The Team House - Regimental Reconnaissance Company with Mike Edwards, Ep. 81

Episode Date: February 20, 2021

Mike Edwards served in 3rd Ranger Battalion and the Regimental Reconnaissance Company (RRC) across 18 deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places. In this interview we discuss his combat jump into Iraq in 2003, a rather hot deployment to Mosul, Iraq in 2005, and then the selection and training for RRC and what those deployments were like before he became an instructor at the military free fall course. Apologies that this was not a live show, we had some internet issues with the snow storm here in New York. We hope to get that fixed but we decided to do a recording and upload it instead to make sure you guys got a good interview. The only thing you missed before we hit the record button was Mike and Jack talking about their time in the Ranger Regiment together and how Jack was a private running away and hiding from Mike who was a new tabbed spec-4 at the time! Special thanks to Mike and our viewers for their patience! Get access to bonus segments with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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

and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Work remotely nowadays, too. I'm sure it's hammering the internet system or the bandwidth, especially in the bigger cities. So, yeah, I apologize to the people who are watching live.

If it comes out choppy, I'll upload another copy later on. we just might have some interruptions doing this live. So what was it then that that finally got you into Ranger Battalion? Well, I was in Korea station 2 ID at 2-9 Infantry over there. The Twin Tower incident 9-11 kicked off and watched that on the news just like everybody else probably did that was alive at that time. And at that point in time, I was thinking about getting out of the military. I really just had been in the regular army and it really wasn't exactly

what I thought it was going to be. So I'd been talking to recruiter about re-enlisting and trying to go to the Ranger Regiment. At the time, they told me they didn't have any slots, so I was like, eh, I'll just get out. And then 9-11 happened.

So at that point in time, I was about a month, maybe two months from getting out pretty close to the end of my window. So I went to the recruiter or to the retention guy and actually asked him, I was like, is there anything I can do?

I want to go to the Ranger retina so I can fight for my country as soon as possible. And I talked to him and I ended up going to going back home, taking about a month of leave. And then after that, I came back, reported a rip and then started the whole process there. And at that point, things were starting to gear up. I mean, you must have at least seen in the newspapers and things that were gearing up for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Yeah, this was 2002 when I got to the regiment.

and then after that I did some train and cycle stuff for a little bit because the guys had just gotten back from the first trip to Afghanistan, and I missed that one. They came back and then I joined my platoon and started training with them just like normal. And then after that, towards the end of that training cycle, we found out we were going to go to Iraq. We jumped into the invasion. I think you were there with us still at that point or had you already left?

No, I got to Ranger Battalion in the summer of 03. So I got there as you guys were coming home. Okay. Yeah, so went to Ranger School, went straight through, came back from that and immediately, what, it just gotten back from that point in Iraq,

when Ranger School went straight through, came back. Then we went to Thailand, did a little training trip over there for a little bit. You were probably on that one. That was probably your first trip. I was in Ranger School. Sorry.

Oh, were you? So we went over there, did a little training thing, training those guys up for a little bit, came back, that normal deployment cycle. And I think that's roughly around the time our cycle started getting on that rhythmic turn of essentially three to four months gone and then six to eight months back.

And it pretty much turned like that the entire time I was there, the rest of it until I got to RFC and it kind of picked up a little bit. Right on. So can you tell us a little bit then about the invasion of Iraq? I'd really like to hear. I don't think we've ever had anyone on the show talk about the combat jump and that whole experience. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just remembering a good buddy of ours, Donnie Forbis, and remembering him from that jump. He was one of my guys after that. I was his team later,

but me and him were there close together. So we go rig up. We were down in Saudi Arabia, just kind of hanging out, honestly, waiting, watching the news. And at the time, CNN was like the biggest news outlet. So we were watching that, watching old Wolf Blitzer on TV. And then hearing all of stuff going on, like the pre, the bombing that was going on prior to the invasion and stuff like that. We're just like itching and waiting for that time to go. We finally get the call. We rig up, get ready to get our stuff on and do the rehearsals for the jump and everything got canceled. So we waited a little bit longer than next thing you know, it spun up again. They're like, hey, we're going to jump into a different location. And we planned, rehearsed for the whole thing,

loaded up on the bird. Our rucks were humongous because we thought we were going to be out there for several months living off of our own stuff that we carried in. So guys were jumping in. It's a pretty heavy rucks. I'd say 80 to 100 pounds, which for a normal housebacks a lot. And we rigged all that stuff up, got on the bird, and we, were you rigged, got on the bird, then sat down so our rucks are hanging over our legs. I remember the frame literally cutting off the circulation on my legs. And then it's one of those things where like you shimmy yours to get comfortable. And then it screwed the dude to your left or here, right? And he's like, come on, man. And he's shaking his. And you're like, oh, my bad, dude. And you're just shimmying your stuff. Trying to be comfortable,

but it was just miserable for everyone. I mean, we're literally touching is packed in. I mean, you know, you both of you guys know, it was so tight in there on C-17. Well, then we get the command to stand up, hook up, all that stuff. The doors come open and the bird's like in this dive. It's in this significant dive, dive again below the whatever radar, ADA guns or whatever it was, they dove down to the exit altitude, pull it up super low, and the doors were open and all we hear is go, go, go. We're all, like, hanging on the anchor line cable like this. The cable's sagging probably like waist height because there's so many people hanging on it. Where we're going along with our static lines, hand that thing off, jump out the door, and then

we jumped in mop gear. So we had like mop level, you know, whatever it is, the top and bottom. And then we had the mask, like around our waist. and that thing got between my legs, so I was worried that I wouldn't be able to do a good PLF. So I'm trying to fidget with this thing and get it out of my way so I can do a PLF. Meanwhile, I hit the dirt. I mean, I hit the ground, bam, hard.

Get up, derrig my stuff, find another Ranger buddy, link up with him, move out, and then we end up linking up at our assembly area and kind of waiting on everybody else to regroup. Meanwhile, there's a couple cars that were on the objective, just haul and butt the opposite direction, but otherwise it looked pretty quiet. So linked up with our guys moved out through the objective.

It was a humongous objective for essentially a Ranger company. I think we may have been a company minus at the time, but we cleared a lot of structures with essentially a company of Rangers. And it was well after daylight by the time we got done. And that was our initial foothold into Iraq. Any contact on the airfield or any use of that mop gear that you were lugging around all that time? No, not at all. Yeah, there was no contact, no use of the mop gear. We ended up downgrading from that, and that's when we continued on sort of pushing further out towards

Iraq or sorry, towards Baghdad, pushing out towards the river, the dam and stuff like that, doing a bunch of lines of communication interdiction, lock interdiction is what we call it, doing that stuff, ambushing some stuff. And then after that, you know, B-Co ended up getting in that big gunfight on the dam, which from what I remember, I think A-Co was supposed to be on that. And then it ended up being B-co, they went out. So we ended up reacting to recover some of their casualties. So I flew into the dam.

And I was just a private at the time, you know, hadn't even been a ranger school. We flew into the dam and we secured the bodies of the couple of guys that got wounded during that big barrage out there in Hadith. But other than that, that was my first combat deployment relatively uneventful. I mean, we rolled around. We ambushed some stuff, you know, shot up some trucks, shot up some groups of people that had ambushed us and stuff like that. But other than that, it was way more uneventful than I had imagined initially. Did that start to change in the subsequent deployments after you went to Ranger School? Yeah, it did.

It kind of took a while. So my next deployment was Afghanistan super. It was in the wintertime. They don't like to fight in the wintertime. So it was super slow. We did a couple movements. We did a couple raids and that's about it. It was pretty dead.

And honestly, at that point in time, I was getting to the point where I was like, dang, man, we're in a war now. We're over here and nobody wants to fight us. But after that, it changed a good bit more after that. We started getting a lot busier, did a lot more deployments, did another couple deployments to Afghanistan. We did a bunch of big missions there. I actually went back to Iraq. And then in 2005, in Iraq is when I ended up getting weighted. We were up there in Mosul.

And I think, I can't remember, were you one of our snipers then? Or was it before that? No, it was after. I was with weapons squad at that time. And so you were with second platoon. No, I was with third platoon. I was a squad leader from third platoon at the time. Okay, okay.

I was with first platoon before that. But first and third, we're up there together at, at Mosul at the time. And I was the squad. I was the most senior squad leader for third to at the time. Yeah, yeah. I saw, yeah, I was a gun team leader in first platoon on that deployment. Okay, so you were there. Yeah.

So it was a pretty busy trip. So you were one of the guys that took frag from the, from the, which incident was it where you got hurt? That was up in Talafar. We had done all those hits there in Mosul. And then afterwards we pushed up to Talafar. that city was so bad at the time. You know, our intel was saying, hey, you know, big armies got this whole thing contained. They're getting sniped every time they go in there with tanks or whatever.

The guys are getting shot in the hatches. So they had pretty much backed off and contained that area from what we were told. We were to go in there busted up. So the first night we went in there. We drove by Stryker. I think it was about a two-hour drive, maybe less. My memory's horrible, but we went into there, did a hit on one place, ended up some guys trying to squirt and roll away.

Some of our snipers took those guys out. And then after that went to the next building. And take that back. I think that might have been earlier in the day in the Mosul, but then we went to Talafar. And essentially the big mission where a lot of guys got wounded at, we went to hit this target. We were all stacked up on the building,

get ready to go. At the time, I was across the street, pulling cross coverage on that side. We rotated our different squads through as like the primary assault squad. And I had just been it. So now I was back out on the outside edge, pulling security for those guys as they pushed in.

So we ended up trying to go into this target nice and silent. Well, some of the helicopters of Kiowa flew over. And at that point in time, alerted the bad guys that we were there. So we heard there was movement, moving around at that point in time, the guy Mike Elliott, who was a squad leader,

getting ready to breach the door, ended up getting compromised by the door. So they just did the right thing. took off into the door, he'll compromise, and essentially took a grenade blast for his entire squad, pretty much point blank, right in the breach of the target. And from what I remember after that, we're waiting trying to see what's going on.

The PLs yelling, looking in there. And then I went past with my squad, about the same time Chuck Kogel's team was actually going in to relieve the rest of his squad. And they went in, we went in, cleared out, and I started seeing wounded guys. We were dragging them away from contact into a room and essentially just telling them to treat themselves initially until we can continue and secure the target. So we pushed on through and these guys are just dropping grenades like rain off the roof at us.

They're just going off all over the place. We were getting ready to go across an open area and the open courtyard cleared into another side of the room. And one of my team leaders, Jeremiah Daigle, was in front leading the way. And super solid dude. he's leading the way. Well, gunfire goes off, grenades go off, and I got sucked into that room to try to clear that. Me and a couple guys went in there. Well, I didn't even realize, but one of my guys had taken a shot in his shoulder and in his leg as well, it was one of our tabs-spec for sawgunners at the time. And Daigle saw that and thank God that he was there because that guy jumped on him and he was

an EMT qualified guy at the time. And so he fixed that dude up, patched him. up. And if it wasn't for him, that guy would have died. So anyway, I wasn't aware of that at the time. Meanwhile, I'm trying to clear this other room. Guys are still throwing grenades all over the place. I pull back to try to figure out what's going on because at this point in time, we've got a lot of guys all over the place. It's a lot of chaotic stuff. There's not a lot of guys on columns because guys are pinned down or platoon leader and platoon sergeant were pinned down over here. Forbis is on the roof with the sniper team pinned down. So we're just trying to make headway so that we can breathe, So I pull back, link up with some of the other guys.

And I noticed another grenade gets tossed into this area where we have casualties being worked on. And it seemed like everything kind of went slow-mo at that point in time. I looked at the grenade and I thought, I'm about to be one ugly son of a gun because it's about to blow up in my face like any minute. But I was like, oh, I'm kicking this thing. So I booted it into a room. And then I dove over to the right, which is where one of my old roommate, Chris M.oden, was laying there wounded like crazy. I dove over to him. And then that's when I realized I was wounded,

bleeding all out of my arm and got fixed by the docks. And then after that, you know, it continues after that. If you want me to go deeper, I probably went too far down a rabbit hole. I'd like to hear how this wraps up. Because to tell you the truth, I remember the aftermath of this, but I don't know that I,

maybe I did at the time, but I don't remember talking to somebody describing the events blow by blow that happened inside the building that day. Yeah, it was, it was a wild night for all of us. I mean, we'd been expecting this for, you know, for years. And but this was, I think for most of us in that platoon, if not all of us in that platoon, was our first significant gun fight. So a lot of guys were like, wow, we heard some little pop shots. So, you know, you go to a target. There's a dude with a, hey, kid at the front

door. One dude smokes him and, you know, targets cleared pretty much. Nobody else is going to fight. But this was one of the ones where these guys were, they were ready to fight and they were ready for us. And we took some heat because of it. But because we stuck to what our training was and we kept our security, we kept comms with guys on the target, we were able to work it out, bring up our vehicles and really tight narrow streets, get those dudes loaded up on the, on the medevac vehicles, and we didn't lose anybody. Luckily, we had some significant casualties. We had, I mean, we had several guys that we were pretty sure we're going to die, but luckily those guys all made it through

and able to walk on their own two legs. I mean, they didn't lose limbs either. So, I mean, we're extremely blessed to make it out of that mission. That unscathed, I guess you could say. And we ended up, they ended level in that entire city block after we left and killed two or three hundred more guys. But I think they estimated we killed roughly 50-something guys with direct fire initially on the target,

maybe less than that, but that might have been with Cass. But then all total afterwards, they just bombed the crap out of it because all the bad guys came in, started collecting the bodies of their buddies and cheering about it. They took them out after that. I remember when you guys came back and I remember mopping the blood out of the back of the strikers. I know it's kind of morbid to talk about, but yeah, I mean, it was dicey. And I'm glad that everyone made it home from that.

Yeah, it was a sketchy mission, that's for sure. I mean, it's the first one that at the time in the middle of it, I was thinking, might not make it back from this one, you know, but we all worked together and we pull it through it. And it was absolutely amazing to see the young Rangers. I mean, guys that like equivalent to you essentially, like the E4 tabbed E4s that were in the platoon at the time, just like robots, man, just doing what they're supposed to do.

Everybody was just like a machine clearing. Some guys were waiting for guidance. but it went down, you know, for as chaotic as it was, it went down relatively smooth. Yeah. So. It's really a testament to, to the mindset, you know, the type of, the quality of guys that are in the regiment. And then also just the training that you guys had up to that point. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

And we had done probably, excuse me, for tweaking my neck, my dang neck's always killing me. destroyed after all those years of abuse. I know you guys know, but yeah, so we had trained and we had done that type of mission set probably close to several hundred times, if not close to eight or nine hundred times at that point in time. Most of us had several deployments to Iraq and at least one, if not two, to Afghanistan at that point, or any, you know, team leader and above essentially had several deployments. So we were pretty solid. And my squad was pretty stacked too at the time.

I can't remember if it was that deployment or the next one. But I had like two, I had like four E5s under me. I was the E6 squad. You had like four E5s. And then like a tab spec four. So, I mean, we were super stacked. Yeah. And I do, I credit, you know, all of those guys and the training and the people that we

work for that, you know, everyone came home alive from that deployment was pretty. I think we were all kind of. surprised. Yeah, I really was. And I have, you know, that was probably deployment four or five for me. And I had seen a little, little gunfight here and there before that, but that was the first big one. And then after that, saw many, many more similar to that or or close to it at least. And, yeah, we were definitely lucky in that one because most of the other ones that were that intensive with gunfire that I was in, someone would get killed or badly wounded at least. And I know probably one of our worst wounded guys in that mission was Andrus.

I mean, he got shot in the knee and his shoulder. But I mean, the guy was, I mean, I'm sure the dude's got some serious pain right now. But he was almost like 100%. He was doing PT hanging with the boys about a year or so after that. He had a lot of surgeries. But all the guys pretty much recovered, Mboden ended up coming back. He took my squad, the very next deployment. he ended up taking over as a squad leader for my squad because I was getting ready to move out

to go be a rip and shunker at that point. He was a tough dude. That guy, he could probably pick me up and thrown me over the brown fence if he wanted to. Oh, yeah, he could throw me over the brown fence too. I mean, even then, and I was like 240 pounds, like zero fat, but Beau was probably, I don't five or six inches shorter than me and wait as much as I did solid steel boy. I mean, that dude was a beast. And that's the last dude you wanted to carry in a training event if he got wounded, you know? You know, it's interesting what a different like five years makes because in 2000, no, in 98, I had a platoon start to tell me that all this CQB training that we were doing at the time,

was bullshit and that we needed to go back to the good old ranger patrol base operation which we still did but he did not like all you know the cqb the mouth you know things like that um what you probably you may have already mentioned it and i missed it because i was going to comments but what what was the buildup of the environment what was it was it kind of an urban was it a village was a single compound for the one in Mosul? Yeah, for the dude. It was from what I remember, and I may be, you know, I don't remember exact details,

but from what I remember, it's pretty close to the center of the city, and there was relatively close in there. It was really tight streets. I remember at times we were having issues trying to get the strikers in there to get them set up for our blocking positions. I can't remember if that was one of the ones,

but I do remember the streets being super tight. So it was completely urban environment, like you would see in any, modernized third world country city yeah interesting yeah guys i'm going to uh kill the stream and then i will upload this interview later i'm just taking down some of the questions that people asked and we'll we'll get to them in a little bit um just so you guys know if you're able to catch up with us i think the snow is just beaten beaten down spectrum tonight so we'll hey i'm glad i'm glad it's you and not me uh because uh that's what i was worried about

i live way out in the country so i have a satellite internet And when it gets a little stormy outside, that stuff goes down pretty quick. Luckily, it's clear skies for us today. So when was it that you started thinking about, or what was the first time you heard about RRC or RRD before that? And the idea occurred to you that maybe you wanted to go and try out. Well, I met a good buddy of mine, Kurt Conklin. I ended up meeting him in, I think it was in PLDC at the time. And he, I think it just went to RRD selection and just made it.

And I spent all the time talking to him about it. He was kind of telling me generally what they did. And I really didn't know. So that's what really intrigued me. But that was as an E5. So I did my squad leader time. And then later on I was thinking about whether I wanted to go to selection up at Fort Bragg or did I want to go to RRD selection.

And I was like, you know, I heard both of them are about the same. same physically. So I was trying to think, you know, if I go up there to Fort Bragg, work with those guys. It's doing the same thing that I'm doing already in the line battalion. For the most part, you know, there's those exceptional missions that they get, but those are pretty rare on a day-to-day basis. The Ranger is doing the exact same thing those guys, the Delta Force guys, are doing at the time. So I was like, ah, that doesn't seem intriguing to me. It's just another level of the same stuff. RRC or RR, at the time I didn't really know what they did, but it seemed cool. And it was different. And I said,

yeah, I want to mix it up a little bit. So it was about the time I got over to be got over there to the rock to be a rip-in-strucker. I started thinking about it. I bumped into some more of the guys and had talked to some of the guys on the teams. And I was like, man, this is what I want to do. But I still wasn't dead set. I was actually thinking about doing the PA program or are actually going to be a helicopter pilot. I was just ready to change it up. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting.

Visit child and family resource network.org today. Well, I ended up volunteering for a trip overseas running one of those special programs that we used to work for. And while I was over there, I realized that's what the RRC, it was RRD still at the time. The RRD guys were doing. And I said, man, this is what you guys do on deployments. Man, this is awesome. And the guys, the team started for that team told me, he said, hey, man, go to selection. If you make it, we'll take you on team three. And I said, all right. So I went back, put in my packet, started PT and hardcore, because I was still recovering a little bit from being wounded. It had been a couple years, but I'd had some knee surgeries

and stuff. So I was trying to heal up, got back into premium shape, and then after about a year from that, well, probably less than that. Yeah, it was probably six or eight months after that deployment. I had my packet and went to RRC selection, or RRD at the time, and then it became RRC. And then after selection in OTC, and that's what they called it back then. Now they call it RTC. But after that, I went straight to Team 3, so their promise stuff, so it worked out for me. What can you tell us about? Because I know 100% sure people are going to ask, what is the selection and training process like? Well, when I went through, you know, there's certain things that nobody even gets to know about the selection unless you're the cadre working there.

But essentially, it's extremely professionally run. And they mirror this off of another selection process. But it's really solidly conducted all the cadre that you enter. interact with, absolutely go off of a script. And what they say, I mean, it's absolutely professionally put together, well articulated. They're dressed for success in suits and ties when they pick you up. They take you to where you go. And when you get out there where the selection courses being run at, then you start doing

a bunch of the administrative stuff. Psych evals, IQ tests, like tons and tons of tests. You actually sit down face to face with a psych. Talk to him on several occasions. And for the entire first week, you're kind of doing like the PT test, all those basic standards, ranger standards you have to pass. And then doing all those psyche bells and interviews. And then towards the end of that first week, you start focusing on some land navigation. They teach you how to read different types of maps, how to make your own protractors and stuff like that you can use.

So like advanced land navigation type stuff. And then after that, we go and put it to application or put it to practice out. the field doing some regular land nav courses you know little picket sitting in the woods and in nowhere and uh so that that right there blushes for confidence obviously because it's a it's usually a regular you know standard army land nav course that hasn't been used in a while so there's no trails leading to these pickets that are in the middle of woods so kind of um breaks your soul a little bit because it's it's tough out there and it's in the mountains but then after that you move on to like cadre lead land nap. And after I got to RRC and on the team, this is one of my most favorite

things to do as a team guy is to lead this cadre lead because you go from one of the mountain passes up in northern Georgia to another mountain pass. And I think it's roughly about 12 miles within there. But the thousands of feet that you change up and down, up and down the whole way is brutal. And the first climb is up like Blood Mountain. You're going up and there's switch backs going like this all the way to the top. And you got like 8, 75, 65 pounds, probably ruck at the time. Yeah, it may be a little less than that. Fifty-five to 65 pounds. And it goes a little heavier at the time. But these cadres that are leading it are absolutely beasts. I mean, they're guys that are on the teams already that have already been through this. And not only

that, they've been told, hey, you're going to support selection. So, you know, it behooves them to beast themselves up before they show up. That way they can break us. And that's what they do. And it is the most fast-paced ruck march you could ever think of it. And they're navigating through it as well, but kind of stay into the main trail. But ultimately, it's a gut check to break you off. And then after that, you go into the actual stress phase, which is the last little bit of it. And that one, every day you get picked up. You're walking all your points in the mountain.

So you're going up over this ridge and back down the other side, back up and over this side. And walking, I'd say anywhere from 12 to 18 miles a day. And if you're not the smartest guy, maybe more. But you've got to be a stud because if you're walking more, now you got to cover that distance a lot faster to make the time hacks, whatever they are. Smart Rangers, strong Rangers, right? Yeah.

So you do that, crank it out. And then on the last day, I'll just leave it at that. At the last day of the stress week, there's a surprise. So you think you walk, you know, like 12 miles or so, and you kind of get this little pause. and then next thing you know, you're walking a lot further than you've ever walked before. And then that's ultimately, I guess, the administrative or the field culmination, and then we did some other things after that, and then they interview at a board.

And during that board, you know, it's just like a standard military or special operations board. We're just getting grilled by subject matter experts on different things. And me personally, when I got out of that board, I was almost like broken. I felt that after all that I put myself through, I'm not getting selected. They're not selected me. I could tell by the looks on their faces. And then when I found out that I was selected,

my mind was blown and I was so happy to be there. And then after that, I mean, the next five, six years, five or six years that I was there went by like that. It seemed like a blink of an eye and we had done so much stuff that it was all over with at that point. What was, we don't have to go and do it. like exceptional detail, but what was the training like? Because RRD and RRC, very few people know about them, but they really are one of the most elite units in the world that, you know,

and it's not that they're trying to height, maintain this huge veil of secrecy. They're just not widely known. Yeah, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's a really small organization. I've talked to guys from some of the other units out there that we work with, some of those special missions units, and they're surprised when they find out how few guys there are in the company. I mean, it's really small. And, you know, it's funny since I've been out, and it'd be nice to put this out there, you know, maybe to bust out any other posers or whatever. But since I've been out, I've had someone, you know, hit me up and say,

hey, do you know this guy? This guy was supposedly an RRC, and I'm like, Like, I've never seen the guy before. What's his name? And then I look at his name. And then I start talking to this guy. And he's like, yeah, I'll put you in touch with you. So I start talking to this dude. I'm like, hey, were you in R or C?

He's telling me that he was essentially on the same team as me during the same time I was on the team and did all this stuff. He claims he was on team three at the time, did a jump into combat with team three in 2009, which was actually team one. It wasn't team three, because I was on team three shortly after that. But anyway, busted the gal for a line. I guess people think that RSC is so big that I might wouldn't know a guy that was on the team next to me. I mean, I may not, I know them all.

I may not see them very often. Like, that's the thing. And the company, you might have one or two teams stateside at a time, but they're usually TDI training all over the country. So, like, sometimes the guys I went to OTC with that were on other teams, I might see them for three years, two or three years. It was a long time sometimes before we would actually be a. the same location together. How did he were so busy? How did he get that information, do you know, in terms of, like, how did he even know

the structure, enough structure to claim that he had been on a team? I think the guy, he's one of those, like, internet trolls, I think, that, like, follows those websites and stuff like that and gathers a lot of intelligence. I guess he gleans what he thinks is legit off of that and then promotes it as himself. I mean, the guy even has a tattoo of, like, RRC's unofficial symbol. You know what I mean? You guys know what I'm talking about. You've seen it.

I mean, it's right up there actually on this plaque. But this guy had a tattoo, and I said, man, this guy is so deep that he's going to get a tattoo. And he was talking about his team warrant officer and stuff like that. And I said, this is not an SF team. We only had enlisted guys on the teams. There's no warrant officers. So, I mean, I knew he was lying right off the bat, but he was posing to a lot of people. A lot of people, I guess, so my buddy, this guy, Barry that I know, I met a guy, old school Ranger guy from back in the day, super solid guy.

And he's the one, actually, I think, that brought it up to me. And, or no, it wasn't him. I met, I met him and this guy at the same time. But he was telling me about this guy who was claiming to be RRC. And so I looked into him. and the guy was obviously full of crap. But this old school ranger that I met from back in Vietnam, he actually served with us in Mosul back in the day.

And I met this guy afterwards, or after I retired, actually. And we've been keeping in touch. And he's actually the guy that submitted my stuff for that thing we talked about off to the side earlier. So after selection, then what was OTC or now RTC? What sort of training did they put? you guys through before you're operational? That's a good question.

That was absolutely the most fun, most rewarding time of my entire career. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of hard work involved, and I mean, a lot of walking, obviously. But we got to go to free fall school. You know, if I wanted to go to free fall my entire career and then finally got the opportunity to go to free ball school and like the best free ball school out there as well. So I got to do that, saw that open mind. to that. And then we got to do a lot of stuff on radios, communications,

saccom, all the different stuff that you have to do in the tactical piece of it, how to be camouflaged, you know, like sniper stuff, hide stuff. We learned all that stuff. And then after that we worked on advanced like mission planning. Because a lot of the stuff that we did overseas, it would be, for example, me and then my guys that I'm controlling out there in the society and the local national populace out there. and I'm doing all their mission briefs. I'm putting all their products all the way up to the commander, you know, the ultimate task force commander.

So we had to know how to plan missions. We had to know how to brief them properly. So we got training on that. Advanced camera training. I mean, we learned how to do anything and everything to include like very long exposure shots with the Nikon D3s and stuff that we had. We learned how to do technical surveillance, how to build little install, little cameras and little gadgets and stuff that we could use.

I don't want to go too much into detail, but we got to do some really cool stuff like that. And then more after that, towards the end of it is more a lot of the clandestine type stuff that we did that I won't really specifically talk about. But it was at the time, I didn't really like that stuff, that more clandestine stuff. But then after we did it so much, I mean, because honestly, that's what we ended up doing a lot of, because there was kind of a shift after I got there. And I ended up enjoying that stuff after a while. But I didn't think I was going to like it at first. So there was a shift from the traditional, I guess you could say,

Reky mission when you picture a couple of guys out in like a cat hole or like some sort of like belly hide with telephoto lenses watching an enemy compound. And then you're saying we shifted away from that to other missions. Yeah. And that was what we typically trained. for and even when I went through the pipeline, they had already foreseen the change. So we were starting to shift in that direction towards the tail end of the pipeline, which made it longer. I think the OTC was like six or seven months at the time when I went through.

And then afterwards, I think they sent it close to a year, like 11 months, 12 months, to sufficiently add that stuff. Because when I went through, we just touched on some of that advanced stuff, the clandestine stuff. But then we went to a team. And after you done a few trips, then you went to that more advanced training. Now I think right after I went through, they're starting to do the whole thing in the pipeline, which adds some significant time to

it. Because they don't want to drop the fundamental mission of two guys out in gilly suits. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's still, the guys still trained to do that and they're still good at that. It's not something that's done regularly

overseas. It's more of the not so traditional, you know, dress like I am now, kind of kind of work type stuff. Right. Right. Was this also part of the transition from the regimental reconnaissance detachment to the regimental reconnaissance company? It was part of that whole transition. Yeah, it was roughly about that time. I think shortly after I graduated from the training pipeline, we became RRC roughly about that time. I don't remember. I mean,

that's a thing. When I was there, it was like the Army didn't. exist anymore and it was like this was work you know what I mean and I know it's weird for some people that are out there that may find it hard to believe but what I can see that was the army stuff and like the stuff that we did it was so non-armie for the most part that it seemed like we weren't I mean we were in the army we knew we were in the army we had a chain of command and all that kind of stuff but we really lost touch with a lot of that normal going on you know goings on of the normal day because we were so busy we were either deployed or TDIWI, somewhere in the country.

I mean, even the first year, me and my wife were together. I was only in the same city with her, not including block leave, like two weeks in that entire year. Wow. So that's how busy. And a lot of that's straight and state side, but a lot of it was deployed overseas as well. I mean, cheers to her, kudos to her for sticking through that because it's not easy. Yeah, it can be tough.

I really thoroughly enjoyed it. I was single most of the time. And I know guys that are married, it can be more challenging. I mean, you got this wife that's standing at home, and she's got to, she didn't even know where you're at half the time

because you probably can't even talk to her a lot. And then when you can, it's super vague. So they have it a lot harder than we do. But most of my time I was single. So, I mean, there was times where I came back from a deployment in RRC,

and then the senior enlisted advisor would call me. I'd be on leave. I literally got back like a week ago. Hey, man, you mind going back over? And I'm like, well, I'm the only single dude of my team. It only makes sense. And he's like, no, this is old Roy Young. And he's like, no, man, that doesn't matter just because you're single.

If you want to, it makes sense to send you back because it's the same location you just came from. You don't have to work it. But anyway, I did some extra deployments because of that. But they were, you know, the unit and the whole regiments like that, they're all about trying to make sure you don't get too burned up because they know that the pace is ridiculous. And they, in RRC, I think they know that's even more so the case there. So they were really aware of that. And I think they knew we had to double tap some guys, but they tried to keep it within

reason. Now, you were there when, and this is my understanding, and I could be incorrect in this, but when it went from RRD to RRC, it also, there was a shift. it went from basically a regimental asset to a national asset. And did you feel that? I mean, did you realize that people were looking at you guys going, man, these guys are good, really good. Let's use them. Well, I didn't, I mean, we didn't see that as individuals on the teams.

To be honest, on the teams, we would have mission sets that we really thoroughly enjoyed. And then we would have mission sets that we really didn't. enjoyed necessarily so much. And, you know, that's going to be the case everywhere. But I think we were able to blend it pretty well, so God has stayed pretty happy. But other than that, I really didn't see that much of a shift or a change within the company. I just know, I do know that we stayed busy and we were getting busier at that time. So I don't know, maybe that opened up some more places for us to go to. But I'm not sure. I mean, for a guy on the team, I was just trying to burn it, you know, trying to,

trying to be after bad guys as much as I possibly could. And, you know, until I got married, then I had to kind of tone it back a little bit. What was that like getting deployed with RRC actually going overseas and doing the job? And can you tell us what the job was? Because I think a lot of people probably really don't understand what the mission is. Well, it depends. I've gone overseas before. And typically, it depends on what location you're going to.

When I go to Afghanistan, usually I'd fly over with the normal rotator of Rangers or whoever from the task force that's going over. Fly over those guys. And we usually, you know, the only difference was that we usually dress like this. We'd have like a collar shirt and some car hearts or something on. And then we'd fly over there. We'd get off, do our normal thing, push to our outstation, and then continue work. Just like anybody else in the Army or in one of the other task forces within, you know, J-Soc or special. operations or whatever.

And, but the only difference is when we got out there, we did stuff where we trained Indage on how to do reconnaissance stuff-ish, kind of, and how to basically provide us with that information that we needed. We trained guys in shooting and lots of various other tactical skills as well, but to be able to use those guys to benefit us for, you know, going after bad guys. We've, I did that selecting and assessing those guys a little bit. I also deployed and ran one of those teams. Once we created that program and pushed them out to certain locations,

I was actually one of the outstation team leaders for a while, and I did multiple rotations in the same location. So the guys that were there, they knew me intimately. They knew my interpreter intimately. And the same interpreter stayed there the entire time. So when I rotated in, it was me and like three other dudes that ever went there. We tried to keep it the same because we had that rapport with those guys. We'd send them on countless missions, and they had survived under my watch and that guy's watch, you know what I mean?

So we don't want to swap it up. So, but we did have guys that got killed, you know, some of our endage. And essentially, that was for them just being too proud. They really enjoyed what they did, and they were too proud about it. Like a lot of Americans, hey, look at me. I'm this bad to the bone, dude. And the Afghans were like, yep, see you later, bud. So that has happened.

But we did that. And we also ran joint teams in various countries that we worked in. Some places we would go in support of other elements within the task force. But a lot of times we would be a team leader or an assistant team leader mixed with guys from, you know, the other special mission units like, you know, the Delta Force guys and the ST6 guys and stuff like that. So big joint team works together. Were there times where you found yourself directly doing that reconnaissance mission, fast roping in and then rucking 12 miles and scoping out targets? So I have, but only in training, because all the stuff that we did overseas, like I said, was more of that, you know, kind of blend in, linking up with the locals kind of stuff. We did most of that kind of stuff, but we did plenty of that stuff in training.

I remember this one we jumped into out in Arizona, jumped in, walked up at the top of this mountain, called Cacho Peak and then walk further from that. End up walking like 40 miles for infill and then I had to walk out to Xville. So we walked about 40 miles over about, I'd say roughly two nights of walking. So we walk all night, sleep during the day, walk all night, sleep during the day. And then we finally got to our position. And then we're just gathering intelligence at the time.

But that was in OTC, they really like to walk you to see if you're going to make, I mean, because all the dudes have been through selection in OTC, and selection, they've walked a ton, but now they're going to throw a legit ruck on you. I'm talking like excess of 100 pounds at times, and you're going to cruise with that thing. And we had some lessons learned because we didn't want to be without. So sometimes there were guys that would pack a little too much,

and Cadre ended up laying us out at one point. They were like, hey, let's see what you got in your rucks. All right, you got two hand mics. You only need one. You know, like they're just ripping up. Like you guys have so much extra crap. That's why your rucks weigh 118 to 120-something pounds each. And so they stripped about 15 pounds off each rut roughly, and then we kept walking.

But that was what it was about. It was about teaching us lessons, us finding our weak link in the team in like an OTC, and then determining whether that weak link remains the weak link. Because if you have a dude that's in OTC with you, he's always the slowest guy. He's always the weakest guy. That dude's not going to make it. And the cadjury are going to notice it, but so are the guys on the team more than anything. So that's, I think what a lot of that stuff was, because we ended up finding that common denominator,

and he ended up going away before the end of the pipeline. Yeah. We actually lost several guys, but that was the one, only the rest of the guys we lost weren't bad guys. They just had a little hiccup, you know, that is in the regiment, go out, have a couple beers, and then you drive to your car and you get popped. That happened to one guy, a little, you know, fist fight altercation. with another guy. But that one guy was actually, you know, a turd and they ended up getting rid of him. Now, did you guys peer him out or was he just noticed by the cadre and they selected him?

Yeah, they selected him out. We didn't have to say anything. They saw it. They asked us what we fought and we said, hey, we've noticed this, that, and the other. I mean, we love that guy. He was part of our team, you know, but I just don't, and he wasn't a bad person by any means. I just don't think he was physically quite where he needed to be there. Because when you're covering that kind of distance with that kind of weight. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children.

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And every time you donate with Gryphal's Plasma, you're compensated. You can receive over $500 the first month. Learn more about plasma and how it helps people at gripplesplasma.com. It doesn't matter who you are. If you do that enough, you're going to have a bad day where you're the weak link. I mean, you have that little cold or you maybe didn't drink enough water that day. Everybody else is premium shape. Yeah, you're going to be the weak link that day.

It's going to happen to somebody eventually. So, but that guy commonly happened to, so he had to go. So when you would go out with the indige, because you said, you know, it wasn't really the sneaky, not the long range reconnaissance type stuff, but more of the technical stuff. So when you're in a car or in a van and you're, you know, in your cool and your man jammies,

was it just, was it generally just you and your indie? I mean, I don't know what you want to talk about, but how did that feel for you? It depends on what we were doing. Sometimes we would be with our team or some guys from the team, moving around doing stuff.

But most of the time when I was running one of those outsides, stations. I would go up by myself with my interpreter. So it'd be me and my interpreter who was an awesome, awesome guy. He actually had him teach me lessons in Dari, and I learned Dari pretty decent from him. But he was an old guy. He was like a grandpa, but a good dude. That dude's not a tactical turp. And they knew that. So that's why they put him with me, because typically he's not going to go out on a raid. But he would roll with me sometimes, but I thought him how to shoot pistol and he went out with me and carried a pistol. But really, if the crap hit the fan, it was me and a 60-something year old guy who's awesome, but I got to save that guy too, because he's my buddy. He's an American

citizen, but he's also my interpreter. So it could add more stress to it, but a lot of times we went by ourselves, and I knew that I had a chain back in the rear that was watching me or that was paying attention to what I was doing. So I had that, but I really enjoyed going out and about and rolling around. I've been in places where I've driven through. I'm like, uh-oh, I hope I get through this spot. But then I've had a lot of places most of the time you're driving around. Nobody even cares until I open my mouth. I mean, I'm usually tan. It's wintertime. So I look all pale now. But normally I'm a relatively tan guy. I got brown hair and brown beard. So I was able to blend in relatively decent over there. I've had interpreters come up to me and just start speaking posh to

and I'm like, hey, I don't speak that language. And they thought I was a turp before. So I guess I blend indecent. You know, we had one guy, I don't know if he's being a smart ass, but he wanted me to ask you this. He said that you had the nickname Magnum. Where did that come from? That comes.

I believe Fred was the first one to say it, one of the guys on my team. And that is my nip. That was one of my nicknames, but I don't think it's appropriate for this forum. That's a funny one. I wish I knew who it was. Oh, my gosh. It's got to be Will or Fred.

Or maybe somebody else that knows me. I had a couple guys busted on me this evening when they found out I was going to be on your show. This one, I guess this guy wanted to know what was your favorite weapon? or weapon system when you were on RRC. Was there something you were particularly fond of? I really like a lot of long-range shooting. So I really like all the big sniper rifles. We had like a variety of them.

But I know it's in one of those pictures. And when I sent the link to my wife, she saw it. And I saw the comments below. So I said something about the MP7. But I really liked that little gun. It was super lightweight. and, you know, I smoked a bunch of bad guys on a deployment with that thing. I really liked it.

It doesn't have a lot of firepower. It doesn't have a lot of power. You know, it's essentially like a pellet rifle, 177 caliber or 4.6 millimeter cruising it close to 4,000 feet per second. So it'll zip right through, but it's not causing a lot of damage. But I shot a bunch of dudes on one target with that, actually. The same deployment that picture's taken from. I was down south.

We walked into this target, and we were kind of getting all of our, our end. all set up and I was like hey I'm going to go get eyes on real quick and just kind of see make sure we're at the right spot and I eased up and ended up getting in a gunfight at the target building prior to the assault so it was kind of like the gigs up at this point but I ended up shooting this dude shooting some other guys and all the all the seals and the other guys that were with me come run into the sound of gunfire next thing I know look left look right I got seal buddies of mine that are just firing away we're just deusing these guys it was a good little good little gunfight and I think that little MP7 performed pretty well all close range shots like

20 meters and in but still I enjoyed that little gun but if I had to choose anything um yeah if I had to choose anything to carry low vis it would be that uh as far as having enough firepower but not too big of a package but but you know like a I like a normal AR 15 with 5 556 I mean I've never had an issue putting somebody down with that you know there used to be those arguments back in the day but I've never had anybody not drop. Yeah. You know? One person wanted to know what the difference is.

I think we kind of covered it, but what the difference is between RRC and the guys at Delta? It's different. So like the guys at Delta have an element within their unit that's similar to like RRC. And they do a lot of the same training. But if you go to Delta, you're going to be an operator kicking in doors, shooting bad guys, in the face like guys in the Ranger battalion, but obviously you could get those higher profile missions.

RRC is kind of like that for the Ranger Regiment, but in the reconnaissance realm. I believe that there's guys from the other, you know, some of those special mission units that are out there. They could even learn stuff from us when it comes to certain reconnaissance stuff because I work with some of those

guys now that I'm out and some of them they didn't do a lot of that. For a while, they shifted back to be an assaulters and then we did lot of the reconnaissance stuff. So a lot of us got a lot of experience doing that stuff. But, I mean, you know, every unit has to have their overarching peace. And those guys are, I mean, all the guys that I've ever worked with in my career within that task force were absolutely phenomenal, amazing human beings. I mean, I couldn't be more happy to have worked with those people.

And, you know, every second since I left the regiment and worked elsewhere, and then as being a civilian, I've realized truly how well we had it where we were at. And it was a good place to be. And you could trust those people when they were super loyal. And one person wanted to know, and I think you kind of answered this too, if there's cross-pollination between RRC and the special mission units, I think you kind of already alluded to the seals coming and backing up your play on that one target. Yeah. There is a little bit as far as like deployments and mission stuff. We work together with them and sometimes in these integral teams where it may be a team of like 10 people, but there may be three different organizations represented within that team.

And we have those across different areas. And sometimes it may be like a Delta Force dude in charge or like a Steel Team Six guy in charge. And then in some places it's a Ranger in charge. But we all work together like a team. And I mean, it's like the best tight-knit group. when you first get there, you may look at some of these guys from the other units that you may have not worked with before. So they may be a new face and they're different units. You don't know how this guy is.

So there's that little kind of like dogs when they meet, like a little sniff, sniff, sniff. And it's like, all right, you're cool. And then we're good. And it's a great deployment. And it always is. It's always professionalism over anything else that could occur. So, I mean, those guys are professional in all of those units. And I really enjoy working with them all.

And they also wanted to ask, do RRC operators go and take the long walk and go on over to the unit later on? There have been several guys that have done that. Some guys have gone over there and then made it all the way through OTC and then they get booted for getting in a, you know, like an argument with one of the cadres. There's a lot of that that happens. But we've had a good many people that have gone there. I think everybody that I can recall that went from RRC to their selection made it through selection and then OTC or if they didn't make it through OTC they usually came back to the company or sometimes they would stay there and do a support role for them.

But most of the guys that left the company, as long as they didn't run their mouth, they would usually be successful. On that note, I have a question myself, a true or false kind of deal to dispel something maybe or confirm or deny. one of the stories I've heard going around is that guys who are not in the Ranger regiment can go and try out for RRC now. Is there any truth to that? Yeah, that's true. Even when I was there, we started bringing in a lot of guys.

There's a lot of guys that came to selection from the regular army. Even in my selection process or my course, there was, I don't even know how many, but at least like four or five regular army guys. And only two of them physically made it to the end. And then those two actually got selected. They were super solid guys. But one of them ended up getting dropped in OTC due to him being young and single and, you know, wanting to party. But he was a really good guy.

And, I mean, a phenomenal athlete. I mean, one of the most physically fit human beings overseen. And then the other one was a guy. And I don't say his name because he's still doing work now. But he was older than I was. and I was 31, I think, when I went to selection. And this guy was older than I was and absolutely impressed me. He was always physically ahead of me.

Him and that other regular army guy, the two regular army guys that I can remember the most because they graduated or they made it into the OTC pipeline. They were physical studs, man, because all of us were beasts. I mean, I was scoring well over 300 on the PT test at that point. And these guys could beast me when it comes to rock marching. and I always consider myself one of the fastest rock barters there was, you know. So that's to me impressive.

But yeah, those guys can come. And I think they eventually opened it up to the last I heard to like SEALs, Marine Special Operations and, you know, any type of special operations soldier from outside the regiment actually can apply now. No shit. So was that because they weren't getting enough traction from regiment, were they not getting enough volunteers? coming through there? I believe that's the case. A lot of guys in the regiment are like, man,

I'm loving what I'm doing. I'm kicking indoors and come back guys every single day. So I think that hurt the guys up at Fort Bragg as well. I think it hurt those guys a little bit too, because Rangers is like, why would I go through that? Like, I'm doing 90% of what they do here, you know? Right. So I think that hurt us as well.

And then a lot of people really didn't know what we did. So I think whenever we started doing that mission set, training those Indich guys in Afghanistan, I know personally I had a lot of FaceTime with some of the line battalion guys. And they would come over and I'd tell them kind of what I did during the day and stuff like that because they weren't aware. And I think that helps with recruiting a lot. But honestly, they probably need to work on their recruiting. But that is part of it. They're trying to reach out and get more people and grab from a broader pool because, yeah, we love our buddies in the Ranger Regiment.

but there's other knowledge out there that we could access. You know, we don't want our inbred information. We need to reach out and check these other people that may have some solid stuff to pass on. The problem with recruiting for RRD and then RRC, that goes back to the unit's inception back in the 80s, that there's always been this problem with guys not wanting to get off that infantry career track where they feel like they got to go be squad leaders, platoon sergeants on the line to move, make their career. And even when I was in, like, you know, I heard squad leaders talking about, you know,

those guys just do recon, they're afraid to fight. There's a lot of misconceptions about what RRC does. And I hope, I actually hope that you coming on this podcast today kind of changes that, that there's some guys out there on the ranks that hear this and start taking a little bit more of an interest. Yeah, and I can clear that up too. And that's one of the cool things about being there. when I worked at the one out station that I ended up going to a lot,

there was always a ranger strike force there and like a Delta force strike force there. And, you know, that one would go out on a mission one night, the other one go out the next night. They alternate back and forth. Well, I was the only RRC guy there, and I'm doing my stuff during the daytime. But one of the platoon servants was a buddy mine. And I ended up talking to him. And he's like, hey, man, he sent one of his guys over my little tent to ask if I want to go out on a mission with him.

So I was like, yeah, sure. So I rolled out with them, kind of just like helped out on a blocking position with their gunners. And they kind of went in the target, looked around. I was like, hey, what do you all need? Let me know I got it. And then I realized they had one of their young E6 squad leaders, super solid guy. But he was doing battlefield interrogation. But he could have much better been used somewhere else.

So I was like, hey, why don't I do that for you? I've done that before. So I took over doing their battlefield interrogation. So then I went on every single mission with them after that. And they sliced that squad leader to do squad leader things. And then I was the guy in there getting the intelligence and determining or assisting the commander and determining whether we're going to go push onto another target. So what I'm getting at is when you were an RRC doing that stuff in Afghanistan,

it was easy to tag along with the strike force elements and still do the DA raid stuff. You know, that may have changed. But I did a ton of DA raids while I was at RRC with the Ranger platoon. with the with the CAG guys, with the seals, with all those guys. So you can do all of it. And the thing that I liked about it is one day I'm jumping out of planes to a military free fall. Like, hey-hose, next day I'm doing long-range sniper shooting. Next day I'm making explosives and learn how to make it from scratch out of stuff that you can get at the store.

And then next thing, I'm learning how to evade, you know, questioning or whatever and learn how to pick out of locks and handcuffs. And we do that stuff all the time. learning how to get onto people's computers, looking how to learn how to take photos and all this random stuff. It just never got boring. I mean, it was like every month you're doing something different, and it's like six or eight months before you back around

of that same thing again. So I really, that's what I enjoyed about. I can't sit still. And it sounds like not only Afghanistan, but they were sending you guys in onesies and twosies, really all over the world doing sneaky things here and there, wherever they needed you. Yeah, they had,

they had guys doing random stuff all over the place. And we, I mean, like I said, we were running. We may have guys, like, say one team deploys. You may have one running that program in Afghanistan, two or three guys assisting with that program at outstations. And then a guy in this country over here somewhere in Africa. I know you got a guy over here somewhere near Afghanistan. So we could have guys in, I mean, literally one deployment I was on.

I think we had out of my team, we had. three guys in three different countries, three or four different countries at the same time. And that's out of like a six-man team. Honestly, it's interesting that you both mentioned recruiting and how poor it was because I didn't even know about like RRD until, and this is like 97, 98, 99, until like my platoon sergeant who had been there, it told, you know, told me about it. Maybe our first start at the time, I'm not sure because he came back. but um but that's the only who was it uh Dave T

oh I think I know you're talking about it went up to Alaska I'll tell you after the show I don't want to say his name yeah yeah that's what I figured I figured that's who you're talking about but I just want to see yeah um but you know he like he tried to sell it to me like he told me about it and tried to sell to me and at the time this is like late 90s they weren't really doing like a lot of the technical stuff um and But they didn't have recruiting teams that came around like Delta did. You know, they didn't have...

Back in the day, RRD, their almost sole mission was to jump in ahead of time and do surveillance on airfields prior to a Ranger Battalion coming and jumping on the airfield. So, I mean, that's just another little indicator of how much things have changed since 9-11. And I think that a lot of people may... Well, obviously not people who cross your path or somebody else. have, but I think that a lot of people still have that idea that, you know, that's what they do. Oh, yeah. You know, pooping sandwich bags and I do believe that's out there. What were you saying?

I said that the image that you guys are like hiding in cat holes pooping in sandwich bags for a week on end. Yeah, I was going to say when I got over there, we would brief our products because we actually do a free fall insertion or Hayho insertion into those training events and sometimes we walk a significant distance with a rock on and we actually pull reconnaissance on these airfields for four or five days prior to and you know the soft force comes in

like as we're getting ready to leave really so they come in they get all these pictures and they thought it was just like kind of like check the block or like it was like an admin thing like these somebody in the staff made this recie report up and I got back to the line they're like you guys actually jump in like yeah you guys didn't

know we're out there. We're out there the whole time. We actually take these pictures. I drew the sketch of that target you just went in because I actually went in it and drew a sketch of it. You know, I mean, we actually did that stuff. I remember this one time we jumped, we jumped in directly this one airfield. I think it was one seven five was jumping in. And there was a mount city on there or a little mount complex. And we snuck up to that thing, me and the medic of my team at night. And we're like, man, there's nobody in this thing. So we literally went inside of it and drew a sketch of the entire floor plan and then sent that to the task force and they later on I talked to the guys and they were like oh we thought that was just made up it was

like a one of those admin plugs into the training event we're like no we're actually there like we were sucking we were I was I was drinking water hang on just a second my my comms popped off but we were we were literally out there drinking water off of the airfield I was drinking runoff because I was out of water so we were really there. That's crazy. And to not even be appreciated for it. Yeah, because you It's because they didn't know. It's because they didn't know, you know. They thought it was all notional. Right. We're actually there. So with all these deployments, I mean, are there any other particularly hairy experiences that you care to share with us deploying with RRC?

you know, ideally, of course, the bad guys never know you were there, just like you were saying. But yeah, ideally, we did have, we did have this one where we were going, hey, let me set this thing up. Sure. There we go. I think you keep sliding off my head, man. My hair's too long. I did get a haircut. We did this one.

We went to Kabul, or not Kabul, but Kandahar. And we were driving back to our camp, which is not too far from there. and it was after curfew. So typically the normal soldiers and Afghans had to be like stopped and not driving on the roads. So we ended up coming back and we broke curfew, just barely coming back. And we got stopped at an A&A checkpoint. And I was driving one of the vehicles. We had some Navy guys behind me in one of the vehicles.

And then we had some guys in the front. And we ended up having some some indage guys with like AKs come up and they're like super aggressive. and we're trying to watch them, but at this point, we're detained. And they've got a Dushka on top of the guard shack, a bunch of PKMs, RPKs and stuff like that, and AKs. And so we're like, hey, we're trying to talk our way out of this thing because if they wanted to open up on us, we would be lucky to get out of their alive. I mean, we're not wearing armor and we're in a thin-skinned civilian vehicle.

So we're like, what that? I mean, we have like low-vis armor, but that's about it. But we ended up talking our way out. Sorry, go ahead. I'm sorry to interrupt. Were these like national police? Were they tribal? Was it?

Who were the indage? This was A&P. So Afghan National Police. I said, that's the Afghan Army, but Afghan police, A&P. And we ended up getting held up there. And it got to the point where at one point in time I have my little Haji scarf deal on and I have my pistol underneath this thing. pointing at this guy's face who's about a foot away leaning into the car.

He can't see it. It's super dark. And our cars are all blacked out. They don't have good lighting over there anyway. So he can't tell that I'm pointing at his face. I'm just waiting for the call so that we can shoot this guy, shoot that guy, and then get the heck out of there. And I had another guy trained on that dude. But luckily, we were able to talk our way out of that and there was no shots fired.

But I've been in probably three or four different situations like that. similar to that when we had a bigger group but I've been in a situation like that where I only had one other American with me and we probably had 30 or 40 guys running up on us and we were doing something

to find out where the bad guys were essentially so we were like an advance element and we had the strike force down the road so when we started having all these guys coming up around us we called up and let them know and luckily they got there in the nick of time because we had 25

or 30 guys with RPG AKs, PKMs, and stuff like that, run it towards us. And then right about the time they get 10 yards from the front of our vehicle, here comes our assault force in from the back and just de-escalated the whole situation. You saw cockroaches just scatter at that point. When you say that in the first scenario, when you said you guys talked your way out of it or barely talked your way out of it, do they not accept, do they know you were Americans?

Did that not, like, give you an instant pass? Or were you trying to maintain a low profile and let your indig talk you out of it? Or what? That's a good question that you asked that. Because initially we try to not tell them anything that we don't want them to know. We're just like, oh, yeah, we may be civilian contractors. You know, because at some point in time, when we open our mouth, they're like, this guy's not from here.

So at first look, they may think we're local. And then once we start talking, they know we're not local, but are we any of it? threat. And so that's where we're trying to keep it to where we're not a threat. We're just like, hey, we're just helping these people out over here or whatever. But at that point in time, it got to the point where we showed American flags. We had little VS17 panels with American flags on that we would, we used it mainly for regular army soldiers because we would pass their convoys and sometimes they would shoot at us when we were low-vis. So we used that. But we pulled that thing up and these guys said, we don't care if you are American, even if you're George Bush

couldn't save you. That's what they said at the time. Even your George Bush can't save you at this time. We have called the Taliban. They come to get you. And we're like, okay, we'll see how this works out. But we're not just getting taken. And luckily, we're able to talk our way out without being in a gunfight. Because if we had a guy in a gunfight, it could have been a catastrophe. I mean, we were just sitting targets. So you said the six years went by in a flash. And after that, you served your time on RRC. Was that when you moved on to be a free fall instructor? No, I left RRC. We ended up having way too many E8s in the company at the time.

So I ended up moving back to Third Ranger Battine, and I was the mortar platoon sergeant there for the 375 mortar guys. Not a mortar guy, but they needed a master sergeant to do that position. So I went there and did that. And it really, it wasn't something that I wanted to do. But when I got there, I realized that there's a bunch of guys. great young rangers in this platoon and they want to do the best that they can. And a lot of them don't like the fact that they're a mortar guy and they don't get to

assault as much as they assault your suit. So I made it my sole purpose while I was there to make those guys happy at being mortarmen. So we did a lot of pistol shoot. We did a lot of rifle shooting because they hadn't done a lot of that. I sent guys to get sniper trained, so to qualified, different stuff like that, other cross-trading within the regiment to try to give these guys like, hey, when they're out there, the platoon, hey, not only can I shoot this mortar, but I can do battlefield interrogation for you.

I can also, I'm a demo guy. I'm also a sniper, you know, use me how you see fit. So I think that helped the morale, but, you know, it's hard to do in that platoon because those guys just don't feel the love like the rest of the guys. It's a thankless job. And man, man, maybe work. Lugging around those base plates and the ammo, like those guys work harder than anybody. And no glory.

And yeah, you're an H. and you got admin guys up your ass all the time. Yeah. But it was good for you. You got to be a platoon sergeant and at the same time it was good for them too, that they got a lot of extra training. Yeah, it was a good time. I didn't think I was going to enjoy it. And then I really enjoyed trying to make those dudes happy. Like I love seeing smiles on their faces and seeing these guys being proficient. And they were really good at mortars. They proved that they were really good at mortars. And they proved they could handle other things too. And it was a really good. time, man. It was busy. And I tried to make it as advantageous for those guys as I possibly could.

But you're right. I went back and did a platoon started stent. But back to that one topic you asked earlier, I don't think I answered that. But when I was in RRC, I kind of did everything backwards. You know, they say you got to be a squall leader for like two years as an E6 before you can even make E7. Well, I was a squad leaders in E5. And then as an E6 for a little bit, and then I left and like, you'll never make platoon start. First look at E7, boom, I made E7 as a RIP instructor. I did that time for a little bit. I went to RRC after having already been in E7 for like a year and a half, two years.

So I was eligible for E8. And so I declined E8 the first couple years I was there because I didn't want to get promoted because I knew I wasn't ready to be a team sergeant. So I declined the eight the first two times. And then the third time I was up for it. I was like, well, it'll take a year or two to penn it. So I'll just put my stuff in and I should be good. Well, I'm 88 and I penned it like meat like pretty quick.

So they had changed the cycle in which they did that. So next thing, you know, we had a ton of the E8s. And then the next year, the next E8 board came out. And RRC is a company of about, you know, a lot less than a normal ranger company. About, you know, 50, 60 dudes total, including support. You know, we had like 16 to 18th at the time. Yeah. And that's probably more than the.

the rest of the entire regiment has. So we started getting hunted big time to, like, if you're not in a team leader, slide you need to go. So I did the platoon start time after that. And then was going to go back to the company, but ended up going out to Yuma. My wife was tired of me deploying so much of being gone. So I went out to Yuma to be a free fall instructor. And I enjoyed that time out there as well. Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty cool job. I mean, by the time you finished out there, how many free fall jumps do think you had? When I retired, I think I was at about 3,200, 3,500, something like that, maybe a little more. Yeah, something like that. I've got roughly 4,500 jumps now total. Awesome. And I did about 700 something last year and then probably 3 or 400 this year.

So somewhere around there. I don't have to keep track anymore. Is that where you finished out your Army career out at Yuma? Yeah, that is. I finished out at Yuma. I worked at the basic course, ended up being one of the detachment in Suic's out there during the transition of free fall to all for special forces. Then I became the NC of the Free Fall Jumpmaster course. And then my last year and a half to two years, I worked at the Free Fall Instructor course, which is a really fun, really enjoyable job. And it was a good way to end my career. That's super cool, man. Now, you say that it was really fun, but I think that a lot of our viewers don't. understand the difference between like skydiving and a good point and you know military free fall yeah can you can you sort of break that down for us yeah so the difference is skydiving you're jumping most of time during the daytime you're going to wear an altimeter and a parachute that carries your body weight to the ground when you want to jump military free fall we take a guy that has never jumped before essentially like

a civilian skydiver except our guys the very first jump he's a very first jump he's a He's got a military parachute, which is a lot bigger and heavier, military gear on military helmets, and we tap that guy and we don't touch him. He jumps on his own and we fly with him. And that's one of the things from Yuma that's different than other some free fall instructors. And Yuma, we really work on being a good flyer. So Yuma instructors are a normal tap and then we fly with that guy. So we match everything he does on the exit. But anyway, the difference in freefall, military free fall versus standard skydiving is we're going to work that guy to jump in a rucksack, you know, up to 60, 70, 80 pounds, maybe in real life it's going to be heavier.

And then he's also going to have a navigation board with GPS's compasses, night vision, oxygen mask. And the goal is to go all the way up to 25,000 feet, you know, so you have to do pre-reave operations and stuff like that, jump out, do a high, Halo or Hayho from that altitude. The Yuma School doesn't have the assets to really do that right now, so they really don't. But some of the other courses that I work at do that, and they do it pretty regularly, and they put out some very good products when it comes to freeball jumpers.

But military free fall is super fun as an instructor, but when you're the guy jumping all that gear, it gets old after a lot. What is a halo and a hayho? So Halo is high altitude, low opening, and hay-ho is high-altitude high-opening. So both techniques are viable, but the high-altitude high-opening has been used a lot in Afghanistan,

but also so has the halo. It just depends on the method of insertion and what your in-state mission is going to be, because it's just a method of getting to the target. So a high-altitude low-opening is jumping from a high-altitude, but waiting until you, waiting for a lower depth before you are, height before you pop your shoot and then a high altitude. What's the difference in the mission or the purpose between those?

So the halo, the high-lop-to low opening, if I'm jumping in somewhere and I just want to open my parachute and have the least chance of being seen flying out of that canopy, even though you can't, you can barely see them in the daytime, much less at nighttime. But that halo, when you fall all the way down to like, say like four or five thousand feet open your parachute, if I was directly below you or even within a kilometer of you, I'm got to hear that parachute opening. But with a high altitude, high opening, we can offset upwind from the target that we want to jump into, jump out, open right off the ramp. And now my parachute opening noise is happening at 25,000 or whatever altitude you're at. It's happening up there. So you're

not going to hear it on the ground. Then we aren't the parachutes. We set up. We navigate. And then as a team, we fly as a stack, a collective stack. And then we set up and it's all planned. Everything's pre-planet. It's briefed, it's talked over the radio. There's drills that we do. And then you come in as a team and set up the landing pattern. The lead man sets it up and everybody lands as a team. Then you take your gear off, get ready for the mission. And if you're walking, you know, 40 miles, 20 miles, 10, whatever, you know, 300 yards, you move out to the target and do it. So it's just a method of insertion. And if you open like a 20,000 feet, 25,000 feet, how far, how many miles do you cover under canopy? It depends on the canopy and it also depends on the winds.

Most of the modern free fall canopies out there, if you had, let's say, some decent average to maybe a little on the higher winds up top, you could do 35, 40 kilometers across the ground under canopy, running with the wind. It just depends on the winds, the canopy and all that kind of stuff. Different canopies fly different. Different flight modes fly different. I mean, that's one of the things we teach. We teach all the different flight modes with the canopy stuff. how to fly your body, how to fly the canopy, how to land it, how to land it in these conditions, those conditions, that conditions, how to rig all the gear. So all that different stuff is what we teach.

I also point out that one of the advantages of using Hayho, when you have that kind of forward drive that you can move 40, 50 kilometers under canopy, so that you could theoretically jump out of the airplane and then maybe drift across a international border under canopy? I mean, that's possible. It depends on the weather at that location, but yeah, it's totally possible. You can cross any type of terrain. We fly over huge mountains all the time. If we're flying over a mountain range and it's in our path, we're going to obviously analyze prior to the mission,

analyze the elevation of that, see what our minimum is that we need to be at to cross that. Because if we come to this mountain and we're like, I don't know if I'm going to make it. Yeah, we're not even going to try. We're going to come over here and land. because if you're not sure, then you're probably not going to make it. Let's go ahead and take our safe option and land here and walk further. But you've got to plan that stuff in because you have to be able to work around that terrain, the border, whatever it is mission specific that you're working on. There are disadvantages or, you know, it's not as easy as people think.

Like I had a friend telling me about how they were going to have a Delta squadron jump into an objective. in Afghanistan. And as much as they planned it and they kept rehearsing it, they were never able to actually do it just because the winds wouldn't cooperate. And they were like, well, if you do this, we're going to have the squadron of guys just scattered all across this valley system. Yeah, it depends. When the winds are really crazy and how to limits, man, it's just better to abort a mission. And it's rare that that happens. But you never can't tell. The weather is a big factor. But if the weather is within reasonable limits and you have very experienced jumpers, I mean, you can pull off some significant stuff. But that's, you know, the problem. There's not

many jumpers out there that have the level of experience, you know, that I have and that a lot of the guys that I work with have. There are in these different units that we've talked about, some super phenomenal guys. But by the time they get to the level like where I'm at where they're at, they're about to retire or they're already retired. So it's hard to get. that number of jumps and experience while being actively on a team, usually you have to go do instructor time to get that many jumps. The same thing on an ODA. Like maybe your team sergeant has a lot of jumps and he's really good,

but the ODA is still made up of, you know, 23, 24-year-old dudes who are still new to it. Yeah. The only strong is your weak is late too. Right. And one of the things I don't think people understand about special operations sometimes is that the more varied your mission set is, the more a generalist you have to be because you just can't train for everything all the time.

Absolutely. And that was one of the things that was cool about RRC because we always moved around and did different stuff. But the problem was we learned some really cool skills, but a lot of them I was never really good at. Like anything that had to do with computers and technology stuff, I was like, okay, I could learn it. and like hammer smash through it.

I'm not a dumb guy, but I'm just not a, I don't like technology. I like being out in the woods, you know, doing my thing. But yeah, that stuff, I'd be good at it in the course. And then if I didn't really use it a lot later on, I wouldn't be quite as good at it. And you know how it is. You have those guys that they find that one niche that they really love and they go for it. Like, for me, it was explosive breaching for a while. And like, that's what I did.

And then it was combative for a little bit. And then it went into like the free fall stuff. when I was at RFC and that's what it ended up being. Yeah. So. Yeah. Lock picking is one of those things. You know, everybody, when you go through that course, everybody can do it.

And then some guys love it and do it all the time. And the rest of the guys can't do a simple three-pin lock, you know, you're out of course. So. Well, and the thing is, yeah, I went to a bunch of courses on that stuff too. And I could still get out of some handcuffs, but I'm not, I can't get out of any. I mean, I can get out of them, but it still take me a while. Yeah. And picking locks.

I suck at it now because I haven't done it so long, but I bypass it. But the thing is you learn not just how to pick them, but how to bypass them in other ways. And the bypasses are actually the easiest way, but it doesn't take any skill. So I've bypassed the lock here at my house. I do these free fall trips with some of these units and the SF guys or whatever will come in. And they're like, ah, I'm like, who's got the key? Oh, the rigors do. I think they'll be here shortly.

And I'm like, all right, waiting around. Like, man, you all don't have the key yet? I'm like, let me see if I can find a pry bar or something. and I go pot, shimmy the door, you know, shim the door in like three seconds. They've been trying to pick on it for like an hour and a half. I go on there and peek in two seconds and pop the door for them. So it's the easiest way and that's what sticks with you. So, like, where are you at today?

What has your life been like since retirement? I mean, 18 deployments, you saw some shit during your time in the military. What was it like adjusting to civilian life? Well, it wasn't too bad. you know, I was doing all that free fall stuff. And I knew that I had work doing free fall stuff immediately afterwards. So I kind of jumped on that stuff. And I knew that I had these certain jobs that I could do because I had been kind of tied in and knew that I was good there.

But I started doing that thinking, I'm going to work a little bit. I'll be able to pay the bills with retirement, just, you know, all that stuff that I get extra pay. That'll help. And then with this, I'll be able to pay the bills and have a little bonus to pay some stuff up. But I ended up being extremely, extremely blessed. I got out and started doing this free fall stuff. Next thing I know, people are like, hey, you want to do this trip? You want to do this job?

Some of these courses were pretty close hold, and they didn't really want a lot of new people in there. But timing was right for me. And then I had a special combination of skill sets that actually benefited me over other guys that may have stayed in. certain other units versus me. Because I went to the free ball school, I got that MFFI designation, which really helps a lot. And don't even wrong,

the guys that work out of Yuma are really good flyers and very good instructors, but a lot of them don't have a lot of a tactical background. Whereas within the command, within, you know, we work within the regiment, there's a lot of experience there when it comes to the tactical piece.

So I did that stuff. And I can't remember where I was going, this whole question, if you can refocus me, but essentially, you know, your post-military life and how you transitioned into civilian life. Okay. Yeah, so I started doing that stuff, and I ended up getting a lot more jobs and I started doing the free fall stuff. I was doing contract stuff for all these different units out there. I'm not going to be specific on that stuff, and really enjoyed it. And then as the COVID stuff started kicking off, I decided, I'm going to take a break. I needed a break anyway. I worked from January.

second until like March 21st. I'd done back-to-back contracts. I was out in Arizona. And I live in Alabama. So I was away from my family. And I came home and I was like, well, now this COVID stuff's kicking off. I'm going to have to take a break. And I needed one anyway. So I decided to take a break. And then a buddy of mine who was in the regiment works for this company called Augustine Consulting. And he asked me if I, you know, well, I talked to him about it. I was like, hey, what do you guys do up there, would you be interested to hire somebody else? And so he brought me on to the process, and I hired on with those guys. So I work as a consultant for them now. And how was the like the mental and emotional transition, you know, having left such a tight-knit community?

And even at Yuma, I'm sure that it was kind of the same. Did you find that community in the skydiving community and with different contracting gigs that you found? Yeah, so doing all the contract stuff was good. It kept me with the guys. I'm working with, you know, Navy guys, you know, Marines, like Army guys, you know, special operations guys from all different branches. And, you know, being with those guys and being able, it was awesome because I talked to these guys and they know that the experience that I have and like the other instructors that they, that are working, some of them have a lot more experience than I do. But we're out there working. These guys really want to learn and they really want to listen. And so that,

kept me tied to the community. So this current job that I have is a little different. I work remote from home most of the time, but I do travel as well. But we work more with like the conventional army, but also with some special operations guys too on some of the stuff that I'm doing. But it's a little different because you don't get that face-to-face contact as often. So really in the last few months is where it's kind of changed for me. It seemed like I was still in the military for the first year and some change after I retired. But now it definitely feels like I'm not in the military, but I mean, I'm happy with that. You know? Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, you're still married. How many kids do you have? I have one daughter. Her name is Anna Lee. And she's a good little kid.

I'm proud of that kid. She makes straight A's. She comes home. We don't even have to tell her to do her homework. She just starts doing it on her own. So you couldn't ask for a better kid. That's awesome, Mike. Man, I'm so. happy for you. It's been so great hearing the rest of your story, things that I didn't know about you even when we served together and then hearing about the whole rest of your career after we kind of parted ways and went in different directions. Yeah, I appreciate y'all having me on. And it was good talking to all. And hopefully I didn't talk too much. I could be a talker sometimes for sure. Not at all, man. You know, I think that we have a lot of people on this show. You're one

of them that we could talk for another three hours easily. Yeah, for sure. Maybe, maybe, maybe we can twist your arm sometime and have you on again. But this has been a lot of fun, man. It's really just been really enjoyable catching up with you. Yeah, I've enjoyed it too. And I appreciate y'all having me on. And nice to be another fellow Ranger that I didn't serve with. But you were a little before my time, I guess, from your timeline you were talking about. But good to see you guys out there doing good things, being productive and being successful. And, you know, that's one of the biggest things that I've learned since I've retired from the Ranger regiment is I look out there and I see.

see all these rangers that were in rc and other place in the batines and that left the regiment went to other places but did a lot of time in the regiment all these guys are crushing it and they're being successful and uh you know it sets us up with a lot of skill sets that that you know in connections that also provides for us later on uh but but i think a lot of it is a testament to the discipline that is ingrained in us from day one in the regiment man um that people want us to work for them and uh and there's a lot of good rangers out there including you guys that are doing good things. Thanks, man.

And we want to apologize to you, your family, your friends, everybody who came in, you know, to watch this live because we had to shut down the stream. We had so many internet issues. Yeah. But we're recording it. It will post it. Including all of our viewers. We take a lot of pride, actually, in doing the show live and going through all the

technical hurdles to do that. But if the internet craps out on us, there's nothing we can do. Yeah, this is the worst. You can't help it. First time it's ever happened. So if you're watching this interview after the fact, please make a sure you subscribe to the channel. Hopefully you'll still like us and leave some comments below and not tell us we suck even though we failed at doing the show live tonight. And we look forward

to seeing you next week, next Friday, with Lino, who was a first Special Forces group Combat Diver. And these days he works with the Combat Diver Association. So we're going from an MFF instructor to the Combat Divers. Also, I was on Battleline podcast with Ian and Tonto last week. So check that out if, you know, want to hear me ramble. Mike, anything else before we go that either I failed to cover or, is there anything that you wanted to plug your consultancy or anything like that? No, I'm good. Like I said, I just took this job with Augustine and those guys have been treating me really well. I feel part of the family, so I like work with those guys.

I still do side work with my company from time to time. But that stuff sells itself, you know what I mean? so I don't need to publicize it necessarily, but I really appreciate y'all having me on and allow me to have this forum. And I hope I get to come back and talk to you all again sometime. Yeah, that'd be awesome. 100%.

That'd be great. You're welcome at any time, man. Thanks, guys.