The Team House - Special Forces Combat Diver Lino Miani, Ep. 82

Episode Date: February 27, 2021

Lino had a fascinating Special Forces career fighting the part of the war on terror you probably never heard about. From Japanese Special Ops, to classified intel missions in Chad, to rubbing shoulders with Norway's elite. Get access to bonus segments with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Podcast version of this show can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/user-796052562/the-legend-mad-mike-hoare-with-his-son-chris-hoare-ep-80 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. 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. 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. Special operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy,

and David Park This is episode 82 of the team house. God willing, the internet cooperates this time with us. If it doesn't, we're getting it fixed tomorrow, actually. So if it doesn't, I'm afraid I'll have to upload a recording of this episode. I hope that it cooperates tonight. But this should be the last time we ever have this issue. So without further ado, I'm Jack Murphy here with co-host Dave Park.

Our guest tonight is Lino Miani. he is a combat diver served with First Special Forces Group. He has experience all over the Asian area of responsibility, experience with NATO, experience working with foreign special operations units, also being deployed to North Africa. So there is really no shortage of things to talk about here tonight. I think this is going to be really exciting because we have a lot of people on the show, including Dave and I, you know, lots of experience in the Middle East. everyone was over there during the War on Terror,

but you're going to hear some stories, I think, tonight from Lino that you've never heard before. Yeah, and you're also part of the foundation, right? Do you want to tell us about that before we start? Yeah. So first of all, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed getting to know both you a little bit before the show,

and it's always good to talk story with SF dudes when I get the chance. I don't get to do that very often, so thanks. But yeah, I'm the president of the Combat Dairaer Foundation. I think most people that know a little about me know that. And I wanted to start with this because you're getting an exclusive here on the team house. We are announcing our summer event. It's a reunion event and a fundraiser we call the Deep Dive on this show. So on August 21st, Combat Diver Foundation in the Florida Bama Lounge are hosting the Deep Dive 21 at the Floorbaumelounge and Perdue Key on the

Alabama, Florida, state lines. Biggest Beach Bar in Florida, owned by a combat diver buddy of mine. Guy, I know I knew from when we were in the infantry together. And, yeah, it's going to be a good time. 5K run, a charity dive, some raffles, an auction, a lot of booze, and some combat divers talking stories. So it would be a good time. Yeah, that's awesome.

And so what does the foundation support and tell us a little bit about it. Yeah, the Combat Diver Foundation is dedicated to preserving the history of the combat diver community writ large. And we get a lot of questions about what that means because it started as an idea to preserve one specific artifact and that was the class plaques

that are on the walls down in the compound in Key West where we go to school. What we learned is we started researching and learning more about the history is that we really shouldn't limit ourselves to that one specific thing. There's so much combat diver history to be preserved. And so we've shied away from defining that term combat diver as someone who went to a specific school

because we'd be cutting out so many relevant people from the community that we just wanted to have a sort of large tent. So we've got members in six countries. We've got 35 states. people that are living in 35 states, six countries. And, you know, we've got Allied Special Forces. We've got folks from all the Joint Force, the Joint Special Ops Force, that are members of the combat diver community,

and we're working to preserve their history. And that includes the SEALs and the CCTs and the SoftT-T guys and the Marines and everybody. Awesome. And is there a website where people can go to find more information about the foundation and the event itself? Yeah, so if you go to combat diver.org, that's singular combat diver.org, you'll be able to find everything you need to know there.

And you can donate on the site. We've got some great merchandise. And pretty soon we'll be putting up the event page for DeepDive 21. Okay, great. Yeah. So everybody, check it out if you got a few bucks. You know, please send it their way. Awesome.

So, so, Lino, one of the things we like to do because Jack and I are both big comic bookie, so one of the things we like to do at the beginning of the episode is to ask people for their origin story. What, how did you grow up? Did that influence your decision to go in the military? Things like that.

We want to know who you are. And it was one thing before, I just want to make sure that the, we've had some sound issues on the show the last two episodes. Like, so if Dave and I, sound a lot lower than Lino, please let us know in the chat. Just tell me,

and I'll crank up the volume on our end a little bit. Sorry about that. I'm just super self-conscious about the technical issues we've been having. But yeah, Lino, please, let us know. Where did you get your beginning? Where did you come out of?

Yeah, an origin story for hero thing, so I appreciate that. I was kind of laughing that he just described me as a combat diver. I am a combat diver, but I agree. I'm like a five-jump jump jump of the combat diver world. And we try to, going back to the CDF a little bit, we try to professionalize that operation so that it's not just a good old boys club for combat divers. So, for example, you know, a lot of our staff are not combat divers. They have some connection, but they aren't.

But anyway, yeah, so my origin story, I was an Air Force brat. So my father was an NCO in the U.S. Air Force. He was a missile, tactical missiles, which has led to some cool stories down the road because my dad served in Vietnam and in Thailand. Later, after Vietnam, Danang was shut down. He moved over to Thailand and was

part of the Secret War over there. And I actually had the opportunity to take him back up to Don Tani where he was based and kind of check out all his old haunts. And we discovered some cool stuff in the jungle that even the ties didn't know, which hopefully we'll get the chance to tell that.

story. But my mother was also in the Air Force and that's where they met. So my dad had a little bit of experience and when my mother was in their equivalent of AIT at Kiesler Air Force Base, they met. And the story my mom likes to tell is that she learned, she's Puerto Rican. And she likes to say that she learned English in the Air Force, which I think is just a myth because I mean, she was, she had an accounting degree going into the Air Force and it's like she tells me her first word was shit and so she got sick and went to sick call and the guys were like what's wrong with you and she's like shit anyway so they met and you know the rest of history they got married um and here i am so i grew up as an air force brat all over the world and that uh that experience sort of detribalizes a person a bit

So I come from a background where my mother's second language is English and is culturally sort of unique. I'm living in Europe. I'm spending summers in Puerto Rico. I'm moving all over the country. And it just, you know, you just sort of look at stuff different when you're a kid. And so it wasn't an easy life. I mean, when you're a little kid and you get uprooted every three years for a PCS move, and you're, you know, 12 years old, you don't even know.

you know, that you have a funny accent and you show up in a place like a new school in Boston and people tell you you're a redneck because you speak like you're from Ohio. It just, you know, that tends to to shape the way you kind of view things. So for me, every everything was, the world is a unique and interesting place to be experienced and investigated. And not realizing that that was really a deeply ingrained. personality trait. When I joined the army, I started seeking out things that were going to take me to interesting places. And so I joined the infantry, went to West Point, joined the infantry. From there, I just wasn't satisfied with that. And I was like, well, I better go SF. So I went

SF. And, you know, there's a funny story about how I ended up at first group with Spanish language rating. I had a 3-3 in Spanish, a Q course. And they were like, hey, man, you're going to seventh group. I didn't want to go to seventh group. I had just, my ex-wife I had just married her. She's a glamour girl from Tokyo. And so I was like, man, I'm not taking my new wife

out of her context in Hawaii where I met her to Fayetteville for her first like exposure to the army. So let me find a way in the first group. So being who I went over into the SWIG building, which you are all

familiar with, I think. And I found a lady in comfortable shoes that does the assignments. Name was Diane something. Old black lady, right? She just, she was nice as heck. You know what I'm talking about? No, I don't. I have my own story of trying to get reassigned, but it was not successful.

Maybe I'd share that later, but go ahead. Well, so here's what you did wrong, man. You didn't flirt with her for three weeks like I did. There you go. But I flirted with this lady for three weeks. CW5 up in the special warfare building. He didn't want me flirting with him. Yeah, probably not.

That would have been a little weird back then. So yeah, I mean, I just, I talked to her every day. I brought her popcorn figured out she liked popcorn and just kind of worked on the source until I was ready to pop the question. And I said, hey, listen, I want to get a first group. You know, here's my thing. How do I do this? I speak Spanish and this horrible, mean captain is telling me I have to get a seventh group. Yeah.

And I don't want to do it. She was like, look, here's what you do. and she's stomping her feet. She goes, go take the test in Japanese. I said, but I don't speak Japanese. I want to learn Japanese. And she said, well, it doesn't matter. If you get, you know, maybe it'll show some talent or aptitude for the language.

And then we'll see what happens. So I did that. I got a zero zero. And unbeknownst to me, she put Japanese next to my name on some roster and nobody questioned it. And I, next thing you know, I'm getting orders for first group. And I was like, awesome. And at the time they were teaching Japanese in the school. And so I said, well, I want to go learn the language of my then wife, you know?

Yeah. And so the language slots came out and I wasn't on it. I went back to my gallop in the SWIC building. Like, hey, what's the deal, man? I want to go to language school and learn Japanese. She's like, look, dude. You got Japanese and you got Spanish. So you're either going to first group without a language or you're going to seventh group without a language.

or you're going to seventh group without a language. So what's it going to be? And I said, I'll shut my mouth now and move out. So I end up in first group and I met my colonel and he's like, what language do you speak? I said, sure, I speak Spanish. He said, get the fuck out of here. He kicked me out of his office.

That was my rival in group was getting kicked out of my battalion commander's office and sent to the Gallag language class, which I don't remember any yet. That's awesome. no in my case i got assigned to fourth battalion and fifth group so i knew i was going to have to stand up be like one of the guys that stands up the battalion and um i knew i went through that in first group we we lived we i lived uh off post right next to this retired cw five who worked in the special forces uh command headquarters and uh i i went up there and uh and he was like okay let me see what i do for you jack and he busts open his three ring binder like let's

who do I know? Trying to get me out of fifth group and even not necessarily get me to another group but get me reassigned to another battalion in fifth group. He's going through the roster and he's like, oh yeah, I know this guy. Let me give him a call. And he calls up the guy and he's like,

yeah, I got this guy Murphy. He wants to be in a different battalion. What can we do for him? He's coming to fourth. And the guy he's on the phone with is like, well, I'm the battalion commander of fourth battalion. If this guy's as great as you're saying he is, why do I want to reassign him?

you know because he's talking me up hyping me up on the phone for like five minutes and it totally blew up in both of our faces he probably knew what he was doing too which is the sad thing that son of a bitch he's like I'm going to show that motherfucker this new guy yeah so it didn't work out

in my case but yeah that's that's the origin story I mean there's some fun details here and there but being in the infantry in Hawaii was a great place to to prepare for SF or soft in general I felt because you

can't do operations be above the company level. I mean, and even that's a stretch. So we were doing everything by platoons and squads. And to be frank, I mean, the infantrymen out in the 25th ID are well prepared. I mean, they're tough. It's tough terrain. It's tough to operate in. And it's it's tough just to get from place to place. The guys are hard and they do, you know, they apply the tactics well. So for me going to SF, it was pretty natural progression. A lot of guys in my company, when I said. When you say that you couldn't do operations or training above a certain size, is that because of the training area involved and the lack of open space there?

Exactly. Yeah. It's just, it's really, it's really extreme terrain. Really extreme. And there's not a lot of it either. So there's just, there's not a lot of open space. So, you know, what year is it you get to your first ODA after getting kicked out of the BC's office? Yeah, that was 2003.

And it was right in time. You have to remember, it was, geez, it was February 03. I got to the battalion, and they stuck me in. The three shop is an AS3 for a JRTC rotation, which was preparing for something, I don't recall what. But this is the time that the invasion was happening in Iraq. You know, Afghanistan had kicked off, and I was in training for all of that. We were glued to the TVs.

And then in 2003, a lot of those same teams and, you know, a bunch of my buddies were getting ready to cross the border into Iraq from various parts of the world. And man, I tell you, that was hard to take. We felt left out, you know, out there in first group. And the leadership wanted to talk to us about the Philippines and about Thailand and how important it was that we go and teach the Thai Border Patrol police, you know, like instructor training. course or some bullshit. It was just tough. It was tough for us as a unit, I think, to deal with that for a long time. It was a while before they got in.

It was like Major League Butthurt and first group wasn't there just because, at least initially, that it took them quite a while to get into the war, as I recall. I mean, what was the first group deployments to Iraq? Was it like 05? Well, 2nd Battalion went to Afghanistan, and I want to say it was late 04. And then third battalion, which is my battalion, we went to Iraq in early 2006. So is that right? Yeah, it was early 2006.

And for me, by that time, I had just gotten promoted off the team. I've been a team leader for two years. And I had command of Ameriops team 193 and then we changed it over to scuba at 195. And so I, you know, I did that Africa. thing in in 2005 it came they actually pulled me out of there a few weeks early to go train up with a battalion to turn around and go to Iraq so I spent six weeks training and sort of at home and then turned around when did another six month deployment to Iraq all right so let's rewind a little bit your first ODA you get to it was a Mar-Ops which was like working with the Zodes back in

those days right that's right it was ODA 193 and we have I had a really, the team sergeant was a guy who knew John Eureg. And John, I recommend him for your show, by the way. John's a very interesting dude. Smart as all get out, really well read, loves history. A dive guy. Ended up going,

ended up going and working for a different agency later in life. And he was a ground branch dude, I think, and did some interesting stuff. I get whispers about John here and there. And anyway, but yeah, the team hadn't been in the water for a while, for whatever reason. They just, you know, so I came in and I was like, all right, well, we don't have any specific deployments on the training schedule. Let's let's become, let's embrace this MeraOps thing and get in the water. And we spent a lot of time in water weeks and weeks of kayaks and boats and aircraft and motherships.

and we did some fun stuff against the Coast Guard station in Seattle, which is pretty memorable. You know, almost getting killed by large ocean freighters in the middle of the night, stuff like that. Running into drug dealers in Boston, like on Boston Whalers, like hauling ass through the Puget Sound, down to Olympia with all their lights off. You know, like, what was that? I don't know. It looked like a Boston whaler. 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. 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 I put a we did a hit against a house that was on Anderson Island prison and Anderson Island is a state maximum security facility and it's the entire island is a prison kind of like Alcatraz right and they have the state of the art facility on there, but it's an old place. And so there's a couple of houses, and some of the staff actually live on the island. And there's

a school, and there's like all these facilities to support an entire community, but there's only like 30 people that live there, and it's a controlled community, right? They're all employees of the prison. So we asked the SWAT team if we could do an opt for like a force on force against them

and their little shoot house on the beach, which is this beautiful little mansion right in this cove on the backside. And he used be a brothel or something. Anyway, there's a, it's in a moon-shaped cove and there's a big rock in the middle of it with a couple of trees on it. And there's a sea lion colony

that calls this place home. And so it's covered all the time, like 24-7, with hundreds of seals and sea lions. Big, big, big giant dogs with flippers. And they kind of told me, they're like, look, don't go to the sea lion, see the island there because it's a nature sanctuary and we're not supposed to bug bother the seals right but i was like man i got to put in a sniper overwatch tonight before where the fuck am i going to put it right

put it with the seals man so of course our sniper team we borrowed from another oda and um the guy the sniper didn't know how to swim it wasn't comfortable in the water so i was like dude all right look we'll go out on the boats and i'll get you right to the island And you get off. But here's take this, take a magazine of nine mill ball. And I'm telling you, don't worry about it. If one of those fucking dogs approaches you, don't hesitate. Just shoot it in the head.

I'll deal with it later. Because I could, I just imagine these dudes like spending 24 hours in the middle of night, like stuck on this island without being able to swim and getting attacked by a 1,500 pound dog with flippers. Yeah. How am I going to explain that to my commander? So thankfully they didn't have to shoot any seals and we put red eyes on all night and that was good. And later the cops were like, man, how did you get that intel on us?

We just, where did you? Where were you? And I was like, man, I can't say. That's classified. And so that's another exclusive here on the team house is that story because I never told anybody that I'll probably get a jail in Washington. That's awesome. Killing baby seals. Lino, you heard it here first.

So, man, and then you said that the team got converted over to being a dive team. Yeah, so we did all that stuff in the water. And in fact, let me back up a little bit. So our kind of culminating exercise there was sort of my fault. I mean, we had demonstrated all this ability in the water. So we did a full eagle rotation in 2004. And full legal for those that don't know is a big full spectrum exercise. Joint Chiefs of Staff exercise in Korea.

And there's a lot of good training to be had. So we went over there as a battalion. And we were in Daegu, which is in the center of the peninsula, big joint Korean U.S. Air Force Base there. And that's where we had our FOB. Well, my mission as an ODA was to infiltrate Kunsan Air Force Base on the Yellow Seaside, which is the west coast of Korea. This is the same coast that the Inchon landing happened on.

In fact, Inchon is just a few miles north of Kunsan. And if you remember from your history, that's an area of extreme tides. And so it was a big planning exercise for MacArthur and his staff to be able to get the Marines on there. I mean, the North Koreans didn't even think it was possible. So you can imagine the kind of challenge we were dealing with with a small boat. Well, we were operating off the ship called the HSV. and you've seen pictures of it. It's this giant, awesome-looking catamaran.

It looks like it goes about six million miles an hour, and it's hard as hell to get a small boat on and off of that thing with a crane. But we practiced all this. We went out in the Yellow Sea, and we spent a couple days getting things right, and I had commanded this ship, well, tactical control of it. And we had a Korean team on board, and there was a big drama with that, but we got them on board. and the night before the big operation

the Korean team leader comes to me and says Hey Lena how are you guys How are you guys dealing with the seawall And I looked at him and you know His name was probably Kim or Fok or whatever And I was like Kim what the fuck are you talking about that And I had a 1 to 25,000 map and that was it And the Koreans had built this giant seawall

Because they were reclaiming all the land And so they I mean Koonsan as a community and it's a city of Coonson and the Coonson Air Force Base. The entire thing, and we're talking like 50 miles, have been encompassed by a giant seawall. And I'm not talking about a berm, guys. I'm talking about like 40 feet high with a two-lane highway on top of it. Close circuit TV system, lights, the whole shebang.

I mean, this is not, this was no joke. And then they were going to fill in the lagoon and make it into farmland, right? And so we had no idea. and, you know, I called back to the battalion and I was like, hey, can you ask yes, too, what the fucking C-wall is all about? They had no idea. Yeah. R-S-2.

And so the Koreans were like, geez, dude, you know, that sucks. So, and anyway. And, yeah, and this was the night before. So we totally had to revamp our plan and all this stuff. And so when the day came, they're still building this thing. So when the day came, we had identified there was a gap about, if I remember, right, maybe half a mile wide, where it was the only remaining entrance and exit to the lagoon. Well, constricted waterways, you know what happens in constricted waterways?

The water flows a lot faster. And so we've got these two loaded down Zodes with all of our equipment and all of our guys and our, I think we had our big engines, but it didn't matter. I mean, we're going like, we're going like two miles an hour, we're creeping through this thing. I guess that, yeah. And for those you don't know, Zodiac is a RID boat about, you know,

like a 12 man boat. Yeah, a small, small and at best. Yeah. At best. And so we're trying to go through this gap and then get to, you know,

to this place where we were supposed to put a laser on a Patriot missile that was stationed there. That was our op-for. And as we're in this gap and struggling to just get make forward progress one of the guys i'll leave his name out it rhymes with kenny g um Kenny was like he just started screaming nearly threw himself out of the boat and he started screaming it's a fucking submarine it's a fucking submarine and i mean all of us instantly kind of like jumped over to

that side of the boat to see what he was talking about we nearly capsized because of it um and what ended up happened is the guy who was on the tiller he got pushed over and the tiller got stuck in his gear and so he put us in this like giant left or right

turn I don't remember which but it's this giant like you turn that he made and we went right around the conning tower of what was a submarine and I'm not I mean I leaned out I could have reached out and grabbed the fucking thing that was sticking out of the water the periscope now it's dark

there's lights in the background so we don't have a lot of detailed view, but I mean, all I could think of was the back end of this thing coming and chopping our zodiac in half. Yeah. In the middle of this channel where the water's flowing like a fucking river out to sea, and it's 35 degrees out. And I was like, I'm going to fucking die here. And I've got to be honest with you guys, I didn't handle it very well.

I was scared. Yeah, I was like, holy shit, man. We're all going to die here. And so after we kind of unfucked ourselves and the other Zod came over with John Yorig, and he's supposedly watching this show, and he's probably laughing his ass off right now. So John comes over in the other boat, and I was like, John, I don't want to talk about it. We're going to park this fucking thing. I got to make a report about this. So we beached the two Zodes on some rock somewhere. I don't even remember if we made it into the lagoon. And, you know, I made a report up to the battalion, like, hey, we just ran into a fucking submarine.

and you know I can just imagine the howls of laughter in the FOB at that point because you know they're not going to believe that story that's amazing yeah they're not going to believe it and so by that point by the time we kind of you know got hold of ourselves or I got hold of myself I'll go ahead and take the blame for it it was too late the tides had changed and now our opportunity to go was lost because if you remember from the MacArthur story it's minutes to get in and out based on those tides changing and so forth. So yeah, we didn't make it to our objective, which is a real embarrassment for me, but that's what happened.

And so the following days were sort of a blur of me receiving phone calls from very articulate Korean colonels telling me that I didn't see what I saw. And it took us a couple of days to get off the ship because we had to wait for the Korean team to do their mission the next night. and then, you know, some travel time back to the FOB. But, you know, for two days, everybody was telling me, you know, you didn't see this thing. I mean, come on now. So, I mean, we haven't seen one since fill in the blank.

And I was like, okay, you didn't see one since then, but it's fucking here now. So, you know, I'm just telling you what we saw, brother. So it was a North Korean sub that you almost wrote? We don't know. I mean, I assume so. I assume so. And we checked the depth where we were, you know, six fathoms is, what, 36 feet or something like that? It's not super deep.

I can't imagine that it was a full-size. It's one of their midgeal. It was one of their midgeal. Yeah. Yeah. I have to assume. And nobody ever told me anything. Yeah.

Now, years later, the joint or combined forces basically just, you know, erase this thing. They didn't really want to deal with it. and I stopped receiving those phone calls from the Korean colonels. But years later when I was in Iraq, I was telling this story to a buddy of mine who was the two and he's like, I was the

four stars interpreter because he had been a Korean like a Mormon missionary or something and spoke fluent Korean. He's like, I was the four stars interpreter and we absolutely fucking believed you, but the alliance didn't want us talking about it. Right. Well, I mean, that's the thing is that nobody's calling you

telling you that you didn't see it, if somebody doesn't believe that you saw it? Yeah. You want to hear, this is a creepy story. If you've ever met Gordon Kukaloo wrote Separated at Birth, he was a special forces officer. He was in Korea in like the 80s. The 70s and the 80s spent a lot of time over there. And he told me a story, actually, about how he was very good friends with a special forces, South Korean Special Forces NCO.

Really good guy. And that was like, I think, in the late 70s. And then he came back to South Korea in the 80s. And he was asking about his friend making inquiries. Like, where's my boy, Kim? Where's he at? And he even had, like, he knew what year he went to the military academy. He had his serial number.

Because they were pen pals. They were right back and forth to each other. And these, like, very stern-faced Korean officers would come to him. Like, we've never heard of this person. He never served in the Korean military. And they're like, no, I know this guy. I have his serial number right here. This is his address where he used to write to him like,

we never heard of this person. He doesn't exist. And he said he found out through the grapevine way later. They sent him on some bullshit intel op in North Korea like undercover as like commercial cover as a businessman or something like that. And dude just vanished over there. Wow. Yeah.

Wow. That's interesting. I actually have a friend who went over there, which is not my story, but it's interesting stuff. She was a U.S. military major at the time, Air Force. Back when there was a joint hotel complex near the border, that caused a bit of a flap. Was that when they were going over there trying to like negotiate the return of our MIAs? I think that's a continuous process, Jack. That has never really ceased.

So yeah, I mean, the answer, the short answer is yes, but there was a, you know, the sunshine policy, they had created this tourist zone over there. It was mostly run by South Koreans because they knew how to run stuff. But you can imagine it was just a, a very tightly controlled facade. And so she had been, she was studying in South Korea on a scholarship and was like, well, you know, I got to. this opportunity to go and she asked somebody, she ended up asking like the absent CO at the embassy hey you think this is cool, do I need to tell anybody?

She's like, don't worry about it. I'll know. She went to fucking North Korea overnight. Holy shit. Anyway, that kind of blew up on her. So that's, I mean, that's fascinating that you guys had that encounter and they tried to like keep as quiet as they possibly could. Yeah, I'm wondering, you know, how much trouble I'm going to be

in just for telling that story. but it, you know, I mean, I don't know what they made of it. I don't know if the intelligence determined for sure whether or not it was a North Korean vessel or maybe one of ours. They tried to tell me at one point that it was one of ours, you know. I mean, this Korean dude's like, no, that's definitely one of your stuff fucking around. And I was like, okay. I mean, maybe it is. I don't know.

You're telling me. Right. Yeah, it's like you had a UFO sighting and everyone starts pointing fingers. No, you didn't see that. Leave it alone. Yeah, I actually wonder sometimes, you know, what the other guys on the team, you know, are saying about it years later, you know,

because memories are funny, you know. Right. And it also, it makes sense that the North Koreans would want to keep tabs on, as enemies would, any enemy does, they keep track of large military formations in training exercises like Full Eagle. And the North Koreans mobilize their forces

to try to match our forces. on the other side of the DMZ. So it's like this little, you know, big dick competition to see, you know, how many troops can you put in the field for this exercise? So it makes sense that they would be out there playing fuck around at that time. Yeah, I mean, the IPB on that couldn't have been that hard. I mean, look, we've got two at a U.S. and a Korean team going to do something in Kuzon. The only way to get in there is through this gap in the berm.

Let's, you know, let's plant some eyes right where we know they're going to be. Right. Well, on top of that, if I knew our, like, long-term enemy, immortal foe, we're building basically a wall. Why not go in, plant explosive charges in that wall while? It's being built. And then D.D. Mal, you know, get out. And you have a, you know, you have it for a rainy day, you know, if you ever decide you want to take that wall down for once they build that up and you want to invade. So, you know. So North, or. South Korea, check your wall. Yeah.

You better make an inspection. You should check that wall. And so that was full legal, and I went right from there directly to Malaysia for a J-sets, which was an interesting one because we had done, I remember right now, we had done a site survey for a thing with the police, which was, I don't know how it works in other theaters, but these were the counter-narcotics. missions under the auspices of the DEA and Jada West. And so these were called Baker missions.

And those were good because they had a bigger budget. And we could buy a bunch of bullshit for the team room. But there was a balanced mission, which was a J-SET, a traditional one mill-to-mill J-SET, with another team from another battalion going on at about the same time. Well, that other team had had some issues in Thailand. one of their guys ended up getting locked up on suspicion of espionage. And so they were... Is this when the tough box of Camo Gear went missing?

That sounds about right. Yeah, it was definitely Camo Gear. I heard this one. Yeah, there was some... Anyway, I don't know. There was a woman in the hotel room, supposedly. Yeah. Yeah, something like that.

And anyway, so the echo, the echo, went to jail. And anyway, so for whatever reason, they combined this into a two-team mission, probably because they didn't want these other guys by themselves unsupervised. So shortly after having all these investigations conclude and losing their echo, et cetera, et cetera. Turns out it was a really, they were a really good team. And, you know, for the guys that know which team that is, you know, you guys were great.

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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. A lot of matured dudes on that team and I think they learned some good lessons from the trouble that they had.

Their team leader went on to become the town of command. So good on them, but we joined them on this balanced mission directly after coming half of Korea or freezing as cold, and then it was 128 degrees in the shade in Malaysia. And that

was a fun time. You know, we were teaching the Malaysian Rangers how to shoot and do, you know, a lot of stress tests and a little bit of urban warfare. And then they took us into the jungle and, you know, showed us the O-shaped ambush, which I thought was just amazing.

Never heard of that technique in my life, but they assured me they killed a lot of communists that way. But anyway, yeah, it was fun. You know, lots of other times where Kenny G. Cut off the King's Motorcade and we had a wreck. It was a whole thing. You guys had a wreck with the King's Motorcade?

Yeah, we did. How did that go? down through the diplomatic channels. It actually, I don't think that vehicle was part of the actual motorcade, but what happened was the king was visiting that camp to visit something, and we were trying to leave. And so we were in a rush, and our only Griffin group driver graduate guy was at the wheel. He's like, I can make it.

I can make it. And he pulls out and he cuts off the king's motorcade, and he's like, I got this. And then he freaked out and decided to get out of their way, and he hit a point. car on the side of the road. And so, yeah, one time. So we didn't have any problem with that. It was just a fender bender. So when did the team make this conversion then to becoming a dive team?

It was in, let's see, so Full Eagles in 2004. I was told during Full Eagle, I think, that we were going to convert the team to a second paid dive team. So for those that don't know, most SF battalions, well, the MTO says each company has a dive team. SF has never been able to fill those dive teams and has only had the money to pay one per battalion because there's quite a specialty skill additional pay associated with diving. So at a certain point, there was a decision made that they had the money. you know the GWAT was raging we had all kinds of money but we had the money and we were going to pay a second dive team per battalion and so I with all this experience in the water despite

despite the Korean sub thing they said okay lino's the best guy the best team you know turn into go to dive school and become one nine five so we did that and most of our guys went to dive school including myself got qualified and we became one nine five one day was like Like, okay, you guys are, you know, your 195, go. So on the last episode, we had Mike Edwards on, who was a military free fall instructor. And we talked about the infiltration technique.

And I'd like to hear from you, especially your work with the Combat Diver Foundation, about this technique, about the Combat Diver Infiltration technique. It's viability. in current times because I mean we could ask some very pointed questions right like when was the last time this technique was actually used like

what's its relevancy on the battle room today no and those are all the valid questions and the short answer is I don't know when the last time it was used in operations we had teams that tried to use it a couple times in Iraq and we're basically told not to bother I do know of

some J-Soc teams that have done some stuff. There were not seals that did some dive work. But it's rare, right? So here's, it's the big question. And the dive community in SF has gone through this soul searching a couple of times. It sort of ebbs and flows. There are times in our history where we did not teach the guys how to dive rebreaters because it's expensive.

It takes training time, maintenance equipment, all that stuff. stuff. And they stopped training our guys in rebreather ops. And then, you know, a few years later, another commander comes in and says, no, actually, we need this. And so it's like a cyclical sort of effect. My argument here, when it comes to the dive capability, is that it is necessary. One, just to maintain our credibility as a full spectrum special operations force. And, you know, we can make the cheap argument that on the SF patch, the unit patch, you've got C, air and land. Well, if we take that dive thing out of there, we're kind of like air and land guys, to be honest. So the more intellectual argument is, you know, for our own credibility with all these other soft forces around the world that do have this capability.

We need to at least know what we're talking about. But there's a second kind of 30s in all these places we need to operate that you're going to see Navy SEALs and Green Beret combat divers doing this against targets. It's just there's not enough of us. So we've got to be able to train other guys to do it. And there are J-Sets where that's the P-O-I is diving. So you think about the viability,

the importance of having combat dive teams is sort of similar to what the SIF did, the commander's in extremist force, that, yeah, they never really got used as an in extremist force, but they were quite helpful and useful in going abroad and training foreign counterterrorism units. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And I think it's true of the I teams as well. Now, let's take that a step further. You're complicating adversary planning by just maintaining this capability. Right. And maintaining it at a certain scale. So if you're the Indo-PACOM commander, you're going to want as many dollars. qualified guys out there training as many dive qualified locals as you can to complicate that adversary planning. So do I think that Green Berets are going to be doing dive infiltrations and direct action kind of roles in any time, anytime soon? It's going to be extremely rare. It could happen, you know, major theater war against pure competitor. Sure, you're going to get a couple of those. But more importantly, you're complicated.

that adversary plan. You talked about rebreathers. So if we can kind of back up real quick, because this is something we haven't really covered on the show, I think, is what is a combat diver? What are rebreathers? Why can't you guys just go take a patty course and, you know, like what's the difference? Yeah. So I'll take your last question first.

So why can't we just do a patty course? I mean, patty course is basically just to get people used to breathing off of compressed air and getting underwater and then coming back up. So we need to be able to do a little bit more than that. Search dives, navigation, night, rescue dives. So, I mean, that's pretty obvious, right? But that's all on what they call it open circuit scuba system. Bubbles come out.

You're breathing actual air, same mixture that we breathe as we're sitting here talking. Bubbles come out of the rig. Well, you can imagine that bubbles coming out of a rig is going to be problematic if you're trying to sneak into someplace that's being actively protected. So then we've adopted the rebreather technology. The specific rebreathers that militaries around the world use are O2 only systems. So pure oxygen, your body oxygen, and the only byproduct is pure carbon dioxide. And there's a process you have to go through to purge the nitrogen out of that system before you actually. actually get under the water so that O2 gets in, gets used by your cells, and then CO2 is expelled.

The CO2 is removed by a chemical scrubber that's contained in the housing on the front of the rebreather. So no bubbles at all. Your standard commercial rebreaters do actually have bubbles. So most of those are nitrochs or some other mixed gas rebreather. There are less bubbles, but there are bubbles. O2 systems are the only ones that don't have bubbles at all. And that's why military is use them. The drawback is O2 is poisonous below a certain depth.

Right. And so there are limitations on your operational parameters using a rebreather. So like when you're using a rebreather, you're like, what, 30 feet underwater maybe? That's a max. Yeah. That's a max you can go. One atmosphere 33 feet is where you start to encounter oxygen toxicity. We have talked a little bit on this show and episodes way, way back about Navy divers

and guys who do like all kinds of cool espionage stuff off of subs and everything. And they're on the, they're saturation divers, right? Yeah, and those are usually like some sort of surface supply or contained. But for combat diving for that, you cannot go below 33 feet. So you have to be trained at maintaining, you know, you have to be deep enough to maintain that stealth and no visible profile, but also you can't go too deep because that's when you start to encounter oxen toxicity in it. It becomes poisonous to the body. Yep. Yeah. That's the short story. Now, there are a few other things that can kill you with a

rebreather and some other things that can just, you know, cause your mission to fail. So it's a very complicated system to learn how to use. That said, again, I mean, an O2 rebreather is absolutely critical for a military dive capability because you, you, you're a very complicated. you can't sneak into places when you've got a bunch of bubbles coming up. So, yeah, I mean, it's tough. I think SF, and this is the point of the story, SF needs to maintain the capability for those three reasons. One, for our own credibility, two, so we can do the FID mission as required,

and then three, to complicate that adversary planning. those once in a lifetime dive infiltration go blow up the president's yacht kind of fantasy stories like the seals head in panama maybe it'll happen someday yeah sure but that's going to be rare you're crushing my soul lino like i was a free fall guy but there's still that little like commando inside me that's like man i want green berets to you know do subsurface ops and go like blow up oil infrastructure or take down a bridge or rescue a prisoner or something cool like that. It could happen. It could happen. I mean, if the conflict's big enough and the seals

are busy and the best way to get in is a underwater infiltration, then it could happen. And we need to be ready for it. Again, maybe I'm engaging in like fantasy here, but I mean, you could use it to infiltrate an ODA to go and do the traditional

unconventional warfare mission potentially, right? Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, that's probably where we spend most of our training time in the water when it comes to underwater ops is and you'll see this in the school and and i did it with my company when i was a company commander um it is you know getting dropped off behind a terrain feature somewhere um by a helicopter or by a mother ship you know going subsurface and navigating in it you know there might be a dog leg in there you know you don't want the navigation to be too complicated because

it's a lot harder underwater right um make a dog leg around the island and hit the beach and the idea is to just get there so you can do the UW mission long term. So yeah, I mean, we we like to say also what distinguishes us from the seals is that we really view the underwater operation as a way to get to work. It's not the operation in and of itself. Right. So is there truth to that? Sure.

I think so, you know. So when you guys convert it as a team to a dive team, pre-scuba is notoriously hard. It's one of the reasons why people have a hard time filling those scuba slots. And the combat diver course itself, apparently I haven't been, but apparently it's very, very difficult. How does that work as a team

though, so that you don't lose the guys who may not be great in that field? We lost them. And that's the short stories. We did lose those guys. There were some guys that just straight up refused to go to free scoep. That was not for them

and they knew it. And nobody really gave them shit about it. They were good operators and we didn't want to see him leave, but, you know, if you're going to be a dive team, you've got to get a man up and do it. So we lost some of them and it took a while to get new guys in that were either willing and capable of getting through the school or had already been qualified. It took some time. I think we did our first reasonable dive ops about six months later. So what was the point where I thought is a very interesting story about how you got hit up and briefed on a very secretive operation to go into North Africa. I was wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, that was sort of a really kind of fun moment for me as an SF guy. Just I got a caveat this with, I don't remember everything that was classified, so I'll be very careful how I tell the story, and I'll try to not to deviate for too much about, too much from what I've already written. I was out on, went out to Yakima Training Center to prepare a team to go to Iraq or Afghanistan, one of those two.

We were going to spend a month out of Yakima which if you're familiar with this, just high desert. Beautiful place, great training area, lots of space. You can do just about everything out there. But there's no trees or anything. It's just, it's desert. And I literally left, drove out to Yakima

in my truck and met another company in the battalion and was going to I wasn't training with them I was like an O.C. or whatever. I was helping their company commander sort that out. And because of my combination of

training and clearances, I got a call from some guy in the group whatever shop one day while I was out there, the second day I was there. And yeah. And, yeah.

And he was like, hey, this is chief so-and-so. I knew who he was. And he was like, you know, you is this, is this Captain Miani? I was like, yeah, who's this? He's like, yeah, this is so-and-so. And he said, you need to report to the group headquarters tomorrow for a mission. It's like, I've got a mission. I'm out here in Yakima helping Whitey with this, you know, get his company ready for whatever.

And they're like, no, no, you don't understand. You're being redirected. Come home and we'll see you in the three shop tomorrow morning. I'm like, all right, what's this about? I guess I can't tell you. I'm like, come on, man. I mean, you can't tell me. What is this?

You know, like, I've been doing this a while, man. This is bullshit. He's like, no, I can't fucking tell you. Get your shit and show up. You're going to be gone for six months and you're leaving like tomorrow. Come on, man. This is not real. And he said, I'll see you a group tomorrow.

So sure enough. Like, I drove back for, I told Whitey. I'm like, hey, man, I got to leave. He's like, fuck. And he's kind of a hot head. He's like, fuck you, Miani. All right. Okay.

Sorry, Major. So I drove back to group and the next day I showed up and they're like, hey, you know, there's a fight between combatant commanders about filling this mission in this for Sockier. Sokir was the headquarters that was running this thing. And we can't tell you where you're going to go, but you've got to go to Sokir. And they're going to tell you, you know, what you need to know. And good luck. I was like, what fucking climate do I pack for, you know? Because it gave me a list. Like, it could be Chad. It could be Tanzania. It could be Georgia. I'm like, Georgia. Tanzania.

I'm like, do I pack winter shit or do I pack like my, you know, my son had? I mean, they wouldn't tell me. I mean, seriously, they wouldn't tell me. You know, all right. So we managed to get it delayed a little bit, and I left nine days later. And it was a small group of us. It was five of us, I think, from first group. And the reason we got selected, again, was as a combination of clearances and training. But also, we were in first group, man.

Everybody else was fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq by this point, and we're busy. and I guess you know the powers that be were like well first group's not fucking doing anything so you know send them you know I was happy as shit to go because I was like I'm doing something no one else is doing this sounds cool secret mission

you know I had to tell my wife at the time like you know hey baby I can't tell you where I'm going I'm going away for six months you know I'll send you a postcard I'm sure sure and yeah and it was legit like SAC here and they'd they hadn't really,

what ended up being was they hadn't decided where they were getting to send. And so I watched a thing of secrecy, and I'm kind of deflating my own stories here, but it wasn't as much secrecy as it was. They just hadn't decided yet. So I ended up in Chad. So we went to Sokker and we received the mission and we got a whole bunch of information,

spent some days. And there's a funny kind of side story in there is that because this was so last minute, I actually had to call my family and tell them that I was going to miss my sister's graduation from West Point. And I was going to miss also that same weekend my father's retirement from 35 years in the Army or 33 years in the Air Force. And so it's like this huge family event that was taking place in Virginia and in West Point.

I was going to miss it all. And so that weekend, and it was like Memorial Day weekend, the Chattians had gotten into a spat with the Americans. Americans about visas. And so they refused to give us a visa. And so the Sarve Major who was in charge of this program, TFO guy, anyway, he was like, look, we can't get you a visa, you know, just go enjoy the weekend, see you on Tuesday.

And so I kind of, everybody left and I closed the door. I was like, hey, Sergeant Major, man, but there's what's going on. My sister's graduating from West Point tomorrow. My dad is retiring the next day from 33 years. in the Army or the Air Force, you know, can I, can I go to the States? I'll be back on Tuesday. I promise. And he's like, no. I went, okay, special ops, got it. We're going to go kill terrorists or whatever. This is important shit. Okay, I'm not going. And then he calls me back to like five minutes later.

He's like, look, dude, get on a plane, go to your sister's graduation. Fucking be back here on Tuesday. I was like, I won't let you down. So I went, and because I was TDIY and they didn't have any control of me and and all this he's like look I can't sign your leave form I don't even want to tell soccer or Fersker that you're leaving

just be back here on Tuesday yeah don't get in trouble yeah and I was like I will let you down Sar Major and and I fucking went AWOL and flew to fucking New York and I surprised my sister and my whole family

in New York at her graduation so I got to see those because of a visa dispute that's awesome yeah so you're supposed to you're like read on to some T-S-S-C-I compartmentalized program. Like, yeah, fuck that. I'm going to go see my sister graduate from West Point.

And then you have to haul your ass all the way back to Europe so you can go do this thing. Yep. And I did that. So I showed up on Monday night or Tuesday morning, whatever it was. And probably the next day we got on a plane and we flew to Chad. And it was me and one other dude. And as you saw reading my... writing there, our mission was basically to find bad guys.

Now, here's where it got interesting for us is that this was a U-Com mission. At the time, Afrocom didn't exist. And 10th group had basically the responsibility for doing this. But they were busy in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. Yeah. So it was for them, it wasn't something they really wanted to do, but it was a U-com commander's kind of baby. Now the Socom commander, apparently, and I'm being told this secondhand, but the socom commander had basically said, no, no, no, this is my mission.

Donald Rumsfeld said, we are going to field these missions, and this is a Socom mission. So the two four stars were at odds about what the actual mission was. And so our guys in the Sokir shop that we were working for were like, look, you're there to find terrorists and prepare the infrastructure for, you know, if we have to go in there and get their asses. Whereas a SOCOM commander had a more kind of general and really boring sort of view on things. But UConn Commander was all about it. So we kind of embraced that. And, yeah, we went downrange with the mission of trying to find bad dudes.

And that was great. I had a bunch of money and I had a couple of small guns and a bunch of weird commo shit. and my job was to like talk to people and see if I could find bad guys and I got to tell you my nearest boss was a continent away and my only link to him occasionally was a was a sat phone that I wasn't supposed to have and I ran around surviving on my wits and Jack I know from reading your book you can kind of appreciate that it was like man nobody's coming to help me out if I get if I get in the clink right I get my ass in a sling it's just me no one's coming It was you in one NCO, right? It was one NCO, yep. But then there were times, if you want to talk about that extenuating circumstances where really you literally were by yourself. Yeah, that was an interesting bit.

So we had, well, let me back up just a bit. So when I first got there, it was early June or late May 2005. And, you know, the war is raging in Iraq. It's raging in Afghanistan. And we're starting to find there was a terrorist group called a GSP. that was operating in the French parts of Algeria and Libya. And this was led by a guy named Mokhtar Bel Mokhtar, who later became more famous.

But the French and the Americans were looking for this dude for a decade prior to him hitting the news. And we knew they were funneling foreign fighters for their own reasons into Iraq, and they were doing their own bad stuff in Libya and Algeria. This was while Gaddafi was still around. before it got really bad. And so we got on the ground,

and I remember taking an opportunity to go out to the Sudanese border, which was where a lot of the trouble was, before we were really ready to do it. And so there's a lot of paperwork you have to do to travel in Chad because they're constantly afraid of coups and whatnot, and rightly so. I mean, their history is full of that stuff.

And so we didn't have all our paperwork in order. We didn't have a good solid feel for even like where we lived and how to drive around the capital city. But the defense attach was going out to this border town for whatever unrelated reason. And so I told I told Sergeant Mike, I was like, Mike, man, we're going. He's like, we're not ready. And I said, fuck it, we're going. because we wait until we're ready we're never going to go.

So here's an opportunity. If shit gets, you know, screilly, defense attach will be out there and we have him to fall back on at a minimum, which ain't much, but, I mean, something. So let's go. And we did it. And we have, it's a two-day drive

across this country. People don't realize how big Africa is. It's fucking enormous. Chad, the country of Chad, is north to south as big as the United States, the continental United States. And when you throw in the fact that there's absolutely, there's only 80 kilometers of paved roads in the entire country,

it's a, yeah, it's a bit of a daunting thing. And so there were some adventures that we had the first time because we didn't know what we were doing. But we were SF dudes, you know, we can get through anything, right? I was behind the wheel and we had this land cruiser, and we stole these civil affairs guys that were down there for Flint lot because nobody was using them and they had money. So it was me and Mike and these.

two civil affairs dudes, one of whom is a one star now. I'm behind the wheel and I'm on this land cruiser and it's this hardball road out of the capital towards the eastern part of the country, which is where we were heading. And I'm going 100K, 60 miles an hour. And there's all these derelict vehicles on the side of the road where, you know, when you break down and Chad, there's no towing company that comes and sorts you out. It's one of your buddies walking his ass back to the capital. and buying a part and then coming back three days later.

And so what we were seeing is all these derelict vehicles with little groups of people standing around them doing nothing. And I'm going 100K having a good old time. We got the music cranking and the air conditioner wasn't working, but whatever. And I see this the road ends and there's a construction barrier. And so I'm studying this thing at 100K and I'm like, okay, which side of the barrier am I going to go off of? to enter the desert and the tracks into the desert. So totally focused on it, and I'm ignoring the vehicle with the guys standing around it.

And there was a rumor of a coup that week. And so the presidential guard was out there pulling patrols and shaking people down, just trying to make sure that the rebels weren't coming. But I didn't realize that they had fucking AKs and were wearing uniforms. And so as I approached this group, but somewhere just south of 100k,

I see a guy going like this and holding an AK-47 in his other hand. And I'm like, why the fuck's that guy waving at me? And it just didn't register, you know? I'm focusing on driving this vehicle. And he's going like this. And suddenly when it finally clicked is when he raised the AK and aimed it straight at my face. And I hit the brakes because I knew who they were instantly at that point. It did finally the light came on.

and I hit the brakes and these dudes are pissed you know that they they thought they were going to have to slag down some vehicle and we stopped so they come over and they're sort of yelling at me in this chatty and Arabic French mix that none of us speak like

the sergeant from the E7 from the civil affairs he was like yeah I had a French class once you know so he was trying to speak French to him and you know I had some classes before we went out and I was like oh my God and they're yelling at us

you know I'm like holy shit man you know and so finally we communicated that we're from the diplomatic corps because we had DC plates on the vehicle and you know we're going to Abishe which is the town

on the frontier it's like the gateway to the frontier out there and at that point they start laughing and they're laughing at us because they're like man I know what they're thinking they're like these idiots are going to get fucked up there's no way they're making it to Abashie these fucking morons

So they're like, all right, you know, they waved us through and we were like, who we didn't get shot today. But that's how Chad was, man. You run into people with guns and just life is cheap, dude. They don't care. I mean, the greatest defense we had, and I'm not being facetious here, was our white skin because they knew that if they gun down a gringo, man, they were going to have serious problems. But if you're average Chadian and you, you know, look at them wrong or you drive a little too

fast at the checkpoint, you're getting your ass fucking shot. You know, and so it was dangerous as hell, because it was just the four of us, and later it was just two of us and then eventually just me. But that's how Africa is, man. We like, you know,

we used to say it's not for pussies, and that was no joke. Africa as well, and it was just us. And all we had was like a nine-mill that we couldn't, we weren't supposed to have in a sat phone, we weren't supposed to have. So, um, anyway, uh, going back to your

original question, which how did I end up alone? On one of our later trips, we were like that the rainy season had started, and so we didn't want to drive because it was just a mud slog for two days across the desert. And I said, all right, well, we've got a pretty hefty op-fund. Let's rent a plane. And we kind of were interested in the gentlemen who own the planes anyway. And so we rented a plane, and the next day the Chadian Air Force, or excuse me, the Chattian government decided they were going to get into the business of licensing aircraft, something that they had never bothered to do because before the French just handled it. And let's face it, the chatians really didn't know what they were doing when it

come to that anyway, but they decided they were going to make money doing this. So they told our French friend, who had some amazing stories, by the way, about getting his throat slit and Bay route and doing some other shit. you know, he's French operator of some variety, I'm sure. And he was real. I mean, he had the scar and just the look and the, I know a bullshit story when I see it. Anyway, so we show up at the guy's office, you know, on the airfield the next day for our flight.

He's like, well, listen, Chattie has just told me I can't fly any of my aircraft except for this one. And there's only three seats in it. and that's for the pilot one of you and you know two out of the three of you because I had an interpreter that that's a whole other story

I went to the embassy and I was like I'm not going out there again without a term yeah and they said we got we got just the guy and she this was a

lady in the poll mill section who had worked with her job was negotiating Sudanese rebels and trying to negotiate the peace agreement with the Sudanese government. So they were all sheltering in Chad.

So the embassy in Chad was negotiating all that. And she's like, yeah, you know, he's a Sudanese rebel, but, you know, he speaks English pretty well. And I was like, no, not him. She goes, well, we got this other guy. She's just clueless, you know? I'm like, I'm not like going out there with a rebel who's wanted by the fucking Sudanese Zagawa tribe or whatever, you know, that's where I'm going.

And so she's like, yeah, we got this other guy. he showed up he's working with flintlock Flintlock is the big joint chief staff exercise that happens across this a hell every year it's okay all right this guy's working with SS teams in Flintlock he's got to be legit well when I met him and I dug into a story

it turns out he was a lieutenant colonel in the Chadian Air Force when they had planes and hadn't been paid in years and one day I said I can't feed my family anymore. I'm defecting to Cameroon. And so he took his C-130 and flew it to fucking Cameroon and was like, here I am, what can I do for you?

And I'm a Chattian colonel. And they had two C-130s at one time. And so he had been all over the world with the Chadian president, had an actual passport with stamps in it from all over the place. And on top of that, he wasn't, he wasn't a Muslim, but he had converted from a Christian

tribe, so he wasn't part of the hierarchy of of power out there. It was just, he was an interesting guy, right? And so one day, the Chattian government convinced him to come back to Cameroon, please come back, we'll pay you. We promise we won't kill you for defecting to Cameroon.

And he actually came back and they actually didn't kill him. Wow. Yeah, it was pretty, it was quite the story. And then six months later, you know, they stopped paying him again. And he was like, I need something to do. And he walked into the U.S. Embassy and literally knocked on the glass at the post one or whatever they call it, the security gate there. And it was like, he put up his passport.

He's like, I was trained how to fly in the United States. I'm a lieutenant colonel and the Chadian Air Force. And I need work. I speak English. And they put him to work with Flintlock. And that was his whole vetting. And this is the guy I ended up with. And he was a good dude.

But I was like, good grief, guys. This is what the U.S. embassy was rocking with out there. So you got this guy who was a C. 30 pilot slash defector as your terp. You got the French pilot who was some kind of Merck or French Foreign Legion bro cruising around Lebanon back in the day with a gnarly tattoo or a gnarly scar on his throat from where somebody tried to do him in.

And a rickety airplane with three seats that is supposed to take you to your area of operation. Right. And it's supposed to be me, Mike, the turp, and the pilot. So you see there's a seat and this. right right so me and mark on the spot we're like well let's do some crossloading real quick i mean it was like the cue course it was like all right what do we you know how do we cross load the equipment here you know quickly like we're moving shit between boxes and bags and whatever and i was like i'll go um and i you know i don't remember my justification but we decided that i would go first and then i would send the plane

back and then mike would come later well um that plane that plan worked until the weather moved in and they had to turn around because of a thunderstorm. Then the next day, some guy got blown up by a mine on a mine clearing operation in the north. So they got commandeered to go medevac that dude. And then weather the next day. The point of all this is, as soon as you turn props on a bird,

you paid for it. So we ran out of money. So after three days of literally sitting under a bush and fucking Eastern Chad in the middle of nowhere, waiting for Mike and attracting all kinds of attention because, I mean, Gringo's sitting under a bush, you know, looking at the grass grow. I'm not kidding. I'm not exaggerating not one bit when I tell you, like, dudes would come up on donkeys and just stop and get off the donkey and fucking sit with me.

And they'd be wearing, like, man dresses and they'd have no teeth. And they'd have like, you know, they'd have like AK-47s and shit. And they'd be like, they wouldn't even talk to me. They'd just sit down and they'd watch the grass grow. And that's what you do when you're a man in Chad. You know, you ride around on a donkey and you look at the grass grow, I guess, and check out the gringoes. And so for three days, I kind of did that. Being a parent can be really challenging.

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We tried to sell us armored vehicles at one point, which we didn't go for. But he's like, listen, you're going out to this place. this town was called Arriva. And he's like, look, I want, when you go to Reba, the guy in charge is Abdulaziz. And Abdulaziz is like, he used to work for the president,

but he killed the wrong guy, and he got exiled out to his hometown in Arriba. And he's just like cooling his heels out there until he can rejoin the government because it was a big scandal. And all you get it. You understand. He's like, you've got to meet Abdulaziz.

And I'm like, I do not want to fucking meet Abdulaziz. but the French guy thinks I need to meet him. He's a power player out there. I mean, I guess I should meet Abdulaziz. So on day two, sitting by the airfield, no kidding, this gold package, like spotless, shining, gold package land cruiser rolls up with tinted windows, and I'm like, I guess Abdullahiz knows I'm here.

Yeah. And sure shit, man, these dudes got out of the vehicle, and they're all like, they're right out of Hollywood, guys. I mean, the aviator sunglasses. the turban, the mandress, the fucking AK-47. Like the weird useless bandolier of ammo that I don't even know what it was for. I'm like, where's your belt-fed weapon that you've got that? You know, just the pearl-handled pistols and like the rounds and the belt.

It's like a scene out of the Mandalorian. I'm telling you, I was like, I don't know if Hollywood imitated art or art. I don't know, man. It imitated real life. Did I say that right? Anyway, these guys were right out of central casting. I'm like, you've got to be shitting me. this must be Abdulaziz.

And he gets out, he's like this big fat gregarious dude. He's like, ha ha ha, ha, I'm Abdulaziz. Yeah. You must be Lino. You know,

I don't remember if he said it in English or French or what the fuck, but the message was clear. And I'm like, yeah, and you must be Abdulaziz. And so he, like, you know,

he motions to his men and they go into his land crews and they open up the fridge. And they get it. They pull out like juices because, you know, they don't drink. because they're all good Muslims and all that. And so there we are, like, sipping on, like, Capri's side of the airfield with the guy and the donkey. And there's, you know, Adil Z's and two or three of his henchmen.

And we're sitting around. He's trying to talk to me and I'm trying to talk to him. It's just not working. And it's just uncomfortable as shit. You know, and I don't really want Abdulaziz up in my stuff. And I don't know what he can bring for me. And I'm just, I just, it just wasn't great, man. It wasn't a great feeling at all.

and I remember thinking like, okay, Adil Z's talking about some bullshit and I'm like, okay, what do I do if this goes bad? You know, I've got a camel back with a nine mill and two magazines. You know, here, like it's not even fast to get that stuff out. And then if even if I managed to get the weapon into operation, you know, okay, put two in Adil Z's first. That's, that's a given. but that guy looks tougher than that dude so I'm killing him second and then him and then what am I going to do about this dude

I'm a donkey he's just like this random guy why's he got to go well I didn't like so but I had to go through that calculation like what do I do about this dude you know and then there's my driver who was from the president's tribe and I didn't fucking trust him

and so I'm like you know and my every day was like that in Africa it's like you know I walk in anywhere and it's like okay who do I whack first You know, if this shit goes bad, I don't want to kill anybody, but damn, dude, you know. And then what do I do? You know, how am I going to run from this place?

Who do I call or how? You know, where do I expect all the checkpoints to be? Because they're in every fucking town. So, yeah, it was stressful as hell. And finally, Abdul Z's left. And I got a call from Mike that day. And he's like, dude, we don't have enough money to make it. You're on your own.

And I remember sitting there under that bush. And I was like, it was. daunting for a second. You know, I was like, holy shit, man. I came out here for it. We were supposed to be together on a 10-day trip on the front, the Sudanese frontier, man, the seam between Centcom and U-COM and a dangerous freaking place,

because this is where all the, the rebellions originated. And this is, this is a bad tribe territory. And I don't know much about it. So, that was daunting for a second. I was like, damn. And then I stopped and I said, well, I mean, this is what they train me to do. So time to get to it.

You know, I mean, all right. It could be fucking dangerous, but this is what we're, this is what we're supposed to do. Right. So I spent the next 10, well, 10-ish days kind of by myself traveling that whole border and doing key leader engagements. and spending money and talking to people. And there was just a lot of wacky stuff. You know, I remember going into a quote-unquote restaurant in the middle of the bleakest desert

and seeing a picture. I wish I had. My camera wasn't working at the time. Two posters on the wall. So when you walk out of the desert into these mud huts, it's dark as shit. You can't see anything, right? And I sit down.

I get escorted to, like, the plastic furniture they have. And they asked me, you know, what I wanted. And I knew how to order one thing and it had beans in it. So I ordered that. You know, I'm fucking starving, but I ordered beans. And my eyes start to adjust in there's these two squares on the wall in front of me. And they're posters. And as I start to make out what they are, one of them's 50 cent, the rap guy.

And the other one's Osama bin Laden. And I'm like, they're kind of looking at each other like they're in love, you know. You know, just by coincidence, these two posters were still. like facing each other. It was Osama in 50 Cent and I was like, God damn it, man. I bought these bullshit batteries in the market and they don't work and I can't take a picture of that. It was just, just, yeah. It was wild stuff, man.

So on this trip, I know you probably can't like name names, but did you identify bad guys? No, man. No. We had whispers that we were tracking down, but mostly what we were trying to do at that point was was develop a network of people that we could count on in case, you know, a bad guy did get identified through some means. It lay in the groundwork. Yeah.

And then someone had to come in and deal with it. Yeah, we were laying the ground. You know, and it's just you and this driver. And so we went from you sitting on the side of the road or sitting under a sitting by Bush. How did you make your way across the frontier over 10 days? How did you negotiate that? How did you like? Yeah, that's a good question.

I actually went to the governor in Eribe, this town, which was a district, like a governorship. And I asked the local warlord governor guy to rent a car from it. And excuse me, it came with the driver. And I didn't want the driver. I was like, I can drive myself and I can navigate. And he's like, no, look, you really need to have the driver. And I said, you know, I pondered that for a second and I made a risk calculation. I was like, okay, I'm going to take the dropper.

He's from the Zagawa tribe, which is the president's tribe. And, you know, maybe he can help us out of a snag. And that proved to be mostly a good decision. He helped us procure some stuff along the way. Lodging, for example. So, you know, we stayed in houses that belonged to people he knew. And he was kind of a playboy. So he would disappear at night and go, you know, meet his girlfriends or whatever.

But it was stressful shit, man. I'm telling you, I'm sleeping with a nine-mill under my pillow quite literally. And with one eye open, hoping this dude isn't going to double cross us. And for whatever fucking reason, money or who knows what. You know, and sleeping on concrete floors and these really shithole houses just trying to, you know, make it to the next sunup. but you know we got to places like teenay which are which is a border town shared with Sudan and you know I had I was hosted there by the by the mayor and and that's where I kind of got tangled up with their fists I later met the Sultan of D'Artama and

because what you had to do in Chad in certain places you had to go talk to the governor talk to the to the Sultan who was the sort of traditional leader that was a parallel structure within the French colonial kind of enterprise. And then you could go talk to everybody below. Once you had their sort of ominous, dominus, you could go do that. And I got that advice from someone that had been there for a while. And it proved to be good advice. And for, you know, living in America, when we think of a governor,

we think of somebody who's duly elected is these governors were mostly, warlords who became governors by power or tribal affiliation or nepotism or something else, right? I believe so. I'm speculating a little bit when I want to comment on that specific history. I would say this, the sultans were all slave traders. I mean, up until the 1960s when, you know, slavery was finally outlawed in Arabia. Right. Yeah. We know, I'd like to get into talking about Cobra Gold.

some of your experiences with the Malaysian special forces and the ties. And I would really like to hear your experiences with the Japanese special operations unit, which I think very few people know anything at all about. So the Japanese soft, that's a heck of a cool story because that involved my ex-wife at the time. So in 2003, when I first got to first group, they had just made the decision, which was quite controversial to establish a soft unit. And they, you know, for reasons of historical... That whole thing in Asia back in the 40s.

Yeah. So Article 9 of their constitution prohibits them from operating outside the territorial kind of waters and airspace of Japan. So what's a soft unit supposed to really do? So they never had one. And a lot of people actually fell into the myth that they don't have. have that sort of cultural mindset or that capability completely wrong. So they did some amazing special operations in the Second World War. And this unit was established in spite of that. Again, it was pretty controversial. And so as a result, it was fairly secretive and they were

very careful with how they used it. Now, in 2003, when I first got to group, a delegation, maybe it was, yeah, it was 03, a delegation from the Japanese soft unit, which hadn't really been operationalized yet, came on this big research tour. If you know anything about the Japanese, they researched the shit out of everything they do before they do anything.

And they're very careful about that. So they sent this delegation to all these special ops units and all the allies around the Pacific. So they came to first group, and then they went to Fort Bragg, and they went to the U.S. Australians and they went to the Germans and they did a bunch of stuff. Well, when they came to my unit, they needed an interpreter, or at least the group thought

they needed an interpreter. And so they asked me because they knew my wife at the time was Japanese. So I was TDIY somewhere. So I missed all this, but she was part of the whole delegation. And it was sort of unnecessary because all the officers spoke English, but they developed a relationship. And at a certain point, when they went back to Japan, they were sending RFIs to first group through my ex-wife. And so her unclassified Gmail account became the conduit for the Japanese soft to research thing. I mean, the whole dot mill p.f, you know,

doctrine operations, training, whatever it is, Manning. And that the whole thing, you know, the weaponry, all of that shit. And so she was passing these RFF. to first group on behalf of a Japanese soft unit. And then years later, she paid an office call of their commander when she was on a visit to see her parents in Tokyo. And he was designing their what became their unit crest. And so when she walked into his office, he's kind of scratching his head and he's got this drawing and he's frustrated and he's like having this trouble. And she's got a bit of a talent for decoration and art. And so she was like, you know, you should put this here and put that there in the sun and the sword here and, you know, the eagle.

And he was like, that's brilliant. And so she designed the Japanese soft crest that they use today. That's cool. So, what was the political impetus for this that precipitated the creation of Japanese special forces in 2003? Like, because it was controversial and it's an island nation, not really a lot. allowed to have any sort of expeditionary warfare? I mean, what the hell was really going on there? I mean, I should know more about answering this question,

but I mean, I think if I'm not mistaken at the time, you're looking at a North Korean nuclear capability. You've got a pretty highly conservative, by their definition, government in power in Tokyo at the time. And so there's an aspect of Japanese society that would like to have some independence from the post-World War II reality. And so it was popular in this particular government to try to get some reinterpretation of their constitution, particularly Article 9, which presents that prohibition.

And it's understandable in a way. I mean, they have some real security challenges. And they're almost entirely dependent on the United States to meet that challenge. The United States has not been a consistent ally from their perspective over the 60, 70 years that they've been in that role. And so, you know, we were busy with the war on terror. George Bush was kind of encouraging the Japanese to do more in the Pacific. And then you had, you know, North Korea nukes happening at the same time, conservative government. So it was a reinterpretation that was building towards Article 9 and what that was.

actually meant. So they created. And what was this unit's mission? I mean, ostensibly, what were they intended to do? I mean, it's the full spectrum of special operations. And it wasn't really, from what I could tell, inhibited by the territorial borders of Japan. You know, maybe that's the story they told

in order to justify it to the diet or to the press. But as far as the unit guys were concerned, they had to be ready for anything. Right. And I mean, did what kind of ops of these guys actually done over the years? Do you have any inkling of that? I really don't. I mean, they train a lot with first group.

They come to the States and we go over there and we work with them. They're very cagey about their history. They don't want their lineage to be painted in the same brush that, you know, the Kempitai and the other special ops units from the second director. it got painted with from World War II. That said, you know, their unit coin has Bishito as our code written on it. It's kind of like, all right, how much space are you really trying to create here? And by the way, the coin is this a good time to go get another drink?

Because I'm out. Do you want to go get another drink? If you want to get another drink, for it, man. Can I have 30 seconds? You're going to have 30 seconds, man. For sure. Guys, thank you for joining us live. apologize if the stream skip the beat right there uh yeah there it goes so yeah we're

giving lino two seconds to go and grab a drink yeah also uh feel free to check out uh lino's organization or the foundation combat diver foundation combat diver dot org uh and lino also has his own website uh that i'll tease out there real quick i think it's a lino Oh, I'm sorry. I'll have to put that in the description in a minute. So guys, I will, we're working on getting the internet fixed so that we never, ever have this problem again. And I apologize for the hiccups.

It's really frustrating for me, believe we may. So we're going to go and go down a spectrum tomorrow and try to square that away. So, Lino, thanks for coming back. Where do we want to pick it up with Cobra Gold? Yeah, so the Japanese came down to cover gold And they announced at the planning conference that they wanted to be an actual player team within the scenario And that caused a lot of consternation with the ties who didn't want Japanese combat troops Operating in a scenario on their territory

And so I was a battalion three at the time, but the group was busy with just soda pee and a bunch of other stuff So I had an exercise So I said, you guys sorted out. And what they ended up doing was allowing the Japanese to infiltrate and be there with us, but not in a player role. So they were observers. And was, I mean, was that from an intelligence perspective? I mean, are a lot of the Asian communities, do they feel that way about the Japanese military being involved in their operations?

Is that kind of leftover from World War II? Yeah, it really is. And Thailand in particular, what a lot of people don't know, Thailand was the only country that was never been colonized in that part of the world. They were kind of taken over by the Japanese, but only they kind of opened the door and let them in because they didn't want to be taken over. So they sort of collaborated during World War II, but it wasn't really by choice.

And there's a lot of sensitivities. It makes them unpopular. It would make them unpopular. in the region if they were to allow Japanese combat troops to operate in that capacity. Or at least. If there are folks out there who are a little bit confused by a pretty friendly, advanced nation like Japan, why would anyone have an issue working with them? You got to go and read like a book like The Rape of Nan King, for instance, and what the

Imperial Japanese military did in Manchuria. And even in far-flung places like Indonesia, the Philippines, I mean, absolutely horrific shit. And there hasn't, unlike with Germany, there hasn't really been that strong reconciliation with their neighbors, I feel like, that a lot of that stuff kind of got, I don't want to say, swept under the carpet. But it's like still an open wound in many ways that I feel like in Europe, they've done a lot of work to try to resolve. The interesting thing about a lot of the governments in Southeast Asia is they trace their roots to either the Japanese Imperial Army or the Special

Ops executive or the OSS that was working against them. And so a lot of the shit, most of the governments out there have founding fought because the communists were the most organized right after the war. And so they fought the Japanese and Japanese were gone and then they became a communist insurgency. So the connections with Japan and counter Japan, in that part of the world are really, really fresh. Yeah. Well, and I think part of it, too, is in the sense that, you know, we didn't really put

some of the same restrictions on Germany and Italy in terms of, and they're landlocked with other countries. So there was, there were those relations going on. And for them, it's been a long time. It's been years and years, you know, decades of working together, interacting, where the Japanese, we kind of isolated and they're isolated geographically and so that familiarity and all that stuff hasn't had time to build

you know where it's like oh there's just another country and put all that in the past those were different people it's all still very fresh and this is who they are yeah it really is very fresh in a way that it's hard for us to understand and and you know when the Japanese got rich really before

the rest of Asia did a lot of their business women went out and just, it wasn't, you know, they were famous in the Philippines, for example, for just going down there and having girlfriends and having a good time. You know, that doesn't give them the best kind of image everywhere that they go. So, yeah, there's still a lot of that. And in any case, the ties really didn't, weren't comfortable with allowing the Japanese to do that. So they were with us as observers and whatever.

and it was at that time during that exercise which everybody tried to keep the Japanese presence secret until a closing ceremony when they put up a big billboard with the Japanese soft thing that my wife my ex-wife designed it was right there on the billboard and it was like oh well I guess it's not secret anymore but yeah it was interesting stuff you know they jumped with us on a what was supposed to be a tactical infill

and the DZ was, the DZ was too freaking dangerous, and the company was like, I'm not jumping at night. So the battalion staff was like, all right, we'll jump during the day. So they jumped with us, and we had some fun on the drop zone, and it was neat. There was something that you said about that exercise that really interested me, where you said the ties treated previous U.S. training exercises as rewards, giving certain commanders an opportunity to conduct U.S. funded training, increase their public profiles and sometimes update their equipment.

Over time, the goal of the Thai commanders was not to improve their capabilities, but simply to create a need for more training. This time was different. I think that's a very interesting observation about special forces missions, U.S. Special Forces missions, these FID missions, and where they succeed and where they really kind of fail. I was wondering if you could unpack that a little bit. Yeah, so the feeling.

in First Special Forces Group over decades of working with the ties is that they're just there to we train them on raid ambush recon for 40 years and they never seem to get better at it. And there's some truth to that. You know, and when you're

you can imagine if you're interacting with an ODA once every three years or once every five years, whatever skills you learn from the previous ODA have gone with personnel rotations or just time or whatever. And so it's a good chance for these units which are not well funded to get things from the United States, whether that's

IPRO or new equipment or, you know, techniques or offer, you know, their, their best lieutenant, the chance to get, you know, go out and train with the Americans and that makes him eligible for the next level of command or who knows what that's all about. But it doesn't seem to have a lasting effect. Now, what had happened with our exercise in 2012 is the Army was, reconciling with the new government of Toxin Shinawatt's party. His sister, whose name escapes me, but she's a Shinawai. You may remember Toxin was a very popular, populist leader from the north, which guy who promised to give basically handouts to the poor,

and he won the election in Thailand, and he was overthrown in, I think, 2006 and a coup, maybe it was 2008, I don't recall, where the army was in charge, and they sort of installed a more royalist government. The army tends to be more aligned with the royalists. And so the royalists released, they met their promises to have an election or whatever.

And so Shinawatt's sister ended up running for his party, the Poutai party. I can't remember party. Poo Tai party, which means I love Thai party. And she won. and she was legitimately elected in Thailand as far as anyone could tell

but the army had been on the wrong side of that government for some time because they were basically suppressing their supporters and in fact within the previous year there was big protests in Bangkok in support of her being elected etc

etc and the army was well documented as being these people down in the streets suddenly their boss is now that that lady that they were trying to prevent from from winning the election and so they kind of recognized I think that they better they better make amends and they needed to do it in the part of

Thailand where this exercise was taking place which is the sort of home area for that party so they were on a charm offense and what was different about our exercise is that you know after 40 years of just trying to get new goggles and new equipment and some ammo so that they could shoot, suddenly they had their own internally generated mission, and that was to build rapport with the people that were voting for the Poutai party. And so they conceived of this exercise where we would go out into that

countryside, and we would have 20,000 plus villagers as part of this thing as quote-unquote role players in the scenario. And when they'd be able to be. And when they briefed us on this, we were completely blown away. Like we, as Americans, didn't know how to even fucking manage that, because we do exercise and all the role players are actors. Right. You know, they have their role.

I'm supporting this side. Here's my story. This is how I feel, and I will play that role. Well, you can't do that with 20,000 Thai villagers. So what we told them, or what the ties told them actually, was you support Jack. Jack is

your man. Whatever Jack tells you to do like you're you support he tells you to fight dave's people you go fight dave's people and they didn't care or know who the good guy was or who the bad guy was like we do in our exercises it wouldn't work but the way the ties had arranged it they just they just knew that they were supporting jack and dave it was fascinating because i mean our guys were like this is never going to work and i said wait a second hold on there's there's no way we could make these guys play a role i mean these are tithe villagers for fucks it there's there's and there's 20,000 of them.

Right. And so we literally jumped teams into the Thai countryside, and they ended up in Thai villages. And all the Thai villagers knew was like, I like Jack or I like Dave. Hey, man, it worked on the path at Lao in all of them, so I mean. Yeah. And it was, honestly, it was a really good way to run an exercise.

But it was something the Americans were just, like we were not comfortable with that at all. you know and so it was it was interesting and it was also interesting that they were very comfortable using their Thai Buddhist temples as the center of the insurgency. So we had ODAs. We had ODAs that were literally housed in Buddhist Watts that were active. Like worshippers would come and they'd be worshipping and there's the ODA there trying to have security. And I remember a guy named Nick Humble who was a team start at the time and he called me.

He was angry. shit. And it was like, sir, how the fuck am I supposed to protect myself? I got all these monks all over me and, you know, people praying and stuff like that. I'm like, dude, that's what the Thai special forces are going to do, man. Yeah. You got to figure that shit out.

Yeah, it's not ideal, but that's how it works in Thailand, homie. Yeah. Man, I mean, yeah, it's such a wild experience. And you did end up in Iraq eventually, right? Like in 2006?

Yeah, I was right when I came back from Africa. So it was early 2006 and I went to Iraq and by that point, came back from Africa and they promoted me into an AS3 job. So I was like, great. I had just been six months running around literally by myself on the African frontier trying not to get shot or locked up. The next thing you know, I'm in like this bob. It sucked.

I was like, God, man. This is a huge culture shock. And so I was just this planner guy and planning operations and like stuck in this room with a, you know, I had a TV and air conditioning and ice cream in the mess hall. And it was just bizarre. It was our FOB, like our head company headquarters, excuse me, our C team, the battalion headquarters was 230 people. And so Jack, when I read your book, you know, and you were talking about how the staffs at a certain point in the Iraq war were generating all this. requirement. I mean, that was our reality. And I don't blame my commander per se, but when you have

230 people in the battalion staff, there's a need for information. And I mean, we were literally receiving 30 to 40 pages of sit reps from the team every single night. And so what are you going to do if you're a captain on a team or a team sergeant trying to report that stuff? You're cutting and pasting. I mean, we couldn't read it. Really? Cutting and pasting? No way. Yeah, I mean, and it was like, you'd get the same shit every day and it was like, oh, this is cut and pasted from yesterday, and everybody would talk shit about the team.

But it was like, holy cow, man, they're not going to spend three hours a night generating a new report. They didn't even go outside the wire last night. Right. You know, what are they going to report on? And at the time, we had this fascination with measures of effectiveness. there was that effects-based operations thing that came from the Air Force. Yeah.

And all the Sam's guys are now switching off this show, because I'm going to tell you that that was bullshit, man. Effects-based operations were designed by the Air Force to measure strategic bombing effects, which you can kind of do, right? You can count the number of bombs and the tonnage and the sorties and which factories got hit. And then downrange you can, you know, downstream you can measure like how many widgets actually made it to the front after our bombing rage.

You can't do that with counterinsurgency. Like you can't measure what's in the mind of a man. Right. But that's what we were asking our guys to do. There's that big push with atmospherics. And everything was about atmospherics. And it's like, motherfucker, I can gather atmospherics all day,

but how does that defeat the insurgency? Like riddle me this. I'm going out there and I'm finding out how much oranges cost in the market, but that's not winning us the war. But there's this emphasis on it, and I really think it was because it was easy to do, and it wouldn't result in us getting attacked anymore because the enemy knows we're useless. And so it just becomes like an easy metric. Yeah, and I felt bad for the teams because the teams are capable, you know,

and they know what's going on. And you go down and ask the E6 on, you know, the junior Bravo on the team, he's going to know. Right. He'll tell you. And up with the battalion, we didn't really quite have a clue. And so I was in charge of developing this system of measures of effectiveness and measures of performance. And there's some sort of distinction there, you know. And we spent a week or two weeks on this with the commander nitpicking all this stuff.

We came up with this huge chart. And I had this. and that's the CCIR, the PIR that you gave to the teams so that we could learn something and we can make decisions ostensibly. So I had this captain from a National Guard who's an infantry dude, National Guard mobilized guy who showed up and he just had no personality in any way. We put him on the night shift and his whole freaking job

was to go through these 40, 50 pages of sit reps that he would print off every night and look for M-O-E. And these MOEs, these measure of effectiveness, were literally things like how many children waved at the ODA when they entered the town. Right. You know? And I remember telling my commander, I'm like, sir, you know, are they waving at us because they like us? Are they waving goodbye because they're about to blow our ass away? Right.

And it didn't matter. It was just like how many children wave. And so, I mean, I had this, I'm not kidding. I had this captain. That's all he did for the entire rotation. sitting in an empty room by himself on the night shift and try to pick these things up. And if he was lucky, we would get six or eight of them a night from disparate ODAs. And it was completely useless.

And I was like, how are we making decisions? Why don't we just go down there and ask the team sergeant or the captain, hey, man, which villages are hot, man, which ones don't like you? Where can you travel and where can you not travel? Right. And that'll tell us more than these. You know, the question is, why are we making this harder on us than it needs to be? And it just needs, it needs like some fucking peer supervision.

Somebody needs to come down and say, what are we doing here? What are we doing right now? Yeah. Like, what's our in-state? How do we know, you know, how do we know when we've won? And how do we get to that point? And children waving is such a weird metric because sure, they're going to wave and follow your truck. Because they want candy.

Yeah, they want the candy, you want the soccer balls. Yeah. Or the- Maybe they're hungry, you know, they just need an MRI, dude. Or the first couple times they see you because you're a novelty. And then once you're not a novelty anymore, it's not like they're going to wave to every single person they see that they like, right? People don't do that.

So, yeah, I mean, it's sort of like a really good demonstration of how the command is separated from the actual operations on the ground. And they want to justify and what charts. and powerpoints and these things to show this is how the war effort is going but really well we've been here X number of years that's how the war effort is going

I sympathized with the commanders to a degree because there wasn't really a better alternative I mean the better alternative is asked the commanders and sergeants on the ground like hey man what do you think what's your assessment but you

can't justify that to hire that's at a certain level that turns into well that just you know what is this what is this e6 no right you know there's some guy on the nSC that's going to go what that came from sergeant so and so why should i pay attention to that right that's not the right answer but that's what you're going to get right there's a certain amount of hubris at that level that they think they know more than the people on the ground yeah which you know i mean i remember them even they came to us and their their mentality was the odys need to get us the intel so we can win the war.

And it's like, this war is not going to be won at some battalion level. No, it's going to be run at a, or won at a squad level, if anything. So it's like the entire situation was inverted and flipped on itself. Yeah, I was, I mean, like I said,

I do have some sympathy for the commanders in a way, but at the same time, I mean, they have a responsibility to design the system that's going to work. And I don't really feel like we did that in Iraq. Or we got to a point where we were so dependent on data that it just didn't make sense anymore

so it was kind of tough and you know I think where you're leading to ask me though Jack is about that story that I wrote that hasn't been published about the about the my sniper guys

who took a shot at a or thought about taking a shot at an IAD that story I thought it was interesting well I was bored in the FOB and so I took a trip out to the wall where we had one responsibility for one tower

along the MSR in just North of Baghdad where we were in Taji. And I found two of my NCOs up there from my ODA and I was like hey guys, what are you doing? They're looking at something down the sights of the sniper system.

They're like, you know, we're hunting rabbits. You know, there's a guy like acting funny over there. So it was a very interesting sort of moral exercise of how do we deal with an obvious IED in place or right under our noses when we can't leave the wire. We have all these restrictions as far as dropping a hammer on a guy. And that was the war we were at in that specific part of Iraq at the time.

It wasn't like that everywhere. and it changed depending on the fortunes of the war. But at the time, it was a huge drama to drop the hammer on anybody. And so we saw this guy digging a hole for an IED, and these two NCOs were having this debate about, you know, do I shoot him or do I not shoot him? Do we send a warning shot? Do we, you know, how do we deal with this?

Do we roll out the wire and just roll him up and ask him? Because he's probably just so poor guy that's trying to make $20 digging a fucking hole, man. He doesn't know. or maybe he's you know, maybe he is a hardcore guy, but until we talk to him, how are we going to know that? And we can't drive out the wire

because that requires, you know, con ops signed by, you know, a 20 star general and, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So we ended up, you know, make a long story short, we ended up not,

you know, even shooting a warning shot at the guy and letting him do his business. And we just reported the information and watched him do his thing. Well, sure, sure enough, somebody dropped an IED in that hole the next night, and it killed a robot

the next day. Thankfully, no, you know, humans were lost, but it snarled traffic, and it, you know, it probably made us look pretty dumb and made the insurgents feel pretty good about, you know, we did this right under their bucking noses, but it was a really interesting discussion to have in that, that tower at that moment, like, hey, What are our options here? You know, you've probably already said this, but what year was this again? It was 2006.

Yeah. Yeah, I know that things for the military get very complicated. Even guys like on ODAs were saying that if they fired a shot on a target, on a planned raid with Connups, if they fired a shot, there would be a full investigation in terms of why that shot was fired. And if it was justified, which. I think it makes it very challenging for soldiers to make those on-the-spot decisions when they need to. If they think that there's going to be, you know, a lot of scrutiny and a lot of, you know, Monday morning quarterbacking, a lot of people say, well, you know, why didn't you shoot them in the leg or whatever else?

It's weird. It's like there was and there wasn't, though. Like, yeah, you had to fill out statements every time, but like, they wouldn't really look into it. It was almost like. Depended here you were also. So these guys were, if I remember correctly, they were an ODA that was assigned to BDOC based defense operations for just our little compound within the compound. So, I mean, you know, we were within this huge base, which was guarded by fourth ID. They were really the ones that had the responsibility to go out and respond to things.

We didn't even have that authority. So there was all these questions about it. And it was like in another, you know, down in Ramadi at the same time, they were just shooting every military age male that had something in his hands. We were jealous of those dudes because it was easy. We're like, yeah, you know, we know. You mean that naval commando element up there in Ramadi? They were just shooting anybody?

Huh? I didn't just say that. Oh, maybe I was, maybe I was just making an inference. No, I mean, look, the war was a lot hotter in 2006. Dave, you got some. Yeah, we actually do have some questions. Let's see here. We need to talk about USAID at some point because there's some interesting stories there.

I don't know how much time we've got. We've been going for like two hours, but we can extend this a little bit longer. Let's see here. First off, thank you, Andrew. He said he went to West Point. What are some of the good stories about West Point? There are no good stories about West Point, man. they're just none.

It's all gray. It sucks. You go to bed at 11. You know, you don't meet any girls. You have terrible haircuts. Yeah. And is that pretty much your day-to-day existence there? Yeah.

I mean, look, it's highly regimented. And without getting into the details of that, it's just every aspect of your life is controlled to the, you know, to the detail of how you fold your clothes and where you, you know, place your coffee maker in your room if you've even allowed to have one. So some friends of mine used to say that West Point was the heart of school in the Army. I think in some ways that's probably true. I would say this, when you're 17 years old and you're going through the same thing as a thousand other 17 year olds, it's a bonding experience that lasts a lifetime. And so it was really

fun in that respect. And so I think all of you can relate through things like basic training in AIT and a Q course or RIP or whatever, you know, experience you've had with your peers, it has the same effect. Yeah. Yeah. So there was some fun. It was a lot of fun, I got to say, is a good way to spend four years as a as a late teenager in an early 20-something. You know, we did some good training and, you know, I got some exposure to the Army and I had some fun out of 10th Mountain Division one summer and learned how to be an instrument. shot a lot of weapons and got exposed to tanks and artillery and helicopters and the army culture. So it was it was useful for that. I really enjoyed that. How much does doing a, not a naval company, but doing a military academy like West Point, and Naval Academy or something with that, or at least for West Point, how much does that play

in your career past lieutenant, past captain, things like that? Is it important? It's funny. I would say no, but a lot of my colleagues who were not West Pointers would say yes. And I'm reporting secondhand here. A lot of them would say, you know, West Pointers have the advantage because you know everybody. You know your entire cohort. You know, a large percentage of the officer corps was together from the time they were 17.

And, you know, through their lieutenant ship and their company commands and their battalion commands and so on. And that's valuable. So it's a networking tool that has some positive effect. Okay. So you're saying that ring knockers don't necessarily have an advantage. It's just the larger community. Or it's the community that they have in form? I don't think that they have a specific advantage.

Some guy who went to ROTI would probably tell me I'm crazy. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. Alejandro, thank you. Being a team that converted a dive, did you have to deal with any of the any shenanigans like carrying a paddle or anchor everywhere before going to school only in dive school and there's probably a guy listening right now named jamie garza who was um who was my echo on the oda and we went to

dive school together and yeah we screwed up and we carried this big giant chain link around like for a couple of days jamie sorry about that it was so when you say we do you mean you or do you mean Jamie or No, it was, I probably messed up. I don't even remember what it was, but it was this big chain link, like from an anchor cable like an anchor chain on a battleship. Yeah. That was, had a rope and then with two loops on the end and you had to put it around your neck and run everywhere together with that things.

Yeah, my fault, Jamie. Thanks, Ian. Gold Star, gentlemen. I was strong and you have that training background. You can make it work, but everybody brings something to the table. and that can be quite different and you know you'll find yourselves in weird situations

where the guy you thought was pretty mundane suddenly shines because you know he had an experience as I don't know a Christian missionary in Botswana or something and you know he just has that ability it was a neat place to be

um wait did I uh that's Ian and then uh thanks again Ian, oh, we have all night if you want to talk. So Ian encourages you to keep rolling with the stories. Glad he's enjoying it.

Thanks for the donation, BPAZ, and then that's it. All right, so do you want to talk to us about then? You went off to NATO for a while, and I think maybe I'll save that for the bonus segment because there's some interesting stories by going to Norway and Korea. But you said you wanted to talk about USAID and some of the time you spent there? Yeah, so I retired out of the NATO Special Operations headquarters in Belgium. And I hung out a shingle with NBizio Global, which is my company. And it was really just a way to mobilize my resume and my list of contacts to help people solve problems overseas, which is still, which is what I'm still doing now in Guatemala.

and all. But at a certain point, my ex-wife told me she wasn't comfortable with that level of risk. And she's like, dude, you got to get a real job. And for her, that meant a government job. So, yeah. So after a couple quite successful years in Belgium as a civilian, I got a job at USA. And I was in a, I was in the Office of Foreign Disaster Assess. Excuse me. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. which was called Offta no longer exists, but at least not by that name. And I was an advisor to the military for the office foreign disaster assistance. What people don't probably realize is that all those foreign disasters where you see the U.S. military saving the day and all that, they're only there because Offta invited them. So off does the actual agency that has the authority to, do those responses. When they feel they need the help of the specific capabilities of the military,

they'll ask the Pentagon. And so I found myself on a very small team. It was like a battalion-sized agency. We bounced around the world from the Middle East to the Far East to Latin America. And I got involved in disaster responses from the Caribbean Islands to Peru, to Guatemala, to Kuwait, to Iraq, Jordan, and Syria. and I worked with people in Korea, Japan, and elsewhere. So we constantly had our fingers on the pulse on a lot of different things.

And during a response, it was a really cool way to work because most of the time we were in a pretty nice hotel. So life wasn't too hard. Occasionally, there were guys that were living under the stars, but that was pretty rare. And then, you know, in the morning, I'd be in them with the Minister of Defense making an argument. you know, or the ambassador.

And in the afternoon, I'm kicking boxes out the back of an MH-53 somewhere. Or CH-53, whatever the Marines call those horrible, horrible aircraft that they fly around. So it was good work, but USAID is a mess, man. I've met some really great people when often and I still, you know, maintain great relationships with them and all my bosses are real happy with me. But, man, it was a tough place to work. they view themselves as humanitarians and it does not mix well with the rest of the United States government. So why was it a mess?

Like specifically when you say that, what do you mean? Well, there's probably a lot of, you know, layers to that onion. So Afta has money from a lot of different laws and authorizations and agencies that kind of are parts of USA that flow into that to their operations. So that just right there creates a lot of issues. But they also have a culture of humanitarianism. So most of the people in that organization come from humanitarian backgrounds. And when I say that word humanitarian, what a lot of us military folks don't realize, that has a specific definition.

And one of those aspects is we are neutral and we don't work with governments. So now if you have that culture and sense, an entire agency of the United States government that's trying to, you know, execute the foreign policy of that government, it gets really weird, man. We were, we were grandstanding on a lot of of points that, you know, frankly, were. So it was, it was tough environment to work in. Hey, Lena, we lost you. I think, I think we lost you on your side there. You said, You're grandstanding on a number of points and we lost you. Can you repeat that part again?

That were frankly a little bit of, they were inhibitive of, you know, U.S. foreign policy. You know, things like, well, we're not going to, you know, Syria was a good example. So the Gisota wanted to support certain groups in order to get access to certain areas where they could then operate. And Offa was like, no, we're not doing that because, you know, we're neutral and we don't support either side. And it was like, hey guys, we're U.S. government. You know, we're not exactly, you know, we'd like to be as humanitarian as possible, but we don't fit that definition. Right.

The United States government says we want to work with this group. Maybe we need to work with that group. Right. They did a lot more approaching it as an NGO, but they're not an NGO. Yeah. And no, that's 100% accurate. That's exactly what the problem was. Well, it's funny you say that because, I mean, even like I know UNHCR, they get involved with, they're not nearly as nonpartisan as you might think from the outside looking in.

Yeah. Right. But I think when you look at somebody like Doctors Without Borders, they are 100% completely non-governmental affiliated and aren't supporting a side. And their security people aren't even armed, you know, like they are reliant on goodwill for their particular. protection. No, and that's true. And actually, there's there's a lot to be learned from that, frankly. And so I don't want to, I don't want to turn this into, you know, off as, it's jacked up because they're not. There are some things that we as a group of military guys could learn from that. Sure. But there's also, there was also an insistence on doing it their way when sometimes it didn't work.

And so I think the humanitarian community in general globally, is starting. to come to terms with the fact that sometimes their neutrality doesn't protect them from getting their heads locked off. They've learned that hard lesson in places like Syria and southern Sudan. And so they're starting now to at least agree that standards need to be developed for how do we incorporate armed security in order to allow us to do our job, et cetera, et cetera. The whole point of this is to say that often was a tough place to work for a formal military guy, frankly. Yeah, it really was. I mean, you know, the work was fantastic. It was really great. It was just, it was difficult to adjust to the culture. Sure. And I imagine that for anybody from the government or who has an American leaning saying, hey, you know, yeah, we mess up, but we are a beacon of freedom and this and that, to go to an organization that is within the United States government, but also says, well, we don't care what the government thing. or we don't care about it, their foreign policy desires, anything else like that, that it would be challenging.

Yeah, and I mean, maybe the best way to illustrate this for the group here is that, you know, when I was in Dominica, the lead civil military affairs coordinator on the team was a lady who had cut her teeth working to help people that were victims of the Burmese army. And so for her, military guys in uniform were rapers and murderers. I mean, that's what her formative years taught her. And so when we show up in Dominica and the civil affairs captain shows up in a meeting, she sees, you know, threat. And she literally kicks this guy out of a meeting that was with the host nation and so and so.

Now, they had their own mission. Had I been that captain, I'd have been like, sorry, you know, he can't kick me out of here. My colonel sent me down here to be in this meeting and I'm going to be in this meeting. But, you know, it just shows you kind of how strong culture can kind of inform the way people act on the ground. And it was tough to me. I did some cool stuff, though. I mean, did a lot of great exercises in places like Guatemala and Brazil, Dominican Republic. That one exercise where you ran a complete simulated volcano eruption in Guatemala,

and it ended up being five weeks before an actual eruption in Guatemala. So you were obviously the entire team was completely prepared for what actually happened in reality. This is a story that doesn't get told enough. And so in 2018, the world probably remembers that there was a really violent volcanic eruption in Guatemala. What they didn't know is that for two years prior to that, we had rehearsed that exact scenario. to the level of detail that five weeks prior, Lino Miani was directing helicopters to the exact LZ that was being used in the real emergency.

Wow. I mean, these guys were putting tents in the exact spots that they had placed, you know, temporary shelters in the exercise. They knew all the vehicles, all the routes, you know, which vehicles weren't working, which weren't, who the volunteers were on the ground, I mean, they knew everything. They had it all dial. It was on their speed dial

because we had done it in the exercise. And all that stuff was coincidence and frankly, really, really good luck. What didn't get told, and here's a fun story about this, so the public affairs people at the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance are really,

they're really cagey. They're not really easy to work with. A bunch of former journalists. They don't actually know how to run a social, like a a media shop. But they're really good at reporting stuff. So, I got a call.

I was, because I had worked with all these people, they were sending me pictures directly from the disaster. I mean, like video and photos of like, burnt bodies in the fucking houses and rural Guatemala.

And I was posting it on my Twitter feed and it went viral. Some of these Some of these tweets were getting 500,000 views. And so I started getting calls from international media asking me if they, you know, if they could use these images on their feeds. And I was like, look, man, these don't belong to me. But here's the person you need to talk to at the National Disaster Management Agency in Guatemala.

You know, call them. And so I had the BBC called me and they wanted to talk about, geez, what did they want to talk about? The exercise, I think, that led up to this. And the PAO at the, I directed him to the PAO at the embassy, and he directed them to the PAOs at OFTA. And the AO's were like, I don't know anything about this. And they stonewalled the BBC.

I mean, they were like, fuck you, we don't want to talk to you. We don't know anything about this. Well, they didn't bother calling me or anybody that had been. there and they just stonewall this guy so the BBC needing to tell a story went and found the opposition guy who was complaining about the response and they interviewed him and put that story on the screen and it made it seem like the response to the volcano was a complete shit show and it wasn't it was exactly the opposite in fact but that's the story they got told next thing you know there's there's literally protests in the street because the Guatemalan people believe that there was a

giant shit show. That was not the case. Right. And so it was a really kind of sad commentary on the power of information, you know, in this environment. But had they just asked me, I would have told them. Yeah. Fascinating. And so how long were you with USAID and that whole thing? Three years. Three years. Yeah, I did three years. And then it was time to move on.

on. I was separated from my wife, my ex-wife by that point. And, you know, I met a wonderful lady in Guatemala who's with their disaster management agency and that we have a daughter. So I'm here in Guatemala. And frankly, I moved down here after my daughter was born. Her name's Ginger. And I intended to be in Washington, D.C. for business purposes every quarter. And COVID, I made one trip before COVID happened. I literally left the state. on January 20th, the day that it was discovered in the United States, and I haven't been back. And a lot of that has to do with Guatemala,

it's borders. They weren't playing around. I mean, if you were out after 4 p.m., you ended up in the Huskow with all the guys with 13 tattooed on their face and getting COVID. They weren't not playing around with COVID, because they know they don't have the medical infrastructure to manage it.

Right. And we still don't have. the vaccine down here. So I literally went to the border with Mexico to get my visa renewed. And the lady there, it was shut. And it was only foot traffic. And she said, look, you can walk to Tapachula and Chiapas, but you can't come back. Yeah.

So I said, okay, well, I guess I'm staying in Guatemala then. Right. And I just haven't had the occasion to go back. Now the airport's open and all that. So, I mean, just to kind of like wrap up the story, I guess, I mean, you're kind of semi-stranded in Guatemala. I mean, thankful you're with your family. But what are you up to you nowadays? Yeah, no, it's a good question.

So I'm back with my consultancy. It's called Envisio Global. I established it when I was in Belgium. In fact, when I was still in uniform. I kind of put it on hold while I was with USAID, but I'm reestablishing it now. you know and this kind of work is again I'm just mobilizing my contact list and my resume and so it's I'm working on a number of projects at any given time right now I'm trying to establish an ISR company in central America with a NAF SOC officer so you know ostensibly once we raise enough money

we'll buy some planes and and we will provide aerial overwatch for security companies in the region. It's something that no one else is doing. And it's techniques, using techniques that have been developed in other parts of the world that haven't yet taken hold in places like Guatemala or Honduras or El Salvador. So we're doing that. I just got a call literally this afternoon from, to be careful what I say here. from a group of guys like us that are have been called to help get a girl out of a country in the Caribbean she got into a scrap with some folks got shot is in trouble government doesn't like her how are we

going to get her out so I work on problems like that all the time and so what I do with the visio global is I have a huge rolodex I've got a lot of capability and a lot of people with a lot of capability and I just help folks solve problems. I don't sling guns. We don't we don't do that. Um, but we help people understand the situations that they encounter overseas. And so, uh, yeah, that's what I'm doing. Lina, just out of curiosity and sort of drawing a parallel for the people in our, in the civilian community watching this, when you say you have a huge Rolodex and you have these people that you can call, how does this sort of translate to everyday life where people can leverage contacts like are these

contacts that you check in with once a year just to maintain that like how can people leverage the contacts that they meet throughout their life in order to accomplish maybe not getting a girl out of you know out of a situation like that but just in achieving their goals or helping other people out or things like that well i tell you social media is it works and it gets a bad rap. You know, Jack and I probably met each other on social media. I don't even fucking remember Jack.

But yeah, I mean, it gets a bad rap. But look, LinkedIn and Twitter, we're paying my bills. And this is a way that I have met real, honest goodness, good people that I've worked with and quality people that I've worked with on serious projects.

I've met on social media. And it's a way to promote your expertise. it's a way to get your message out there. So you've got to be careful what you do. You know, I've been burned many times. I kind of learned the hard way on some things. But I've learned some good lessons too. And I've had some clients and friends come from that environment.

Yeah, I mean, I would encourage people to engage with it. And just to always remember that you have to present yourself as a professional. Right. Do you mind talking about some of the ways? that you were burned or a particular way that you were burned in what that means? Yeah, I'll give you a recent example, actually. And I actually talked to Jack about this because I know he's been burned as well. You know, I said something, yeah, I said something critical, what was perceived as critical of other SF guys on Twitter, I think it was.

and an anonymous account, you know, started whining to me about, you know, hey, you shouldn't be critical. Your brothers and the family's going to judge you and all this other crap. Turns out, you know, he's actually a very influential guy within the former Special Forces community. And he said about to slander me on, you know, through his channels. And I've actually received feedback on that in other ways later down the road. Yeah. And so, you know, you know, you don't want that.

I try to be as positive but positive as I can about people Right But there's some lines that I just I you know We're all A type guys here You know Some shit sets you off

You know You'll say something back And that's that But yeah So that's kind of how I've been burned You know plug Plug your book That I read

And I found very helpful When I was over in the Philippines Working over there You wrote a book About the Sulu Arms Market So I am probably one of only three people that have written about the illicit arms market in that part of the world. I wrote about specifically the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. It's called the Sulu Arms Market.

I did it while I was a grad student in Malaysia. And so as a result, at the time, I was on a special program called the Olmstead Foundation Scholarship. which for those of you don't know, it's a private foundation made by a guy named George Olmsted, who donated his private fortune to send military officers to study overseas so that they can learn something about cultures that are not their own. His idea was that that made them better leaders. And so I chose Malaysia because I thought it was a place that could challenge me. I had worked with the Malaysian Army and police, but that it was also a nice place that I could enjoy.

And so I found it to be really fascinating. While I was there, I wrote about the illicit arms trade in that region. It was nominated for an award in 2011. Didn't win, but it was long listed. And, you know, it's about how people smuggle guns in the Philippines primarily, but also Indonesia and Malaysia. It's a really interesting problem. There's historical ties, tribal dynamics.

I mean, government entry, Al-Qaeda comes into play. It's a China, meth, you name it. I mean, the North Koreans and a settlement full of guns. It's all kinds of stuff. I will say that it's currently unavailable on Amazon. We should get that on Kindle. You have to go to the publisher's website, to the actual publisher. Yeah, it's published by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.

So if you go to the ICS website, or IFCS bookshop, you'll find it there. Okay. It's currently on sale, so get it while it's hot. Yeah, no, it was a good book. Like I said, I found it very helpful in my own research when I was down in that part of the world, trying to understand some of the dynamics going on. So, you know, thank you so much, man, for joining us tonight.

Hit us up again about the Combat Divers Foundation and the event you have going on, and then you have your own website. so. Yeah. So combat diver.org is where you can find all the information about the deep dive and any events we've got going on. We're about to unveil a virtual museum, which is so freaking cool. I'm so excited to talk about it. It's like the space station underwater where you have all this combat diver history and it's really neat.

And then my company is called Navizio Global. That's N-A-V-I-S-I-O-N-V-V-I-O-N-V-Global. so for those of you who have business ideas or problems you need solved around the world and you don't know how to solve them call me if I can't do it myself believe me I know somebody that can so I'll ask you stick around for a moment for the bonus segment if you can and next week I hope you'll join us next Friday Baz Basil retired CIA paramilitary officer he's going to be on the show spent time in well I'll let him describe where he was at and what he was doing

very interesting guy old school guy and we do apologize for the internet issues that we've encountered we should be the last time we found a fix it's going to be fixed this is the last time I'll say anything about it but check out Battleline podcast from a couple weeks ago they interviewed me it's just a brief overview my life

thank you very much we appreciate it, man. I enjoyed it, man. I mean, you know, when you're retired, you just want to talk about your old stories, right? So with guys that know what you're talking about. And the stories, I mean, your stories are fantastic, and I know we barely kind of scratched the surface of...

Yeah, there's a bunch more. Yeah. And we'd love to have you on again sometime and, you know, and talk about a bunch of more of those and, you know, get an update. We'll hit it. Sure, man. Well, let me do this. I know we're going into a business segment.

I need to take a break. All right. Yeah, we're going to, we're going to.