeah. Basically. So, yeah, there was no water at that point. And, yeah, we were booking it up that hill. thankfully the 160th guys when they came in to recover the bodies once we got up to the mountain they they restocked us for a little bit at least yeah so now it's night time so you guys have been on the move and working hard like expending massive amounts of energy for almost 24 hours

straight correct so it's it's time to go home no no no no No, they put us back at HLZ up there, and we created a patrol base, and we pulled security for the night because they put us down for the night because they're like, we're going to kill these guys if we keep pushing them. Yeah. They're basically out of water. They've got to recover. But they said in the morning, we're heading out again. There's some other things we need to do. And we're going to drop some ordinance on this village nearby, which we almost were in. the night before.

And this is apparently where Ahmad Shah had his ID factory, and they suspected him to be there. So they were going to drop three 500 pound J-dams on this mud hut. It's weird, I mean, it's odd to me that they're going to drop

ordinance on anything when there's an American or at least, you know, that there are possibly four Americans out there alive that they don't know where they True. Yes. As I was in the patrol base that night, me being the young private, I was a smart ranger.

So I always had these questions and I always had, you know, insight. And I was asking things about my team leader. Thankfully, I had a good team leader who actually answered them and didn't just yell at me. Right. But I said, I asked him. I said, isn't it weird that we're dropping bombs when we don't know where our guys are? And he just stared at me. Yeah.

Like no answer. He literally just stared right through me. Like, I want to answer you, but you don't want to hear my answer. Right. Right. Well, I have an even more obnoxious question is why send the RECI out on this facility if you're just going to drop some bombs on it without a Rookie? If you haven't heard from your Rookie team and you don't need their input, then why didn't you just blow it up anyway? Just throwing that out there.

Hey, teach their own. Yeah. Well, I'll say this. You know, I don't know. if they had Intel on that building or not. Right. Now, RRRD was on the ground. So they may very well have had eyes on.

But we didn't get that information. So I don't want to assume everything, but that was just my thoughts at the moment. Gotcha. Fair enough. I did not know that ROD was on the ground. So maybe they had confirmed. So they were out in another location.

What were those dudes up to? you know I don't know we did link up with them that day so that night we did link up with them so I don't know when they arrived or where they came from they didn't come in with us they just appeared

I mean Recky doing what Recky does or RRD does what RRD does right they just appear so I wish I could get a hold to some of those guys and find out where they came from but they were definitely on the ground for sure so now we're getting into day three yeah this was three days post crash

but day two of us on the ground two days of you on the ground the second morning how much water and what how much water did the chinucks bring you did the recovery team bring you did they restock you guys they had like three or four cases of water water, like the Costco size, basically. And we burned through it right away.

Oh, sure. It didn't last very long. We each grabbed a couple bottles, and that's what we had. I drank one during the night. I should have had another looking back on it, but we all had a couple bottles of water for the next day. When you say bottle of water, you're just talking about like the little... That's a plastic bottle of water.

It's a 12-ounce polar. Not like a, like the, remember the... In a rack, the huge ones. Yeah, or not even the bottle, but like a, you know, like the fuel can full of water. No, no, just a little plastic bottles of water. Well, you've got to love Army supply sometimes. Yeah, I mean, I have one of my photos in the book is actually shows, you can see the trash on the HLZEs. We just piled all up.

Yeah. You can see the water bottle sitting there. Yeah. What are the temperatures like this time, you know, of year like at night and during the day? Halacious. I mean, during the day, it's triple digits. And at night, it gets into the 60s. So, you know, it doesn't sound cold. But I'll tell you what, when you've been sweating all day and it gets down to 60, it feels like 20. It feels like it's freezing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I was shivering. I was like, my teeth were chattering in the morning.

Had you guys, with your lack of water and the temperature in the day and the work and the movement, had you guys had any heat casualties at this point in time? Surprisingly, no one had a heat casualty at that time, but we did have guys that were near their dropping point shortly thereafter. Sure. So we're getting in it. So that next morning, what was the, what was the, what was the, next orders that you guys got over the net? What came next for the patrol? The next was we are

dropping ordinance and basically you're going to chase the ordinance. So what they did is they, you know, we heard the ordinance drop. We felt it hit because it wasn't that far away. And I mean, it shook that whole mountain. Yeah. Three 500 pound bombs. It's a lot more than I expected. I mean, We were probably a mile to a mile and a half away, and you could feel it under your feet. So as soon as they hit, we were out chasing them because our job now at that point was we need to confirm we got our guy. And at that point, we still didn't know where our seals were. We had no clue. We didn't even know we were going to go next.

They were just sending out patrols in different directions, just trying to sweep them out in as much as they could. Yeah, what the hell are you going to confirm of the guy after you drop three, 500 pounders on him? You need to ask the commanders above our level. I mean, even our commander, when we got there, he said, so what do you want us to do? Yeah, yeah. This was a building, and now it's a field full of cement and grass and dirt. And they said, lo and behold, I need to.

you guys to SFC that site. So SSC means sensitive site exploitation, and it means like if you go into a house, you search everything in the house, you take all the documents, you take the computer, like you search everything, and basically they want you to do this to a pile of rebel. A pile of rebel. I mean, to be honest, it didn't even look like a pile of rebel. It looked like, to me, it was like a farm field. with some chunks of like rock and cement and dirt and clay.

Right. It didn't seem like a building at all. Right. Were they doing this to target Ahmed Shah? Did they expect you? I mean, they send you in with a handy rapid DNA like sniffer that could pull all the DNA odor from the, no?

We had nothing like nothing of the sorts. I think they wanted to find a body. which really three 500 pound bombs. Right. Right. But, you know, before we even got to that, you know, that patrol down to that location was, yeah, it was downhill. But it was some of the most fallacious terrain we saw the whole time. Yeah.

We were sliding on our rear ends down this mountain, you know. And it was wide open. I mean, we're sliding on our butts on a hillside. basically if someone had a RPK, they could have picked off a Ranger platoon. I mean, easily. So to get down to that site, you know, we're basically running, sliding on our butts,

and then we get there and we find this complete mess of a J-DAM site that our commander, who is now in general work, he basically said, are you sending us heavy equipment? because that's what it's going to take. Right. We don't even have gloves. We don't have gloves to do this.

We have shooting gloves. Right, right. So what did your SSCE consist of while you were there? That is pretty awesome. Yeah, I was, you see anything? No, you don't? Okay. Really, there was no SSE.

It wasn't possible. There was nothing to SSE. You know, we started moving rocks around, and it was a complete waste of time. But we did find actually a hand. There was a hand. And one of my team leaders of my squad was poking at it with a stick. Come look at this, guys. Look at what we got.

Pretty horrific to see a hand, especially when you get up to it. down and the hand looks awfully small. You know, it was, I would say, best case scenario was a teenager. Yeah. Or a little person. Maybe it was a little person, you know, the infamous midgett bomb maker. It's possible. Yeah.

So it was a little disheartening. You know, you don't go to war to see potential civilian casualties. That's not what you want. Right. No one wants that. Right. So that was my first thought, actually, is like, oh, man, we killed some civilians. This is horrible.

So we were all sitting around thinking, we just killed civilians. Great. Right. That's freaking awesome. But years later, I found out from my platoon leader who actually went back to the same village as a company commander, actually he left that, he left Red Wings and became company commander for the company that was in. in the documentary Restrepo.

Oh, okay. So if you watch that, that was his next deployment. Pretty unbelievable. And he found out that actually, that J-DAM actually killed a bunch of insurgents. So it wasn't, it wasn't a civilian casualty like I thought. Right. So that was a little bit refreshing. But, you know, I lived like 10 years of my life thinking I saw a bunch of civilians.

Right, right. And I mean, up to this point, like, you guys haven't. been in combat. So you haven't had that, I don't want to say release, but sort of that active part, you've recovered bodies, which was probably, or had some emotional, you know, weight. And then you go and you think, you know, you feel as though we just j-dammed civilians, which has emotional weight. And, I mean, does this feel like a heavy offer for you, especially since you haven't been in combat yet? Yeah, for me it was like I Honestly this was the moment

You know Jack was mentioned earlier Is this you were living the dream right This is what you thought it would be no Well that's the moment I had It was basically right after that That night after that J-DAM site I was sitting there and you know talking to one of the team leaders And basically it was like

Is this what you thought war was going to be like? No This is nothing this is This is nothing that I thought I was going to be like And it was, I mean, the whole mission was a complete failure, right? Like, we wouldn't even know about this mission if it was a success. Right. So the whole point we're talking, the only reason we're talking about this is because it was like one of the most epic failures in spec ops history.

So, you know, we're sitting there on the mountain. And I'm just thinking, okay, so we know 16 guys are dead. We killed some civilians. We still haven't found our Navy SEALs. And I haven't eaten and we're out of water. This fucking sucks. You know, this is like, this is horrible. And so now, where's the fighting?

Where's the glory? Right. And now it's time, of course, for you guys to get on the bird and go home for hot sandwiches and soup, right? Ice cream. You know, I wish, you know, at that point we were starting to have heat casualties. People were starting to fall out and docs running around with IVs and it was a mess. and I'm sitting there joking with one of the guys

that's about to be heat casualty. I asked him, wouldn't it be nice if they air dropped some pizza? And he didn't like that because he was about to, come to find out, he was about to pass out. Yeah.

So, you know, we finally got a resupply that night. But that was another shit show was they went to go air drop us water and food and they dropped it a valley over. Oh my God. Shit.

And we're like, you've got to be kidding me. Yeah. Like, we've walked for 24 hours. Like, we're not going to get it. Yeah. And the one that landed near us, the shoot never opened and it burned in. So half of the stuff had exploded. Yeah.

Yeah. So we were, I'm drinking out of these like broken water bottles that were half full. And we're just chugging these things. And they resplied us the next day. Finally, we ended up getting. food and water. But it was on the way down to that J-DAM site that we heard that there was new Intel. That's when we kind of heard about the seals.

So Three Charlie was on our way down, was sent to a village to search for what we heard. We heard was an American. They had an American. They were kind of chattering on the radio and someone had come into a local base. and said we have an American in our village. So three Charlie basically started running to that village while we were on our way down to that J. Dam. That was the only glimmer of hope I think we had

for the first two or three days there. But we also heard shortly after the SSE that they found somebody. They literally found an alive American. And I can't even explain what that felt like. After all that negativity and all that failure

that we all felt, it's like, holy shit, someone survived all this. And yeah, it was like a, we were like partying. And you guys got it.

And, and not only did they survive, you guys being out there, having gone through all that, you guys were on, you know, close enough to actually go and get him.

Yeah, he was not that far. I mean, far considering all the injuries and stuff that he went through. Sure. Like, I can't believe he made it that far, to be honest. But I guess, you know, adrenaline does crazy things to the human body. Let's actually get to some questions. Okay, before we're talking about. So we just want to get to some questions, and then we'll get back into this.

Okay. Jackson, thank you very much. For Tony, Jack, and Dave, where do you all see the future of Ranger Regiment headed in a perfect world? What would be the next evolution of the 75th? Tony, taken away. I mean, I think they've kind of already molded into this counterterrorism type force that is new to them. They went from, you know, airfield seizures to these direct action raids. And I think that's the right path given there's so many urban centers in the world. If we're going to war again, we're going to need that large urban force to go door to door and fight.

I mean, it's urban warfare as the future. Yeah, I think the Ranger Regiment, you know, they build themselves. They call themselves America's premier raid force. So that kind of says it all right there what they see their future as. So that's definitely not going away. I mean, I was there. So I can't speak to it so much now, but I was. was there when it was, you know, airfield seizures, when it was patrol base, and when it was

making the change into the CQB and things like that. And there were a lot of people at Ranger Battalion that resisted that. They didn't want them to go that way. So we were, you know, kind of serving two masters, you know, one, you get in your Arsav, you know, your Ranger, whatever it was vehicle, and go out and sit in a barrisuit on a cold-ass airfield in the morning after, you know, whatever. And then, you know, and then you'd go do, you know, up drills and, you know, Mozambiques and stuff, you know,

on the range or the shoe house. When I worked with Rangers or, you know, in Afghanistan, Iraq, they'd become, later on, they'd become so professionalized where they could become dog handers. They could become, you know, the interrogate. I mean, they just had a lot more going on, which I think is fantastic.

And now it's like a little arm. me within an army. Yeah. No, I think that's fantastic. But you guys obviously know a lot more than I do about that. And then Jackson, again, what was the most professional unit you worked with? Rangers seemed to always talk highly of Delta, Air Force Special Operations Command, and HRT. Did you work with any of them?

Yeah, I personally worked with all of them. I mean, I worked with Steel Team 6, HART. I worked with Delta. The PJs, the AFSOC guys. PJs, obviously, yeah. And I would say the two that stood out to me the most, one being Delta, far and away, I think the best

counterterrorism force out there. And the other one is the PJs. Those guys, you talk about knowing your job inside and out. Those guys were amazing. So I give a lot of props to those guys. Jackson, thank you again. How critical were other soft

elements of the seal? Oh, how critical as in like, critical were the other soft elements of the SEALs plans for the Rucky of Ahmed Shah. All due respect was their pushback on their planning ability? No, I don't know the full details of that. I think this has been written about. I think Ed Derek covered this in his book.

And it's, I think a lot of the soft community actually didn't want to do this mission. and the only people that actually accepted it was the SEALs. So I think that that was the pushback was, now this doesn't seem like a good idea for our guys. So all it takes is one commander to say yes, right? Right, right. I think there were some people that told the SEALs that it wasn't a good idea. But, you know, that's one opinion and the SEALs had their opinion.

So, you know, I think the Marine commanders in particular advised that they should have more Marines on the ground nearby when they're doing this recid mission because of the terrain. Yeah. And I think they said, no, we're going by ourselves. Yeah. Alejandra, thank you, buddy. Hey, Tony, was talking to a mutual, our Ranger buddy of ours.

He wanted me to ask you to tell stories of bush diving and BAC and RIP. Ha, ha, ha. two. That's, yeah, that's, I think I know who, who, who, who asked that question. Felipe, I know that's you. So, essentially, we used to get a little rowdy on the weekends, and I, I fell into a bush on a walk back to a motel. And, you know, you tripped over your own feet because you had one too many. and the bush was the softest bush I'd ever fell into.

So every time we would go back to this motel on the weekend, we would jump into it. And so we called it Bush Diving. Rangers being Rangers. Yeah, exactly. Dickie's Discords Daily's. Thank you. Oh, I didn't get a notification. My malfunction. Yeah, sorry about that.

Hit the little bell icon and select all notifications. Yeah. Pro tip. And Alejandro, thanks again, buddy. Afghan portion. What was talking with Philippe was talking with Philippe P

he mentioned during the insertion almost fast roping off the side of a cliff LRL. He mentioned you had a guy land on you

while roping in injured your arm and Charlie Mike. Yeah, so I wasn't the one who was injured but yeah, I mean,

it was a bunch of tree on the ground. Yeah. And we were very close to a, to a cliff. Thankfully not super close

but close enough. and Bert was the guy. Specialist Bert, a radio operator, broke his arm. John Duggan, thank you very much. No segue for ball tremors. Awkward. Next time. We'll get you.

We got you. We got you. Don't worry about it. And then BPA, Izzy, thank you very much for the donation. I don't see a question. So let's talk about the recovery then. You guys on the ground had gotten word that an American has been found.

What was the next step for your platoon? After, you know, they found Marcus, and that was three Charlie that found Marcus, but basically the next job was, you know, where's the rest of your team? You know, we know there's four of you, so where's the rest of your team? And, you know, Marcus, Marcus did his best, and he basically gave us a decent area to go search. and it took quite a bit of time to find the rest of his team. So our job then was we need to get the rest of these guys. But he quickly told us that, you know, they're dead.

So he knew that it was, there was no rescue. It was recovery. So Marcus told Three Charlie an area to search. That got radioed over to your platoon and then you went to search the area, if I'm understanding right? No, it was really close to where Three Charlie was and they actually searched. Okay, gotcha. But we were still doing, you know, presence patrols hoping to draw out, you know,

Ahmad Shah and his boys in case they were still around. So that's what we were basically doing at that point. So one of the things I noticed in your book was that La Troe was very concerned about how many guys three Charlie had with them because, you know, they had been under siege and he felt like that they were going to, he was worried that you guys were going to be outgunned, right?

Yeah, I mean, the element that he came in contact with was pretty small that he saw. Now, there were more guys, but they were kind of hidden around the village. So his concern was, you know, they've got a lot more guys than we do. Right. You better have more. Like, he never really said that. He just kept asking, you know, how many guys do you have?

Yeah. How many guys do you have? And Lieutenant English, who was the, a guy who was basically interviewing him. A former enlisted guy in Cag and a Green Beret. Just an amazing guy. He suspected, it's what he told me. So I just want to say that, you know, Lieutenant English has since passed from cancer.

So sorry to hear that. This was interviews. Yeah, I mean, what a great, amazing human. So I just want to say that I interviewed him shortly before he died years ago. And this was before I decided I was actually going to write a book. And he basically said he suspected that the handlers that were with Marcus were waiting to know exactly how many men they had, waiting for English to say something so that he could, you know, tell his buddies. So English never told him how many guys they had.

He just kept saying enough. We have enough. So, you know, we were still skeptical that, you know, these villagers were protecting him, right? Right. I think rightfully so. Yeah. Interesting. So what happened?

So what happened in terms of the gears turning above you when Free Charlie calls back to command, like Jackpot, like we have one? I mean, was the whole world moving for you at that point in terms of military logistics and everything you needed? Oh, yeah. I mean, it was, yeah, we had resupplies at that point. We had other units moving towards us. We had a marine unit that was moving to us on foot. So reinforcements are on the way. And then the next part of the mission was, okay, we got to find the rest of this team. and it was you know we knew they weren't alive so it was it slowed down dramatically at that point it was like to a crawl there's no more running around now now we're doing legit like patrols

where we're drawn to contact we're trying to try to make contact and assault the enemy and of course they were long gone because they're smarter than that I mean look at what's happening. Right. Like what's happening right now. As soon as we left, what happened? Yeah. Now, at that time, are you, are you guys out there in basically a company-sized element? We were in a platoon minus element at my location. Well, I mean, we were split up. Okay. That's what I mean is like with England, with everybody, if you would have consolidated about how many people did you have at that point? There was about a company arrangers out there. I mean, there were two platoons from Charlie Company, one platoon from Bravo Company, and of course all the other

elements that were out there, you know, PJs, you had elements of CEL Team 10, you had RRD, we had Green Berets, we had Marines that were also in the area. So I would say total, probably two full companies of people on the ground. You guys could definitely lay some hate then if you needed to. Like it wasn't, you weren't at risk of it becoming another like fighting retreat from, from, or ENEs from something.

I mean, it sounds that way, but we were so spread out. You know, we're a few miles apart. So in that terrain, you have to be together in order to be effective. Right.

We were so spread out. We were, you know, yeah, we were ready. We were pretty, exposed, I would say, each element.

So what happens next? So they call Jack Potter. They have Latrell. They find the guys. Now is it time to go home? Now do you get to go home for some cake and ice? Not quite. Not quite.

This was the point where we still need to find his team, right? So Three Charlie has an idea of where they are. But they weren't, I mean, Latrell's description was not. like this is the coordinates it was like this here you're there you like circled an area on the map and we we trusted him so we sent three charlie there but one charlie my unit did patrols in other areas that we knew that they had passed by just to be sure that you know he just been through severe trauma so you can trust him but you can only trust him so much right we don't know how

baddies hurt at that point. So we just kept patrolling and looking and crawling around in the mountains at known areas of where they had been. And it was a few days later before we found

his buddies. So you can imagine that that terrain's that bad. I mean, it takes days to search a little area on the map. See, the whole time I was out there. I just had no appetite. I mean, I was like snacking on things, but I never ate full meal really.

You're a little bit on edge from the days prior. So you weren't very hungry. So I mean, I lost like 15 pounds in that week. So just sort of curiosity, you went to Ranger School. Like, when you went to Ranger School after this, you're probably like, this isn't shit. Like, I get two to three hours and I sleep. I get at least a meal or two a day. Like, I'm cool with this.

No, Ranger School still sucks. But I would say that. It was still awful, but at the same time, I always had that to fall back on, right? Right. You know, I was in the mountains in winter. It sucked. And I just kept thinking, well, at least I'm not in Afghanistan. Right, right.

At least I know I'm getting a meal today. So how long does it take for three Charlie to recover the other three seals? It was a total two days after Marcus to get everybody. And there's still, there's still, Matthew Axelson was still not recovered at that. point. It wasn't until we got, you know, reinforcements from 3rd Ranger Battalion who basically

deployed early because of this mission. As soon as this mission went down, third range battalion was activated. I remember when that happened. Oh, really? Yeah. It was a Charlie Company, I believe, was like a platoon or two from Charlie Company. That got deployed.

They did. Yeah, they got out there, I believe it was the 6th day, or 5th or 6th? Yeah. It was, it was. It was, it It was like, you know, an RF1 recall. They called everyone's cell phones, got them in there and rapidly deployed those guys. Oh, yeah. Wow. Yeah, I mean, like I said, it was the largest rescue and recovery operations since Vietnam.

So I think the military treated this as we are not having another Roberts Ridge. This is already bad. We're not going to get overwhelmed by firepower. Not going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's amazing. So how were you guys doing, were people just pretty much sticking their errors?

How are you doing Battlespace Deconfliction at this point in time with so many moving elements that did not normally work with each other? I don't know how to answer that because I don't know that it was that, I mean, it was tough, obviously. There were so many moving parts that and radio transmissions out there were just God awful. I mean, half of the time, nothing would go through. You'd have to try satellite. That wouldn't go through. So it was line of sight. Wow.

You know, I mean, yeah, it was tough. The commanders had their work cut out for him for sure. Were there any blue-on-blue incidents during that point in time? Surprisingly, no. I mean, we linked up with units on a patrol. Like, we linked up with R.D in the middle of a patrol. troll. And, you know, so I don't know how it all occurred, but it was very well done by at least my leaders that I saw. I mean, I had some of the best guys on planet. I had, you know, Lieutenant Colonel

Howell. I had general work and, you know, Congdon, who is, I believe he retired of the Sergeant Major, these guys were cream of the crop. So, you know, impressive, let's put it that way. Yeah. So how did this operation finally start winding down? I mean, after you're out there five days, everyone's recovered. What was the next step? You know, Axelson still wasn't recovered but when three when uh third ranger battalion arrived you know they they wanted to get us out of there we were just like a battered bunch of kids out there i mean i have a picture i think you guys i sent it to you but it was a picture uh right after the mission and we looked like we had a couple pigs that rolled around in the mud you know we all had beards um it was that's how it wound

wound down. It's like we got to get these guys out of here and get them replaced because they're beat to all hell. Yeah. That's that's amazing. And so what did 375 do when they hit the ground? They immediately went after the, the area where they believed Axelson to be. And, you know, Axelson, you know, this is not like, isn't common knowledge, but he was not near his two buddies. He was a little bit away from them. So, you know, one can say that, you know, he may have survived much longer than we thought. He may have been eating himself. So that's why it took so long.

He's a stud, right? So he may have, he may have, you know, made his way out of there. What was the estimated size of the force that they encountered? You know, there's so many conflicting reports out there. there but I have seen videos of the Taliban that the Taliban has put out or Amman Shah's guys have put out and to my to my best estimation I think it was no more than about 12 12 men but you got to keep in mind and this is not to I'm not trying to like make Marcus a story not true because that terrain right you could have put five guys against those four seals and

the superiority of position they had, it wouldn't have mattered. It wouldn't have mattered if there were 50 or five. You're shooting down on these guys. And just walking that terrain, I'll just say this. I don't know how anyone could have survived if they're ambushed from above. I just don't, doesn't, there's no cover. I mean, there's trees, but they're shooting plunging fire down on you.

Right. Like, you don't even have to aim. So our estimation is about 12. Yeah.