The Team House - Tactical Signals Intelligence with SOT-A | Clayton Jensen | Ep. 179

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

Clayton Jensen completed six combat rotations as a SOT-A in Afghanistan and Iraq where he did tactical signals intelligence operations. Today's Sponsors: BUB's Naturals  https://www.BUBSNATURALS.com/ Use the code "TEAMHOUSE" for 20% off your order! Pick up their collagen protein, MCT oil, and apple cider vinegar gummies today! BUBS Donates 10% of all profits to charity in Glens honor, starting with the Glen Doherty Memorial Foundation GO TO: https://www.BUBSNATURALS.com/?discount=TEAMHOUSE  or Use the code "TEAMHOUSE" at checkout for 20% off your order! FEEL GREAT. DO GOOD. Words that we live by. MANSCAPED  Get your balls right this holiday season with MANSCAPED! Go to https://www.MANSCAPED.com/ and use the code "TEAM20" for 20% off and free shipping! https://www.MANSCAPED.com/ and use the code "TEAM20" ! Your balls will be eternally grateful Thanks for supporting the companies that help support the show! To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! 👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch:  https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media:  The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 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/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #specialoperations #specialforces #theteamhouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Team House know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our team house. bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do.

And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone, welcome to the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. This is episode 179. Our guest today is Clayton Jensen or Clay as he goes by. Clay started off as a low-level voice intercept guy in the conventional military and then became a Saude A with the special operations community assigned to seventh special forces group. And, you know, we'll get much deeper into it. Side A guys in short are kind of electronic warfare dudes who do interceptions and things like that. I'm going to sound like an idiot even trying to describe it. I'll let Clay tell us

what his job was. But this guy did seven deployments, or six deployments. I'm sorry, Afghanistan, down in Latin America. A lot of people come to us on this podcast asking us questions about Sadi and other obscure units. And Clay, you're the first guy we've actually had who served in that position. So we're really excited and really happy to have you here tonight. Thanks for joining us. So, Clay, actually, Dave, I should toss it over to you first. have something to tell us about one of our sponsors tonight yeah guys shave your balls um we're happy to welcome manscape back um back to the fold they've got some really nice stuff guys christmas is here you know buy it for your buddy buy it for your buddy help your buddies out

christmas gift yeah um scape.com i would tell all three of our women to buy them for their man uh but uh but anyway uh manscape puts out some really nice products um you know the weed whacker, which is the ear and nose thing. I don't even know what they call their ball term or now. I haven't read the propaganda, the advertising. Oh, wow, this is really nice. This is a new one, better than the one we have. But they've got a lot of great products.

They have ball deodorant, ball tonic. And so go to Banscape.com promo code is Team 20. How much percentage do you get off? 20% off and free shipping. 20% off and free shipping. manscape.com use the promo code team 20 so clay over to you man thanks for bearing with us uh tell us about a little bit about your origin story and kind of your pathway that took you into the united states military sure um well i i grew up in central ian kind of a small smallish blue collar

manufacturing town um my dad was a firefighter and so was my grandfather both retired professional firefighters and my mom was a nurse. They got divorced when I was probably about five. And my mom moved out to a smaller town, only about 10 miles away. And it had like 100 people. And there were like 20 kids, 20 boys all around the same age. So I'm sure you can imagine we kind of ran the show that caused a lot of trouble for the old ladies. Sorry. But yeah, so I grew up between two houses. One was in a blue-collar neighborhood, kind of rough. A lot of kids who, you know, didn't take shit-talking or attitudes and stuff.

So you got put in your place a lot. And on the other hand, in my mom's, it was basically open air, run around, go down the railroad tracks a few miles and just play out in the woods and farm fields. and creeks and just explore. And so I, you know, gravitated a lot. I think most of the guests actually say this. But, you know, in the 80s we had Magiiver, Rambo, the A-Team, even Magnum P.I., you know, these kind of people that were more about improvising and thinking outside the box and stuff,

but they were still in the military. And, you know, compared to, you know, the Vietnam movies and stuff. stuff that were going on. I really wanted to be in kind of that specialized world. And I knew that probably from eight years old on. And so yeah, I grew up definitely wanting to be in the military and in some type of unconventional capacity, I think. And about the same time, I started playing soccer and over the years, you know, would improve and got pretty decent. Was part of the Olympic development program. I got picked up for the regional pool for, you know, the sector of the United States,

a group of kids that could be picked for, you know, the national team. And in 1993, I think I got lucky. we got a phone call that I was being invited to go to Japan and play in the under 17 World Championships. Wow. Yeah, it was crazy. And especially since I had broken my leg in two places, the Tibia and the Fabula, a year and a half before in a high school game. So, you know, I figured I was done. Some of the college offers dried up, and I just, you know, I just.

just it was it really lifted my spirits I went over there spent about 10 days in Japan and it really opened my eyes it was the first time I'd been anywhere outside of you know maybe going to like Arizona to the Grand Canyon and stuff and I loved it you know I was hooked on the international travel cultures language and I had I had wanted to join the military directly upon graduating from my school. And my dad sent me down and said, hey, you know, you've got a couple offers for some smaller schools. And why don't, why don't you go try college for a year, you know, thinking I would get it out of my system. So I went, played soccer to small college here in Iowa for a year.

And I think, unfortunately, for my college career at the time, the college wasn't much bigger than my high school as far as, like, student body. So it still had that same culture, clickish, You know, rumor mill type high school attitude. And I just didn't care about that stuff. And did my year, I guess, and then enlisted in the Army. I had joined the National Guard halfway through the school year so I could go through the cadet program and things like that. And, you know, help pay for college.

I went to basic training following my freshman year of college and just fell in love with the Army. Yeah. Oddly, at basic training, which isn't the real Army, but when you, when you went, when you joined the Guard,

what MOS did you go in as? Actually, they made me a, uh, back then it was a 31 fox trot, and it was a small emission node communications, like, uh, radio telephone operator vehicles.

That's why you never want to do that well on your ASVAP. Like there's, there's a maximum, Like there's a minimum level you want to hit and there's a maximum level you want to hit. Otherwise, they're going to funnel you into. My team sergeant once jokingly told me, never show aptitude for a job you don't want to do. Exactly. Yeah, because those recruiters, man, when they see that you can fill one of those, you know,

commo billets or linguist billets, like they're all over it. Yeah. So I, like I said, I went to Basic and I came back and went to an active armor. recruiter and said, hey, how do I get out of the National Guard? And he's like, sign here. So he sat me down. You know, we talked. I had really been kind of attracted special forces, obviously just because of, you know, who those guys are and what they bring to the table. And at the time, you know, that you couldn't join. They had no SF-A-B or 18XRA program where you could join straight in. So the recruiter pitched my MOS to me based on the fact that I had to go to language school.

I had to go to airborne school to jump out of airplanes. And I had to have a top secret clearance. So once I had those three things, he said, oh, it'll be a breeze. He'll just transfer over. You'll only have like two classes left and it'll be a green brand. I'm like, cool. So, no, and you know, it's funny. I've said before that I owe that guy up here.

I really do because I found the right job or he found the right job for me, however it worked out. So when you went in, because the MOS, you went in, I'm assuming as a 98 golf, right? Voice interceptor, Cryptolinguists. And that, that's a crazy wide range of jobs because. because you could sit at a at a desk inside a small room or a big room. I don't know with with cans on your head listening to Chinese like voice intercepts or you can be with an SF team hump and a rock like how right how does that work when you're when you're going through the 98 golf process but you want to do like the low level voice intercept

instead of the strategic stuff. Well I think you know like I said for me, Um, when I enlisted it was for, I mean, if I'm, if I'm going to airborne school, they're, they're going to send me to a tactical unit. Um, I won't be at some national security agency outstation. Not a lot of, not a lot of pair of troopers there. But other than that, um, I think at the, the, the schoolhouse at the, you know, the MOS training portion, the AIT, I really think the instructors look around and say, okay, this person could do this, this person could do that. And then, you know, they, they notify your branch managers. And I know that's what happened to me because when I went to, Dave, you've been there, Goodfell Air Force Base, my follow-on orders were to El Paso, Texas, to fly on a reconnaissance aircraft. And then one of my instructors was like, oh, no, man, you're already a paratro.

You're going to Fort Bragg. So did you have an, did you have a, did you have? an airborne contract when you went in. Is that how you arranged that? Okay. Yeah. So at the time, there was such a great need for Spanish speaking, airborne qualified signals intelligence collectors.

You know, it was the late 90s. And really, other than the Balkans, the only military game in town was in Latin America. The war on drugs. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Or on drugs. You know, I mean, even monitoring for socialist progression throughout the region, you know, counter corruption, political tracking and influence, things like that. And yeah, I was I was super interested in that. I mean, clear and present danger was one of my favorite movies growing up. And, you know, Tom Clancy, you've got, was Harrison Ford?

Yeah, Harrison Ford was Jack Ryan. Yeah, it was Jack Ryan. And William Defoe was. Clark. Yeah. Yeah. And then you've got the SF team. Yeah. Seventh group working down in Columbia. So the whole drug lord thing was and Pablo Escobar happened when I was in high school and I'm like, yeah, man, I want to do that stuff. I want to blow up drug labs. I want to catch bad guys. So it sounded like a really cool gig. So what did you end up doing when you got to the 82nd? Yeah. So I got like I said, I got to Fort Bragg and went to a report. replacement unit, you know, where they figure out what unit you're going to go to. And I had orders to

7th route to be a SOTA. And the sergeant or whomever looked down and said, no, you're, you're going to the 82nd. And I'm like, wait, my orders. And so, yeah, apparently at the time the 82nd had a need. So I go straight to, it was 313th military intelligence battalion. And it's no longer there, but it was the division used to have its own MI battalion. And yeah, we go in. It's our major staying in there. And again, and even in that unit, you have kind of different levels of

tacticality or tacticalness. You know, you have people that work kind of back in the top or the jock and the command centers and the intel center. And then you have people that are, you know, vehicle-borne that run the large-scale kind of collection. and then you have the guys with the backpacks and the radio gear that jump into an airfield and then move out into the woods. Yeah, and it's really interesting because for the low-level voice centers,

like the 98 golf track is a nerd track, right? You have people playing like vampire, LARP, you know, role-playing games at DLI and, right? I mean, and, you know, and then it's a nerd job, but then out of that population, they draw people, and they don't give you any tactical training frontload. It's not like you're actually in sort of an infantry position going out as a recon element in a lot of ways. But they don't front load that training for you.

No. So, you know, I had very little, very little field training. I had a lot of equipment training, a lot of language training, a lot of, you know, translation and reporting type training. But yeah, getting to the 82nd, it was, it was, we're going to. that, you know, they had to train us up. So it started out, I mean, we did land nap two, three times a week. We'd go out to the land nap course. We would go out and dig hide sites or, you know, spider holes and place our antennas outside.

A lot of stuff worked with the scouts. The long-range surveillance detachment was in Arbitine, so we worked with them a lot. And, yeah, it was all OJT, which, you know, I think when speaking about the 80-second airborne, and a lot of people say it's a great place to be from. And there's a lot of reasons for that. It's a hard place to be high standards. But you do get an excellent foundation for the future in your career. And, man, I learned a lot.

I learned a lot. And we definitely did more and harder field training in the 82nd than they did in group. So a spicy comment. A spicy comment. So can you tell us sort of what a 98 golf is and then what low level voice intercept is as compared to like

your peers who would go on to the strategic conditions? Sure. Sure. So I guess kind of maybe a small history is the following World War II the army was in charge of all signals intelligence collection and the CIA had already taken control of the human intelligence collection and those types of missions. But the Army was still in charge of signals intelligence, and they had what was called the Army Security Agency, which then became the National Security Agency as the other forces joined in.

And starting in Vietnam, early, early Vietnam, the Special Forces groups, had implanted Army security agency special operations detachments. So these kind of our forefathers, four-man teams, signals intelligence, linguists, recon specialists, and then, you know, they work with the SF groups and their missions. But the other track has always been working kind of in that, like you said, the with the headphones on, sitting at a computer, playing recordings and intercepts over and over, translating them, writing an analysis report, and then just doing that over and over and over again for eight, ten hours a day. And I mean, that's, that scared me. I couldn't do that job.

So, yeah, that's half of the job. And then the other half, like we said, is tactical. the low-level voice intercept, on the other hand, started as Army Security Agency battalions that were with the conventional military. So each division had a battalion of ASA collectors. And then once the NSA was founded, the ASA battalions or the seaweed battalions, they were called, they became conventional army units. and the SODs became the SOT, special operations team, instead of detachment. And what capabilities did those groups, like in Vietnam, what capabilities did those groups bring to the ground forces? Well, I think the biggest one, obviously, is, you know, when you're doing those jungle patrols

and you're trying to find people in tunnels or in small encampments or just laying an ambush, you know, having the ability to say, hey, the bad guys are saying this, and they're right over there. That's basically what it is. And at the time, they were basically just using standard radio receivers, you know, ruggedized. And then a loop antenna, just a hoop. And as they would turn it, you know, the signal would get stronger or weaker. And that's how they would hone in on directions. And, I mean, they were incredibly successful.

In fact, the first casually of the Vietnam War was an SOD. So. I didn't know that. So how did that capability evolve after the Vietnam conflict and eventually turn into, you know, the capabilities that you took part in? So pretty much following that, you know, we go straight into this kind of Cold War, great power competition, if you will, kind of predecessor to what we're seeing today. And so then it really turned into monitoring that Russian influence, Russian aggression. So even Dave, even when I went through the 98 Gulf, which is now 35 Papa, when I went through the schoolhouse, I mean, I'm listening to Cuban traffic because they're using Russian equipment. you know they're a communist country we weren't practicing a lot of

Colombian drug lords or you know Ecuadorian generals that want to have a coup it was all military order of battle Russian order of battle stuff and again the technology technology really drives what we do so as long as the bad guys are talking on radios we're listening to radios you know they they get encryption you know they that makes it harder and things like that, but that's what we're there for. And then this war that we just wound down, if you will, the global war on terror was really the first war. We saw things like live action video from the enemy being shot on the street corner and posted onto, you know, their website as it happens. So, oh, by the way, Sergeant Jensen, you and your team need to figure out how to capture that video as it's traveling through the air.

So it's gone from a push to talk radio to, you know. Internet connections. Yeah, Wi-Fi with these stuff called Wi-Max, which 5G is kind of replacing. But, yeah, all of those things. I mean, we went from standard push-to-talk radio, walkie-talkie-type stuff to, oh, man, you got to, you got to find them on anything they're talking on. Yeah. On C-D-M-M-A. I mean, especially, oh, yeah, GSM, CDMA, L-T, Sathphones, Wi-Fi.

I mean, it started out just ICOMs, right? You know, you get an ICOM and you're going to get them. And then as, and their tactics evolved too. Like, they would get these charms on their phones. That would light up. Yeah, the RF charms that would light up whenever. Yeah. There's such a fascinating story there that hasn't really been told.

And maybe one day you're the guy to write that book, Clay, about the countermeasures and the counter countermeasures and that whole. because as there's a shooting war taking place on the ground, there is an electronic war that was taking place, you know, that a lot of people... This quickly evolving. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it evolves so quickly.

It's a really good question you had, Dave, because it evolves so quickly that the units in special ops outside of the SF groups, they weren't ready for it. They did not have their own organic signals intelligence collection. And a lot of people thought, oh, it's the special intelligence, the NSA will handle it, blah, blah, blah. blah. We've got databases and satellite links and this and that. When, oh, by the way, you know, you've got a tier one strike force trying to go into a series of compounds.

And you need to be able to say, hey, left corner, second floor, right, you know, red building. So Clay, I'm going to ask you about your first deployment with 80 seconds. But first I got to give a shout out to our sponsor for this show. it's Bubbs Naturals. Bubbs is a health food company. They work with the Glenn Doherty Memorial Foundation, so a percentage of their profits go to the foundation in Glenn Doherty's name, who of course was a former Navy SEAL-turned CIA contractor who perished in Benghazi, Lydia.

He's a super good dude. And, you know, Bub's kind of, and the Glendorty Foundation helped carry on his legacy. What I'm holding here is actually protein powder that they make. This is flavorless protein powder. I've used this for years, so I can, I give you an honest endorsement. It's really good. You can mix this in with water, coffee, whatever choice of beverage you have. And they make other products as well, MCT oil, which is like a creamer substitute.

This is really good. And this is a newer product they have. Apple, cider, vinegar, gummies, which, as I've said before, that probably sounds like it doesn't taste very good. They're so good. They actually taste like completely. It's hard to limit yourself to one a day. It tastes like totally normal gummies. And these are to help you with your digestion.

So, guys, go to bubs naturals.com and use the promo code, team house. You'll get 20% off your order. Again, that's bubs naturals.com. And team house is the promo code to get 20% off your water. So, Clay, if you could, please tell us your first appointment was to Afghanistan early on, 2002 into 2003 with the 82nd. early on in the war man what was it like going over there well you know we'd have we'd been involved a little bit with with the invasion but there wasn't a lot of knowledge of ground truth and the overall situation when we went for that that 80-second rotation and I think at the time

the enemy had gone to ground a little bit following, you know, Toribora and then Anaconda. But they kind of gone to ground. So we came in. I was with Third Brigade, 82nd Airborne. I spent the majority of my time with Third Battalion, Third Brigade, and Three Pather, H-minus. So, yeah, we hit the ground. and we were just kind of all over that coast province, Nagar area,

kind of along the, the Paki border. And we did a really large operation. I think it was probably, man, it was close to two weeks. And it was called the Coast Bowl. And we went in and cleared the entire, district and I mean going through bazaars every compound everything that that we came across and we rounded up quite a few Taliban and al-Qaeda individuals not a lot of not a lot of

trips and contact scenarios not a lot of firefights I think at that point you know some of these guys that started to figure out that yeah you know there's 200 Americans coming they're gonna cuff me and bag me, but I'll be out in four days. I just got to keep my mouth shut. And so that was, that was happening a lot, a lot of catch and release. And then we moved into the city of coast proper. And the first night, I'll never forget this, first night we walked in, and I grabbed a British MRE, a British field meal, because they had a bunch of them, and they were short on ours, on our MREs. And I go to crack this open, and I start eating, and I open one pouch, I go to eat it.

I'm like, man, I can't eat this. Open another pouch. Oh, man. Open another pouch. And it says sausages. And I'm like, how bad can you mess up a hot dog? I open that. And I'm like, come on, you know.

It wasn't, it wasn't great. And I was just sitting there, and I was kind of complaining about it as I'm sitting in the mud and it's raining. And I've been walking for 12 days. and I'm mad because my British field meal is terrible. And all of a sudden, the world just erupts. And we are getting shot at from 360 degrees. And nobody can really figure out what's going on.

The whole city of coast is just tracers and gunfire and explosions. So that went on for a few hours. And we all stayed in that, you know, we had a damn near a battalion. infantry a couple sf odia teams and some some brits i mean we wake up the next morning and find out that the warlord that we were paying to protect our airfield from the outside got in a fight with his cousin who wanted the contract so they were fighting over who got to guard the americans as they're shooting bullets over the american sets so it was uh was pretty crazy And, but yeah, other than that, it wasn't too bad.

There was one other instance, we go to a compound. There's maybe 10 fighters on the inside, and they're throwing grenades over the wall, and they're shooting out through little portals and stuff. And we did have casually a front of mine, actually, Chris Vedvick, who got in with a piece of shrapnel and his calf from a hand grenade. And kind of jacked up his leg pretty good. but, you know, we pulled back and the Air Force just made it not be a building anymore. So that was really it as far as like combat from that, that rotation.

We did. Got to stand up the FOB at Salerno, right? Yeah. Yeah. So Fob Salerno, which ended up being a pretty large forward operating base with airfields and tons of hard site, you know, buildings. When we got there, it was two small kind of mud adobe houses and some concertino are around those two buildings. So we get there and kind of sit on the ground and say, okay, this is our new firebase.

And then gradually over the next couple weeks, things came in like HESCO barriers and then some engineers that built bathrooms and the plywood, you know, Porta, Porta Johns. and yeah it was very rudimentary living in GP medium tents the army green tents it was like mash you know that whole TV show just mud and tents and showers with plywood doors and flies everywhere so it was really cool you know you make fun or you you make fun out of wherever you can you know you find some rocks and make up a game you know if you're with your friends it can be a lot less miserable but it was pretty rough living yeah well that that's kind of when i don't it's like you say like that's kind of when the wars are fun though is as just you guys once they roll that first like green beans coffee in or burger king in then that's when they start

patrolling the streets and making people like slow down speeding tickets and yeah you've got to wear your your safety belt everywhere war's over time to go home that damn belt Your next appointment, though, was 0304 to Fallujah. That must have been pretty dicey, I'd imagine. Yeah. So we, 82nd part of the invasion, and they were actually going to jump there for a minute into Baghdad. Yeah, I'd buy off. I think, was it third ID maybe beat us there?

Took it over. It was going to be 82nd, and the entire Ranger regiment was going to jump on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they rigged up and sat outside of planes like three days in a row, I heard. So sitting in a parachute all day in the desert sound. That sounds great.

But yeah, so we get there. And I'm immediately sent down south of Baghdad to an area. It was called Mahmoudia. And they put us up. We established this Firebase, too. And it was a, it was like a. lamb chicken processing plant

and so we get in there and I mean if you can imagine a slaughterhouse in a third world country it's not the cleanest nicest place and all of a sudden that's where we live and that was kind of a that was the first place where indirect fire became a norm

you know so in Afghanistan in where I was at least, you know, we would get some mortars or a couple of rockets from time to time. And then we get south of Baghdad and we are catching mortar rounds and rockets and RPGs and gunfire every night. And it just became this thing where it's like, it doesn't matter. You know, there's no running out of the bracket, stairs stepping away from artillery or mortar fire. It's, man, I'm just as good standing right here as I am standing anywhere else. when those guys are shooting.

Yeah. I mean, Mama, dude, that whole area, like from there to Baghdad was heavily mined, like tons of IEDs on there.

There's so many IEDs down there, too. So we ended up, we were down there. There was a missile factory. I think it was called the Al-Qatah or Al-Qa-Missile factory. And so we went to take that over. And there was a whole community of dorms and apartments

around there. And it was all the people that worked at the factory and all the bath party individuals from that whole area. And I think the three towns were Machmoudia, Iscandaria, and Yusufia. And they kind of formed this area that was super bath party heavy. And so again, all of a sudden, you know, here's the intel guy that's trained for three years on digging a hole in the woods outside of a seized airfield to, Well, I'm with four infantry dudes and I guess we're clearing this house. So, you know, I guess I learned CQB just by doing it. Now, at this point in time, what did SIGAN look like for you?

Was it still, was it still sort of icons? Were you using more advanced systems at this point in time? Were you tapping into like the intelligence that was coming from the cell phones and stuff with the SIM, the, or IMEIs and stuff like that? It, both. Both. It really depended. There was a lot of cell phone stuff, but it was so quick. You know, the guys would, there'd be a call and it would be, hey, we're here. Okay, fire. And then hang up. So you couldn't get anything out of it, really. And then all of a sudden you hear him drop a round in the mortar tube and you're like, oh, they're talking about us.

So a lot of it, though, happened to be that cell phone detection and not necessarily kind of like, you know, the intel work. but you're driving through an area and you get indications that there's going to be an IEDs. And at the time, a lot of those IEDs were cell phone initiated. So, you know, a guy would have artillery rounds or some explosives in the ground with a cell phone hooked up to a blasting cap. And then they'd use another cell phone to call that phone when it rang. It would blow up the IED. So we were really trying to try to go after those triggers. and figure out how they were doing that.

And if there was a way we could defeat that, that was really the thing at the time for us was being part of that IED defeat effort. Yeah. But tactically, yeah, a lot of the, a lot of the Feddy and Saddam, the Muhammad's army, Jish Muhammad, the AQI kind of guys after that, they really did use a lot of push to talk. Yeah. I think because they thought we were only listening to cell phones and that.

So, and, you know, smart on them because you can only hear walkie-talkie so far away. If you're on a walkie-talkie, right, your friend can only be so far away. Well, that means I got to be in that area, too. So, I mean, you're getting real close when you start talking about push-to-talk. Yeah, yeah. You're within hundreds of meters, usually, you know, not miles. But yeah, we were really successful with that over there. And again, at the time, the whole second world was growing.

Technology was growing. The government and NATO allies and us at the ground level, we were scrambling to try and keep up with technology. Yeah, it was tough. It was really fun, though, because it was such a challenge. Right. You know, once you did get something, you're like, yeah, I got it. and, you know, nugging it out for six hours and figure out something.

But, yeah, singing-wise, it was really just kind of tactical. You know, we drive into a neighborhood. Hey, they know we're here. No, they're not going to attack us. They're going to let's drive through. Hey, watch out. Somebody put an ID, you know, right outside of town. Stuff like that.

Yeah, it's like you're playing. Where's Waldo in the electromagnetic spectrum? Right. Oh, yeah. We call it spinning and grinning. So you're just turning that radio dial. waiting into oh oh there's one i like you know yeah yeah then and grand just turn on that radio and were you guys doing a lot of df at that time yeah oh yeah so so df is direction finding so how

would that help like you on the ground in the and the and the tactical forces well i mean it's huge uh and it's it's incredibly challenging we'll get into df but it's incredibly challenging in an urban environment so i guess we can start with with people that live in a large city or kind of going through a dense urban environment, you notice that your satellite radio goes out quite a bit because the skyscraper is shielding the signal. Well, imagine a guy on the ground using a phone or radio with buildings everywhere, streets and things. So that's pretty challenging. So that being said, you've got to get on rooftops. So, you know, again, training and first rotation in Afghanistan, I'm kind of a tactical recon living on the dirt kind of person.

And now all of a sudden we're a climbing team because we got to get on the roof to, you know, do that direction finding. And basically what that is is, yeah, deciding or measuring where that emitter is, whether it's a radio, or a phone or anything that emits, you know, that radio frequency. And where that strongest signal is coming from is your most likely area. And then, you know, if you move and you can get a better defined area, you start throwing those lines of bearing and where they intersect, hopefully is. But yeah, it was huge. I would say more so in Afghanistan, rolling into these open valleys or desert or whatever.

you know, there's five or six compounds and you start hearing people talking about attacking or fortifying or hiding weapons and this and that. And being able to just say, hey, it's that compound right there and not that one over here. It's pretty big. Yeah. You can look at your, you know, Jack, I'm sure you can imagine you're going on a on a DA. It'd be great to know which of the six buildings, the bad guys. Yeah, for sure. And we wouldn't have to hit all six houses.

And the nice thing that's we often did. Right. And the nice thing about, yeah. Oh, I was going to say. And you're not getting. Go, please, go ahead. Please. No, I was just saying, and you're not getting shot in the back going into the wrong house by the guys in the right house. Right.

I was going to say that, like, the nice thing about those areas, Afghanistan and Iraq in particular, is they didn't have radio brevity like we do in the U.S. military. Right. You know, like they have full on conversations. Yeah, there's a very gossipy. They give you the time. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. We could, you know, I don't know.

You want to keep this PG rated, but we can go into some of the conversations. This is an adult-rated show. So, yeah, if you want to give us some spicy content that you heard over the intersex. We're here for it. All right. Let me. So you know in Afghanistan, it's a cultural issue to kind of for men to connect, unmarried men to connect in a... I've heard.

I've heard. Loving, loving manner. Yeah. Usually supportive. Yeah. We would, you know, we'd sit outside some compound for two or three days and you get to know these people pretty on a personal level with their individual likes and dislikes are. And it gets pretty graphic sometimes. Yeah.

And then in Iraq, it was, there was a lot. And I mean a lot of people, men and women, like a man and a woman, having. phone sex. So you're thinking, you know, your town's getting overrun. It's like the Ukraine. Like, how are they sitting outside eating pizza right now, right? I'll tell you how. I was in Iraq and 19 times a night I'm listening to, you know.

I do know that when people are in the, the throes of passion in Iraq, they say, yeah, Habibi. Is that, do you think that's because it's a wartime thing and people, are, you know, there's that natural kind of like you start thinking about it a lot more when your life is on the line. No, I think people just have phone sex. Or is it a, is it a, I've heard that it's a cultural thing in some, in some Arab nations too, because men, men and women can't come face to face and whether go out on a date or talk or whatever. So the like phone sex or sex thing becomes a really big thing in some of those cultures. Well, that's, yeah, that's kind of their version of safe sex, if you will. You know, it's the abstinence, but yet you're, you're,

You know, but yeah, that was just funny. Intercept-wise, yeah, you know, throughout my whole career, that's some of the best stuff I've ever heard is people that, they're not bad, they're not anything, but just weird, weird stuff going on on in people's lives and, you know. But yeah, I think Iraq started to change. You know, we got there and for that trip, June and by and by the end of August they moved they moved us up to up to

to Fallujah proper and this sounds cool but it wasn't we lived on a on a small lake outside of Fallujah at the time the Fobb was called Volterno it had been called Dreamland by the Iraqis and it was a resort for the bath party individuals outside of Baghdad and there was a a lake that was kind of a donut with the island in the middle, a bunch of cabanas and small houses. They had a small midway or carnival ride area, you know, Tiltaboril, Ferris wheel, all that stuff. And so that's where we lived right outside of Fallujah, right next to the clover leaf, the main interstate exchange right there and started going into town. and it was it was it was pretty it was pretty hot and heavy and and the thing about that was we were doing a lot of i don't even know what what do you key leader engagements i guess we call yeah the s f fred world yeah but you know with the conventional army this is fullberg colonels generals people like that going in to meet with the mayor of felusia or the shake for the tribe in the area so we we were doing a lot of those which were you know

know, noon driving in the middle of Fallujah with a U.S. Army colonel or general meeting with the mayor and the provincial governor. And these are probably the four highest targets for the bad guys. So it really drew a lot of attention when we'd go into these meetings at the mayors. They called it the mayor's cell, but basically like city hall. And yeah, it was, again, it was a different kind a war like Afghanistan was wide open you kind of when I was there the first time you could kind of start getting an uneasy feeling I guess you know that that six cents um Iraq there was no six cents it was just any second you're going to get blown up you're going to get shot you're going to get so you know just that being being that switched on all the time

and having those every time you go into town there's at least a few gunshots if not a full on assault on your convoy if you've made it past all the iEDs or the fuel barrels on the side of the road that the black market fuel sales that were also bombs yeah a lot of a lot of a lot of fighting infusion and so my when I left for that rotation I got back from Afghanistan and was was pretty sure I wasn't going to be deploying anywhere for a year right get back from Afghanistan, Iraq's kicking off, but it's like, oh, our brigade's not going to go. You got a year. So my wife at the time, and I decided to start a family and she got pregnant. And I think probably like a week or two after we found out she was pregnant, I got orders that I was going to leave in like four months to go to Iraq. So I left and I think she was about five months pregnant at the time. So we're doing a, one of those T-leader engagements in Fuluzia. And we'd been getting mortared quite regularly from there was a concrete plant right

outside of our fob. And the bad guys would just go park in the concrete plant and mortar us and drive away. And so we had a lot of different types of dangers at the same time. We go into town doing a key leader engagement and a large, uh, assault, you know, enemy assault starts taking place. They're throwing hand grenades over the walls into the mayor's city hall compound. Uh, we're on the roof. We're taking shots on the roof. Uh, there's rounds impacting the side of the building. And, uh, you can see guys down an alleyway, they would pop out. fire an RPG, pop back behind the building, reload, pop back out and fire. And it was just this

continuous barrage. And we're also getting mortared at the same time. And about, I would say probably about an hour, hour before sunset, sitting there. And I just hear this crack. And sound a lot like a gunshot, didn't sound like a round passing me, but it was, it was my collarbone. I had, uh, I had taken around right through the top of my shoulder. I was in the prone. Holy shit. And came right through my, my AC joint, collarbone and down in. And, uh, the shrapnel from that had done a lot of damage and, and, uh, oddly enough,

I get pulled into, uh, a field ambulance, Humvee ambulance. and we start off towards Baghdad. And early on in the war, not everybody, especially in the conventional army, had night vision goggles. So apparently the two medics in that ambulance, the sergeant was in the passenger seat and he had the night vision goggles. The private was in the driver's seat and did not. So we're going down the highway towards Baghdad and slam into the back of this National Guard convoy. and I'm in the back on a, you know, gurney just, and I had, I had arterial bleeding up before they loaded me up. So I was, I was in a bad way.

I was shooting blood, you know, foot and a half out of my shoulder. Yeah. And so we get in this wreck. And I am screaming at these two minutes. And I'm a staff sergeant. I'm an E6. You know, I'm the highest-ranking guy in the truck. And I'm yelling at this sergeant to get the brink.

private night vision of goggles and get me to the hospital right fucking now you know so we get we get to the hospital at uh bagdad and uh right outside of bagdad and uh i jump out of the back and uh i jump out of the back like i just get up unstrap myself and i am pissed and all these medics and doctors they had come out they knew we were coming in and they're just standing at me and they're looking at me like oh he's fine he's not as bad as they said Well, this doctor walks up and she puts her hands on my shoulders and she's like, we got you. And I collapsed onto the ground. And my body had just basically shut down and expired at that point.

And so I think it was about, it was a little over eight and a half minutes later to get me up and running and, you know, back. Like you went into cardiac arrest. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'd gone into, I can't remember what they call it, is a hypovalemic shock or whatever when he basically bleeding to death. Right. Holy shit, man. Yeah, from a, you know, just a small entrance wound.

And it just hit that, that, that artery. You were also laying in the prone. And so the way that. Yeah, and it came. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it was actually kind of taken cover, but I'll just say I was laying on the prone right.

Not very good. Yeah. They, they, obviously, she did take care of you, though. Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And so I, I guess I come to or whatever come out of the anesthesia and surgery and everything. And I just, I'm waking up and they're wheeling me outside of the hospital. And I look up and there's our brigade commander, a colonel, and he's handing me a satellite phone. and he's like, you need to call your wife right now.

And I'm like, you know, I'm confused. I'm dying, sir. Can I have a moment? Yeah. Well, apparently there had been embedded reporters in for this like key leader engagement. So they were worried that I was going to be on the news back home before. Oh, right. Yeah, they're trying to be responsible.

Yeah, I get it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good news travels fast, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, you know that. The, what do they call it, the family support group back home?

Yeah. I mean, you stub your toe overseas. Everybody's wife knows. Yeah. Anyway, so I call her. She's back in Fayetteville, North Carolina at work. She was actually worldwide at this point. And I said, hey, everything's fine. I'm okay.

I'm fine. I'm really okay. But I got shot. And she apparently, you know, kind of collapsed under the ground and, and, oh, my gosh, started developing preeclampsia. So, oh, no. She goes into the hospital, comes out, goes back in the next day. She's there for three or four days.

I mean, just bad, low blood pressure, just doing real bad. And so six days after I got wounded, they ended up inducing. And we had our first child, my oldest son. So I was still in Iraq and the leadership had made the decision that I wasn't hurt bad enough to come home. So I, yeah, I stayed, stayed in, in-fellusion in-country with my guys and kind of healed up in about, it wasn't even a month later, three weeks later, so I was back out on. What the hell? Yeah. Yeah.

Clay, that is what you refer to as a war story. That is a true life war story right there. For both you and your wife. Yeah, yeah, for the whole family. Yeah. Including your son. Yeah, your son, too. Yeah, we've got some, we've got some jokes about it.

Like, isn't that crazy? We're all three dying in the hospital at the same time. Oh, my God. 9,000 miles apart. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, right? But, uh, so yeah, I ended up. getting home. It was

St. Patrick's Day of 04. And so Blake was, he was almost six months old first time I saw him. Unreal. Wow. Yeah. Unreal. And as you're kind of getting back to family life now,

and you're healing up and, I mean, I can't even imagine, but how did special forces and going and becoming a sade, like how did that, and her into your career and your family. How did this come about? Well, you know, I was I was still kind of jaded from the fact that I was quote unquote supposed to go that route from the beginning,

but you know, the Army had other designs. And some of my classmates, you know, AIT classmates and stuff, a couple of them went there, three of them went there. And then I think there was like four of us that ended up getting sent to the 80 second from the same, you know, cohort. But having worked with, with, soft teams, individuals, collection units, if you will, Intel units. And just to be honest with you, that incident where, you know, I get shot, my wife's in intensive care, then my son's in the NICU, and they don't want me to come home for a week on R&R or whatever, you know.

So that really, that really kind of drove me to just, look for a new job make a career change yeah you can say i gave you the case of the ass i get it yeah well you know i've been in the 82nd for six years i got there as a as a pfc paid your name and had some amazing amazing leaders and it's a great unit it's it's a great there's a lot of pride there's a lot of uh holding each other to a higher standard you know a lot of internal competition that's good you know in a unit um but yeah I just I I I at that point I was like you know what screw these people I'm going somewhere where I'm going to be treated like a a person yeah so what is that process then is there

at the time was there like a selection for sod As or do you just have to have the chops or no because you had guys that went straight from a you knew guys who went straight from a it right um so like I said no at the time there was really no there was no you know there's no selection there's there's no real assessment other than kind of the unit calling branch you know your career hr people and saying hey we're looking for someone like this and then branch will kind of you know call around and offer it to people but so it was time for me to go i i was on a promotion list to make uh sergeant first class um so it was time for me to change

units anyway and they wanted to send me to the schoolhouse which again like we've talked about Dave there's two types of kind of the intel people out there and it seemed to me that I didn't want to hide out at the schoolhouse like we say right you know there's there's actually three kinds of people I think in my career field there's the people that stay in that strategic you know kind of sterile environment, the building with no windows and headphones. And then there's the guys like us that want to sleep in the dirt while we're translating foreign languages. And then there's there's people that just, they kind of remain in that schoolhouse environment.

They don't really want to do the job. Right. You get somebody that's been an instructor for nine years that's never done the job. Right. Right. So. And it was funny. because, you know, I think, I think my HR people were trying to just be like, hey, you've done your stuff, you know. At that point, I had, you know, a lot of combat time, a lot of experience.

I had, you know, I'd already kind of done that route. So I think they were trying to help me out and give me a position. I said, you know what, listen, I just want to go to seventh group. It's right across Fort Bragg. It's this and that. And my branch manager, of course, was like, yeah. for one, you know, we talk about the selection that's in that world, it's hard to, it's hard to get certain people to want to jump out of airplanes and do missions with green berets and seals and Rangers. Right. Generally, people who are going into that field are not people who, they would have gone into the infantry if they wanted to do that job. They wouldn't have gone the 98 golf route. Right.

You know, and there's nothing wrong with that. Right. Obviously, we have those billets. we need those people, those jobs are extremely important. I need someone that speaks Chinese Mandarin that can translate diplomatic cables all day long. Right. Right. And they're good at it. They're really, they're really good at it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I would never discount anything they do at all. I just, it wasn't for me.

Right. You know. Um, and a lot of what we do isn't for them. And that's, that's fine. But yeah, so I, uh, went over to seventh group as, uh, as, and was promoted shortly thereafter to start in first class and had a team the second I got there. And, you know, that was one of the things I get there. And coming from the 82nd, having been there so long, having been to war with the 82nd, you know, having a different kind of idea on leadership and standards and things, it did take me a minute to kind of ease into the, you know, it's not that rigid. Right. You know, it's not that.

The non-conventional side of the military? It's not as tightly wound. Right. And, I mean, you guys know, you were in regiment and then went to other soft units, so you get it too. So were, did you, when you were a team lead there, did you get like those kids that were straight out of San Angelo? And like, how did, based on your experience, how did you work them up? Because when you went in, nobody had had had combat at that point in time, right? Yeah.

It was funny because when I got to seventh group, I was, yeah, I was like one of the only dudes with the combat patch or anything. So they were, they loved that I showed up as far as that kind of stuff went. And yeah, you know, getting those young soldiers, you know, it's a double-edged sword. We don't get or didn't get at the time a chance to, again, have that baseline. that you know and trust that you do with. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Rangers have RAS, but you've got the SFAS slash SFQC and, you know, and we didn't have anything.

It was just show up and don't look stupid and don't make us look stupid. So luckily there was a couple guys, other team sergeants that had kind of the same mindset that, you know, we need a baseline. you know these odas these you know green bray teams they need to know when we walk in the door they can at least expect this level of performance you know whatever it is and and that wasn't the case it was a crap shoot you know i i can't tell you how many odas i'd be like man we had this one team one time and they were just terrible and i would hear that a lot or you know i'm never letting this certain dude you know deploy with us again because he's you know i'm just like man And it made it harder for us.

You know, we walk into the door and every time you've got to, you know, start from from scratch. Yeah. You got to prove your worth. Yeah. And it's like you said, I think you said it before we before the show, but you've got to show up and show that you're an asset and not a liability. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's, that's the deal.

You know, being a direct support, uh, person, soldier, whatever. Um, we have a job to do out there. You know, we're not out there just to hang out and, oh, we're going to go right around with the green berets today. You know, we have a job. We have a purpose. And if we can't do that job to the level they expect or, you know, require, then we're not, we're not an asset. Right.

And if we can't, if we can't perform tactically, if we can't drive, if we can't shoot weapons, and do those kind of things, then we're not a tactical asset either. And there's nothing in the 98 golf pipeline that teaches you that. No. It's such a crazy field. It's so interesting to me, you know.

Yeah. Because the other thing that a lot of people don't know is SOTA is it's a victor slot, right? Yeah, it's a Ranger, Ranger slot. So. Yeah, a Ranger qualified slot. So do guys go? Were guys going to,

Ranger School before they came to you? Or would they come to you and then you would get them a slot there at some point? Yeah. So the guys we had show up with Ranger tabs were I think there were two or three of them, but they were all prior infantry guys that had gotten their tabs.

But yeah, we sent quite a few people that were successful. My detachment sergeant at the time, he was a team sergeant at the time. He was an undergrad at Ranger school. as a seventh group side of a guy. But the thing was, we only got so many slots. Group only got so many slots.

And then if you're deployed 300 to 310 days a year, where's the other 60 whatever for Ranger School? But nobody in group wants to go to Ranger's School. Come on. Yeah, that's true. If you didn't come from Italian, you're not going to Ranger School. Unless you get, unless you're getting punished.

And they're like, they're going to Ranger School. You're out of SF. I knew guys a group who went to Ranger School, but it's not high on the priority list. Like Halo, Scuba. I don't know about Ranger School. Yeah. So, Clay, you know, go ahead. I was going to say, no, we looked more into schools like the Recon, it's,

the Ranglet's Leaders course, to be Lerslick. We would go to that, and it could be a team event. You know, we'd send a whole team down there. we did a lot of driving reaction shooting kind of the break contact type shooting right Griffin group down in you know Florida learning how to break vehicle roadblocks and get out of vehicular ambushes and things like that and then we did a lot of surveillance and counter surveillance training because our missions when we're not Afghanistan. We have to hide right out in the open and do what we do.

Well, let's talk about that, Clay, because you went to seventh group kind of looking for a change of pace, looking for a new mission, and you got it. Oh, absolutely. Tell us about what they, what they had you doing. So I got, I got the seventh group halfway through 04 and another battalion. I was in second battalion. One of the other battalions was deploying. So I was going to have some time. to do some training. So I got my team, and then we took about eight months, I think, and all we did was back-to-back schools and equipment and intelligence training, you know, up in the D.C. Baltimore area,

trying to, you know, we plot it out, okay, here's what our tasks are. Here's what our inherent mission profiles are and things. And, you know, instead of trying to go to scuba school, I need to learn how to see if, you know, if I'm being surveilled or followed or if somebody's trying to figure out what I'm doing down there as an intelligence collector. And so we spent about eight months doing a lot of different stuff, Sears schools, reconnaissance schools, close target reconnaissance stuff, so urban reconnaissance. And then my first deployment with seventh group was in 2005 to Columbia. And that, you know, you always hear about this mysterious war in South America, you know, the drug war, the, you know, these insurgent groups, that's real. You know, it's real, it's been real for 50 years.

So Green Brays have been going to Latin America since. since the 50s. So, and doing real world operations. So we get to Columbia. And during that time frame, there had been, initially it was four U.S. contract personnel

that were down there, helping the Colombian government map out coca fields and things like that to mark for eradication for spraying and things. And they had engine trouble went down and were immediately captured by Columbia's I guess what

neo-socialist narco-trafficking mafia style insurgency the FARC People's Republican Army of Columbia and yeah

and so yeah we get down there and it's hey we got to find these dudes and we got at that point when they went down the main pilot couldn't walk so they shot him as well as a Colombian that was on board and then took the three other Americans with them into the jungle for the next 1796 days something like that I actually have the book at home it's like over a thousand days I think

that they were held hostage oh yeah it's almost 1900 I think yeah it was it was yeah it was over six years so and yeah these guys were were kept you know like Vietnam P O style in a prison bamboo huts being moved around yeah absolutely so you know we get on there in 2005 we're in way southern Columbia working out of a house in the middle of FARC territory and we end up yeah we ended up uh helping to narrow down at least the scope of that operation and uncovering a lot of the communications and and logistics that that they were using to kind of keep those prisoners. There was also another prisoner with them,

Ingrid Betancourt, and she was a French Columbian, but I think she was a political candidate of some sort. I can't remember what senior political candidate when she was kidnapped. So yeah, we worked on that mission. And we also got to go. go out on some live missions with Colombia's 9th Mobile Brigade, which would be kind of like their armored cav guys, and go out into the jungle and look for FARC dudes.

And that doesn't sound incredibly exciting, but, you know, working on what at that moment in time is America's largest hostage rescue effort since, you know, the full account, POW stuff from Vietnam. I think it's pretty, pretty fascinating. I mean, this is the fine, fixed finish mission, but you're, I mean, you're doing it in a semi-permissive environment, but in a very clandestine manner, right? Yeah. Yeah. So the thing that we had to worry about down there in town wasn't everybody on the street. It was, you know, it's starting to get dark and you get pulled into an alley and, you know, you get messed up. But, uh, I mean, it was still, you know, definitely, high threat and then you know the sensitivity of what we were doing but and were you guys able to

identify um through comms like where the prisoners were or you know like you said start to narrow down where they were yeah so we it was incredibly hard to to do any type of direction finding from where we were at we're kind of surrounded by some hills and and definitely dense jungle so we were basically just again that spinning and grinning you know turning that dial to try and find the bad guys when they were making their their radio comms and they were very disciplined in a very tight schedule they had code words call signs all kinds of different thing number codes and it's funny uh sent up a report one night and it didn't sound right to me but it didn't sound it wasn't like straight up hey we're moving the the prisoners tonight but the

words they were using, it just didn't make sense for what they were saying. So I sent up this report and I get a call from the embassy like 15 minutes later. And it's like, they're talking about them. So we kept monitoring and really we didn't get a whole lot. I don't think out of that other than we hadn't had proof of life in two years. Right. So. Which is huge.

Yeah. Yeah. It's huge. Yeah. So, you know, our little contribution at that point in 2005 was they're alive. They're being moved tonight. We don't know where. But, yeah.

And then you were also moving in with the Colombian partner force and like hitting some of these camps too. I mean, if not, if not, I mean, it's all, it's all hopefully leading up to finding the hostages, right? Right. And, and I think 90, percent of the effort at the time from the embassy on down, uh, throughout the military personnel, including Colombian military personnel. That was the main effort was fine those guys. Yeah.

There was really, you know, there's, there's a few drug cartels. We had a, the Colombian, uh, self-defense force, which is kind of another story, uh, started them out as, it's kind of a good guy, commando unit to fight the park. The, uh, and then they turned back. AUC. AUC, right. Yeah. Like our right-wing militia, I guess.

And yeah, they originally started with a bunch of people whose family members had been killed by, you know, the cartels and the FARC and stuff. So they had a lot of hate. And then we, I guess, and by we, I mean the U.S. government, not seventh group in any fashion. But the agency that covers that kind of stuff. Stop providing them with as much support because they, they were a little heavy-handed in what they were doing. Yeah. And there were some questions about, like, human rights violations and things.

Yeah. So we stopped funding them. And then, you know, they don't want to just go away. So they get into the drug game. Right. They have to fund themselves somehow. Right. Right.

Right. Right. Yeah. That's interesting. So, yeah, we were working for the Castellano brothers, I believe. We'll see those guys were. But, yeah, really, that whole effort, Jack, was, was fine. dudes. Yeah. You know. And what was it like working with the Colombians? I mean, the,

the American perception is that they're all hopelessly corrupt. But I imagine the reality on the ground must be a different story, that there are some factions that are compromised, others that are, are, you know, you know, honest actors. Yeah. Again, like pretty much like anywhere, I would say, you know, my mantra after traveling the world three, four times is, most people, are good you know most people just are most people are good people but the thing is down there the the people that have the power and have the corruption and I mean god dang man we're seeing it here we're seeing it and we see it everywhere is that nobody really steps in to do the right thing right does that make sense yeah so you

know once you start going down that road of corruption and and and power grabbing and stuff you're it's it's almost like you're unstoppable yeah yeah um because they play for keeps it's not about yeah Jeffrey Epstein type shit it's about cutting your head off yeah they're they're willing to go a point where the people who are good aren't aren't gonna go yeah yeah and then i you know it's hard for me to say that that that there's none of that or it's not a factor because that was one of my main jobs down there was was was counter corruption was you know, making sure those guys were buying uniforms and boots for their troops with our money and not speedboats and fancy houses. Tigers.

Right, right. Tigers. Yeah. Hippapodontas. Clay, out of curiosity real quick, because when you went, like a lot of things that when people go from conventional or when you compare conventional forces to special operations units, you always think of money. You think of budget. Think of gadgets and gear and, you know, and all that stuff. When you went from the 80 second to SF, was there a world of tech that you were introduced to that you hadn't seen before? And then were those like things that you were utilizing in these operations?

I guess so with how do I put this? Yeah, I know there's some secret stuff that you can call. about but i mean yeah not classified yeah i would just say we're trusted with more of the secret spook stuff the toys and the gadgets than you know your conventional people but i would say mainly it's because of the job we're doing you don't need some of that crazy stuff to jump out of an airplane land on an airport take it over so the air force can come in and bring in the bulldozers you know my job in the 82nd was to protect the infantry and find an aircraft that are going to shoot at the Air Force when they're coming in right right and my job in the SF unit is whatever the

commander asks you and by commander I don't mean your units commander I mean the commander of Southcom pay comp right because when and that's another thing because of our authorities So, yeah, we got, we definitely got access to a lot more things. But because every time we step outside the door, outside the U.S., we have to have national authorization. Right. You know, they call it special intelligence. And that's because of the way it's safeguarded. And the biggest thing, I think the biggest difference, like you said,

it was the technology, you know. Yeah. Well, I mean, and this is an interesting factoid is that for a 98 golf, no matter where you're going to, you know, Georgia or whatever, or LLBI or whatever, you have a higher clearance to somebody in Ranger Battalion, a standard person, a Ranger battalion. Oh, way higher. Or, or SF.

I have a higher, I had a higher clearance than my SF group commander did. Yeah. Yep. Because of all the sensitive. The radons. Yeah. and all in the programs. I got it.

Yeah. So, I mean, and that's, you know, it's an interesting thing when you think about it that you guys in that community had access to so many different, so many more programs and technology and everything than a standard SF guy or Ranger or anybody else would,

would even be aware of. Yes. I mean, anywhere I went and stopped and turned on my equipment, I had to call. a win-800 number with a GPS coordinate every time. And that 1-800 number went straight to, we'll just say, the southern Baltimore area. The big eye in the sky. Yeah.

What we call the building. The house of glass. Yeah. Puzzle Palace. I think it was a book. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That's right. The palace. Puzzle Pallis. Big brother. Puzzle Palace. Anyway, so yeah, I mean, in effect, if I was in a hotel room, an apartment, or an up-armored suburban, I was, you know, that area is considered a secure area for top secret information. So normally you think, well, you talk about like Mar-a-Lago and shit.

Yeah, I could have had those boxes in Mar-a-Lago as long as I call the Wyn800 number and say, hey, I'm set up in his closet right now with all that. Right. Right. This is a skiff now. This is a skiff. It's a skiff, right. How did you manage that when working in another country with those forces? Some partner forces.

Yeah, with partner forces. So they didn't know what we were doing. So when I was working with partner forces, they didn't know what we were doing. Does that make sense? They just knew you as a SF attachment. Communications. Communication support. There you go.

Comma support guys. And so then you end up back in Columbia again in 2006 doing somewhat similar but somewhat different stuff. I was wondering if you could kind of tell the rest of the Columbia story to us. Yeah. So going into 2006 and again, as this technology is evolving and growing and the agency is trying to keep up and the military is trying to keep up. the you know we go back in 2006 and we go from working specifically in kind of that tactical army setting you know in your uniform living with columbian military guys and being out in the field and stuff to working straight out of the embassy and the country team and doing you know playing clothes work in support of, you know, U.S. government agencies. We worked in 2006, we worked with pretty much, pretty much every organization within the, within the embassy, from law enforcement to security and intelligence.

There was a lot going on that year. Columbia's president, Uribe, was going in for his second inauguration ceremony. We had, we had some issues. with a mole, if you will, some of our platforms being compromised and things like that. So we had to root that individual out. Was that an American or a foreign national? No, no, it was a, it was a Colombian partner nation individual that worked with one of our intel platforms on a joint platform. And he was, he was given their operational information to the FARC. so that they could basically turn off all their radios before that platform came through.

So, yeah, it was a big deal. And so we did, we went up, one of the first things we did, we get there and I run into an old acquaintance from training. He was actually my first sergeant at Goodfellow Dave. and this guy was on the rooftop with a lifeless Pablo Escobar at one point you know what I mean so he was

he was one of my instructors at AIT and we get down to Columbia and we're walking through the embassy compound and I look over and I smile I'm like hey he's like you know gives me the and then pulls us off to the side and he's like hey you know this is what's up I'm not a first sergeant anymore

This is who I am. This is what I'm not. This is, you know, that kind of stuff. And so, he's like, hey, what are you guys up to? And I said, well, we're just kind of bumming around Bogota for a few days trying to figure out what to do. And he's like, well, I got something for you. So we got hooked up with the DEA and flew up to Medellin on a surveillance operation to locate high-volute. uh narco trafficker at the time he was he was probably not probably he was the he was the biggest

uh narcot trafficker in columbia guy named uh by the name of diego montoya and he was finally captured i think in early 2008 but uh it's kind of a funny story we get to we get to medelline we get off we get off the airplane and uh get pulled into our hotel Which as we're pulling up, the DE agent informs me that, oh, by the way, Diogen Montoya owns this hotel. Oh, boy. And we're like, oh, sweet. And so we're, you know, of course, Jack, we're going upstairs with Pelican cases and shit. Right.

Yeah. I'm getting just cuckong, you know. We're not conspicuous. And pull down and we get into our room, we set up some of the real simple shit. And the first thing we hear is one of the guards out front of those. hotel and say, hey, the Americans here. We think it's the DEA. And this is like the parking security guy. Right. Telling someone. And who else travels with Pelican cases? I know, man, right? Yeah. So, yeah, like they tell us after we land. Yeah, we're staying in his hotel. I'm like, stupid, man.

Yeah. Um, but yeah. So as soon as we got there, they, you know, they, which isn't a bad thing. Um, those guys, I think they learned their lesson quite a few years ago. They're not. They're not down there to kill DE agents anymore. You know, they don't want to get bombed. Yeah, raises their profile too much. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what Pablo Escobar went wrong when he did that airline bombing. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Now you got Uncle Sam's attention, maybe more attention than you bargained for. Well, we wouldn't have invaded Panama off that road checkpoint didn't happen, you know. Oh, were they killed the Americans? Yeah. The captain in his pregnant life. Mm-hmm. That was the final straw. We were there, what, 20 hours later?

So, yeah, so we go in and we start driving around Medellane and start looking. And lo and behold, I think we were there probably like four hours on our first, you know, kind of search and identified him. Proved he was in the area and then we pulled out. Wow. Got there, got the hell out of it. I said, yep, he's here. And then got the hell out of dodge. So I think it took about another year and a half, like I said, for the Colombians to get to a point where they could, you know, they fall comfortable going in again.

Because that's the kind of guy you don't attack at a cafe because everybody on the street is going to protect him. Yeah. His security is hidden better than we are. So. Yeah. No, that's, I mean, that's, it's interesting. And I mean, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, you know, sometimes it's the J-Soc rate. in Syria or Pakistan or wherever, in this case, with a partner force.

People see that part in the news, but they don't understand this. It's like a long-term project that takes like years and years to put together. Oh, it took seven years to find that dude. Yeah. And, you know, they fly us into Medellin just to say, is he in this town? Yep. All right, you can go. You know, it's Holocaust.

I'm sorry, I had to make a Princess Bright. In Ego Montoya. That's my favorite movie. I had to be good. You can ask my ex. Any of them. You can ask all my exes. People make fun of me.

And then you got rolled into the like force protection for the inauguration too, right? Yeah. Yeah. So we knew President Rebae of Columbia, his inauguration was coming back up. He was pretty popular. He was definitely popular with the American government. And so an entourage of cabinet members, U.S. cabinet members went down for his inauguration.

Condoleezza Rice was down there. The like the Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Interior, you know, kind of a group like that. And so we got rolled in with the U.S. Secret Service into their motorcade detail and security detail for the U.S. personnel. And so we had we had a couple guys in a high rise overlooking, the route, you know, listening to everything, whether it's police on the street, them talking to each other, because, you know, if a cop sees something and he calls it up to his sergeant, I need to

know that too, you know, because I want to call that up to, you know. So listening to those guys and, you know, just kind of doing that overhead stuff. And then we also had people in two separate vehicles, Suburbanes with the Secret Service detail. And I remember at one point, the guys are driving through and they just take a hard right and hit the gas and that only means you know one thing i think you guys probably understand if you're driving around with the secretary of state in your car and you hang a hard right and step on the gas it's probably not a good place for her to be um so the columbian army uh a specific uh group of officers in the columbian army decided it'd be a good idea to plant what they thought were fake car bombs on the day of that

inauguration so that they could go and disarm them and quote unquote save the day and make Colombian army look great, which at the time we're giving them billions and billions and billions a year. Plan Colombia. What could go wrong? Well, yeah, exactly. Planned Columbia. Clinton's Plain Columbia.

I tell you, I tell you what, going down there under Planned Columbia or. orders, you get a lot more money for your mission than you do going under operation of during freedom South America missions. It's like, it's like, why do we get so much cooler shit when we go down to like, give it to the Colombians? But yeah, so they had planted three what they thought were inert explosives and one of them went off killing a Colombian. And then the other two were, you know.

found. Well, a couple days later, we, I guess our team stumbled across the realization that those Colombian officers were directly involved with the entire plot.

They planted those on purpose and they had hired some former insurgents to build the explosives, which of course were not supposed to be real and easily disarmed. Well, the bad guy's double-crossed. them. So yeah, we ended up, we ended up busting that out. And, uh, yeah, that was, that was pretty crazy. You know, it's a movie plot.

Yeah, yeah. I'm about to say. That's like a Netflix miniseries right there. Right. Never challenged a Sicilian and battle wits, right? Oh, man. You know the silly thing about it is I'm not even left-handed. But it all ended up. Well, I mean, horrible killed one person, but I guess you guys were able to minimize the damage and uncover that that was a plot. Right. And, you know, so, I mean, basically what that does is it goes from there's really bad guys in Columbia that would like to attack Americans, you know, making everybody think that Columbia is so dangerous when in reality it's a Colombian military officer trying to make it look like he can keep. Right.

the danger away. Right. Like in other, there was no danger. Like in other parts of the world where they play both arsonist and firefighter to keep the American money rolling in. That's exactly what it was. Yeah. Yeah.

And then 2007, you had a pretty substantial deployment to Afghanistan. Yeah, I would say that one was probably, you know, the defining deployment of my career. We deployed in early April of 2007, and we replaced a third group, ODA, who had just had a pretty significant event in our area. We were in Norei, Afghanistan, along the Pakistan border, up in the Konar province, along with Nauristan. which for familiar, it's pretty bad area. I think within 20 kilometers of that fire base, there have been nine medals of honor awarded from that area. And, you know, six miles south of me is where lone survivor had happened.

And nine miles south of us is where the Battle of One eye. happened 12 miles north of us is where the outpost you know camdesh happened um it's a bad bad area so we we come in and it starts off not too crazy we get in a couple small fire fights but basically what it was was we'd be driving down the road and two or three guys would be spread out along the hillside and they'd shoot at us you know it wasn't it was more harassment maybe to slow us down you know, things like that. But May 5th, which happened to be my wife at the time, it was her birthday or 30th birthday. And we get a call up in Array that there was a, what do they call them, military training team, mobile training team, the MIT team.

Yeah, an MTC team. So it was a couple, yeah, a couple Marines that were embedded with Afghan soldiers. and they had decided to drive from the firebase in Asadabad to our firebase in the Ray by themselves in Humvee. So two guys in Humvee taking, what is it, a 30-mile drive through the worst, most contested territory in the last 80 years, probably, since World War II, I think. And, yeah, so they got hit. They called us, and we initially get told. you're not the QRF, you're there to, you know, by with and through. And so we're like, cool, turn off the radios head south.

And we get down there and immediately make contact with the enemy. And there was a conventional mortar team, and they were, you know, the big mortars. I think it was a 120. And they're shooting up the hill. And we're trying to get a gauge, you know, at this time, I'm doing the, you know, all four of us on the SOTA team were there and we break out the gear and we start pinpointing locations of these bad guys and, and we get really successful. I was just talking to a buddy about this is a funny story. I'll throw out there.

So we're down there on the side of a road and this is probably, let's say probably about four miles south of where, was it 3-3-1-2 maybe, Robbie Miller and those guys? Yeah, if you had one of them as a guest. Yeah, if people go back and check out the interview we did with Javier Mackey. Javier, yeah. So his team replaced us. Oh, really? That's the team I ripped out with.

Yeah. I hope the viewers will go check out Javier's interview. Yeah. It's heart wrenching that story. He's an amazing human being. Yeah. Yeah, really good guy. I don't know if you guys know this, but Robbie spoke like four or five languages.

Oh, no, I didn't know that. He was, what do you call? They're level three. Um, so, you know, when we go to rip out, he comes in and starts talking to us about, you know. So I got to meet the guy. He was really cool. Um, and yeah, I mean, obviously a hero. So, um, but yeah, we get down there and these bad guys are, you know, they're engaging us, but they're pretty far away. And we're shooting the, the 60 millimeter mortars at them, the little commando mortars. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, I've got a combat control, Air Force combat controller in my truck. Dale, love you brother.

And he can't see the bad guy. He's trying to get, you know, where he's at. And he's looking through. And I'm like, he's right here. He's like, show me. So I'm on the, in the back of the truck shooting an M240, you know, machine gun, belt-fed machine gun. And I've got that gun in the back of the truck like this, just straight up and down.

And I am, I am shooting plunger fire with my tracers trying to point out, like, the saddle. he needs to drop bombs on. And I'm like right over there, right over there. And my buddy Craig, my teammate, he's working with the interpreter. And he's like, hey, the bad guy is telling his friends right now, he thinks he's okay because the Americans are shooting too low. And I'm like, sweet. So I give it a little more elevation. And next thing I hear is you can hear the guy screaming over the radio.

They hit me. They hit me. I need help. Oh, my God. So I got a live action of me shooting someone from about a mile away with a 240, like pointed, pointed straight up in the air. But if that is not a advertisement for Side A, I don't know what it is. No, I know. We always talk about that.

It's like the perfect, like I hear him. He's over here. Shoot. No, shoot higher. He's saying you're too low. Yeah, he's giving you corrections. The bad guy was giving me corrections on my plunging fire from a machine gun. So it's pretty funny.

I kind of forgot about that. But, you know, and the thing is, it's one of those moments that you kind of lose touch with, I don't want to say reality, but comparatively speaking, you lose touch with the normal world. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, looking back 15 years or whatever, it's like, man, that's crazy. But at the time, you're like high-fiving and like throwing a full court shot for $50,000

or half time. You know, like, I can't believe that went in, you know. I don't even know how to play basketball. When you look back on it, like, years later, it feels like some sort of weird fever dream. It's like, did that really happen? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, that was May 5th. And then we roll into a couple pretty decent large-scale, you know, patrol operations were walking through the mountains. And this is kind of where I learned. that if you don't have your own specific partner force that you sleep, live with, work with, train with, it's probably not worth bringing them. So at the time, our SF team, we didn't have our own Afghan force assigned to us, right?

That's because SF was direct action at the time. Well, it was kind of a weird deal, man. It was a weird. It was a weird deal. everybody wanted to be DA, but the leadership was like, no, you're Fad VW. And then it's like, it's like, but wait, the Afghans run away every time the shooting starts. So why don't we just do this ourselves? And then we did.

So we just stopped bringing Afghanis with us. You know, there'd be 16 of a sudden. We'd have the goddamn cook on the Mark 19 shooting into a compound because the Afghanis are worthless. We would just leave them. Like, hey, stay up in this hill. We get shot at. us out and they never would. They would just, yeah.

But it's because we didn't have our own guys. You know, we'd pick up a police unit from right, two provinces away and they would show up in their dress uniform with leather, shiny shoes. Yeah. Wait, we're, we're patrolling for the next side. Some NDS element or whatever that. Yeah.

Yeah. So then, yeah, like I said, June was, as I remember, was fairly, you know, straightforward. We were out, we were out all the time, huge, long patrols, super high altitude. 14 to 15,000 feet. And then in July, starting in the beginning of July, the northern outposts, which were conventional output, regular army outposts,

started having trouble with getting resupply. The resupply helicopters that were flying up there were getting shot at or even hit. with rounds and they would they would turn back and so these guys were up there running out of batteries water ammo food everything so we had kind of planned and going up and and seeing what we could find in that area as far as command and control who's running the you know the bad guys and stuff so let's let's go after them so we can start getting our guys food and water beans and bullets and stuff again and the night before we had

Our team was moving from Norei to Jalalabad for a large op that we'll get to. And we were going to stage out of Jalalabad. So we drove for, I think it was like, it was like 13 or 14 hours. We drove. And like we had one of those Afghan jingled trucks flip over onto its side. So we had to call another one and we're lifting ATVs up into the back of the next jingled truck. I mean, it was a nightmare. And so we call into Jabad.

And I get this guy running out. Typical, typical OGA, CIA guy. He's got the, you know, like the fly fishing vest and the, you know, brand-newas solo boots and Indiana Jones hat. Right out of Soldier of Fortune magazine. A whip on his, yeah. Right out of Langley thinking is, you know, I'm going to war, you know, hey, guys, I'm here, you know, one of them dudes.

The, uh, the banana republic vest. that uh milt was telling me there are two there are two types of intelligence people right we've already covered this a hundred times okay people that don't want to get dirty and the people that want blood on their face so yeah so anyway uh we get there and here comes this guy and he uh he tells us hey we just got information that the number two I value target is in the area up there. And, you know, that was I'm and all Zawahiri, deputy commander of the Al-Qaeda at the time. That he was in the area.

They'd narrowed him down to this valley and that we were going to go up and kind of refine the target. So we load all of our stuff onto this Black Hawk, you know, our equipment and tenants and Mount Amal to the Black Hawk and we take off and we're kind of doing the brief in route. Like we had to go like right now. And we're going up, figuring out the plan. It's one Black Hawk with two SOTA personnel, a U.S. citizen interpreter, and two ODA guys. We brought our senior medic and our.

a SOTIC sniper qualified Bravo with us for the trip. And two Apache helicopters, two gunships. And our mission was pretty direct. It was, you know, we weren't going to fast rope and flex cuff anybody, you know. Right.

We were there for one reason and one reason only, and that was to find a radio, hopefully, pressed up against somebody's ear and fill it with pell fire missiles. We get to the mouth of the valley and turn in and immediately start hearing enemy traffic talking about us.

And, you know, they're calling out, hey, they've got a gunship, then there's a helic, and then there's another gunship. And they're talking about, should we engage, should we not engage? And you start hearing this one individual saying, no, wait, here's how we do. it. This is, you know, so of course, he draws our attention. And we make, you know, pass up, pass back down.

So that's one lap. We make about four laps up and back. And the whole time, these guys are just itching for a fight and their, you know, command and control element is like, no, no, no, no, wait. And we're coming out of the valley towards the Konar River and the pilots to say, I've got enough fuel for one more run. What do you think? And I was like, dude, we're here to get the number two HVT in the world. Right. I'm like, I don't care if you run out of gas. We're fine on this dude. You know, like, so we turn to go back up into the valley and somehow we end up in front of both Apaches. So it had been one in front, then us, then one in back. So we had, you know, gunship support to the front and to the rearers. We're coming through. Well, and by in front, I mean almost a mile in front.

of both of our, you know, escort helicopters. And I hear someone on the equipment, they key their hand might, you know, the bad guys, they go to start talking. And I don't remember any like intel stuff from that point on. I remember thinking, oh, they're going to say something. And then the tail of our helicopter gets smacked with a SA7, shoulder-fired surface stair missile. Holy shit. Yeah. And so it hit in the back of the Black Hawk helicopter, specifically, there's a big wing.

And it's called a stabilator. And that's what controls the pitch of the hell. It keeps it level. It's part of the autopilot system and stuff. So it hit the control system for that. So that big wing in the back of the Black Hawk just flop down, which threw the airplane up onto its nose. So I'm sitting in the back of this Black Hawk looking. forward, you know, I can see all the way through into the windscreen, the cockpit's windshield.

And I'm seeing Class 5 rockets. Like, there's a, you know, a glacial melt river right below me in this valley. And I'm looking down at like river and rocks. I'm like, well, we're dead. I figured we're going to flip all the way over and slam. So pilot, Jason, again, another dude I love. He got it level. and we're we're moving forward we've got we've got a small fire on board uh well small our uh our own ammunition that the door gunner ammunition was cooking off uh an aircraft gun uh what are those uh 12.75 millimeter that zukiac csu like a zsu 22 or something like that yeah so i got 12.7 it's a it's a big ass round bigger than a 50 cow um and so one of those had had gone through an ammo can with the, you know, the ammo for the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the doorguns on the 60. So, that stuff's cooking off. You know, guys are getting hit with chunks of brass and things, and, and, uh, I remember looking forward and seeing one of the doorgunners shooting out the side of the helicopter on his machine gun at bad guys. And then with the other hand, he's got a fire extinguisher. And he's putting out the fire, on the helicopter and shooting bad guys at the same time.

And I look up and I'm like, oh, yeah, it's on right now. Like that dudes, you know. So I'm looking forward and I catch something just peripheral, you know, and I look over and I see a smoke trail kicking parallel to our flight. And then it just takes a hard left. Yeah. And it's coming straight at my face. And I lean back and it comes right through the open door between me and the guy sitting in front of me

and punches through the ceiling. And so I had a surface air missile blow up about a foot and a half from my head. And so it punched up through the ceiling, hit the left side engine and one of the rotor blades, took about half of the rotor blade off. And so at that point, with the helicopter.

I mean, it's like being on a mechanical bowl. I mean, it's just rocking and shaking. It's out of balance. Meanwhile, again, helicopter's on fire. We're shooting at bad guys, so we're still shooting at us. And the thing, like for people at home, we're in a mountain valley where the mountains are 16,000 feet tall. And so we're flying below the crest of the mountains.

The bad guys aren't below us. shooting up at a helicopter. They're on the side of a hill shooting straight at us. So we're flying through, and I'm shooting straight out of the side. You know, and we're still taking rounds from that, you know, whatever, small arms and stuff. And all of a sudden, the helicopter pitches pretty high nose up.

So I know we're coming in, right? We're auto-rotating at this point. We've got one engine, which he locked out to full power. and however that works. So he spun the blades as fast as he could, and then the engines were done. And then so we auto rotated, and we hit the ground,

and, you know, looking back, I'm like, man, we landed really well. Because we stayed upright. He kept it upright. Yeah. But talking to the guys on the bird, they're like, oh, dude, we hit so fucking hard. Like, I broke my back.

You broke your back. You broke your leg and your back. You broke your neck into your back. Everybody's got those L1 through three compression fractures, right? Yeah, I just had two disreplaced, and then I broke my T6 in the crash. We know that, and I probably broke my C5 in the crash, too. I'm shocked any of you survived after getting wet. Oh, we all did.

With two surface air missiles and then ADA fire. That's not supposed to, I mean, who is it, Sikorsky that makes the Black Hawk? I mean, holy shit. The crashawk. You can just glide those in, right? They're very aerodynamic. So here's the thing. So we get shot down and, you know, we're on the ground.

And first thing we do is set up satcom, you know, call in and make, you know, establish comm, set up security. And, man, there's, you know, we already know this. There's hundreds of bad guys in this violent. Like, this is our, it's a known thing. Right. And so we're just sitting on the ground like, oh, this is. This is not good. So we start gathering up all the sensitive items and clearing out radios and stuff like that.

And pulling security and, you know, we've got the medic checking guys, you know, we're, it was crazy how four aircrew from one unit, you know, helicopter guys, they don't practice this shit a lot. And then you've got four soft guys and a civilian interpreter. So we had nine people on the ground. And the second, we jumped off that helicopter while the blades are still spinning and trying to seat cover. I really don't remember that many quote-unquote orders having to be put out. You know what I mean?

Like the biggest thing that had the biggest impression on me was a bunch of dudes that just met an hour ago. Had an event that, yeah, you can train for, but not to that level. Yeah. And everybody just got out and did their job. Like, you know, one of the doorgunners pulled his machine gun off the helicopter and put on a boulder with the butterfly trigger and stuff. Like, we all just went to work, you know, we had, you know, one of the ODA guys was trying to find an escape route, E&E route, you know, we had the medic checks all the casualties,

and then he tries to cross the river to see if we can get to the other side of the river because there's a building on the other side of the river we could post up. And, I mean, that was the thing that always impressed me the most was, we all just did what we had to do to get the hell out of there, all of us, even my turp you know how did you get the hell out of there in the end so we had some you know they told me that the the the the t the white i hate to say it the white guys but um the uh p j i don't know what do you want to call them jack but PJs yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah jpra guys whatever 24th sts yeah yeah for for the viewers out there task force white was the

like moniker the code name for the Air Force 24th, yes, yeah. Yeah. So their job is basically to rescue down pilots and aircrew in enemy areas, right? But they were flying out of Boggram Air Base, and that was about an hour away. So for this mission, since it was just a high profile mission going after an HVT and, you know, we had forward positioned another UH60, Blackhawk, at another base at an array in case hours needed to be replaced, you know.

So we had a spare. Well, the pilot of that spare, his name was John Holmes. And I haven't seen him since, but again, for the people at home, when something like an aircraft going down, that goes straight to the Pentagon. So, you know, we're on the ground. We're calling in. There are literally people in the Pentagon listening to our radio comms trying to figure out that aircraft, you know.

And so they already had it in motion. The search and rescue guys coming in when John Holmes decided an hour's too long. And he basically just turned his radio and transponder off in his Black Hawk. and flew up there and landed a Black Hawk in the river. Wheels Dunkin. I've never seen this. We went out into the river. We're throwing our sense of items, radios, our sign-knit stuff, and dudes, injured dudes.

And this Black Hawk is in the river, like it's in the water. And we get out and he flies us away. And, you know, thanks, John. Just some 80-second pilot that was like, I'm not one of my friends going on like this. And just came and got us. Yeah. Yeah, hardcore. At the same time, the 173rd Airborne Brigade was covering that whole area.

That was their area responsibility was that Camdash, Mir dash, Gowardash kind of area. Was there ever a final verdict on Zawahiri? I mean, obviously he survived. They put out, it's funny, I have all this stuff. They put out a Taliban put out a press release, said they shot down a helicopter, nurse and district, and killing all people aboard, right?

Which is funny. I have. It's actually on one of my LinkedIn posts, but yeah, they didn't kill any of us. So, and the person that put out that press release, his name's something,

my name, what's his first name? Mujahid. Shit, it's my grass. He's now the Taliban press secretary. Oh, really? Same dude. Zawahiri got his...

Zabiyula Mujah. That's the guy's name. Zabuula. But, yeah, he's the one that put out the press release, so we were all dead. So a bunch of paratroopers came sliding down the mountain. And, okay, so these were the guys that were at Camdash, Camp Keating, when it got overrun months later.

Oh, wow. So the whole movie, the two medals of honor that came out of that, like Clint Ramisha and those guys, like that's, like, that's, That's them, dude, so. That was such, I mean, that, that was such a rough area for those guys. And I feel as though that those stories aren't just, they're not told enough, you know. Yeah, it was a brutal area. And then there was also an OBL mission, like not long after, right?

Yeah. Okay, so on the way to that, we'll cover that. So, like I said, we were driving to Jalalabad to stay. age for at the time, all we knew was it was going to be a company grade special forces mission in support of a larger operation. Well, Jack, you're the, you're the green bracelet in here. How often do you guys do an AOB company size operation? Like early on in the war, there were quite a few in Afghanistan from what others have told me.

but company level operations in SF is like doctrinally they don't exist right right no such thing um so they are very rare right um and then about um you know so we go up we get shot down and and the whole zawari gets away thing happens so um we change focus and then we moved down to the torre bora area where they had you know chase bin laden out of Afghanistan or where he got away, however you want to put it in 2001. And so we're prepositioned down there and we get a call that those paratroopers that were up where we got shot down, they had made contact with a very large enemy force. And they had a company and a half of infantry heavily engaged.

And so they started spinning us up just again for Intel support. And then the call came over the radio that they had a, what do they call it? Dust one. Yeah, that's like a missing guy, right? Yeah. And MIA. That's what they called up. Duty status.

When Burntall went missing, they called up Dustwin. Dust one. Duty status. Whereabouts? Whereabouts unknown? Yeah. Something like that. So we go, we get thrown, we get thrown into a black cock.

They fly a black cock out and pick us up. And we go immediately back to 800 meters from where I got shot down six days earlier. And there was a unit of 173rd. It was actually first squadron, 91st cavalry, 191 Caval. And there was one of the, was. the troop, troop commanders, guy whose last name was Bostic.

His guys had made contact, so he kind of stood up and went forward towards the enemy so his men could escape and was mortally wounded. And then he was drug off to a cave. And the Taliban,

if you will, I don't know which group they were, but bad guys. were actually on his radio, his M-Bitter radio, taunting the American troops. Holy shit. Yeah. Yeah. So, of course, we hit the ground.

I turn on my, you know, a little piece of equipment. And it's like, oh, he's right there in that cave. At least you had to fill, right? Right, right. So, yeah, we ended up, a couple small groups ended up fighting our, you know, way up to the, that area to where that cave was and then there were three enemy combatants in the area that we ended up engaging and and then moved into the cave where he was at and you know that was I think at that point what my fifth combat deployment and that was probably the worst thing I'd ever seen in my entire life

was what I walked into in that cage cave so um And so, yeah, they end up recovering Captain Bostic, posthumously promoted to Major Bostic. And he was awarded the Silver Star for his gallantry in that engagement. And then it was later upgraded to the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army Cross. So Major Bostic, a great, great hero, literally stood up and ran into withering fire so his men could run away. And now run away, you know what I mean. Right. Down back.

Yeah. I'm looking. I was actually awarded. It was never in the cab, but I got to war gold calf spurs my last three years in the Army. I was awarded combat cavalry spurs. So it's another little version of like the CIB, if you will. So yeah, we were awarded spurs for bringing him back home. Fly back down to Niagara province, to where.

towards Torabora, the Black Dust Mountain, Black Dirt Mountains. And we find out at that point that we are actually part of a very large operation that we're going after Osama bin Laden, who was reportedly returning into Afghanistan for some type of engagement, family engagement, wedding or funeral or something like that. We insert into the mountains, the valley leading out of Torabor. Our job was to two side A guys, a sniper team, Air Force Combat Controller to call in fire and everything. And then we had five Afghan commandos with us and an interpreter. And this was the same Afghan Tier 1 guys.

They're little strike force guys. And we ended up, we were supposed to sit up there for like two days. And then we ended up having to sit up there for over. It was between six and eight days was the total mission. And it was because there were B2 bombers flying. And for those of you that don't know, there is one place in the world. that those guys land and go to bed and that is in missouri so when a b2 stealth bomber takes off it flies from missouri to where it drops bombs off and then flies home to missouri um that being said

we had to wait for the weather in missouri to be good enough for the b2 to drop bombs in afghanistan wow so they they couldn't take off in missouri they were having thunderstorms we ended up for like three days waiting on this bomber that takes 20 hours hours to get there anyway. So there's four days. And, and yeah, I was insane. It was a really large scale op. A whole company of SF, a company of Rangers, one of the tier one strike forces and a whole bunch of other people involved. And needless to say, it wasn't, wasn't a successful op in the aspect that we didn't catch in line, but a lot of stuff came out of it. But the one thing that did happen was on August 12th, we had a team. It was ODA 741, which was coming through the mouth of the valley in their vehicles, where they struck an improvised explosive device. And I lost two guys that I knew pretty well.

two special forces guys, green berets, and then a psychological operations soldier and then a civilian interpreter, American citizen, civilian interpreter, were killed in that. And that really, those were the first two guys in our close circle that had been lost that deployment. Bunch of Purple Hearts, bunch of, you know,

crazy stuff. We get shot down on a helicopter. Other guys that IEDs and walk away from us. It's pretty miraculous. But our sister battalion, first battalion, seventh group down south, they lost quite a few guys in a seven, but, and another helicopter crash. But, yeah, that kind of wrapped up the 07. Well, so after we missed, I like to say after we missed bin Laden,

we did another company-sized operation up in Nuristan. where three A-teams landed in three different villages and assaulted them at the same time at dawn. And ended up taking out an IED manufacturing facility run by Al-Qaeda, a bunch of logistics communications nodes in these three villages in Nuristan. And it was really successful up. We had, I think we had three guys get shot, but they were all walking wounded. you know, which, hey, guys, sorry you got shot, but I know what it's like to have a beard and a slight wound

and sit in a field hospital with a bunch of nurses that have never seen combat. So I'm just going to say that. Was there, again, was there ever, was there ever a verdict on Bin Laden? Like, did you guys get sick and hits on him during that op? We did not. We didn't get anything as far as that went.

We got a lot of, hey, what's going on? We're going to get out of here, because it sounds like there's going to be a battle. Like normal people in town would be like, hey, what's all this going on? And they were trying to lead. You know, there was just a lot of that. I mean, somebody had something because they sent the Rangers and, you know,

the guys that ended up getting, whatever it was. Yeah. The guys that got him four years later were on this mission too. So, you know, same dudes. Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, you know how that goes. How many, you know, I was in a rack. I can't tell you how many missions we went on that we thought Saddam was going to be in the house when we want to. As we said it earlier, I mean, how many?

Everyone knows about Abadabad, but there was a many long years effort that led up to all of that. It didn't just happen in a vacuum. Well, and the thing is people don't realize, like Ahmad Shah, like the lone survivor bad guy. Like he ran that whole area forever. And then north of me, you had Hizbizbizlama Gubidine, so Sir Rajan Gubidine and his heck Mityar Gilbadine and those guys that are that are part of the Taliban government now. And then, you know, like I said, Zwhaliri was running, Zawahiri was running Al-Qaeda operations in Afghanistan.

And then bin Laden, of course, was in, you know, Pakistan. It's kind of more of like a figurehead, I think, at the time. But Zwaheri was always in, he was always in Afghanistan. And so next stop for you, you get back home. and you're hurt, obviously, for this helicopter crash. And you tried to bullshit the army and tell them you weren't hurt because you wanted to go back out the door. Yeah, so kind of what happened is, like I said, that happened July 20th. I went through that.

And I got home, I think it was like October 5th or 6 because it was right under my sister's birthday. And I would say within two or three weeks, like my ex-wife will tell you, my life just started falling apart. I started forgetting things. I started forgetting where I was at, what I was doing, what I was supposed to do. I would, I had falls. You know, I would be walking and then I would just fall. I would get vertigo and fall down. Headaches, but mostly it was cognitive decline.

Like, and it just, it seemed like over a few weeks it started getting worse and worse and worse. So by the beginning of December, I'm going to Womack Hospital in Fort Bragg to what at the time was the defense and veterans brain injury center. And it was centered on Fort Bragg because that's for the paratroopers and that stuff guys that bang their heads all the time are. So I was enrolled and they immediately,

they tested me, screen me or whatever, and immediately all of a sudden I'm going to the doctor five times a week. And things got pretty rough. And so the U.S. Army Special Operations Command Surgeons office started a medical board for retirement for me. And I'm sure, you know, you've had a lot of guests talk about this, but there's a certain addiction to being deployed or being in combat, if you will. And I don't think it's like the adrenaline rush of the firefight. I think it's just, it's such an easy life. And it sounds weird to people that haven't been there. But like, what do you have to worry about?

Right. Like, I got to wake up. I got to eat. I got a maybe shower and brush my teeth if I have the opportunity. And then I got to not die today. It's very pure. Like it's that. It's that. Not worried about paying taxes. Yeah. I just got to not die today. There aren't social niceties. There aren't taxes. There aren't social pressures. There's nothing but the mission. no there's no trying to drag out of your girl what she wants for dinner there's no none of that anything it's just it's simple it's and i by primal i don't mean like you know testosterone and stuff but you guys get it like primal like uh uh yeah like you feel almost like a pioneer yeah everything you do you've got improvised with what you have laying around and it becomes really to me it was

fun yeah let's figure out how to build a bench with a gerber You know, the little sob blade on a, on a leatherman, let's build a picnic table. And we did. Yeah. And so you sweet. Making cuts like this. You, you, you were on the 08, or I'm sorry, the E8 list. And you managed to sweet talk the Army into giving you another, another pump overseas.

Yeah. So basically what happened is the, the USOC deputy surgeon, so the Special Operations, Army Special office deputy surgeon. You know, we're some of the first guys with kind of these TBI issues that are, that are. Yeah, it's really starting to show itself. I mean, there's not a lot. Right. There's not a lot of guys that have had those acute injury in the soft world in the SF.

They haven't identified. They haven't identified it. That's the thing is like everything's getting written off as PTSD. Like they can't differentiate the, you know, the stressors. Well, okay, imagine a hundred years ago when your doctor was like, hey, you have cancer, there's nothing we can do. Right. That's kind of what they were doing with TBI all the way up until probably 2012 or so, I think. Yeah, yeah.

It was, oh, you got a brain injury, and that's the answer. Right. You know, and walk it off. Yeah. So, yeah, we got pretty close with this guy, Bob Forston. And there was a point. And he, you know, he knew we were serious. Like, I, I'm begging him.

Just get me better. I want to go back. You know, I'm not trying to get out. I'm not trying to get a med board and retirement. You know, I'm trying to stay in. And so I'm going to the brain injury center three, four times a week, doing cognitive therapy and vestibular therapy and all kinds of shit and speech therapy. And I come out on the promotion list for Master Sergeant for E8. And at the same time, I am in my reenlistment window, which, you know, people know when you reenlist, oftentimes for an high demand job, they give you a lump sum of money to reinlist.

Yeah. So I'm like, shit. You know, my bonus was like $40,000. Right. But if I reenlist in the U.S., I have to pay income taxes on that. if I reenlist in a war zone, I get to keep all $40,000. And at that time,

because of the whatever you call it, capital gains or lump sum, whatever, bonus, whatever, like I would have lost like $12,000. So I'm like, hey, I'm feeling great.

I feel a lot better. Ed doesn't hurt. I can remember everything. Like, no problem. And so I kind of get, I kind of get out of that where they want to, you know, retire me into, oh, maybe he is rehab and getting better from all these deployments. So, yeah, I basically just lied to everybody and to know I'm good and redeployed to Afghanistan in late May, early June of 2008.

And again, it wasn't because of the bonus money. It wasn't because of this and that. It was because I was getting to the point in my career where I had. done, I knew. Once I became a master sergeant, the chances of me staying operational, if you will, are very slim. So there is one team per special forces group that has a master sergeant team leader. And there's, you know, the tier one units, but by the time you're a master sergeant, you know, going into that world, you're a little late for joining into that world. So I knew that I was, was going to be an instructor, sit at a desk, or be a first sergeant or, you know, something.

So I was like, I got to get back out there. So I get back to Afghanistan. And I get put on a team. And at the time, I don't know what they're called now. We were called the advanced collection team. So it was, it was four senior guys. You had to, you had to have been a Sade team sergeant prior, you know, done your time as a team leader. And then you could go for this advanced collection team. And it was more of the kind of, kind of blurring the lines between clandestine and covert, if you will. You know, we're still a military element, but we have authorities to work alongside government agencies and government entities and things. And just, you know, that maturity level, that training level, that experience level, again, Dave, like we talked about. We don't, at the time, we didn't have a track into being a Sada.

You know, there wasn't those gates and hurdles you have to pass to, like you do to be a green beret or to even be a support guy in some of the tier units or, you know, we just didn't have that weeding out process. So the advanced collection team we did. I guess it was built in. You know, you had to have. Right. So I'm like, hey, I want to go back to Afghanistan, do this advanced collection team. I already knew my buddy was going to stay in group and just be that team sergeant as a master sergeant. So last hurrah again.

And so I get to Afghanistan and we immediately move out to, I'm trying to remember the order of this. Let me think. Yeah, so, okay, I think we moved to Jalalabad, and we were joining another SOTA team. to work on kind of a large operation. And we get a call that there is an outpost up by Asadabad that is being overrun. And the current report is over 150 enemy on site and nine dead Americans. So we're like, shit.

Jump on the black ox, head north. And at about 40 minutes, we come over a small village named Oneot. And right outside of this little village Oneat was some sandbags and some concertino wire, razor wire and a few of those Hesco barriers that you fill with sand, you know, to make a wall. And it was a, it was a small outpost, man by Periturperature. again and yeah they get overran and uh last nine guys uh we we're on the endbound as part of the QRF in these blackhawks and you can just see the bad guys scurrying away like cockroaches when you turn the light on as soon as the helicopter comes in there's just bad guys running for the hills everywhere and uh yeah i think at the time it was the single largest loss

Because I think Camdash happened right after that, which was, you know, the movie The Outpost and all that. But We're not, the Battle of Oneot, it's pretty much the same story as that Outpost story. Like if you look through and look through the history of the Battle of One Not, I mean, it was a small group of Americans stuck out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by mountains like they shouldn't have been. Yeah. And they get overrun by bad guys coming down the mountains. Like, aren't we supposed to be at the top of the mountain guys? like are we supposed to fight down like so yeah that's as this tour went on was there any particular moment that like struck you that you realize like i'm having like some serious cognitive issues

that i'm struggling to do my job i'm not at the same level that i was on the last deployment yeah yeah definitely so right after that one not deal we ended up getting sent out west to farah province on the Iranian border to work with Marine Special Operations Command, the Marsaq guys, Raiders. After Fred Gavin's tour, Marsok got a redemption tour, right? Yeah, they did. So this was 2008. This was kind of their reintroduction into the family, which, you know what?

Sidebar, I have to apologize to those guys, because when I got into country four months after that happened, everybody was like, oh, fuck the Marines, man. made us all look bad. You know what I mean? Like, because that was the rumor. Oh, the Marines went crazy. They killed everybody. And it's like, yeah, fuck those guys.

They shouldn't be in soft. And then after working with them a year later and again, watching the episode with Fred and just learning about it for real. I was like, oh, yeah, that shit didn't happen at all. Yeah, shocking, isn't it? Yeah. Well, I mean, and it's happened to, I don't know if it's happened to you, Jack, but it's definitely happened to me where you go on an op and come back. And it's like, we didn't kill 19 civilians. Yeah, what are you talking about?

What? You know, they just, that's just like the Taliban saying they killed all of us on the helicopter. No, they didn't. Yeah. No, they didn't. So, yeah, so we're out West with the Marines. And we go on this basically like a nine-day death march in Humvees where we set out to do reconnaissance, kind of traditional Marine Corps force reconnaissance.

type mission in support of an Italian operation out west. And then it just rolled into so many more things, you know, so many follow-ons that we just stayed out. And it was during that time. And so in this nine days of patrolling, we had six different contacts with the enemy in nine days. So six different firefights. I would say three of them were real big and three of them were probably, you know, any real

fighter would be like eh but so yeah uh and it was just that you know not sleeping you know stop out in the middle of the desert circle the wagons sleep for an hour while your buddy's on guard you know that kind of in the middle of a you know sandstorm while you got a dead guy and a body bag on your hood because you just found him out in the desert so it was just a weird time and and and just going through that I could tell I wasn't on it. I wasn't on my game. And the thing about what we do, that direct support mission that we have,

my number one priority out of all my different kind of mission profiles is that force protection of those green berets on the ground. Like that's why I'm in Afghanistan. It's so that while we're moving out, I can give you guys early warning, maybe say the bad guys are the left or to the right, hey, stop because there's IEDs in front of us, or, you know,

add intelligence to build your target packages and keep us going and things. But, yeah, I just, I really started to feel, like I didn't, I didn't want to miss anything. You know what I mean? I didn't want to, because as I'm sitting there, you guys have to remember, like, we're driving down desert roads or mountain roads

or whatever in a Humvee. I'm the dude sitting there with two laptops. one conversation in this year, another conversation in this year, and an interpreter telling me what this conversation is saying, whereas this one, you know what I mean? And if one of those words was hit them now and I missed it, like, that's my job. To tip you guys off for an ambush or an IED or the targets in this, you know, and I just felt like I wasn't, I knew that I wasn't. I wasn't on that game anymore. Yeah, I wasn't the guy that could speak languages, translate, do the intelligence analysis, do the reporting, and do the tactical shit at the same time. I just, I knew I wasn't.

And physically, I was able to, you know, at that point, we're all kind of old dudes. These Marines have been beat up. You know, we're all at about the same level of rucking speed and all that. there was a point where we're driving just let's see how I can put this so we're just inside Afghanistan on the Iranian border there's a road that that is literally if you go off onto the right-hand side ditch you're in Iran if you go on the left-hand side ditch that border's a gray area we don't need to get into specifics borders are a Western concept anyway Yeah. I knew who saw Monty was like eight years before he died, if you know what I mean?

Cudes dudes. Cudes dudes are bad. The craziest damn thing. Cudes dudes are bad dudes. Uh-huh. But, uh, yeah, so we, we were going through that area. And like I said, we'd been up for quite a few days. One of my guys could have sworn he saw himself doing PT next to our vehicle. So we're driving down the road, and he thinks he can see himself with his PT belt on, jogging next to the envy.

Like, we're hallucinating. Yeah. It's bad. And because we just keep getting called for, oh, go here, QRF these guys, and go recon that. And it was nuts. And then all of a sudden, again, like it always happens with a firefight, the world just opens up, right? And there's tracers everywhere. There's RPGs going across our.

our hoods and stuff and we're trying to you know you get oriented and then return fire you know and then figure out what's going on so we do that and and the whole time we have i don't know maybe 60 to 100 Afghan soldiers with us and the Marines and people are all on the radio like hey you know we're america we're afghanistan army stop shooting and stuff well these guys keep shooting and engaging us and so we just moved back probably another their 500 yards out of their range. And, you know, we're talking to the command back in Boggham at the Siege of SOTA, the Special Office headquarters.

And they, uh, they called in an AC 130 gunship and, and just, you know, erase that side of the mountain. Yeah, you pray for hate, right? Yeah. I mean, you know how it is, guys. Like in a lot of the listeners, you know, you're, you're pretty, you're pretty high strong. You just been getting shot at. You got an RPG skip off your hood.

You're a little excited. Yeah. You know, it's like drinking three Red Bulls. You've had it up to here is what you're saying. Yeah, right. And then, and then all of a sudden you just hear, you just hear an airplane circling overhead and you're like, oh, we're good. Yeah.

We can't see them, but they can see us. And, you know, so they light these guys up. And the next morning, it comes out that it appears it was an Afghan border checkpoint, Afghan police border checkpoint. And the provincial governors pissed and this, you know, people are trying to figure out what's going on. And by the way, Congressman Barack Obama is in town talking to the president of Afghanistan, you know, a little pre-election stuff. So it was a bad time to have a friend. fire incident.

But so we, you know, they, they conduct an investigation and everything in it. I mean, it is quickly decided that, yeah, I mean, these guys are wearing Afghan uniforms, but they weren't good guys. You know, it was one of those. And this was, again, this is kind of in the beginning of that whole blue on green, blue on blue, whatever. Blue on green, yeah. You know, that wasn't a big thing yet, honestly.

You know, if an Afghan soldier shot in American, that, that was horrifying at the time instead of oh shit again yeah you know but uh so yeah we we get we get cleared out of that and it was you know we get back from this kind of marathon operation and i i am cognitively emotionally mentally spent yeah i am you know i i just felt stupid you know in the brain a little a little slow a little and i knew I knew. And I just told my team, I was like, hey, man, I, I'm, I can't do this anymore. So I went back to Boggram and talked to the task force sergeant major. I walked in and said, hey, I can't do this anymore.

That's a tough conversation. You know, I just, I can't, I can't keep the pace. I can't keep the, you know, the mental acuteness that you need. And he just kind of looked at me. And this is a guy that's been a green bray for like 30 years, you know. And he looks at me as like, Clay, I'm surprised you last to the day. this long. Wow, man. He was my battalion sergeant major when I got shot down and then he was the group sergeant major of that next appointment. So, you know, he's like, thanks for coming, man.

Thanks for trying. Yeah. And that was probably one of the coolest conversations I ever had with like a senior leader. Yeah. It was him just being honestly like, man, thanks for trying. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like you said, you went all the way. You were completely spent by the end of it. And the problem, the problem like with those TBIs is they sneak up on you. You don't even realize how they're affecting you cognitively until one day you're like what like what's going on like i i feel like you used to be faster at this i feel like you used to put these things together quicker or speak more clearly like they just sneak up on you and clay you you had a a very mature reaction to it really because i mean so many of the guys um this is not like a critique or a criticism of

anyone but i mean if you're especially a special operator like the type of person that's that becomes a green beret or an operator. You're an elite soldier. You're this elite athlete. And the male ego in generally do not take too well to these things. And a lot of the guys, they start blaming themselves. They think exactly like you said, like, I feel stupid. Like, I'm dumb.

Like, what's wrong with me? It's like, no, you're not stupid. You know, you have something medical, a physical has happened to your brain. And a lot of guys, you know, they really beat themselves up over it, unfortunately. Yeah. Well, you know, like I said, for me, my number one job in my mind was keeping you guys safe. You know, if I was out on a task force operation with the SEALs or working with my ODA or I don't know, another task force off with the Rangers or whatever, my number one job, we get off the helicopter, we drive in or whatever. I'm sitting there making sure nobody gets one up on you guys, you guys, you know, the operators.

Like, that's why I'm there. you know i'm not there because they needed someone on the machine gun or they need you know you don't need an extra body like i'm there for a reason and and i felt in the end that i couldn't i couldn't keep up fast enough because i should i mean you can't control how fast the enemy moves you know and and you've got to be you've got to be right on top of it and i just knew you know and it was scary because you know i had almost 15 years in the army i was i was being promoted to matt well i've already been promoted to master sergeant and I mean, I was looking at coasting it out.

And then it's like, oh, well, now what do I do? I'm getting out of the Army at 15 years. And, you know, what's next? Yeah. It was scary. Can you hit up the, if there's any viewer questions? Yeah. And in the meantime, Clay, can, so you got medboarded out of the military.

Like, what is post-service life entailed for you? Yeah, well, so I got kind of lucky. I had run into some individuals throughout my career that ended up being pretty high in the CIA's kind of signals collection collection. You've got to be careful with what words you use because people get touchy because the NSA does SIGA. The CIA can't do SIGA. They do information operations, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, I work with these guys in Columbia. I'd worked with them in Afghanistan.

I've worked with them all over. So I knew I just wasn't going to go that route. So I had some other friends who worked at a company that did training for J-Socca and the agency and bringing new people in and teaching them how to do kind of that tactical signal via the aircraft and vehicle born. Did that for a year. And honestly, I wasn't great at it. You know, I wasn't a great instructor.

I wasn't, my heart wasn't into it. My, you know, and again, I'm dealing with some things that I'm trying to, you know, kind of overcome. And, you know, I'm teaching kids how to hack into a cell phone network or, you know, a laptop on a, you know, it's like, I can't miss words or nomenclature. steps, you know. So again, I didn't be great at that. I did that for a year and then stopped doing that. And then again, my wife and I at the time, we decided to move back home to Iowa, which is where I got picked up to do some contracting with the agency. So it wasn't a full-time gig. It was, you know, as needed. Cool. And living, back in Iowa, dealing with the TBI, dealing with, you know, resettling away from the military.

And, you know, that was the hardest thing. Everybody says it's about the people and it really is. But it's also about the culture. Yeah. You know, I mean, what, we met a couple hours ago and we're already friends. You know, that culture. Yeah. It's a shared culture, yeah.

Right. So. You've eaten the same dirt. You have a bunch of mutuals like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and so that was hard. Yeah.

What do we have from the folks out there? Let's see here. I think we got something on Patreon, too. Yeah, I found one of them. I don't know if it's John Pierre or Jean-Pierre, but thank you very much for the very generous donation. A lesser-known capability in the special operations community, I think we're speaking out Saadais in SIGA.

Really cool you guys did this one, especially for those of us. that are on the support side of the house. One team, one fight, right? Like, you know. Yeah, I mean, we all have our, we all have our position, you know. Yeah. And a raid doesn't just happen generally.

It has to be developed. Oh, yeah. Like, I mean, and that's the thing. You know, I really, I'm not dogging on strategic intelligence or analytical jobs or any. I'm really not because there. There have been so many times I have been shocked by the target package someone hands me. And I'm like, how do you know this about someone? And they're like, oh, I've been digging through a database for four days.

Right. Wow. Yeah. I've transcribed every phone conversation they've had for the last four weeks. It's like, oh, my God. Yeah. I know where he's eating breakfast every Tuesday for the last year. Right, right.

Oh, go ahead. Patrick Hall asks, touched on this a little bit. would love to hear in detail about some equipment techniques you used in the field, barring any spicy classified stuff if you could as a, as technical as you can. I guess this dude's an engineer. He's just interested in this kind of stuff. But I mean, is there anything you can say about that? Yeah.

I mean, so, you know, we talked about the early technology before the war, the beginning of the war. So, yeah, we're basically using. just a wide band radio receiver. So your car radio goes from, you know, 88.9 to 107.9. And hours go from, you know, 0.5 megahertz to 5,000 meghertz. So my radio can intercept Wi-Fi. It can intercept your cell phone, open channel.

It can intercept your cell phone closed channel. I have a laptop that can decrypt your cell phone carriers encryption. I have another laptop where I'm actually now a cell phone tower myself. So, you know, it's honestly, it comes down to being just specifically a radio and a software program. So the, let me show you something. So if you want to know specifics, I got this. Elf on the shelf. after I got shot down because

we used equipment from a company called DRT digital receiver technology. Dave, I don't know if you guys had these in group. The dirt box. I don't know because I really didn't spend any operational time there at all. Yeah, it's called the DRT. We call it a dirt box. And so, yeah, that's It's basically just a large computer, what we call a software-defined radio. So instead of having transistors and stuff like that, it's a computer chip and antenna.

But yeah, so 99% of what we do is open channel stuff. So unencrypted, just trying to break out some data. And then, you know, the stuff that gets into kind of that, the touchy subject, if you were, is how, which technologies we can exploit to a certain degree. Right. Right. And how, yeah, I mean, how all that works. But, I mean, specifically, we want to know, like, so for direction finding,

normally we would be used like a Doppler-style antenna that uses the, you know, the echo-balanced Doppler effect, or we'd use something that's called a, like an H. Adcock design. So if you see an antenna, it's flat and it's got, you know, like, imagine a, a pizza box with an antenna coming out of each corner. So four antennas. You see a state trooper unmarked car driving down the road and it's got four antennas on its trunk equally spaced. Turn yourself one off. So. Did you guys when you, because obviously the technology was moving so rapidly during this time. And the military wasn't developing this stuff. This was coming from contractors from, well, maybe they were. But I'll say that a lot of it was,

kind of like wasn't a lot of it off the shelf like private companies could like move yeah yeah we call it cots right we call it cots can consumer off the shelf stuff yeah um yeah i don't want to and i know the military is working on there stuff yeah did you guys go to a lot of schools for this or did you just like oh jt it well okay so there's i guess for every little box you get and and by box i mean let's just say technology so if each technology satellite phone cell phones, radios, Wi-Fi.

Each one of those, let's just say, has a box, right? So you have to go through two types of training for every box you get.

Of course, you go through that, you know, technical vendor training where they show you how to push the buttons

and, you know, kind of how to operate the box. Uh-huh. And then you also have to go through a certification training through the

agency that makes you a subject matter expert on the technology that box is used for. One of the the one of the biggest problems the SIGM-Comtech communications technology world has is when we mess up. We are supposed to do this job 100% in the shadows. Right.

Right. And that doesn't mean just hiding it from American people are staying off the news. When I hack into a cell phone network, I become my own tower. I am now also hiding from every engineer that works for that cell phone company. Right. That says, wait, we don't have a tower here. Right. Why do we have a tower that's driving through downtown moving?

Right. So I'm hiding from them. And I'm, so you have to be certified so that you don't expose the capabilities, the techniques and things like that. So, yeah, a lot of training. Yeah. Once you expose that capability, it's basically extinct, right? It's basically, you know, that technology. So Donald Rumsfeld really screwed us in Torabora because right when it started,

oh, we located Osama bin Laden via his satellite phone calls and chased him into a cave. So guess what bin Laden never did again? Right. He used a telephone. Ever. Ever. It would have been much greater if Rumsfeld would have said, hey, we got in pickups and chased him into a cave. And then he would have just kept using telephones.

We'd have found them next week. Right. Hey, one of his inner circle ratted him out so we know where he is. Right. Yeah, that shit doesn't need to be on TV. Right. Sporben Group, one of our very first guest, Clint, thank you very much for the donation. Ahmed Aktaib, Aktaib, thank you very much.

Appreciate the space you guys create. Consider adding a join button to allow people to become members and support the channel monthly. We do have the Patriots. that you can join. We could also probably do this on YouTube. Crystal Moon, thank you very much. Was Shannon Kent assigned to a SOTA? I thought I heard from some,

heard so from somewhere in the Navy. No, she was trained in the same way a cryptolinguist is. She was a cryptolinguish. She was a cryptolinguist, right? She was a Navy's route. But she went. Please, go ahead. Yeah, hey, Jack, do you know,

Do you know her husband, Joe? I was actually on a few ops with him in Iraq way back when. Okay. Yeah. So he just ran for Congress. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know what happened.

He was running for Congress. But no, so Shannon wasn't a Sada. What Shannon was was basically the same skill set used in a very specific way. And by advanced, I mean spooky. type stuff, right? So she supported, man, how do I differentiate this? She, she went into a space where there really weren't that a lot of women at the time, I guess, or maybe there were, but I guess here we go. So my entire career, I was either a tier three or a tier two, you know, service member. And as far as that umbrella, people hear about tier one.

one ops and tier two ops and black ops and gray ops and white ops or whatever you want to call it. But as by assignment, I was in conventional and then, you know, that special operations command, but that, you know, the white slash grace off, if you will, the tier two world. And Shannon was in, you know, the tier one space. So she was in a J-Soc unit that, you know, so that's, yeah, she did, I would say, very, very similar job. but at a different level. So, you know, we're out there collecting military information and actual information.

She was out there collecting, you know, big picture stuff. Joe's got you. Thank you very much. Were you ever invited or considered trying out for the TFO SMU? And none of us know what that is, but were there ever any special mission units that you were invited to or considered? Yeah. Yeah, it's a funny story.

So I ended up going out to Nevada for that. And my wife and I decided that what was ahead of us, because you don't really find out anything until you kind of get past all that. Right. And it just wasn't going to, you know, I hate to be the guy that's like, oh, my wife wouldn't let me. But to be honest with you, my whole career, my family's come first. So it's always been a joint decision.

on what I did with my career. Yeah. It's insane how many of my friends and coworkers ended up working, you know, with that organization. It's a small world. And then, like I said, when the war first kicked off, the first few years of the war, the tier one, the tier one, I mean, what do you want to call them? The CT units, okay, the two CT units. They did not have organic singing teams. So we picked up all that slack.

So I worked, you know, in Afghanistan, that's what SEAL team was covering. And Iraq was where the Army SMU was, you know, Delta. And I would be in Afghanistan. So I worked, you know, we worked with SEAL Team 6 all the time and the agencies, you know. So I liked my mission better. And, you know, the thing is, like, you know, there's a lot of Ranger Regiment guys that don't want to be a Green Beret because it's not better. It's just different. Right.

And there's a lot of green berets that go to Delta Force and then come back because they want to do more than just direct action. Right. You know, so, yeah, for me, it was, I liked where I was. and I got to do some really cool shit that at the time those guys weren't getting to do. My buddy's up in the special mission unit and they were jealous of how many fucking gunfights I've been in. Yeah.

You know, I'm killing bad guys every day for months and they might shoot their gun someday because that's not their job. Right. The job's to stay out of, you know, in the shadows. Isaac has a question. He's had some medical issues, having trouble getting waivers, but he wants to do the sort of spooky stuff that you got to do. For somebody like that who is in kind of that position, I mean, what sort of career path might you suggest for somebody who, I mean, I guess sort of like yourself in the sense that, you know, medically disabled but still trying to work within this field? you know what i i would say that if if you can get the waivers to get into the military you know physically you know we've we've concentrated on i guess the guys that sit at the nsa or the outposts

kind of like that lady that killed the dude in england driving on the wrong side of the road she was a when I say person by the way so you know and then there's you know

kind of what we call the muddy boots guys like us and then you've got the super spooks like we were just talking about Shana Kent and them

but we have so many niche jobs that I mean you talk about cool stuff like it depends on what you consider cool is jumping out

airplane's cool is you know, riding around on the back of a Humvee, cool, or is fucking one of my best friends saved the Olympics in 2016 in Rio? He was a singing guy working for a specialized program within the military, and he found out there was a bomb plot. I know you all don't know, but there was. And he has a letter from the president and the director of the NSA and all kinds of stuff.

But he wasn't in an SF unit. He wasn't in a tier one unit. He wasn't in a. you know, a boring building. Right. There's, there's a lot of different. Yeah. I mean, if you think of my job.

A lot of the script offices in the Virginia McLean. Well, and outside of the special issues. In strip malls, Jack. Yeah, yeah. Outside of special. It's not a dentist, by the way. That's not a pediatric dentist. Right.

That's, that's one of us. Outside of the, like, the SMUs, you have the special access programs, which are just regular people, not regular people. So, yeah. I'm pretty sure you don't need to be able to do 100 pull-ups to be in the CIA or the NSA. So, you know, again, without going too deep, you know, in the Army, we obviously have counterintelligence agents and we have, we obviously have case officers. So people that run intelligence assets and people that try and find intelligence assets that are trying to spy on us. So imagine being, you know, a signals intelligence guy being trained in telecommunications, computer networking,

languages and then your job is to go to Las Vegas and see what the new Wi-Fi protocol or the new, you know, what this video card can do or, you know, what this new cell phone is going to do. So we have, you know, we definitely have personnel that we would consider tactical collection, but not necessarily with a boots and a gun. Well, they have guns. but, you know, rifle and uniform. It's a, I tell people, if you have a, if you have a love for travel, culture, languages, things like that, I, that's why I'm glad I did what I did. You know, I really got to concentrate on the geopolitical, the language, the culture.

You know, I got to concentrate on like that. And for me, that's what it was. You know, I ended up doing French at SWIC. my buddy and I taught each other Italian and Haitian Creole. They're Japanese and kanji. So I, you know, it was kind of my gig. Like, you know. That's cool.

But what was your favorite role playing game? My favorite role playing game? I would say it's probably when I like pick the locks on your front door. And I come in and you wake up smelling roses because they're touching your lips. I love that one too. We'll chat offline. One of my favorite courses was, you know, surreptitious entry and then apprehension avoidance. So how to break into places and how to break out of places.

Any other questions? Yeah, we got a few. Robert C. Thank you very much. Currently listening active duty as a 35 Sierra, any advice for getting to the Ranger regiments and my battalion and what day-to-day life tasks are like? Well, first, I'd say what rank are you? because you're either going to go to what RASP 1 or RASP 2.

He says currently enlisting. Oh, currently enlisting. I guess if you've already signed your contract, you know, Jack, you probably know more about this than me. If you're not coming in on a 40 contract, I guess, you know, volunteering for the regiment is different than volunteering for Ranger School because Ranger School is based off of slots and things like that. volunteering for the regiment is a

you know I don't I don't think the army can't deny you something like Rasp or something can they it's like SFS you want to go you're going They can deny it and I I didn't know that 30 first off I don't even know what 35S is but But and I didn't know

the regimen had it but here's the thing If you're If you're probably a technical skill Because I know Ranger Regiment has really grown Since I've been there If you're a technical skill and you're motivated to do that stuff. Once you get to boot camp, if you don't get it in your contract, once you get to boot camp, if you're hard charging and you like meet the PT standards, I mean, look, if they want to know about Ranger Battalion, S. Fricurter, right? There are tons of interviews on this show with Rangers that you can go check out. Yeah. Plenty of information at the team house with lots of Rangers. Go check out the interview with Ian Carusia Gay, where we talk all about Rip and Rasp and how it's involved. I mean, and I'm sure that. For like, for the smart people, you know, the people who could go sit in an office somewhere who want to go to Ranger Regiment, like they'll.

Well, yeah. But then you start, you know, like, so like they're singing teams, right? Right. I believe they're called OSTs, operational support teams, maybe. They didn't have those in the beginning of the war. That was something they brought out around 2006 or so. So, yeah, they came around. they were recruiting, you know, guys out of the SOTA teams and stuff, but more so, you know, senior team sergeants and then they were going to bring people in as junior people.

I don't know a lot about their OSTs. I did train them after I retired. And so I know that they fall under the headquarters company. There's a small section of signals intelligence, and they also do what we call, what was it TSE? the, you know, bugging and tagging, tracking, locating, technical surveillance. Technical, yeah, technical surveillance, whatever. So, yeah, they do like, yeah, like tracking beacons and bugs and shit too. But what else?

Yeah, I would say, honestly, if you want to, if you want to go to the regiment or do an SF unit, call the, I would say with the, with the Rangers, you got to call the soft recruiter, I would think. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like if you get to boot camp and you volunteer for that stuff because you're technical and you want it, because a lot of people to go to those techno fields don't want that. That's a funny question because I just remember this. This is a very minor story and it's not that cool. But when I was at airborne school, they said, all right, who wants to go to Rip?

And, you know, raise my hand. Get everything done. That was like three days before graduation. You know, they call everybody that's going to rip, throw your duffel bag on the truck and get running, right? So I run. I don't even know. Three miles or whatever getting screamed at and shit. And we get there and they're like, oh, we don't.

have your MLS. Right. Like, what are you? It's like, Rand of the, Rand a Rit for no reason. That's hilarious.

Bunny, this five years later, they did. David Maynor, who we love, who you might enjoy talking to. Do you know, David? I think I know Dave Maynard.

Ask him if he knows me. If he does answer now, well, I'll ask him. Was he, what was Dave? Was David Sonday? No, no, definitely not. No, wait, okay.

Uh, I'll, I'll talk to you about David off the time. He's, uh, he's, uh, a, sounds really familiar. He's a cyber god. Um, anyway, he just,

thank you, David, nerd track. Yes, we were on the nerd track when he commented. Uh, Jane, uh,

thanks for the generation. Does a pipeline in a site A currently exist? So that's something I've been, I've been really kind of talking to a lot of guys about. I've been unplugged from the community. for a long time. It was something, so the last probably year and a half, two years of my career, that was something we were really working on with Socom, Army Special Operations Command, the Army G2, so Michael Flynn, the, you know, Trump's National Security Advisor and stuff.

He was helping us form it up. So, you know, we had designed and planned out this SOTA qualification course. And so I know it started out at the Special Forces Schoolhouse, on Fort Bragg in some way, shape, or form. And then it moved out to the west. We'll just say out west. Here's a riddle for you. Tell me where Area 52 is, and I'll tell you that's for the Sadi courses. So, yeah.

And I've heard different things. I've heard guys say it's good. I've heard guys say it's not what we wanted back in the day. I've heard guys say it's It doesn't meet the intent of what we had I don't know I'm not an instructor there I'm not a student there

I would say something is better than nothing But putting lipstick on a pig Doesn't make it smell any better So right Tony AEO Thank you very much for the very generous donation We deeply appreciate it There was another one that was redacted

is classified. George Kornak, thank you very much for your donation and your classified message. George Kornak, thank you. Clay, how is your time at DLI? Any tips, tricks for the DLP? Any tips or tricks for the DLP? And do you happen to know how Adam White,

previous guests, and we're connected on L-I-F-I? Oh, do you happen to know Adam White, and you and he are connected on oh i linked in i guess so yeah linked in yeah yeah i do um so if i have any advice for taking the d lpt which uh the d l pt is the defense language proficiency test so that's where you get your scores and how how much of a mastery you have in language and those are measured in listening reading and speaking If I have any tips for the DLPT, I would say hammer down on your conditional future and your subjunctive. So would have, could have, should have, I will do in the future if I have the availability to, you know, those kind of, I like ice cream is one thing.

but I would like ice cream if you will buy it for me is a completely different thing. So, yeah, function, you know, focus on that conditional and then your future subjunctive and past subjective texts. And how is your time at DLI? It was awesome. It was awesome. You know, it's funny you go through basic training and the way I went, I went through basic training and then I went to airborne school right away. So I got to DLI as a E2 paratrooper. Oh.

So there was like, they did it amazing. Yeah. Yeah. No, I got you. DL. There was like, yeah, there was like six of us.

And, uh, you know what's funny? I was just talking to a guy earlier. His name's Dan Daly. He was a Navy SEAL. And he was like an E6 in my class back in 1997. And this dude swam from Santa Cruz to Monterey, 25 miles across the bay for fun you know like that's the kind of dudes we hung out with they're like

oh you guys are paratroopers come on so all these old like there were some sod day guys a couple green berets some seals so we yeah man d l i was it was it was it was like it was like college you know you live in a barracks with no sergeants running around back then we didn't have drill sergeants we didn't have shit and there's you know it's the best post thing in the military. All right. Yeah, it's like being, it's like being in a frat. All right.

Yeah. Cameron Perry, thank you much. Do you foresee the, these significant capabilities permitting further through ODAs as we shift to near pure conflicts, or will an SME always handle this? They're already trying to do that. They're trying to push. Yeah, I can't, I can't get

too much into that, but there's certain things that, you know, you do in that technical space that anybody can do. There's certain things you can do that you don't have to have a T.S. clearance. Yeah. Things like that. So, yeah, I mean, obviously, they're calling it convergent.

Convergence. or optimization that they're trying to create like 16 man ODAs that have some sort of electronic warfare capability and like whether or not that becomes like a new MOS or an 18 series MOS, I think that's all like very much still on the drawing board. But, well, yeah, and you, you know, drone operator and some other things like that. Yeah, they're experimenting with it. And last one, Sierra Star, thank you very much for the generous donation. Y'all awesome. Merry Christmas.

Yeah. So, yeah, Clay, thank you so much for doing this tonight. I mean, this has been like a pretty amazing episode, some wild stories. No, this has been really cool, man. I'm kind of blown away. Let's see, coming up, we have a crazy week coming up. So we're recording our episode for Christmas tomorrow with a female DIA person. And we're recording that tomorrow morning for Christmas.

and then we're having our team house Christmas party on Sunday. And then midweek, we are interviewing a Ranger Regiment veteran. So we're doing an extra episode. We'll have him here in studio. And then next Friday, we're going to be talking to Jeff Stein, who runs Spy Talk, also, you know, a former intelligence dude himself. So we got a busy week coming. We have a really busy week.

Yeah, yeah. That's like four days of work. Indeed. I tell you guys what, if Andy Milburn's going to be at your Christmas party, I will walk there and sleep in a dumpster. Andy is in Ukraine right now. God, dang. Yeah, I'm sure.

We'll try to, we're going to have a few people from the Mozart group there at the party, but we'll try to Shanghai Andy into it next year. Yeah. And we'll try to Shanghai you. Yeah. It's actually mandatory. You know, I don't want to offend you, Jack, or are you, Dave, but if you want to know, like, people ask me, what's the best special

ops unit you ever worked with? Uh, Marsok. I mean, no, that's okay. We're cool with Mars. And that was in their infancy because they had something to prove. If you said, you said seals, you would never be welcome on this show again, but, you know, Marsok, we can handle that. I'm all right.

Yeah. My ego's intact. I can handle it. No, because, you know, they were, they were like us. because, I mean, you guys think about it. They came in after the situation, you know, year prior. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were like the step siblings.

Yeah, yeah. Well, so am I as a direct support guy. So it's like the thing was is the Marsat guys, they had to prove themselves. Yeah. And so we came in and I don't know. It just worked. They appreciated any support they got. Yeah.

And more. Oh, they fucking love to show up, man. Marsaac's doing. They're doing great work literally all over. over the world at this point. Yeah. And so they've already gone to that, that you're talking about, Jack. So a Marsok team now has its own organic.

Yeah. Interrogator, SIGA, all that. Whereas, you know, your ODA has your Fox. They actually have the collectors in their teams. So we will see all of you guys very shortly on, I think Wednesday is an episode. Yeah, Wednesday with. That's crazy talk. dude served in the Ranger Regiment.

And, hey, those of you who support the team house at the highest Patreon level got the invitation to come to the party on Sunday. So we'll see you guys there too. Otherwise, Clay, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you, everyone who watched the show live or is going to check us out on a podcast this week. And that's a show, man. Thanks again.

Thanks, my guys. Thanks, Clay. It was awesome.