The Team House - The First Green Beret in Afghanistan | Justin Sapp (throwback episode)

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

originally aired 04\22\22After the 9/11 attacks, small CIA paramilitary teams were secreted into Afghanistan to pave the way for a larger Special Forces deployment. Amongst them was Green Beret Justin Sapp who was the first U.S. Special Forces soldier to infiltrate into Afghanistan.Subscribe to our new newsletter!!!!https://teamhousepodcast.kit.com/joinFor ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Special operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Team House. This is episode 143.

I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park, right over there. Our guests tonight in studio, we're very happy to have Justin Sapp here with us today. Drove in to Brooklyn. I told them we're deep behind enemy lines out here. here. That's a joke, by the way. But Justin, no stranger to any of that. He is the first Special Forces soldier who was inserted into Afghanistan after the 9-11 attacks, detailed with a CIA paramilitary team. Those events were detailed in Toby Arden's book, First Casualty. We had him here a few months back and interviewed him about the book. But we're really glad to have the man himself

here in studio tonight. Thank you for joining us, Justin. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, man. You know, we'll start off where we always start off. You know, I want to ask you a little bit about how you grew up and your family background and upbringing and sort of the path that took you into military service. Sure. So I grew up. My dad was a CIA operations officer, a case officer, ever since, well, prior to me being born.

So I was born into that, I guess, lifestyle, so to speak. And that lifestyle is very much like being a military brat. You know, you're moving around except you're moving around the world. And you're living in embassies and stuff like that. And not always embassies, but, you know, in an international kind of environment. And so I started out, I think the first trip, I might have been three or four, somewhere in that realm. We went to Lebanon. My dad had a knack for getting all the good spots.

And at the time, Lebanon was like the so-called Paris of the Middle East. And then that changed about six months into his tour, and it turned into the Lebanon that everybody knows. The Civil War started after the Marinites and the clash with the Palestinian. So we evacuated from there, lost pretty much everything, and then went to Greece for a while, back to the states, reset. And then we went to India, Bombay or Mumbai. I did two years there. That was pretty straightforward, you know, South Asian tour, enjoyed it. I was a little kid, swimming, you know, kind of subtropical environment.

And then I actually went to an Indian school there. It was the only American kid in the school. English curriculum. Can I ask you, we've interviewed a whole bunch of CIA officers on the show before who talk about their kids and getting to the point where at a certain point, you have to tell your kids this is what I do for a living. I was wondering as a kid, did you have any inkling that, like, dad disappears late at night with a bag under one arm and then comes back, he keeps odd hours? Do you have any inkling of what your father did?

I don't think I became really cognizant of that, the sort of strangeness of what he did, vis-a-vis of compared to other people until I was probably, like, I think, 12 or something. And it was the people that would come over, you know, and hang out he would hang out with. That was, you know, not totally unusual because we were in Cairo, for example. But it seemed a bit odd. And then I remember my dad had a firearm. He had like a pistol. He had like a Ruger Speed 6, 357, which I thought was really cool.

And I'd go, you know, ask him to show it to me and stuff. But he never explained why he had it. And I just sort of figured out that your average guy at the embassy is not going to be carrying one of those unless he's RSO or something like that. And then he eventually told me, I think I was like 13. He pulled me aside and he said, hey, you know, you probably realize that I'm not your average bear here. I have a different job and this is kind of my mission. He didn't go into tons of detail, but and you should, you know, be mindful of that, safeguard it. And, you know, I ended up in seventh grade, I ended up moving to Virginia where he was an instructor.

And so that was obvious because then he was an instructor and I'm with other kids that are dependents of, of, you know, agency people. So, you know, then it started to come into the resolution as to, you know, the kind of nature of the job and all that kind of stuff. But honestly, I didn't, I didn't have tons of interest in that because I sort of saw it like, still I still saw it as kind of related to being a diplomat or kind of diplomatic international lifestyle. And that's a different kind of community from the military.

And I always had more affinity, honestly, as a kid, to the Marine detachment because, you know, we'd be at the embassy and I'd hang out with the Gunny's kid or my friends tended to be the Defense Atashay's kid, not always, but, you know, frequently. And, you know, we move so much that I just kind of gravitated towards that profession. I was more interested in that profession. And I probably by the age of six or seven, I had decided, hey, I'm going to make a career in the military, whatever that means. I didn't quite understand the different jobs.

jobs in the military, I just knew it was about fighting and the Cold War was, you know, we were still in the midst of the Cold War, so it was a calling, you know, like not to be cliche, but I felt like that's what I want to do. There was no question. And so all these kids who were searching, you know, in high school or college, like I'm going to decide it. I don't know what to do with my life. That was never, for what a reason that was never a problem for me. I always knew, okay, I want to be in the military. Now I got to figure out which branch and what I want to do. And it was always either the Army or the Marine Corps. and so forth. Yeah. And so how did you also go to high school in the States or was that overseas? I did first two years of high school in New Delhi, India, and then I finished up in Marietta, Georgia. It's kind of a, my dad wanted to get close to his father who was estranged from who lived in Georgia. So that's how we ended up in Georgia. And I finished up there. And then I went to college at Virginia Military Institute. And my family ended up moving up to the D.C. area like a year later. And then they became Northern Virginia denizens for, well, pretty much the rest of my dad's life. And so I was like three hours away at BMI.

So that wasn't too bad. Yeah, I mean, and it was weird. I mean, I left from India, and I remember showing up the first thing, 11th grade, came in like a couple weeks late. And where do you say you're from? Indiana? Where in Indiana do you come from? I said, no, India. I came from India.

And so, I don't know. I was a bit of a weirdo, I guess. And, you know, that's bad to move kids in the middle of high school. Yeah. I totally realize that now. And so I struggled a bit just assimilating. And then, you know, but eventually I got it together. When you were going to high school in India, because you had mentioned that when you, and I don't know if that's when you said that you went to like Mumbai and you went to an Indian school.

Is that also in high school? Was that the same time? Oh, yeah, good question. No, I'm sorry to confuse. So I went to, like, first grade in Bombay. And there was no American school there. There was, like, German and French schools, but no American school. In New Delhi, there's the American Embassy School.

I've been there for years. So we just plugged right into that school, and I did ninth and tenth grade there. So when you, when you, like, actually got to high school in the U.S., because you had been going, you know, to schools all over the world, basically, right? And was it a bit of a culture shock to you? It was American culture? Yeah, so I'd lived two years in the States, seventh and eighth grade in Virginia. That was helpful.

But, you know, in American high school, it's different. You go to an international school. It's a mixture of people. There's no American football. Sports are not. Don't define the social hierarchy as much as they do in the States. You know, it's just the way it is. And so I had sort of these eclectic friends who were like a French guy who was my friend

and a guy who ended up being Bosnian, Muslim was my friend. These were my close friends. And then I had American acquaintances. Come back to the States. You know, it's Georgia, so it's all about American football. So I didn't, and it was a good school. Don't get me wrong, but I didn't play football. I was a swimmer.

So I said, okay, I'm going to do swimming, and that'll be my thing. And that was sort of a, that's not the same as, it's a team sport, but it's not, it's a very individual sport. So I was kind of, that was my clique. And then I did Jay Rotsie, you know, Navy J. Rotsie, and I had some friends there. But by the time you show up in like the fall of 11th grade, you're already behind. All the cliques have been formed. And so I'm like, I've got to get through this and then I'm going to move on with my life. No offense against, you know, North Georgia, great, you know, that northern suburbs of Atlanta.

You know, but time to move on. Yeah. And then what was it the college, had you already decided on the Army by the time you went to VMI? Like, where did you make that decision to go Army? Did you make the decision to go to special forces at the same time? Because you had been exposed to a lot of Marines at the embassies and whatnot. Yeah, so I didn't really, I was aware of the term Green Beret. And I think I had seen the movie, the Green Brays, on projector at one of the embassy parties.

But I didn't know what that meant. I knew there was the army and that they were like infantry and that they did stuff like that. And they had tanks and artillery. And then I knew the Marine Corps was the same. and I had family members who were both sides. So my grandfather was a career sergeant major in the Army, fought in the tail in the Battle of Bulge. I had an uncle that was, you know, wounded in the Korean War at Marine.

So it was a little bit of both. Honestly, the Marine recruiter in Marietta was really good, and he almost got me into the reserves because he's like, hey, you come, do, you know, basic training boot camp at Parasile, and then you'll go to a reserve unit, and then you can go to college or whatever you need to do. do. And I was like, oh, this sounds pretty cool. And I got to say, I was influenced by those movies. Like, I know the Marine Corps says full metal jacket is not representative, but it was

great propaganda. And it drew. I was like, okay, that sounds cool. I think it's very representative. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I, you know, I, uh, I wanted, I love those kind of movies. I love Platoon. I loved all of them. And so anyway, I knew I wanted VMTree, something like that, or combat arms. And, uh, one day I went to this, uh, college fair. I think it was at Oglethorpe University and there was a brochure of BMI and sit it out in other places like that. And I was like, oh, this looks fine. You know, this looks pretty cool. And then I went to some luncheon or dinner that they hosted.

And there was actually, it was a former Green Beret, I remember now, chatting with me. And I know what it was. Then one day I was in the library and I found an old Time Life magazine. And it was Roger Donlan on the cover from was 64, 65. and he had the Medal of Honor. And I was like, ooh, what's this? And I remember going there, and there was those photos of him with the Montanyards, and he was smoking the pipes and that whole indigenous,

Unconventional Warfare thing. And I said, wow, that looks really cool. But it never, I wasn't that far along. I was just sort of get into the military what I wanted to do. And then I thought, well, if I go to VMI, you know, I should apply for an RTC scholarship. Why didn't get a four year? Because those are very few and far between. I got, I ended up getting a three year.

But so I went to VMI on my own dime. the first year and then I got a scholarship and and went from there and it was at some point at v.m. I want to say like my 10th, whatever, sophomore year, my third class year, that I was down in the like bowels of the library again. And I was studying and there's just some pamphlet. It was a brochure or something. And I don't remember exactly what it was. It might have been the SF, some sort of journal. And it had the green berets in there. And I remember flipping through it leaf and through it and then there was the Battle of the Green Beret, you know, written out. And I remember reading it and I said, wow, I got to learn more about this.

And so I eventually did. And then we had – some people may have crossed past with him. We had an RRTC SART major. We had 06 PMS who was, I think, armored at the time. And then we had a Army S.F. guy named Billy Goodson from 10th group – First Battalion, 10th group. He had been – he was scuba qualified he had all the you know all the stuff and man he was a great role model he could pt he was like 40 and he could like pt out pt most of the cadets and so he would do morning pt like three days a week so we'd go out with him and and he was a real role model i want to i want to be like that guy and so that was probably the galvanizing moment but then you know you find out okay so you can't just excess you know go to selection as an officer from you know from based you know

your basic horse, right? You have to go serve three or four years and then be selected later. And so I ended up getting armor. I wanted infantry. I got armor. All right, but it was good enough. It's like, you know, combat arms and interesting and kind of like Patton. I like Patton. So I did that. I did Korea as my first tour up near the DMZ. It was about 10 clicks from the DMZ. Monson, Camp Pelham. That was a good tour. And that was about as close as you could get to combat, right? I mean, I wanted to be deployed and kind of near the danger zone, and that was about as good as it got in 1995. Yeah.

So I was there, I did a year, and then I was fortunate enough to come back, and this was luck and timing, and I got an assignment to 373 armor in the 82nd, which was this one-off battalion that's now disbanded, sadly, that had air-droppable M551-A-1 Sheridan's, and I was lucky I got that. Because it's right there at Bragg. Yeah, it's right there.

at Bragg and so I was there for a couple years. They inactivated the unit. I turned in the company's worth of the tanks. I was like the XO of a Delta company. And then I went over to the cab for a while because it was the only place to put a 12 alpha armor guy. And I did, I think, about just under a year there and then I went to selection. And then the pipeline went from there. So I spent a lot of time at Bragg starting about 96 to 98. And then I graduated the Q course in, I started selection 98, and then I had to go to, you know, you have to go to the captain's career course now. Came back and I graduated December of 99, and then we went to Sears School.

And so I got to group in early 2000. Wow. So you've probably figured like maybe there'd be a Bosnia deployment in your future or something of that nature. It was all about that. It was all the, you know, the JRTC rotations at the time of the late 90s. were, you know, Bosnia I-4-esque. You know, you had, you know, the bad guys were sort of these quasi-insurgents,

and you were escorting convoys and stuff of that nature. And the heroes were the Somalia vets, and in the 82nd, it was all about Panama. The Panama Rangers, yeah. The Panama guys. And in our unit, the Sergeant Major Troxel ended up being the Joint Staff Sergeant Major, he was our first sergeant at one point and he had jumped into Panama so he was he was like he was

we loved him right and little did I know that in several years we would get her own kind of as he called the baptism by fire and yeah so it was all about that and when we got to group the mission of the time was called Desert Spring it was a legacy

of the containment of Saddam if you all remember and they were 90 day rotations to Kuwait so there'd be a brigade armored mech brigade and then there would be an SF slice and we were part of that so we'd do those rotations and those kind of sucked I mean quite frankly I mean it was always like you know really hot and you were cooped up on Doha which was north of Kuwait City and it was like an old warehouse for shipping and it was like all asphalt so like in the middle of the summer it was

just sort of like a you know like a radiator but anyway we went out we did some training with the Kuwaitese I was on an ASOT team. I was on ODA 552 at the time. We were doing the three. And what's an ASOT team for people? Oh, sorry. Yeah. The acronym. So advanced special operations techniques or now they just call advanced special operations. But we were technically called an unconventional urban unconventional warfare team. So the lexicon was a Ruck team, which was like your standard SF team. Then you had the specialty teams, Halo, you had dive teams. And then you, you had the ASO teams. And so I got pull into an ASO team I got called by a guy a warrant named Steve Milar out of the

blue which I was really flattered he called me at the Q-court's he said hey somehow he got you know my my digits from from group because they knew who was coming he said hey do you want to come to our team 522 and we're an ASO team I said oh wow that's very cool honestly what I want to do is go to dive school one be a dive team guy but the fact that some guy some vet from group called me I was like I I can't turn this down. So I ended up going, I did that. My team sergeant was a sergeant, well, at the time, you know, was Tony Pettengill.

He was a master of Pettigel who came out of, kind of came into SF kind of late. I believe it was an E7. He was a drill sergeant, all that kind of stuff. He was really good, a very discipline, great at, you know, physically fit, all that kind of stuff. So he was a really a good role model. And anyway, and so that progressed. Tony moved on, moved and was up with a company for a while before he PCSed. And then after he PCS, I was still on the team.

But what happened was I was coming up at the end of my two years. So this is like, yeah, like the spring of 01. And I just done a PDSS pre-deployment site survey to Uzbekistan for a joint training exchange. It's so-called J-SET. We did the J-Set in Uzbekistan, which was interesting. and I'll come back to it later on. Yeah. Yeah.

But we were in the Fergana Valley. So we were around Afghanistan. We were in that neck of the woods. We trained with the Spetsnaz unit, Uzbek Spetsnazian, which is essentially a legacy of the Soviet specimens, right? So that was interesting. Before I left, I had cobbled the deal with the old battalion commander where I had told him, hey, I want to go dive school.

He said, okay, fine, we'll send you to dive school. We got a gap when a dive team in Alfa con. company first battalion. Now, off a company was going to become the Cree, the SIF. It was in the midst of this transformation. So the team, I don't think it was a paid team, but it was like, hey, you're going to get another team. So a third year, which is not guaranteed. Which is a big deal for an SF captain. Yeah, because the Halo is like, hey, Halo team take a number because you got to, someone's going to knife you in the back to get that team, right? Right. So I, but I really wanted to be a diver, honestly. And he said, okay, it was John Allen, Lieutenant Colonel John

all the time and he's like hey Justin you go you go to dive school you make it I'll put you on an alpha company and and so but he changed command in over the summer while we were deployed I come back and preschool is looming so I had about a month to get myself into shape for preschool and and I knew what was involved so I was like worried and and I was a swimmer but I was still you know I was worried and Colonel Haas Chris Haas was the battalion commander new battalion commander. And he pulled me and he said, hey, look, I need someone really smart to take over his S-4. I understand you had some deal with Colonel Allen, but Colonel Allen's gone, and I got priorities, and you're going to be S-4. And then, and I said, what are you going to say? You're in the

military. Roger, that, sir. And then he goes, but I tell you what, I'm going to let you go to dive school. And I said, well, thank you. Because this conversation occurred, I think, after I finished pre-scova, but before I went to die. Oh, so you already did the hard, I mean, not the Oh, I already like past pre-scuba, right? So that's like the gate to get in. Right. And he was like, I'll let you go to dive school. But when you come back, you're on the staff. And I said, okay, fine, sir, that's fair enough.

So we went down to dive school, and while I was down to dive school, 9-11 happened. And then everything changed from there. Guys, before we continue on with the story, we do want to give you guys a heads up about some of the sponsors for this show. We got a ORCA coolers. And I got some stuff here to show you. We got some thermosos, and we got this. Well, you got that there, Justin. Oh, thank you.

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So SAP gear, honestly, they're pretty badass. You guys should check them out. They have all kinds of apprehension avoidance gear. They have these. awesome little things. So, well, this is a little bracelet you wear, obviously, but, so I always keep a window breaker in my car, right, in case, you know, you get trapped in your car. Getting out is not, you can't just bust tempered glass. You can't just bust the car windows. So I normally carry one of those trigger, or have one of those, like, little trigger guns to, to break the glass. But you

might not always be able to reach those. So one of the things they sell is this GTFO bracelet. It's like eight bucks um and really especially if you're driving on icy roads i like just throw this thing on because what it what it has is it has one of those i don't know if it's carbon fiber what it they have the the video on youtube but it's got a little i assume it's like carbon whatever it is but um it's a little bead that will break tempered glass so when you have it and then you uh kind of like a slingshot yeah you pull it back like a slingshot and you pull it back like a slingshot And it'll break out the glass on your window. Hit down in the bottom of the corner.

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While you're down in Dodd School, 9-11 happens. What are you guys thinking and feeling as you're watching that unfold on every single television channel on the country that day? So what's weird is we were actually underwater when the event happened. Wow. Because you do, at least you used to, a morning dive and like afternoon dive and night dive. So you had like three evolutions the day, and we were on Dregors, the LAR5. So we were closed circuit. We were like in the fourth week, I think, of the POI, some three and a half weeks in.

It was a five-and-a-half week POI at the time. And I remember we came off the dive, and so they got this little area behind the schoolhouse where you freshwater rinse your stuff. So we're in there, clean it up, and there's the instructors walking around. And they're like, hey, you know, and I overheard him talking about a terrorist attack. And, but no one had said anything, no one had pulled aside. And I, I remember asked one of the instructors, I said, hey, sorry, you know, what's the deal with this terrorist tech?

He was, oh, you haven't heard? I was, no, no, we haven't. He goes, well, you'll find out soon enough. And then at some point, one of them came to me and said, my fiancé had called the dive school. And I didn't give her the number of the dive school. Why would I do that, right? I'd give her my cell number or whatever I had, I guess we had a cell phone at time, which I thought was weird.

And anyway, all of a sudden, they're like, everybody, get their ass up into the classroom. So we stowed our dregors, we went up to the classroom, and one of the instructors came in, and he popped in a VHS tape, and it was a VHS taping of the second plane. And it

kicked on with the explosion, all the fuel, and to me, my first reaction was it kind of, it didn't look real, it kind of, I don't know, like a Hollywood. Hollywood explosion, right? Big food gas explosion, and then he said, gentlemen, our nation's under attack, or something to that effect.

training will be suspended until further notice, and we're going to guard Fleming Key. So in Key West, it's like a, you know, there's a very long spit at the end of Key West, if you look at it from, you know, like looking south and north. The very end of it is basically where the dive school is. And so we had to patrol the area, I think a day or two we did it. And some guys were in Boston Whalers. So it was just sort of surreal. You're in UDT shorts, which are not the best shorts in the world. shirts with mag lights and tivas walking around looking for scuba bin laden and uh and then meanwhile the guys

are motoring in the boston whale i was jealous i want to be out on the boston whaleers but we're just walking around you know the sand fleas are getting you in the little fire ants or whatever and and then finally i think the second day they said okay we're going back to training but there was no hey you're going your group's going to do this there was none of that it was all sort of news blackout one other thing I remember this is kind of funny the next morning it was like September the 12th I was the guy who had to run the detail to put the flag up right so it's like 5.30 in the morning still

it's like you know dawn and we put the flag up and I said hey let's put it up and bring it to half-mas you know sure enough we did that and then really like three minutes later this I don't remember his name but he was the Navy XO he was a Navy officer He came up, he looked up, and he said, why is it a half-mask or something like that? And I was like, you know, I'm like, he's like, have you received official notification, put the flag at half-mast? I said, no, I just kind of assumed that was the right thing to do.

And then he said, we'll put it back up until we get, you know, the notification. I said, fair enough. So anyway, I just distinctly remember that. And we all kind of had this perplexed look at each other. But anyway, we continued and finished the training, and they had to compress it because we had lost a day or two. and then we graduated on the 20th of September and I think the day before I called group in the three was Mark Schwartz at the time

Major Mark Schwartz at the time he picked up the phone and I said hey I'm down here coming back home tomorrow graduating what's going on and he said something like you know come it was come in Saturday morning so we get back Friday night come in Saturday morning see the battalion commander so we get back one of my teammates picked me up at Campbell or at the airport

in Nashville. I remember his dad was driving. Like I'd never been his dad. He's like, oh, guys, I wish I was young again. I want, you know, he was a Vietnam vet. He was, you know, everybody was speculating as to what was going to happen, but no one knew anything. So I get back to group or get back to Campbell and I was living in Oak Grove at the time, actually, and paying 500 bucks a month for my apartment. I ended up going in to see Colonel Haas in the morning, Lieutenant and he said, hey, bud, first thing he said, and that's how we would speak. Like, hey, bud, first thing's first, you're not going to be the S-4. And just for people who don't know, like, you thought you were going to take a third year on a team, which is a big deal for an officer, a captain, right? Yeah, it's like a great privilege on or whatever. It's good, you know, you want to do that. And then he comes in and tells you that you're going to be running logistics.

Basically. Yes. Logs. So I don't know whether I'm getting that job because. I'm getting relegated or I'm getting that job because I really am smart. Right, right. I don't know. I think my company commander, I think the companies had to cough someone up and they said,

well, SAP will be good at that job with numbers. I don't know. I have no idea. So I ended up, so I get into his office and he's like, you're not going to be the S4. He goes, I'm going to lose you for a while. And he said, so you need to go up and see the group commander later today. but we will high-five each other on top of a T-55 in Kabul or something like that. He's just kind of, you know, that was his thing.

He's like, oh, right, bud, and he's kind of like that, and he sort of, I think he hugged me or he slapped me in the back or something like that. And anyway, I left, and then I went up to group, I think later in the morning, and Colonel John Mahon was the group commander. And I was waiting in the outside, and they called us in, and all of a sudden these other guys showed up. So it was me, it was another captain, who I knew from the Q-Corps, good guy, and three warrant officers. And we went in, so there's five of us. Mahalans like, sit down. We sit down and he said, I have to send, I have to pick three of you to go to the interagency, the CIA, to conduct an unconventional warfare assessment, then ex-fil-out and brief the ODAs, and then they will infiltrate.

So you're doing what we would call the pilot team thing, which was the kind of team I was on. But the way they were doing was different. They didn't have a whole SF UW team or ASAT team go in. It was we were going to augment an agency team. Were these other five guys also from ASAT teams? I think they were, I don't, you know, that's a good question. I know at least one was. And then the other captain, he was, I think,

think he had been on an urban UW team, but I don't, he hadn't been to ASOT, neither at I at that point. I had been to Broken Axel, but I hadn't been ASOT. And I don't know about the other guys, but the two other warrants were very senior. They were like threes or fours. I thought that was very senior at the time. They were older guys. And there was a younger warrant, and there was two captains. So we're like in our late 20s, and maybe they're like in their late 30s. And anyway, so I assumed, well, if I was Kromahaw, and I picked the season warrant officers because they got all the experience and they're trusted guys,

trusted agents, so to speak. But anyway, he said, okay, and he went around the table and he asked some questions like cursory questions, like, does anybody have any experience with, you know,

interagency? And I said, well, you know, I did, I was an intern when I was in college. And he kind of, I'm not sure that was a right answer.

He was like, okay. And then, and then everybody else was like, you know, I did this, whatever. And then he said,

said okay come back this afternoon he goes go back to your battalions we'll get back to you and so it was very clear like he had to make a decision out of the five who the three were going to be so we left and and then we're called back and then it was like 1500 that day and i just remember he was major bob mcdow the time we called him angry bob mcdow good guy but he was very like he was a strong ex-o right and he was a guard dog right so he would guard the colonel uh assiduously and we go up there and he's what are you doing here we're told to come up here sir he's like all right just sit over there so he calls us in and uh it was only three of us this time the other two had not been called back and then he said you guys are going you're going uh i think so this was like

saturday evening he goes you're going monday you're going to dc you're going to get briefed up you're going to liaise and then we're going to go from there and i think we actually went to socks in all the way so it was like a two-phase trip. And that was it. So we got our stuff together over the weekend. We flew up to down to Tampa. We did some meetings in the J-3. I remember I think it was Lieutenant Colonel Lieutenant Colonel Shlump at the time. Really good guy and he kind of, they briefed us up. But, you know, it was what we knew about Afghanistan was so. Very little, right? Very little, right? So it was sort of like, okay and then we went up to headquarters and um that's when things got interesting because you know

it was they were also in a state of flux too everybody at langley yeah yeah i mean everybody was trying to figure out what we're going to do and we're outsiders so we have to sort of be assimilated and minded and you know we're not we're not from that organization so we were there for a couple days. We got, you know, treated really well and, you know, but what are you going to do? You're not, you know, you don't have a desk job there, right? You're a green beret that's hanging out with the Starbucks coffee cup that's now a spit cup, right? So I don't, you know, I think we eventually decided that we just keep the Copenhagen in the car. So went back to group a couple days later and went to brief Cromahall and he, we explained to him.

what we knew. It was very much like, hey, we're going to come back to D.C. And then we're going to be put in an OML, an order of March for teams going in. And that was it. But in the interim, we were to wait to be called on. And so the order of March, so to speak, had not been decided yet. And so we were just on call. And I remember the guys in the three shop, there was this a guy who worked at the tree shop who was detailed or tasked to help us. He was phenomenal because we'll say who, but one of the three of us got to Nashville airport in the next trip and it forgot our passport. He went all the way back to Campbell and got it before the flight left. It was amazing. I don't know how fast he went, but he could play 100 miles an hour.

But anyway, we were called back within two days. So it was like, hey, wait a week or two, and then a week or two became two days. So what I did was I packed everything I had that was not discernible as military gear. And then everything else would be procured later. And it was weird because I saw all my kit, you know, L.C. and all that kind of stuff that I wanted to take. And they said, don't bring that. So I left my issue. And that was a little weird. And in retrospect, I wish I brought it. But at the time, it made sense. So we get to, we get to headquarters. We get to D.C. And they, they, said okay you need to be outfitted so we ended up going out to uh rei one night and i think i spent like i don't know thousands of dollars buying everything imaginable and it ended up packing it into one

i don't know like a osprey kind of three-day pack or something or hiking pack which is you know you know relatively small and then i had a more of an expedition pack you know that was uh that was that was filled out with different kit. We bought some silly stuff. I remember I bought glacier glasses because I assumed we were going to be in the midst of snow and high altitude, all that kind of stuff.

It's all a mystery at this time. Yeah, it was totally occurring cognita. You're outfitted like you're going to go scale Everest. That in our mind's eye, that was what it was going to be like. And so we bought some weird stuff. But anyway, we packed it all. But at the end of the day, it all fit into two bags.

And we got there and it was so, it was sudden, such a state of flux that from one hour to the next, you didn't really know what you were going to be told. And we were not in the decision cycle. We were the help, right, that they brought in to be liaisons and sort of military advisors, for like a better word. I remember we got a brief at one point, you know, about bin Laden and all that kind of stuff. And at the time, we didn't know where it was.

and they had an idea, but they were trying to keep us busy, and they sort of gave us some briefs and stuff like that. And then one day, the next day, I think we were there, about the third day, that second time. So this is around the end of September, probably around the early October. They said, hey, you're leaving tomorrow. And that was it.

And so we had to rush out and get some last-minute things. And then we boarded a vehicle and took off from me. there. And next to you know, we were in Germany. And then from Germany, we went to Uzbekistan. So had you been assigned to a paramilitary team at this point? Yes. But I didn't quite, it's interesting. I didn't quite understand like how they were structured, right? All I knew is that, okay, there's teams. They had one, Gary Schrohn's team was already in the Panshire Valley at the very end of the, uh, the very end of, uh, the team. September, sometime, I forget the exact date, maybe 26th, somewhere in there, 22nd, September,

last weeks of September, they were already there. So they're like, hey, we got guys into the north. But that had been an area that they had iteratively gone to meet with Massoud before he was killed. So that was somewhat of an established relationship. Dostom was like this shadowy figure that they did, you know, was out there and Ishmael Khan and all these guys. And I remember seeing him on a map, like here are the Northern Alliance. guys, and this is the sit-temp enemy, you know, Northern Alliance. Very general, broad conceptual. So we get to, so I remember getting the vehicle the day, the evening that we were going to fly out. And that's when I met Mike Span. Some of the other guys I had seen around, but there wasn't a lot of

time to frattenize, right? So I sort of met him. And I remember I sat next to Mike riding in this van, and that's when I first spoke to him. And he's kind of a quiet guy. And so I had to sort of, you know, work out a little bit. And then we got to know. He was, oh, you're, you know. Well, he knew I was from fifth group. I didn't know anything about him.

And he told me, hey, I was a Marine, you know, I was an Anglico guy. And we started chatting. And then we get. And so we flew together. And I got to know him. And so we kind of bonded. I mean, everybody did. But I, for whatever reason, Mike and I talked a lot.

And he was roughly my age. I wanted to say he was like three, maybe four years. old to me. So he was like a 92 guy graduated college. I graduated 94. So he was two or three years old than me. So we get to Uzbekistan and then things got, you know, I mean, it was all we're putting it together. I met J.R. Seeger who we ended up being our team leader. And he was already there. And so he had the plan as best we knew. But at the time, I didn't know that we were going to meet with Dostom, that we were, our mission was to link up with Dostom. until maybe around the second or third day we were there.

And maybe it was just I didn't ask. But I was really the gun guy. So we had these AKMSs that were, you know, meant new. They were good guns. And we had some pistols and radios and stuff. And so we set about getting that organized. The commo stuff was more work because there's, you know, that was the first time I'd seen satellite capable embedder.

Mm-hmm. The embedder was still kind of new at the time. So I was like, oh, what's that? You know, and then we had to put the evasion plan of action together. And that's when I worked with Mike quite a bit. And I got to know him even better. We were sitting in this warehouse. And we didn't have enough maps.

We had some jog maps. We had some 100, 1 over 100,000 DMA maps. But they were incomplete. So I'm putting them together and I'm like hey Mike this is incomplete So this is not really good because what we wanted to do is outfit every individual with at least a jog map Of the appropriate area right right but you know invariably it's like gonna be on a scene right So you're gonna eat two maps or tape them together or something like that So Dave Tyson who's in the book of course

He was there and I told him oh man we don't have maps so he goes I got some Russian maps They're probably pretty good they're they're in the back you know in my my office so you brought the scroll of these old Soviet maps. And I remember they were like red inky map, red brownish. They were really good. The relief, all the contour intervals, all that kind of stuff was was good. The problem with those maps were they use a different middle system. So I forget what it was, but the 160th guys and I talked about this. It's like if you call in coordinates off that map, you'll be five miles off is what they told. It's not UTM. The grid sign. Absolutely. It's not U-TM. So, but for terrain association purposes, it was okay.

Right. And so we pieced that together and had a more complete map set. So when you went in and when you were doing like the radios, were you guys on agency fills or military fields? Like who were you reaching back to? Yeah. Well, we had our own internal like interagency sort of hierarchy, right? So I was told, hey, you are under our authority. you are not under Colonel John Mahalans authority

and then by law that that was correct, right? Right. That's the way it works, Title 50 versus Title 10. And so I'm very much part of the team and be honest, you know, honestly, I was the low-ranking guy on the team. So I was just there to really do the needful and help out where they needed help.

And it became very clear that Colonel Mahalun originally expected like this comprehensive unconventional warfare assessment like you were taught to do in training. Like an area assessment sort of thing. Exactly. And in fact, that's what I had. I had the template for an area assessment that I, I don't know, I got from somewhere.

I had it on a, I can't remember. I had it. I had it printed out. But that, it became evident that the timeline, the two-week timeline in the next fill, that was not going to happen and that things were much more compressed and accelerated and expedited. And so my task then became more to serve. rapidly survey LZs, HLZs and drop zones to get the guys in and get both humanitarian assistance and basically what became our resupply in. And so that was that was my task.

So you had reached back to the military with with like your radio. No, okay. No, it was all, you know, all interagency that they, there was their hierarchy, their chain of command. I was, you know, a minion in that, you know, I was basically an outsider attached to that. Meanwhile, fifth group is down in Uzbekistan and they are, you know, setting up shop there. Right. And so the fact that we ended up co-locating and we ended up working together. So a lot of that distinction was, was mollified because we were there and everybody was part of one team and it worked really well.

But yeah, if it came down to it, if someone said, you know, if someone said, you know, said, hey, SAP, you need to do this for, you know, I don't know, Max Bowers or Mitchell or Major Mitchell, something like that, I could say, well, no, actually, I don't work for you, but they never, that never came about. That was, you know, theoretical. Did you notice a difference at this point in time? Because now you're, you know, in this, you know, agency team. And you're also co-located with, you know, Fifth Group, which is still, even though they're, the special operations are still part of the Army. And the Army is not a fast-moving organization. did you notice a difference between the flexibility and mobility of the two different outfits?

Yes. So I think it's true. And a lot of people on the agency side of the house will tell you, hey, we're much more nimble. I agree with that wholeheartedly. But part of that is you're smaller, you're more flexible. You have a, let's just say, the way they develop people is very much like more individually focused. So that makes sense and they can move on a dime. But it's a, like a lightweight fighter versus a heavyweight. So you have a lot of movement and you can do this and that. But if you want to pound somebody, that's who you call in the heavyweight. So group pretty, you know, relative to the conventional force, pretty nimble.

And maybe not as nimble as some units, but it's pretty nimble. So, yeah, it was definitely, I saw that. But the reality was at the end of the day, when we ended up going in, we went on 160th aircraft. So that's when I realized that all that's great, but there are certain capabilities that only the military has.

And it's amazing capability that came out of the ashes of Desert One and we're only country in the world and could do that stuff. And that was really amazing because at first, just quickly an anecdote, when I first got there to D.C., they were speculating on infill

rat line mechanisms. One was, hey, we'll take you'll be brought in by Hilo in southern Afghanistan and then you'll wear burqas. That was at one point that was kind of spitballed. At one point we were going to go in a truck that was modified with hiding a hidden compartment. Then we were going to go on other aircraft and then finally General Franks, you know, long stretch, coughed up the aircraft to do it and they were 160 the aircraft. DAPs. They're direct action penetrators,

MH60s. Could you tell us a little bit about the team you were assigned to how many guys were there? What were these guys like? I mean, who were they? And you're experiencing sort of all this for the first time as an Army dude, as a green suitor hanging out in

a black world, I guess you could say. And that's sort of run up to insertion. So they were all, the first thing, they were all prior service guys. They're all military guys. I mean, every last one. of them. So, you know, JR had been an entry officer. You know, Dave had been in the military. Alex had this story career as a sergeant major. You know, Andy, they were all like, they were

all prior service. So that, you know, that was a prerec, right? So we had all these guys. And then JR was kind of an outsider they brought in from another area. But they brought him in because he was known to be a guy who worked well with the military, and he had in fact been a guy, I think he had briefed Schwarzenoff in Desert Storm. So he was well known, and I think Hank Crumpton picked him, hand-picked him to do that job because he was like a GS-15 at the time. So, yeah, it was amazing that as quickly as they put the team together and as quickly as they shuffled the order of March, because we were not originally going to be the first, one of the first teams in. Of course, Garrett Shrone's team was in

but it was sort of up in the air and then we were moved from the back of the formation so to speak to the front and to this day I think Alex knows a reason I don't know why but that's when things changed and all of a sudden the next day we're it's like hey tomorrow we're going to the airport and so so yeah

but they were all good guys really good sharp guys and it took a while to get to know them but I realized it right off the bat that, you know, that this was, however the team was put together, they'd done something right. And they always said, you know, Jared would say,

well, it's good to be the first, one of the first teams in because, you know, there's certain advantages to that, and it's everything's new and nothing's established, right? You have an ability to shape things. Yeah. Indeed. And so that was cool. Yeah, so, and Scott had been in Mogadishu,

and I learned later that he had gone to, VMI like me, but he was like four or five years old than me. So he had graduated before I got there. So that was a little bit of, there was some affinity there. But anyway, yeah, so they were good. They trusted me to do my piece and they had their peace to do. And J.R. knew more about Afghanistan than anybody had met. And then Dave, of course, knew tons about Afghanistan, particularly northern Afghanistan. And he had the language skills that were phenomenal. So that was indispensable. So we had those two guys. We had Alex, who was a Sard Major, who was, like, you know, looking after the team. And then you had these younger guys who were all, you know, champ in the bit to do something.

They had me, who was the gun guy and the HLZ Pathfinder, really a Pathfinder kind of guy. And that was it. And we were there with Fifth Group, which had a very kind of expeditionary presence of the GP mediums and so-called pissholes and all that kind of stuff. It just been established. It was a little rough. And we isolated for, I think, three days. So there was a delay. And then on the, you know, I think it was, you know, it's in the book, of course, the night of the, I think of the 15th over 16th, period of darkness was when we went in in October.

So, and we went on 160th birds. And there's a whole story in the book about how the DAPs were picked and the 47s didn't go. At the time, I didn't really think about it. but later on I met the guys and I realized, yeah, that is somewhat, you know, weird, yeah, weird, right? It was good. It was uneventful, uh, uneventful flight, uh, down to the Uzbek border. We left right after dusk, I think it was like 9 o'clock when we went wheels up. And I remember talking to Carolema Hall and he was standing on the tarmac and this is, you know, you know, like right, you know, right at dusk. And, you know, I'd been pounding water because I get hydrated.

I don't want to get shot down. I want to be ready. You know, all this kind of stuff that's going through your mind, all the various contingencies that can occur. And then all of a sudden I had to go to a bathroom, like horribly. I ran over there, went to the bathroom, came back, and he's just staring at me. And, you know, he's pretty tall. And he's just staring at me, and it was really, it made me a little uncomfortable.

And then I kind of took a step closer to him, and he goes, don't get killed. I'm like, don't get killed. Just like that. And he said these big hands. He said, don't get killed. I said, I try not to let you down. And then he left. And then we got on the aircraft.

We rehearsed, you know, on one load, offload, all that kind of stuff. And they were, you know, right after dark, we're up. And I want to say it was two and a half hours, maybe ish, three hours. I can't remember. But I found out later that was the first combat aerial refueling. In theater. Of an MH60 in theater or ever, combat. Oh, wow.

because I guess it qualified as combat at that point, right? So, and I was sitting in the back and I had PBS 7s. I mean, we went in pretty light. I mean, we had AKMSs, Glock's, two backpacks, you know, med bag and med kit, you know, the thigh thing with the morphine and all that kind of the Oshamans. And that was it, you know, and not a lot of food because we were going to be relying on the Afghans, which actually worked out fine. And I'm looking through the PBS 7s and I see this 47 chasing us in the back, which I didn't know was there. I'm like, I just kind of wondered, why is he following us? Because 160th, they didn't explain anything.

They're like, hey, we got the infill. You guys just sit back and ride. And J.R. had the headset on. I did. So I don't know what was being said. So we're just sitting there and I'm enjoying the ride and was smooth. And all of a sudden, I look out in the distance and the lights of what was Uzbekistan, Uzbekistan. just end and then it's just black beyond that south of that it was just dark and I'm like I remember

I remember thinking that has to be Afghanistan and then there was a little shimmer off the Amadaria river because there's a little bit of loom that must be the river and then you know like a minute later the crew chief was like passed back hey we're in Afghanistan and we look down and that part of Afghanistan north of Mazar near the Uzbek border they have a lot of sand dunes and so I remember We're seeing that and then we hit the mountains and went in another maybe 30, 45 minutes and then we infilled. And it was unique in the sense that normally as we all know, you know, you kind of flare in like that and you land, right?

It's more efficient. But all of a sudden it was like we stopped and then we just elevated straight down. And I had never done that from that kind of altitude. And I remember looking to either side of the aircraft and it was sheer like rock face. It was a gorge. What the clearance was, the rotor disk space between the rock and the road. or disk space, but it wasn't much. And we went straight down and we landed and then we got out and we all had our little duties and set up a perimeter. And then we talked to the crew chief and thumbs up.

And there was two birds and the offset like that. And then they left. They were like, bye, we unloaded our stuff and that was it. And they were gone. And then as soon as you know that, you know, as soon as you go in on an air assault, there's, you know, the tumult of the engines and all that. And they'll prop rotor wash. And then they're gone and it's silent. Yeah, dead silence. It's just silent. And then you're sort of like, okay, this is one I'm supposed to do Sills.

And then I remember looking through my nods and there's these Afghans. There's just like a wall of them. And there's some horses and they're sort of naying and all that kind of stuff. And there's this one big guy because DOS is a little bigger than everybody else. He's at least six foot, I think. And he comes out and then he goes toward J.R. and J.R. meets up with them. And they shake hands. They start chatting a little bit in, I guess, Dari.

And from there, we picked up everything and we were ushered quickly into a meeting. And that was a big meeting. And then I remember J.R. and Dave and I, and everybody was sort of arguing over whether we should take our weapons in. Because, you know, it's a little bit awkward, but hey, we're in Afghanistan. We don't know these guys. Oh, by the way, Dostom's reputation wasn't the best. So, you know, it's like, I don't know, man. And so basically, we decided to take our weapons in.

And I remember sitting down and you're doing the Indian, you know, the sort of cross-legged thing. And they were chatting and it was all done in Dari. And so J.R. was really good about explaining and gisting what was going on. But I remember I sitting next to Mike and we were told to take notes. And so I was trying to take notes. And I had to listen to what Jair was relaying to us. And that went on for about an hour. And then it was like, okay, let's get you settled in.

There was a little claw down the, you know, a little ways down. And we'll get a couple hours of sleep and we'll get up in the morning and get busy. And it was like, you're going to go do the HLZ. You're going to identify an HLZ survey. It sent it up. Got it. So next morning we woke up and they brought a vehicle. I think that there's a picture in the book.

Maybe there isn't. But it was a, you know, jingly truck, whatever you want to call it. It packed with RPG rounds. They were in these like burlap sacs. or some sort of sack that you put grain in or something like that. Maybe it isn't, isn't it? Is this it? It's that, it's that probably that truck, but it's a different photo.

That's probably one of those trucks, something like that. And that was the truck we rode to what, towards the front line, which is the crow flies probably wasn't more than 10, 15 clicks, maybe 10, 15 miles. No more than that, but on the roads there, the road was riverbed, riverbed, Riverbed was a road that took forever. But I distinctly remember Dave, his Uzbek, because the guy was Uzbek, if I remember, was so good, he was just rapping with the guy talking to him. And then he would joke and the guys they were laughing and they're telling jokes and all that.

And I'm trundled along there with my AK. And then we get to this day he was the town. We got out. We met with, you know, the local sub-commander who was one of Dostom's lieutenants. We had a discussion about force array and how many troops he had and all this kind of stuff. And then I went out with Dave and, you know, I surveyed HLZ based on the, it was the SWICGTA that they gave you, that fold out, that trifold thing. And I just used that and then we sent it up later on in the day. And that was the HLZ survey.

And then they came back and said, just marked the hazards with an higher stroke. And we got the rest. And then we went up that, I think the next day, was when we first got on horses. So they had a couple of vehicles, but not many, to move, you know, precious cargo for like a better word, you know, RPGs and rounds and whatever. But everybody else was either footbound or,

they had like a couple of Hyluxes, but mainly it was horses. And so they showed up and they said, we're going to the front line and you're going to meet Dostum. And again, and we're going to talk through some stuff. So we went up to the front line. It seemed like about a three-hour horse movement. I was excited, you know, it was cool riding a horse. I wasn't a great equestrian person.

I had been on horses before, but not much. And Jared knew a lot about horses. So we went up there, and the dumb thing I did, I wore my three-day assault pack with my AK. So riding on a horse, the one thing I remember, wearing a backpack's suboptimal, because you're just going to stress a lot of muscles. You don't normally stress.

And then the AK thing, any rifle, The magazine beats against you when you move, and so there's a way we configured it, so it would rest under our thigh, and it was somewhat accessible, but it didn't beat your leg, because if you had allowed it to beat your leg, your leg would be bruised and raw. So we got up to this kind of a giant, I guess it was a mountain, maybe like 6,000 feet, somewhere in that altitude. It wasn't too high. But there was this giant gorge, the Daray Sioux Valley, that separated. It's like something out of a cowboy movie, like a cliff or Indiana Jones where they go off the end of the cliff. It was that kind of precipice. And on the other side were the Taliban.

And you could see them. They were little, you know, ant-sized figures, but you could see them through binos. And I remember Dostom had Lazy W. Soviet-style defensive positions dug in, like a trench line with latrines and everything coming off. And then he had a command bunker with a stove and everything. And we went in there and we met with him. And Jair and Dostom spoke at length about the strategy and what they were going to do. And he had this map that someone had drawn by hand. It was like a special.

Like they'd taken a map and then they had made their own special. That was like the size of maybe this beige padding there. And that was the special for the area. And then we, you know, after that we went back. And then the ODA came in, I think, the next night. So it was an interval of like we're on the ground about three days, I think, and then ODA-595 came in. They came on on 47s. And that was around one or two in the morning, somewhere in there.

And it was straight up, you know, iron bust saw or strobe, whatever I had, I think I had a strobe. And they came in, they landed and got off. There was Andy Marshall. I kind of knew from Group was on the team. and he's funny he's just a funny guy and he came off and I said something like

welcome to Afghanistan you know it's kind of a little bit like the Stone Age here right you know it's just not you know you're it's going to be a little rough and he had been a Somalia and he said oh no no worry I've seen worse before

I was in I was in Somalia for you know 90 whatever it was 5 or three or what I think it was three so I was like okay so you know anyway so we set them in to the claw which became known the alamo. I didn't call it that, but someone named it that. And it was just a

standard Afghan claw with a I guess you call it an artesian well in the center that kind of it was a cistern type of thing where we procured water from. That was the other thing. The water situation that was a huge limb factor. So we showed up, I had the reverse

osmosis, RBI pump. That was not like nowadays is like this big. And I'm like furiously like pumping the thing in the morning. And then finally Mark the medic was like, okay, this is not going to work. He goes, what we're going to do is the volume. Yeah, yeah, thank you.

The volume of water we need, we're just going to bleach it. And so we did. And then everybody, the brooms smelled like an indoor pool because everybody's off-gassing core. But the water was pure. Right. And, but yeah, so that's where we stayed. We put the ODA in there.

And the next, that was late at night. the next morning, doostom showed up. He said he'd be there at 8. He showed up like 715 or 7.30. I think he did that on purpose to offer, you know, to sort of keep, let us know he was the boss, right? And the ODI wasn't ready. And so they were scrambling to put their stuff together.

I mean, their LCEs, I don't know, weighed 60, 70 pounds. They had Pdm, you know, M67 grenades, you name it. They had it pursuit to term munitions and ammo and water. And so we were scrambling to help them. And then the Afghans had brought mules that we had requested, or donkeys actually, and horses. And then they took the heavy stuff, the rucks, you know, the medics rucks, stuff like that, and they put it, you know, on either side.

And they did that, lashed them down. Howard they did that, I remember watching them do it. And then everybody pretty much rode with their LCE on a horse that had been provided by the Afghans. But Dostom was so frustrated initially that day. I just remember that morning that Dave was a little bit excited, too. He's like, hey, Dostom's getting pissed, man. We need to move out. And I said, okay, he goes, go talk to the team, man.

I said, Dave, they can only move so fast, right? Look at the rucks. They're like 100 pounds, you know. He goes, okay, man, but he's getting pissed. And so sure enough, Dostom barked out something in Uzbek, and then he just rode off with his little entourage, right? And they left. And he's like, I told you, man, he's pissed.

I said, well, he's not going anywhere until we bring in the close air support. so he can just be pissed, right? That's good, you know, sorry, dost him. So we eventually got up to the front line and everything worked out. But I think there were some hiccups earlier on that I'm sure Mark Nuch could talk about, but they were trying to call in, if I recall, they were trying to talk the guys on the target. So they got air pretty quick. I mean, the thing I remember about that era from like 9-11 through probably December,

it was like riding a tsunami of anger. And you were like this big wave surf guy on the edge of it. And you didn't want to wipe out because you just knew that there was a thousand other people that would take your job in a second. And I know that carriers, the plane started going back still with bombs on. That was the wrong answer. And so there was a lot, a little bit of tension early on about that. But that was we were just, the team was just getting their groove on.

they're getting warmed up. And they eventually, they all augmented them with an STS guy. And then things really started going well. But the first time I remember, because we were sitting up there and Dostom had this carpet, like a little Afghan carpet. And on top of it, he had his radio operator, I called him. I forget his name. And he had stuff like something you buy at Radio Shack, like a scanner and all that kind of stuff and powered by car batteries. And they were scanning the freaks Dave talked. Dave was listening and he could understand and he would you know, the

Talbs would talk in the clear and they pick up their freak and then Dustin was sitting there listening and he's like picking his teeth listening he's like give me the handset and he was like hey and then you start cursing him out and they're like who the hell is this and then they go back and forth in this sort of sophomoric

banter back and forth Yeah it's funny they talk shit to each they talk shit to each other on the radio but then they were respectful to each other like he said get your commander on or something like that. I remember Dave saying, and he was actually at one point speaking to the Talib commander. And they were very polite like, hey, sir, how are you? You know, this unfortunate situation and, you know, and Beddosa was a little more aggressive because he had the upper hand and he was talking shit. But the other guy was very deferential, you know. It was kind of weird,

kind of Afghan way of war, you know. Right, right. But anyway, that won't for a while, but I was quickly task organized with Mike and Mark, the medic, to go to Bamion. And then another team under Scott, an element, went over to link up with Muhammad Atah to bring in another interagency team and an SF team, which became 534. So things were quickly evolving. And so JR was like, okay, we're going to break up into three teams. Alex and I will stay here with Dostom, you know, the, you know, the principal. And then, Scott, you're going here and, you know, Mike Span, you're going to be in charge

of his team and you're going to bomb an unlink with Mr. Kareem Kalee, who was, you know, the leader of the Hazara people. And I didn't know much about Hazara and people, and I didn't know, certainly didn't know anything about Kareem Kalee. So we looked up and then his, Mr. Sultanei was his sort of emissary slash driver slash interlocutor. who I didn't know all the time. Years later, I helped get him back to the States, but that's another story. But he helped, he moved us from the Dariusu Valley all the way to Yacalang Valley, which is west of Bamiyan.

So the Tauv's had Bamiyan at the time. So we crossed from the Dariusu F valley all the way up into this, more or less, the geographic center of Afghanistan. And then we passed by Bandae Amir, that famous lake that people back. and the 70s hippies would go to and stuff like that. And then we ended up linking up with Mr. Karim Kalili and Yacalang. And then that was Mike's kind of first trip alone away from the main team. So it was a big deal to him, right? And so I was there to support him.

Mark was there for medical coverage. And we were there alone for a while. And that was weird because I remember I probably never do this again in Afghanistan, but we were doing like eight-hour shifts, right, 8, 3 times 8, 24. But then we said, ah, we got a little lazy, quite frankly. So, well, we just, you know, shut down from whatever hour or whatever hour and sleep. Everybody slept.

I look back on that. That was trained not to do that, and you did it. And fortunately, nothing happened. We ended up bringing in an OGA team, and then we brought in an ODA, and then our mission there was over. And we had some comms issues that we fixed, but man, like for Mike, that was huge because if we could make comms, we were dead in the water, you know, for him at least. And so we fixed that, fortunately. How were, how was it like interfacing with the Hazar? Because one of the main issues in Afghanistan is all the different ethnicities.

And I know that traditionally, like the Hazar, they've been really kicked around by, in Afghanistan. itself, right? So did they look at it as a freeing Afghanistan or were they just trying to protect their own area? You know, I'll say my first impression on the Hazara were they're very quiet

like as a subculture or a culture very quiet people. Someone referred to them as like laid back like the southern Californians of Afghanistan. But they were very, I don't know, meek is the right word, but they were very

kind of chill people. And so it was hard to get to know and they're kind of quiet and they weren't, the postions you can tell they're just a more aggressive culture because they're the dominant culture, right? For them it was like,

hey, we've been downtrodden and beaten for hundreds of years, literally, you know, really starting badly in the late 1800s. And so they just wanted to protect their sort of ancestral seat there as best they could. Of course, regained

bomb on and then regained some of the villages that went up the Dariusuf. So what I did know at the time I learned later, that Dostom's area was not the Dariusu Valley. He was the, whatever, the most effective combat leader, but the area we were in when we infilled initially in Dehi, that was basically a Hazara area. And then further up, and I glossed over this,

but we had an excursion to Taliban, the first Taliban prisoners, and we had, I think anyone had seen on the American side, and it was through a village called Bizarry Shukte, which was a Hazar village that had been raised. And I remember it was burnt, I mean, like something you see in Ukraine now, it was just burnt, destroyed, and the Hazar people were like, hey, you know, the Talbs came through,

they came all the way up as far as they could, they burn everything, and then they left, and they did other unspeakable things. So the Tsar were like, I don't know, just, they knew that they had, they were at a disadvantage. and that all it was all they could do to ally with someone strong, make an alliance with the Uzbeks and the, you know, Tajiks. And that was their key to survival.

And Kareem Kululi was a very quiet guy, very kind of studious guy. He looked studious. He had glasses and kind of like professor type, kind of very thoughtful guy, very quiet. You know, he's very clear. We're like, we're here to help you. How can we help you? We propose to bring in these teams and they can bring in air power and that will help you. And then we'll attack Bamiyan and we'll defeat the Taliban and you can take Bamiyat.

What I wasn't sure of was their capability on the ground because I didn't get a sense like I didn't see a lot of fighters like I did with Dostom. So I was kind of wondering where are those guys. I think they were up closer to Bambian. So we didn't go to Bami on. So we brought the teams in and the OGA and the ODA and they were sort of linked up together and then we left. And then we went all the way back. And by the time we got back to link up with the ODA 595 and JR, they were already pushing through the final pass at the head of the valley,

which is in the movie 12 Strong and sort of, you know, the rockets flying all that kind of stuff. I missed all that. And so when I got there, it was the aftermath of, you know, there's some bodies here and there and some destroyed kit. And then, of course, there were the tanks that were. I guess hit with proximity fuses from air. And I remember the Afghans were perplexed about how we could strike so accurately because they would say, well, the Russians would just come in and bomb it with dumb bombs

and they would hit everybody and kids and everything, obviously. And you guys don't do that. It's pretty impressive. And I say, yeah, well, you know, spent a lot of money for developing this capability. But yeah, so there were tanks that the Talibs had that were knocked out. And it was just sort of wreckage as we tried to catch up to O.88595 and JR and Alex, actually. And so we linked up with them south of Mazar Shreif at the Klai-Jung-Ghi Fortress, which had just been evacuated by the Taliban.

And I remember because I called, like we had an eridium. So I called Alex, the Team XO, and I said, hey, where are you all at? He's like, we're at this fort. It looks like something out of a Foreign Legion. You can't miss it. And sure enough, you couldn't because it's on the south side. It's the south kind of west side of Mazar. And there was, you know, big parapets and all that kind of stuff.

So we went there and then Dostom had us there with his guys for a while. I can't remember how long. But I think it was twofold. You know, you want to keep an eye on us, too. It was like milling around. And I always noticed that they had minors. Like, you know, Dostom wanted to know what we were up to. Which is fine.

I get it. And so we were there for a while, and what was interesting about that place, which became the focus of the prisoner uprising, was it was a bifurcated compound, massive. And on the southern side, where all the stables were and the granaries, there was also connoxes. So I was with, I remember, Sergeant Major Mario B. Hill and I, he was the third battalion, fifth group. So everybody closed on this place. It was our team, Team Alpha, ODA-595. It was a third battalion fifth special forces group, Mark Mitchell's staff, and Sart Major Vihil. And Sergeant Major Vee Hill and I kind of knew each other.

He said, let's go look around, you know, so we were snooping around the fort. And it was just packed with mines, anti-tank mines, any personnel mines. And then they had these six or seven connoxes in the South Courtyard, Southern Courtyard. And they were just packed with, you name it, PPSH-41s, M-1, Graves. I mean everything you could ever imagine some arms dealer would send were there ammunition out the yin-yang dishkas and one of seven rockets and then they had like a single shot I remember you're seeing them with the tripod single shot 107 that I guess they developed for specinas but anyway they had all that stuff and I remember going

around and I was cherry picking some stuff they had bayonets they were World War I bayonets so we grabbed those war trophies and then I never forget. We in one room, and to this day I regret not bringing this back. It was a, like, paper mural, for like a better word, but some Talab had taken colored pencils. And he had colored Taliban flag, but he was a good artist, and it was, you know, tacked to the wall. And I remember Mario and I looked at each other and I'm like, sir, made you want that? He goes, we want it. And I know we wanted it and then I was like I'm gonna take it so I took it and I rolled it up and I kept that and I ended up sticking it in an old Stinger missile tube that we found later and uh and then I never got it back

because you're not going to bring a stinger missile right to back to the states right so at least not on commercial air so so I don't like TSA would know what that is yeah you're right maybe they wouldn't there was no grip stock it was just but but yeah so we uh we found all this crap and and there was mines galore well that became the ammunition that was used for the prisoner uprising, a lot of it. So everyone kind of like ended up coalescing around this fortress. And it ended up, at what point that it started getting used as a prison? So, yeah, I'll just lead up to the day.

So we moved from the Klyjungi Fort to another place on the east side of town. and we started to separate ourselves from Dostom and Dostom was doing his own thing and, you know, whatever. The politics, him and Atta were getting kind of fraught. Mike and I ended up getting told to go to the southern part of condues. There's a town called Polly Cumbery. And Polly Cumery, there was a sub-commander there that we were supposed to link up with and convince him to essentially attack or at least block the southern exodus from condues. So the idea was Dostom, ODA-595, JR, all those guys, the sort of task force,

would push from west to east on condues, call in close air support, and then they would isolate condues as a urban center. So we went down there. This is a day or two before the prisoner. uprising and we met with this guy and i remember we sat down we had tea and whatever you know pistachios and he was having none of it he was not interested in moving because from his point of view they had that town and they had no interest in moving anywhere they were going to sit on that town so everybody was starting to carve up the pie right so mike got really frustrated

i remember he was upset with this guy i was frustrated but i wasn't really upset he was upset with the guy and he pulled out he and he's like kind of in my ear like cursing guy like i can't believe this guy, you know. I said, well, we're done. Like, you can't force him to do anything. So Mike's like, yeah, you're right. And then we ended up linking up with Alex in a bourgeois neighborhood. It's really weird. I guess the Soviets had built. And they're over there talking. I'm roaming around this place. And it was like a time capsule. They had these family photos in this house from like the late 70s, like before the war and the revolution. People in bell bottoms and no burkas. It was really surreal. We're walking around and I'm waiting on them to talk. They ended up conferring

and it was decided that the next morning Mike and I would go back to Missouri Shreif. I wasn't part of that conversation. That was between Alex and Mike. And I don't know at that time whether Alex had heard or Mike had also heard that there were prisoners, but we found that out on the way back. And it was weird. You know, the Afghans were always like at a checkpoint, you'd arrive at the checkpoint, chit chat with the guy. had I was driving but we had an Afghan with us and they said oh there's 300 it was always Chechens for some reason there are 300 Chechens up ahead and they're really bad news people and you got to watch out this kind of thing and so we're like okay so we went forward and

it was funny because we asked these guys like hey if you know where bin Laden is you know let us know we'll take care of you kind of thing and they were just like yeah we don't know where he is but anyway well we went up and we ended up running into the van of Dostom's group. And that was the evening before the uprising started. And it was, you know, late afternoon. We were hoping to get up there. I personally thought maybe we could get in a position we could call for Cass on these so-called bad guy Chechens and be done with them. And, I mean, you know, you know, consistent with the law of our conflict. But, you know, basically that was that made sense to me, right? We'll get in a position we'll call Castle.

But we got there and they were gone and then Jaron pulled Mike aside and I was near him but not with an earshot. So I couldn't really hear what was being said. And that was when we, you know, they were discussing the prisoners, that the prisoners that come out of condues, that docent and made a decision to take him to the Klygeny Fortress and that y'all should go. Someone needs to go and interview these guys because there's a treasure trove of information. These are the guys like Dave said. These are guys we've been looking for because up to that point, all the prisoners, who ran into all the detainees or whatever you want to call them they had all been afghans and

they weren't like necessarily posthians they were they were they were they were like turkman guys who have been pressed into service so they were sort of quite honestly like pathetic i kind of felt sorry for some of them because they're like hey i got gunpoint i was told to go fight you guys and but they always said the al-qaeda guys the al-an sir brigade guys right zero-five-five brigade guys they're just one terrain feature ahead you just got to you got to catch them you're going to catch them but they're over there. And we never saw them. And so when we heard that, it was like, oh, this is why we came here.

These are the droids we're looking for, right? So we went back to Mazar, and then it was right at dusk, we got to the fort. And I remember the guards, and it's in the book course, the guards were really cagey acting, and Dave was talking to them, and they were, he said, oh, man, they're all amped or something to that effect. we go into the fort right to the point where the prison reprising would start and I parked we had a Toyota surf vehicle with all these japanation stickers on it from Hokkaido I remember like a used car or something I don't know how we got it but but anyway we go into the the fort and there's I remember seeing a guy dead under a tarp with a wispy beard and his beard was like kind of blowing in the wind and I was looking at him and I'm like what happened here and Dave was talking to the guy so I couldn't figure it out and the day Dave came back, he was, we need to leave and come back tomorrow. This is not good now. It's dark, and the guards are sort of unhappy, and someone was killed, et cetera.

And so on the way back, I learned from Dave that there had been a guy who had killed himself with a grenade. And then he took some of the Northern Alliance guys. Unfortunately, had died as well. And that was when I realized, okay, these guys, they're armed or, you know, they're, you know, there's a problem here, but I didn't go. Sadly, I didn't think about it. You know, I didn't go second, third. There wasn't so much you could really do about it at that moment either.

It just seemed like that's Afghanistan. Right. And, you know, and it was like, okay, that's sad. Okay, we'll get back. So we got back, but you're busy. We get back. Okay, we're going in tomorrow. But there's only three or four of us there at the MSS we were staying at.

And so we had a radio, so someone had to watch the radio. So we'd split up, you know, like DA6 kind of thing. We'd split up our duties, right, two hours on and the next guy's on. And the next morning, about 7.30, I remember the MR. SOT rang, and Mike was up, and he got it. And I was up. And he's chatting. And it's Alex. And Alex said, hey, we had this WAS truck or whatever, Waz Jeep, Russian Jeep that have been delivered.

and it was kind of a piece of jump. You need to deliver that to Polly Camarie because I have no wheels. And I'm relying on the Afghans. I need my wheels. It's like, fair enough. So we were going to go in at eight. That was the plan.

And then Mike turned to me, I recall, and he said, hey, change the plans. You're going to go with another guy, Greg, and you're going to go deliver this vehicle to Alex. So it's a three-hour trip. And I said, okay, what about the bad guys? What about the toads? or we just call them Talibu. They were, you know,

El-on-Serve-A guys. He said, well, we'll link up, you'll go back, we'll link up in the afternoon, and there'll be plenty of them to, because, you know, I'd be honestly, I was curious to see who the hell these guys were. Because when I got there the night before, they were all packed in the pink house, in the basement, so I didn't see any. Anyway, we got down the road.

I'd never forget this, so back up. Mike and Dave got in the Toyota Surf. and the thing had a problem wouldn't start so he had a clutch started. So Dave was like, how do I clutch started? So I said, oh, I got to push it. So we pushed it. He clutched started. It got going.

I said, see you guys later. And that's the last night. I saw that. Sadly, that's the last time I saw Mike alive. And, you know, I would see Dave later. But so we left and I drove that Wazz was about 30, 45 minutes outside of Missouri, and it broke down. Something with the distributor cap.

So fortunately, I had a guy from Fifth Group who was also this awesome mechanic. He was like a motorcycle guy designed his own Harleys. And he got up there and, you know, those engines aren't that complex. He was like, it's a distributor cap and we're going to have to get a new one. And so we towed that vehicle back to Mazar. And this is where I really feel bad is I came back to the MSS and I'm like trying to problem solve. So I'm like, where's Dave and Mike and said, oh, we haven't heard from yet. They're still busy, you know, they're working.

There's a lot of guys to go through. I said, okay. I said, well, I need to get this vehicle fixed. So they linked me up with this Afghan who was like an Afghan grease monkey and we went to the bazaar to get a distributor cap. Because any tasks like that fell on me, which is fine. I was, you know, sui-spontaining, right? So I was like, okay, fine. It was when I came back that I knew something was up. And at one point, and this is where I didn't, you know, you get those cues, but you don't, in retrospect, they make sense by the time. They didn't make sense. Paul Cyberson, who was there, and I knew at VMI, he was a year ahead of me, and he sadly passed away. He was killed in Iraq in 2004. He came up to me from, you know, his third battalion, and he said, hey, have you heard from the guys down to Clyde Jungie? Have you heard anything from them? It was like, I heard some rumors.

It was like some shenanigans going on, or something like that. But it was couched in a way that, I mean, I don't know, in retrospect, I don't know. I can't remember what he said, but it was, I wish I had asked a question. It seemed more casual than what it was. Yeah, I guess. I mean, in retrospect, what he was talking about was the uprising. Right. But it wasn't relayed to them.

It was related to them through Afghans. Right. Kind of a convoluted matter. Right. I said, I'm sorry, I haven't heard anything. And I went in, I remember talking to the guys with my team, and they were like, and we haven't heard anything. And then I was like, okay.

And then he went back, and then he went back, presumably, to talk to, Major Mitchell or Kurt Sontag or one of those guys, I don't know. And then I went to get that stuff. And when I came back later in the afternoon, the comment was, I'm glad you're back. I wish you had been here. Greg said that, I think. And I said, what do you mean?

He goes, there's something going on at the fort. I had to sing Glenn. The medic, the other medic there was two. Actually, PA, or both PAs, to the fort and investigated. and he went with the Brits. And I kind of glossed over some things. But the night before the SBS detachment had arrived,

I didn't even know where they were there, and there was some shooting outside. And we went to kind of battle stations with 100% security, and all of a sudden I heard British accents. Chatted this guy. I figured out he was a medic, you know, British military guy. So they had gone in with Mark Mitchell. Glenn had.

But, you know, Greg had to stay because we had to guard the equipment. and then I was out getting, you know, a distributor cap for the vehicle. So we were trying to take stock of what was going on, and then shortly thereafter Dave shook. And it was right at, like, gloaming right at dusk. And Dave was, you know, he was not in his, he was usually a pretty jovial, carefree kind of, you know, happy-go-lucky guy, and he was not. And he had dirt all over him, and he had this AK.

And I knew he didn't have an AK. He didn't carry a kid. He just carried a pistol. He had a. He had a.k. He had a. I remember thinking. And it was covered in dirt. I mean, he clearly something had happened. I was like, Dave, what happened? And he went on and started telling me the story, but it was sort of in bits and pieces. And it was all about the Dagestani guy that bad. Or something like that, you know, it was bits and pieces. I'm trying to put it together. And of course, I'm going, okay, there's a fight going on. You know, where's Mike? And, um, and then he said Mike got out. So-and-so, the Uzbek, my friend, told me he got out. I talked to him, he got out. I said, okay. So I was hopeful, as we all were. And then, you know, I don't know how much time elapsed.

And then the Brits came back with Mitchell, but we were in a different floor. So the Brits came back. I didn't see Major Mitchell or any of those guys. And they came up and they said, hey, are you Dave? And he's like, yeah, I said, you know, and they said, you know, And they said, okay, good. Oh, all right, mate. We got you, Dave.

Where's Mike? We said, we don't know. And he said, oh, wow. And then they sat down and we were just sort of relaxing. It kind of collapsed down there, lean up against the wall. And then there was a Step Bass was there. And he's American. And I started chatting with him.

And Steph was like, hey, man, it was bad in there. Like, he was telling me about it. And I was sort of. And he was very, he's kind of a non-plus kind of guy. But he was like, man, it was. bad in there, you know, and he's told me the whole thing. And then Glenn, of course, was more animated, and he was like, he was going off on this guy and that guy, because the Afghans, because at one point they'd been introduced to the fort right in the line of fire. And he was livid about that,

which I totally understand. And he was, he was just going off about that. But anyway, heard about all the J-DMs have been dropped, but I wasn't there, you know, and I was like, God, damn it, you know. So, um, They had decided to pull back after that initial push in. They dropped the J-dams, which turned out to be decisive, as I understand it, in terms of shattering the potential of the enemy to take the whole compound. And the next morning I saw that because there were just, you know, corpses everywhere and the trees were decimated and our vehicle was like a cheese grater.

And there was just, it was made, it was a real fight. So that night, I remember, I said, I'll watch the radio, you know, and we're going first thing in the morning, but right now we're going to regroup. And so the MR. SAT rings, and I pick it up. It's like three in the morning. Someone in the States, and they're like, hey, how's it going? My name's Phil. I said, hey, how are you doing, Phil? And he goes, how's it going, buddy? And I said, uh, it's, uh, it's, you know, I don't know what I said. And, um, but he was trying to get information. out of me to figure out what the status was for Mike and Dave.

And I said, well, Dave's been returned, but we haven't found Mike yet. And he kept kind of pushing me, like, to extrapolate. And I said, I don't know. And then finally, I kind of, I was starting to go a little frustrated. And I said something like, well, this is what Dave told me. And it was very kind of cynical. Like, you know, you can infer from that, you know, that, you know, whatever. So, and then he hung up. And then that was it. We say, hey, talk to you later, hang in there. I said, we're going in the morning. He said, okay, I'll relay that. Well, what I realize now, I didn't know at the time. Bad information went to Guy X, who ended up brief and eventually getting the director or eventually briefing the president. So, but they didn't tell me that. I probably would have reported myself differently. Right, right.

I would ask me that. But I was pretty frank. And the next morning we went in, there's a little bit of a F-up breaking contact between us and third battalion headquarters. And as a result, they got in there before us and we came in right behind them, but then I didn't know where they were. And so we ended up in a different part of the fort vis-a-vis the command element, which was led by Major Mitchell. And there was a T-55-25- tank you've probably seen in some of the photos that was firing into the southern courtyard, but it was up on a, there was a ramp, so it was up on the parapet firing into the southern courtyard distance of maybe 300, 400 meters, maybe. And so we're trying to figure out and get our bearings. And it's Greg and I. And Greg said, well, you know, this is smart. He said, hey, first things for us set up the radio, get comms, make sure they know we're here, and then we'll go from there. and you know there's like bodies that was the first time i'd gotten up close to guys that looked like they were friendly that were killed and there were some hizarre guys that were dead

uh and i was like okay and um anyway so um i got comms and with the with the base and uh i say hey we're here and this is what's going on and then we keyed the mic like you know you can hear all the gunfire there's just cacophony of gunfire and you didn't know where it was coming from and it's a very sort of asymmetric kind of structure, you know, so every turn there was something, you know, you didn't know. So you didn't know where the gunfire was coming from. And we didn't be either not long, and I established comms, and then all of a sudden, I told Greg, I remember saying, Greg, I said, I think third battalion guys are over there.

So we probably need to link up with them. And right about then, I think we're getting up. we're just about to fold up the antenna and put it in the side of this backpack. And all of a sudden I saw the shadow. It was a nice day, you know, maybe like below 60s. Shadow cast itself across the wall of the fort in front of me, like just like that a flicker. And then other peripheral, my right side peripheral vision, I saw what looked like a giant black laundart just for a split second. And I remember thinking, what the hell is that?

And then all of a sudden this horrendous explosion that you see. and you can see the video it was taken from the outside of the fort and we were people don't believe this but we were 170 meters away and there were guys a lot closer some who were wounded pretty badly and some who afghans who were killed anyway so we you know got in the pro-imposition and then there was all sorts of like second you know secondary missiles and i the one thing i didn't know about that because i remember training like you know ernie tabata i don't know if he was still there at the Q chorus, but he always talk about, what's the biggest danger, secondary missiles? I remember thinking about him, secondary missiles, and I like got down, and all these things

are landing on me, and they're hot. They were just like burning into my back, and I thought for half a second I'd been hit, but I wasn't. It was just like Earth. There's so much energy in that bomb, you know, and it just rained on it. So we brushed that off, kind of like the Blues Brothers, and then I'd seen also, this is the part of really kind of, I felt like. like it was intimidating. I saw a big chunk of something hit the wall in front of me. It was like gray, black smoke. It was a, bam.

That must have been a giant chunk of shrapnel from that bomb. I thought, God, thank God. It was just blind luck where you are in the structure, whether you're going to hit or not, the way that thing fragments. But the good news was that it hit at the base of this wall. So to an extent, that served as a sump in my view. That just kind of absorb a lot of the blast.

But still, it was a huge. huge, you know, net explosive weight. So the tank was flipped, as you probably know, the turret on those tanks have we seen in Ukraine. It comes off and, you know, the whole tank crew was killed. And everything was rubbled and a bunch of equipment was lost and there were several wounded who had to be evacued. So then the next, you know, several hours were spent evacking people. And, yeah, we were left actually accidentally we were left behind in the fort. Greg and I. So Greg was pretty upset about that, which is understandable. He's like, they left us, man. Your guys left us. And I said, well, they didn't do it on purpose. But we

were gone. And literally, we were on the radio. And the dust cloud had just settled. And then one of the Brits came to me. And he was running. And he was covered in dust. He looked like a cartoon character. Just his eyes were, and he had blood in his ears. And he ran up to me. And he was yelling, get on that radio and call that bastard off. He just dropped the bomb on us. Because the initial impression I had is that it had been a 107 or something that had hit some of the mines in one of the rooms because a lot of those rooms were packed with stuff and that it had a secondary and that blew up. And he said, no, no, it was a bomb. And so I had to call back to the Siege of Sotiv and relay to the guy you answered to go to the Joint Fires

element, get a hold of K-Mart, because I wasn't talking to the AWACs. Right. Tell that pilot to cease fire to stop, drop, you know, that you had – we had friendly – well, he said first, we have – I think he said we have casualties, so I relayed that to them. And so, you know, later on I got the rest of the story on the other end. But they relayed the message. The pilot stopped what he was doing. And then we started to, I guess, triage the guys, at least as best they could have. there, but you got to remember, I didn't know where they were. Right. So I didn't know that how many guys were killed or how many guys were hurt. All I saw was a giant plume of dust. And it was big enough structured. You couldn't see that far.

And that's how we got left because I remember I looked over my shoulders on the radio and they were there. And then all of a sudden, Greg's like they left us. And I looked back and they were gone. And so we had to get to our vehicle. I remember we got to a vehicle. We had this, at that point we got a new vehicle. It was a little Toyota minivan that was parked on. the barrier of the gate.

And it was all bubbled up from the overpressure. But the windows strangely were not blown out. It was weird. And all of a sudden, out of the dust comes this giant Brit named Jono. And he must have been from like, I don't know, Newcastle or something. Like he had this really thick accent. And he was like, your bloody door on the sliding door of the Toyota van wouldn't work. And I was just like, manhandle it.

And he just ripped it off. just came off, like the whole door, and he just tossed it. He was like, looked at it and he just tossed it to the side, and I say, oh, we got air conditioning now. And then we got in the thing, and we had a couple of soldiers from Tenth Mountain. There was a QRF element that had been called in, and a couple of them had been left. So it was a bit of a goat rope getting out of there. We got out. We assembled outside, and then our major Mitchell was there, kind of got everybody together,

and then decided that we had to take the casualties. somewhere else that it was unsafe to land a medic back bird near the fort and so that was reset like and then and then you know the the battalion group surgeon was there fortunately and he was able to help our casualties oh wow yeah yeah and he did a great job anyway they were evacked the casualties were I believe that night if I'm not mistaken but things were happening you know in parallel simultaneously right so um then that night they got got ECAS in the form of AC130. So it's in the book.

They must have worked that place for about three hours. So the next morning, I mean, it was like showers of sparks and Alex and and Jara were a little closer and Alex said at one point, one of the bad guys was adjusting fire with the 82 millimeter mortar and then I guess

the 40 millimeter Beaufort got him eventually. But it was sort of like, Alex related the story, you know, that's hey, they're adjusting fire on us, adjusting to flexion. He's bracketing. He's braking. I guess he made me. They were bracketing, but they said they were walking it, whatever.

Then all of a sudden, nothing. It's like, oh, you got him. The next morning, it was like a medieval battlefield. Because you look in the southern courtyard, and there's pictures of it in the book. It was just like, you know, bodies every couple, maybe five, six feet. And they were just pretty evenly scattered about. And just clumps of, like, rags they look like. And I don't remember at that point, we were up on the,

corner, which would have been like the south, eastern corner. And there was this little room almost like a, like a, a rook tower or something like that with a little loophole. And there was a guy shooting through there. And it was the radio operator guy from Dostom's guy. It was the same guy. And I remember talking to him. And there were a couple of dead,

Alanservigate guys just lying there. And, you know, so there's like, okay. And then, I don't know, killed them, but they were, you know, one of many. And I remember sitting next to kneeling next to, I think of Major Mitchell. And these poor horses had been tied up, I never forget this, two these stanchions or whatever, right next to their troth, right? And they had weathered the whole AC-130 strike, tied up. Holy shit. And they were like limping.

One was limping on three legs. I mean, you know, animalized people would get really. I mean, it was terrible. They were just like limping around. And a couple of them were just absolutely eviscerated. Like, I mean, like this, carcass, you know. And then others were wounded and then there was cat dead. Anything that had a heat signature.

Yeah. That was above ground was fair game that night. Yeah. And I just remember someone saying, oh, someone should put that horse out of its misery. I'm sure someone did, but it was tight. It was still tied up and it was like limping around on three legs. I was like, oh, man. And anyway, then the Afghans, if I recall, and like I said, this is kind of stream of consciousness,

but they did an assault, and the idea was they were going to clear, I believe, from east or west to east, across the southern courtyard. And that's when a couple of the bad guys came out, because they were still alive. Yeah. That was the part that struck me, is that fort, because it's, you know, made out of Adobe, essentially, Afghan version of Adobe, it's kind of a pretty resilient thing in, like sandbags. So if you were hunkered down in those granaries or in the stables, you probably, I mean, you probably concussed, but if you didn't, if you hunkered down, you didn't catch any of the frag, you're still going to be alive, right?

And they were, and they were pretty feisty. I mean, they were still fighting because there was gunfire, and then the Afghans would run away and they'd come back, and it was, you know, it was very indecisive kind of fighting. And finally, after this went on for a while, I think Dostom had arrived in town and he brought, someone brought a T-E-62 and one of the guys

that talked to him the other day, he's in New Jersey now. He was like, yeah, I was a guy who brought the tank. So they came in and they started working that main gun on each one of those grainy kind of stable things and figuring out where, there was always Chechens, right? They're Chechens and they're, okay, fine. Whoever they are, they're bad guys.

So they were firing one and the other. I remember he's throwing the brass out of the cupola, you know, onto the ground. And finally it was like crickets. There was nobody. Nobody left that we could tell. And except three came out later that day. And I remember there was this pretty heavy explosion like a boom like that. I thought, what the hell was that?

Was that the main gun? It didn't sound like a main gun. And then they brought these guys out on a tarp who were sadly, they were killed. North Alliance guys and there was a feigned surrender. And I don't know what they detonated, whether it was a grenade. It was bigger than a grenade. I don't know if it was. Suicide belts weren't that common then.

So I don't know what it was, but the guy clacked off. Well, they had all the ordinance. They had all those mines and everything. Yeah, and he killed three North Alliance guys took, he killed him. And then that was it. And then later we found out that there were 86 guys in the bunker that were still alive, include John Warka Lend. But no one was really fixated on the bunker.

And I knew there was a basement to that building. But I just saw all these corpses. And I assumed, you know, that the Al-Qaeda guys, all unsurbingy guys, that kind of fought to the death, you know. And that was the end of it. And then, you know, then we found Mike, actually one of the Orleans guys that, you know, was able to. to identify him and then Mario Sir Major Vee Hill and I found him and then we repatriated him.

And then that was the end of our piece of that. Now they still went on because as I understand the Afghans and some ICRC guys I think, I went into the bunker basement. Toby's got it all in there. He's got it in detail. but, and were shot. And so then the Afghan was like, okay, we got to deal with these guys. And so they tried to burn them out with diesel and frags or something like that and didn't work. And then they brought in a water truck and then they flooded it.

And that's when they eventually, I think, got hyped out or surrendered. And that was it. And there was 86 of them. And then that's when John Walker Lynn, the next day or later that evening, of course, was discovered. and then that created a whole other avalanchea. Yeah, a chain of events. And John Walker, Lind is now out of prison and writing op-eds about the war crimes,

horrible war crimes that we committed in Afghanistan. Actually, didn't he praise ISIS and, yeah, but he writes under the name of like, yeah, yeah, he serves 16 years and got out for good behavior. Yeah. Yeah, if you guys have not read it, definitely check out Toby's book first casually. It really goes into detail because he interviewed everybody. I mean, he had incredible access to the team involved.

He talked a lot to Dave about the events of that day because, you know, when Justin's talking about this prisoner uprising, it's not like a prison riot in the U.S. these people were taken in mass and weren't really disarmed they weren't searched they weren't disarmed they were just like sequestered so a lot of them still had all their you know their weapons

and it was it was a planned uprising and that's part of the thing about John Walker Linnis he was very aware of this if not a party to it and I guess it's I guess it's only worth 16 years What was the next step for you after that? You said that was kind of your piece of it was done,

and you guys left at that point after you repatriated Mike Spans for Mains. Yeah, well, he was taken back to the States. Alex went back with it. And then there was the funeral in Arlington. In fact, I visited his grave at Arlington last week with my son. Then there was a funeral. I actually went back for that. But what happened was the team was sort of dissolved, right?

And everybody went off to do whatever their new mission was. And then I was still, I still had time on my clock, so to speak. So I ended up going on another trip and joining another team down in Canterhar. And then I ended up in Orsgan province. And that was during the Anaconda phase of things. But it was a little slower there. Although there's some action that was mainly out east in Anacondas, you know. and that whole thing.

So I was there during Anaconda, but not in the East, you know. And then I redeployed and went back to group, and then I became the H.H.C. Fifth Group commander that summer. And then we got ready for Rock, probably about August. So I'm back by June or whatever, May June. I can't remember. And then next to, you know, by August, someone said, hey, you know, Rumsfield's, signed some dep order or something that we're going to go probably going to go after saddam and then

that started a whole chain of events for the invasion so very quickly became Afghanistan was an rear-view mirror and we're going to rock in the span of you know months and then we were on the ground i mean fifth group infiltrated d minus two so can you walk us through that where were you at during that time um i was uh i was a battle captain actually so what happened was the the headquartered absorbed, we grew from an HAC into a ced of soda. And so we absorbed a bunch of reservist augmentees who were staff guys, so they were officers mainly, but not exclusively. And we built out the headquarters so they had a jamd, you know, and we just started filling the slots. And then we did all the manifesting. And my first sergeant, Rob Glass, he and I kind of, that was

stressful man I mean by the time we got on the plane and like I think it was January 03 I remember we watched the Super Bowl and then it wasn't long there long after that we were wheels up and I remember getting on the plane it was like really cold that that that day and it was just like a relief to get on the plane and then we staged out of out of Jordan the siege of Situ was in Jordan and then we had two battalions in Kuwait and of course all the conventional forces were in Kuwait you know And then D-1-2, there was infiltrations. D-1, there were infiltrations. The air interdiction started right around the same time as our infiltrations.

It was mainly into Al-Lambar and into south-center Iraq. So my duty was to battle track the south, southern and central part of Iraq. So second and third- Battalion, 5th group. First Battalion was in Al-Lambar doing counter-theater ballistic missile suppression, scud hunting. And that went on until, man, I don't remember maybe like April or something like that or May. I think it was April. But, yeah, it was pretty heady times. But that was a conventional fight.

We were the supporting effort, you know, so it was very different. Along Bar was ours along with the Brits and the Aussies. But center and south, that was, you know, 5th Corps and 1MF. And then we had second battalion, a second battalion had infiltrations into, Central Rock. So they were doing strategic reconnaissance. And I remember Iran, you know, I mean, it was just, you know, I was an operator then now I'm now I'm a staff guy and I'm briefing, you know, Colonel Mahal and every, every day, twice a day. My boss was Mark Schwartz, who was the S3 of group. And that was more of a staff grind, you know. I do, I too remember this. like the day we infilled, the group infilled is D, I guess it was D minus two. The word came down from Soxent and was, you know, execute, execute, execute, execute, kind of like emphatically. And we're like, sir, we received the execute order.

Like Mark Schwartz, if I remember he talked to Colonel Malland and, Colonel Malarland wanted to pick up the SACOM and talk to all three of his battalion commanders at once and, you know, say execute XU get XU. and I remember the S6 had everything right you're not comms or everything was right and good to go and then like 10 minutes later it failed and I remember he keyed the mic and I could hear the of the SACCOM not working

and he just he was like he just like let the the thing down and he looked at the six he was just like all I want to do is talk to my commanders is that too much to ask or something like that And then he turned to me, he said, call him on the M.R. Sat or whatever the bat phone was. And I called them. And, you know, that was it. And then we battle track the group, you know, from the headquarters. And then eventually they moved the command element into what became the, I believe it was a Rodneya Palace complex. So the hill were near Saddam, sons. He had the, the tigers and stuff and the zoo and stuff like that. And they set up there. And then I read a pull.

back to the States in the summer, and then I PCS to SWIC. So, you know, all the assignments things, the assignment cycle didn't change. Whether you're in combat or not, it actually got me in trouble a little bit with Branch because I wanted to stay longer, and I didn't know how the game was played, and I, you know, I sort of tried to pull some strings, and that was the wrong answer. So, yeah, anyway, they got me back. Well, before moving on, I would like to ask. a few of your, I guess, impressions of the difference between the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion

of Iraq. And what was some of your takeaways were and how those two conflicts were prosecuted? I mean, very different countries, very different geographies and approaches. As you said, Iraq was largely conventional. Yeah. So two things. It starts with the difference of the countries and most people who serve over there. Afghanistan is much more rural than Iraq. I mean, I mean, there's plenty of rural areas in Iraq, but the preponderance of the population is urban or kind of semi-urban based in Iraq. In Afghanistan, it's not. And so the centrality, it's not customary in Afghanistan for the periphery to adhere to the center of Kabul. That they don't like that, which is the problem, right?

They don't want to obey Kabul. In Iraq, they've been under Saddam since, what, late 60s or whatever. and it's a much more wealthier country with much more infrastructure and an urban, large, urban, middle class. And so that's socially the society there was different. And I think that made the war different. The other thing is we went in in the very beginning, and it's in the book, the whole option between Koffer Black's light touch approach or General Franks's let's drop the 18th Airborne Corps

into into Afghanistan which he probably thought was a light approach that that had just unfolded well and a lot of it was put together

on the fly and it worked Iraq was a much more deliberate plan because I remember going to Fifth Corps headquarters in October was right around

September October late September and for a planning conference and man that was you know, this was like, hey, this is how it's going to be done. Ob orders. Decisive maneuver phasing. All this kind of stuff you're taught. And it was all done the American way of war, man, decisive maneuver. And actually it's kind of impressive. You're like,

this is what the machine can do. And the machine did it. And you see it unfold. Because I saw it hour by hour unfold, you know. And yeah, it was amazing. But it was a conventional fight. And we were in Iraq very much a subordinate or supporting effort and that kind of I think pissed some of the guys all chapter your ass a little bit yeah I remember A15 I love them and death they got mad because they were supposed to hit this target in a southern Iraq it was a radio tower or something like that and they were all amped up to do it you know and the Brits overran it like it just wasn't a thing oh because it happened so that so quickly yeah and they were and they were stood down and and they were champing it a bit because they had done some good stuff in uh in in in afghanistan so anyway they

ended up getting plenty of plenty of work later down the line yeah yeah but uh but at the time they were they were you know they were pretty miffed but anyway you know the whole thing unfolded and then there was that big uh tick up up near carbala so the whole focus was sort of like in 91 to destroy the republican guard special republican guard they're the center of gravity i mean it was cog analysis all that kind of classic, you know, shrere-punk, you know, decisive maneuver kind of stuff that you're taught in Commander General Staff College and all that. And it culminated there and there was that operational pause and then the – the Saddam, you know, Fedellin and those guys had sort of sort of gotten together and they attacked us.

You know, it didn't attack me. I was in the headquarters, but they attacked, you know, the vanguard there, third and there was a bit of a fight there, as you remember, and then they eventually ended up overrunning biap. There was a bit of a fight there. There was some fight, you know, there's obviously some fighting up in Baghdad. I remember that, and our first casualty I remember was Sergeant Levesay. I remember that because we had to try to coordinate in evacuation,

and it was like on a line between the Marines and the Army, and that created some confusion. It was bad. and anyway so other than that though we quickly overran Baghdad the original plan had been to create these tactical assembly

areas around Baghdad but events overtook itself General Blount did the famous thunder run and you know Colonel Perkins at the time and it would become my big boss years later he was brigade commander armor guy

so they took Baghdad was taken and then it It wasn't probably until later that summer that the first kind of IED started occurring, like, very, you know, unsophisticated. How did, I'm interested, how did the ODAs perform during the invasion? Because I feel like most of the accounts we have of this are actually from the invasion during Desert Storm. We've heard about some of those ODAs and what they were up to. I feel like not so much, maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe there's a book I missed, but I feel like there hasn't been a whole lot out there about, the special forces role during the 2003 invasion. Yeah, well, I don't know why. That's a great question, actually. I think it might have been kind of subsumed or shabby. By how big the military effort was. Well, I think if the insurgency hadn't become what it became in 2004 or really 05, you might have heard more about it.

But there were so many other things going on and it continued to go on and transitioned from, you know, decisive maneuver to the counterinsurgency campaign. Yeah, you heard about, like, was it 525 in Desert Storm that was compromised, and they had the big tick with the huge firefight. Huge firefight and were able to, fortunately, were able to ex-fill. A lot of it was similar. I mean, they had SR. The difference was they were infilled with vehicles. They were not infilled by foot.

So they had mobility and they were moving around. And the biggest risk you had, quite frankly, was friendly fire. I think that was more of a risk. There was a couple of close calls that fortunately worked out. But, you know, when you have a giant force moving forward, and you've got Kyow Warriors screening forward, and they're looking for targets, you know, and you're in a non-tactable vehicle,

even if it's marked properly with the S-17 panels, you look like Saddam Fedian, you know. So anyway, there's some close calls, I recall about that. But it's basically strategic reconnaissance, looking over key crossing points in the river where bridges were, stuff of that nature. Carbolic Gap was a big one. And then Alambar, and then Thurbatan came into Baghdad during the whole reduction of Baghdad, if I recall. I didn't follow that as closely.

And then boom, we were set up, hey, you guys are to Rado-Mia Palace complex, you know, that this whole, the structure that became a rock that we all knew was, was, was, was coalescing, right? And then it was quickly like new rotations came in because I remember we were leaving, third ID was coming, or was a third, no, it was a third ACR, but at the time as Colonel McMaster was going into Al-Qaim and all this stuff was moving on. And there was a whole new OIF rotation coming in. And I left, and I went back in the summer of O3, I went to SWIC, and then. And so you were the, you were the gig pit guy, as you told me earlier. I became the commander of the 18 X-ray program, and I didn't know I was going to be that

because originally the plan was I was going to be 18 Alpha instructor. At least that would the assignments guy told me. But anyway, I showed up late because I pulled some strings. I stayed longer with the group. So you were in the doghouse. I was. But I didn't even realize until I got there. But like, you know, whatever deal was struck and whatever assignment you had,

and then you get my buddy, Pete, was leaving the X-ray program and it had been around before as a National Guard program and then in O-2 I believe after 9-11 when they had to ramp up the production of SF guys

I think it was 750 was the aim at the time they expanded the program so I inherited that in the summer of 03 And actually, it was, it was a good prep, I thought, for selection. I mean, like, I wish I had gone to that. Physically, did a really great job preparing, you know, these young guys for selection. Yeah, it was, there were some risks there because it's brag, and we, like, we wouldn't run selection,

we wouldn't run the training POI in August because it's so hot. And we had to watch that key casualties, you know, obviously. my biggest fear and it was always uh it was never the hottest day when you have a heat casually and it was never not necessarily the least fit guy i remember this one soldier we had x-ray candidate he uh he was a super fit fast runner and uh he went down on the five-mile run and i was really worried about him he ended up being fine but that was that was a nightmare um and then land navigation uh a lot of guys don't realize that whether you do it Benning or that's a lot of work and that's a lot of managing people and it's kind of a thankless job

but we had a huge training area they had taken over an area that had been leased it was leased to the government by the Rockefeller family I can't remember some rich family owned the train it was a big piece of real estate they called the northern northern training area great for training landav and we would run a nine-hour land-aub examination mini-star we called it and that was great. That was great training. But the problem was you always had a couple guys you'd come up, you know, missing your index. So then I'd have to call a helicopter in sometimes to find them. And then finally I got frustrated at that and I just told people, I said, if Cadre catches you sleeping, you're dropped from the course because you're a safety hazard. Yeah. Because guys would

come out of the woodline without a beat of sweat on them at like 915, index was 0.9. Where you been? oh i was trying my best to get here sergeant i'm like yeah it's like july in north carolina with a ruck on you don't have a beat of sweat when you've been sleeping yeah and so anyway i don't know i'm that was the part that was tough was um coming up with rules and then you had to stick by them because i was that was a very big thing to me is that if i'm going to put out a rule it has to apply evenly to every right right and where it became interesting was um and so i was pretty ruthless.

I remember it was hard and fast. I remember there was this guy he was a really good student but he was

caught sleeping and the rules were the rules and I remember the cadrary on the mic were like we caught

roster number so and so cold busted sleeping and he didn't know I was listening and I was sleeping

huh and then he came back and I said he's gone like well you know he's really good I said

sorry rule If I'm going to apply it to all 350 guys. Right. It starts a preferential. Yeah, I can't. You like the guy? I got it. But he broke the rules.

He'll come back and he'll do fine. Right. But yeah, that was tough. And then I'd say the other thing was, yeah, letting guys go that really wanted to be there, but it broke in the rules. Just had a bad air, got hurt. That was tough because you could see it. It was heart-wrenching for them and to an extent for me.

Um, yeah. Did you guys ever like think that, I mean, was there, with, when people go missing and it becomes a, like a safety hazard, was there a reason that you didn't put like BFTs on them or something like that? I don't think you had them at that. We didn't have them with that. So that's a good point. That was coming about, and I forget the nomenclature on the thing,

but we actually had a guy from Sonto, a finished guy come out and meet with us, and they were pushing whatever their, their technology was. But we had, we eventually had a device. but that came about like as I was transitioning. I see. Okay. Yeah. So it was very much emerging, right? Yeah.

But you know, maybe like 06 maybe, 05. I can't remember. But yeah, that was a huge problem. And then we had ATVs and we had to run the roads. You had to quickly mark all the points in a period of, you know, between the end index and the new start. And guys got her own ATVs. That was a whole other issue. So there was a lot.

I mean, there was a lot of movement. I can't let you go either without telling us about the gig pit. Okay, so the gig pit was a venue that was set up before I got there. And it was simply like a kitty pool about, you know, two feet deep, if I remember, with sandbags and, you know, with water. Right. And it was muddy because it was, you know, whatever. It was a mud pit. And this is where students were physically corrected. There were times when, yes.

And I got to be honest with you, I don't know, maybe, you know, I'd get thrown in prison today for doing that. But at the time, we had issues with, these were young guys. They were out of basic training. And honestly, there was kind of uneven levels of discipline, right? And so some philosophy, the old SF guys, would say, well, you know, it's all, we need to treat them like big boys. And if they fail, then you kick them out. But the problem was I couldn't just kick them out.

So, and it was a collective thing. So. You couldn't kick them out because, like, there was a mandate to get more people into SF? Yeah. I couldn't just arbitrarily or even on cause relieve a guy unless it was on our violation. Uh-huh. Because that was not my purpose. My purpose was to prepare them for selection.

And then selection did that. So it was not selection. That was very clear. The group commanders are clear about that. This is not mini selection. This is not filtration. This is preparation. And so fair enough, right?

But the problem was you have all these young guys. At one point, we'd have 300-something students because you have awaiting training guys, med-hold. I mean, it was a management issue. And you go in and they were living in the barracks that had been kind of refurbished World War II barracks. And there was, you know, I mean, you know, young guys. I mean, they're just going to be doing stupid stuff and the place would be a best. And you'd take them out and do some push-ups and wouldn't correct. So it was sort of an escalation of discipline kind of

thing. And the gig pit was the ultimate octagon and whatever. The ultimate corrective action that was at our disposal, short of kicking a guy. out, but like I said, there was certain hard and fast rules that applied. Right. You know, I kicked guys out for honor violations. So guys were cheating because you could cheat on land nav, but we catch you and you'd be gone. Peers were good. The peers helped me identify some people who were problematic in terms of their integrity and stuff of that nature that you never would have caught otherwise.

And then, yeah, and then sometimes with the cadre, you had to watch that a little bit because guys, you know, guys would be guys that get a little carried away with PT and stuff like that. And the other thing, too, is it's not all about PT. The problem is that when you have young guys and you have them for what's really just over three weeks, and, you know, optimally, it's a 21, 22-day peel. I think it was 23-day P-O-I, and then you got a little downtime and they go to selection. So you had to do a lot in a short amount of time, and so most of it, what can you imbue, you know,

fitness, land navigation, some discipline, but you're not going to imbue experience. So the X-rays, from what I understand, got a reputation for being very fit, but clique-ish within their own little group because they had many of them come through the pipeline together. It's because of the gig pit.

It was the man-making. They had this bonding experience. Maybe that was the galvanized them. I don't know. But the criticism I got was it's not fair to the inservice guys because these guys have a month to prepare that the in-service guys don't. They have to do it on their own. They come back from a deployment. They're out of shape, whatever.

They've got to whip themselves in shape and go and that's not fair. And that's one way of looking at it. The other one was how you capture your statistics, right? So if you look at the statistics, they were very successful, but it's where you start the measurement, right? If you started it from basic and then where it culminates and graduated in a qualification course, a little different, but the way they captured it was a little narrower, from arrival at the X-ray program to graduation.

Or from completion of selection being selected. So that was, that was, you know. We taught, was it, was it, was it Ryan? Who were he talking to who said it? Because he was in, whoever we were speaking with said they were an x-ray. And when they went through the x-ray program, they felt like selection was no problem after they had done the x-ray program. Like, like they were ready for it.

They were fit. Yeah, there was, there was a high, the guys I sent to selection had a high success rate. But, you know, I had them for roughly a month. In some cases longer, if they were like awaiting training. or something. And what are you going to do? I had guys who are in great shape. P.T. Landab P.T. Landab is P.T. You know, and these guys were just fit, aerobically fit. They were strong. And they, hopefully by then, you know, they had a mental kind of toughness. So the psychological toughness. For the leadership challenges, you had the gig pit. The gig pit, which, and we, for a while, we had

the gong show, but it was eventually done away with, which was, we felt that we didn't want people to quit without thinking it through. So it was kind of an analog to the ring of the bell in the sense that if you're going to quit, you need to do it. It needs to be deliberate decision and you need to explain to your peers why you're doing it. Rather than just disappearing like at Ranger School. Because when I was a Ranger School, I remember it was like, close your eyes. All right.

No shame. Anybody wants to quit can quit now. And I look through the fingers and then be a couple of things. Yeah, right. wanted them to, we didn't want them to quit, right? So we wanted to make sure that they had thought about it. And that was the gong show. They would go up and they would explain to their peers why they were quitting and they would hit the thing and they would leave. After I left, I don't know. All that stuff started before me. I continued it. I was inherent. And then after I left, I don't know. I think one thing

that got better for sure was the understanding of kind of training modalities and sports medicine because they brought some guys in later that had studied that. Right. I was I was kind of brought up from the old school way as just you know you're going to go PT and you know if you're sore or whatever suck it up right. Right. You know and and there's there's obviously a little more science to it than that. Yeah. And I think it got better over time. I don't know. Well, I think a lot, I don't know about the military in general, but I think a lot of the special operations units are seeing that. Yeah, for sure. Where there are, you know, the sports physicians, there are, you know, the physiologists, people like that.

Let's hit up some questions here from the viewers. Seifer, thank you. Rummy, two questions. Why does the CIA make up artificial political factions such as the Northern Alliance and sell it to the public like it's organic? Let's just start with that one. So the Northern Alliance was the name that was ascribed to what was left of the resistance to the Taliban is really what it was. And so from, you know, the Afghan history at the end of the Soviet war of aggression, for lack of a better word, Afghanistan descended into the sort of warlord chaos. And then Malamah Omar came on the scene.

He galvanized what became the Taliban, supported by Pakistan. Pakistan and he pretty much took over three quarters, four-fiths of the country. What was left was the Tajik's under Ahmed Shah Masoud, the Uzbek's under Abduar Shadh, Ishmael Khan, who had Tajik folks in Harat and Mr. Mohammed Atah, who is also a Tajik and some Hazara folks like Mr. Khalili and Mr. Mokak. That was it. And so they were collectively loosely affiliated. They were called the Northern Alliance. And they kind of cooperated, but like in a very diluted and loose way.

So you had to call them something. They were not the Taliban. They were opposed to the Taliban. They became the North Alliance. Yeah, I mean, all political factions are ultimately artificial, cobbled together by elites, right? I mean, in Syria, we put together the Syrian Democratic forces or Syrian defense forces, whatever it was. I mean, you got to do what you got to do, right? Yeah, it may not be coherent, but you got to give them a name to kind of define them and distinguish them from, you know, you know.

And even though they're all warlords and they're all sort of grasping for their own power, you still want to create some sense of unity amongst them. Like there's a common cause. You know, we want them to operate at least jointly for a while. Yeah. Who knows what's going to happen? We know what's going to happen. The second part of the question, should we have killed bin Laden and left? I mean, yes.

I mean, ideally if we could have found him, but, you know, we know how that went. I mean, it wasn't that easy. Now, hindsight being 2020, we know where he was and we sort of have reconstructed his exodus in Pakistan. But at the time we didn't know that. I mean, we, I remember asking Afghans where he was in northern Afghanistan. He wasn't anywhere near northern Afghanistan as it turned out, but we didn't know any better. And then we got close to him in Toribora and that kind of phase in December of 01. But he slipped into Pakistan and then he ended up and, you know, eventually ended up in Abadabad, as we all know.

So it's not easy, you know. It just isn't easy. That's all there is to it. And there's even the discussion, regardless of bin Laden, And like our mission there really, I don't think had much to do with the Taliban, it was about AQ in the beginning. It's like once we wiped out AQ, did we have any more business in Afghanistan? Yeah. You know, like our invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, even though they were different, you know, you have the light touch and then you have the full conventional military invasion.

Both the invasions were very successful. It was just sort of everything after. It was like, okay, well, now what do we do and our decisions from that point forward? Yeah, I mean, it's a good point. I think it's all boils down to that old adage that was really designed for corporate America, but culture eats strategy for breakfast. I mean, you inherit your victor, right? You're a conqueror, for lack of a better word.

You're militarily successful. Now you've essentially deposed whoever, the out. was, that system. Now you're the alpha, now you've got to control it. Right. And I'm not, you know, Saddam was a horrible guy, for example, in Iraq. But he understood Iraq better than we did. Right.

Right. And so he knew, you know, through brute force and he was an evil man, how to keep the lid on things. And then we went in there. And I never forget this, because the first time I heard the Arab point of view, it's always weird. I went to CGSC and Kuwait weirdly. And the Kuwaitis, who are our allies, they pulled me aside and said, you know, we despise Saddam. He invaded our country. But, you know, when you remove him, then you make Iran strong.

Right. And it's sort of that, that whole logic that I had never really thought. Because at the time, we were so confident, we're going to knock him off. He's evil. The whole WMD thing, from my point of view, was how we sold the war to the UN and to the the world. But, you know, I heard Tony Blair say it the other day in an interview a couple days ago that we genuinely believe the son was evil and he needed to be deposed because he was an evil person and he committed all these atrocities. And that was righteous, right?

Right. When we talked about the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it wasn't, you need to find, I mean, WMD was part of the thing, but it was, this is an evil guy and we're going to take him out. Right. And it's just and we're going to do it. And that's how we viewed it. The WMD thing was part of it, but it was, you know, it was how we, unfortunately, we didn't get the security council resolution that we wanted. And that was kind of how we presented it as a means of justifying what we already thought was justified, at least from the military point. Anybody I had any dealings with, it was like, he's evil, commits atrocities, he needs to go. Right. And it was long overdue.

Yeah. I mean, it's challenging because he is evil and Tito is evil and we see what happened to Yugoslavia, you know, right? Like we see sort of these artificial countries and Afghanistan is the same way where it's deeply divided within and it's a, you know, a dictator or somebody, you know, some strong force. It's like holding this group of people that want nothing to do with each other together and then you remove that person and then what happens. Yeah, I mean, from the Gulf Arab point of view, many of my peers told me that he's simply a ballast. As evil as he is, he's a ballast against Iran. And at the end of the day, as bad as he is, he's not as bad as Iran. Right.

And even we thought that for a while, because we supported Iraq against Iran for quite a while. True, true, true. You're right. You're right. I think at the time, I'm just looking back in thinking of the zeitgeist, you know, it was like, it was like, Psalm is evil, and this is righteous. But I do remember at one point in 2003 leading up to the invasion, I remember talking to my first start. I didn't think it was going to happen. Yeah.

Because like the Brits were sort of wavering. And even the SES guys were like, hey, we're not sure we're going to be here. And I remember I told to turn to Rob, I said, I think we're going to be. He said, I don't think it's going to happen. I like, well, I don't want to sit out in the desert for three months waiting on, you know, the UN Security Council, or whatever it was. I can't remember I said. and then sure enough about a week later is execute, execute.

KT has a question. I don't know if this is some sort of a euphemism or something. When did you see the first music tent in Afghanistan? I think that was for Dostom. He had music tents? I didn't see any music tense.

You mean like so I didn't see any music period or hear any music, rather period until I got to after Mazar fell. In fact, the first women without burqa's

on I saw was the women's right movement, underground movement that Dostom, that came to meet with Dostom and Shepardon. Yeah, that was really weird because I hadn't seen any women over the age of like 12 without a burq on for like months.

And then all of a sudden we're in in Shevergan and these women come in And this is a culture. This is interesting. Like, they come in and Jerry's like, watch this, man. So they come in, there's probably like 20, 30 of them came in. They have the burghiz off.

They're in the room, and Dustin gives a speech. Like, you're free and, you know, the Taliban oppressed you. But I promise you that you will be allowed to go to, you receive an education, no barriers to advancement, all this kind of stuff, jobs, work, you know, all this kind of stuff. And they made, said some things. and then there was like an older lady who was kind of the alpha there

and she was like, okay, and then they walked out and they left and we were like an oddity because it's like dozed them and these two like American dudes with AKs were just standing there quietly watching and they leave and then he goes watch this and I looked out and they

come out of the building and they got the burkus back on. Wow. And the Taliban along gone. Yeah. And he goes, you know why they do that? He goes, it's like wearing a fedora in 1948. That's just what you do. here. It's not it it it yeah the Talbs enforced it but half of them would do it's a it's a cultural norm now yeah it's normative yeah exactly that was yeah it's you know you talk about uh dostum and and and women and then you're earlier when you're talking uh how they talk you when you're

saying how they talk shit on on the radio to each other because they're all in the care it reminded that story in toby's book about when there was when dulcum heard that there was a female uh pilot that was bombing them? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, like, starts rubbing that into their face that it's a woman that's bombing you guys. Yeah, that was cool. I actually met, I think it was her. I met her at the horse soldier event a couple years ago. Anyway, yes, the angel of death or something. So apparently she was the navigator or the, I think she was navigator, the FOCO and the AC-130. And she was on the net. And so Dozen could hear her. and he said, oh, man, I got to kind of let them know. I got to like use some, you know, whatever sciops here. So he he grabbed the, according to J.R.,

I think it was J.R. Scott told me this. He grabbed the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the Motorola and he put it up next to the embitterer, and he just keyed it. And he goes, hey, Mullah, whatever his name was, hey, Mala, maybe it was Mola Fawzal. I don't know. He's like, hey, just want to let you know, you're curious to know who's killing you?

Listen here. And he was just like, and, um, And supposedly this went on for a while, and then he's like, you know, I'm not sure you're going to get in heaven. You get killed, you know, by the angel of death. It's going straight to hell. Something like that. I don't know.

And, you know, in their Muslim, Afghan sensibilities, it really sunk home. Peter says, awesome guest. Really looked forward to the interview. Thanks for the quality time every week. Team House. Thanks, man. Let's see, what else do we got in here? How embers worked in Afghanistan back?

then? They worked pretty well, didn't they? Yeah, they were new. They worked, SAT, FM. Yeah, they were fine. I'm not a comma guy, but the problem was, I didn't realize this because I wasn't, we were trained at the Q-course at the time, mostly as, most of the comms training I received was

OGT, the Robin Sage. We had an officer phase, but, you know, quite honestly, it won that great. And it was all about HF comms at the time. The 137, stuff of that nature. The SATCOM was like kind of this niche thing, but we weren't, I don't remember using it much.

104 we used, and then we get to Afghanistan and no one, it's the thing, and it's all about SATCOM. So I fear, and this is, I'm sure a lot of comp, comma guys would argue the same that, you know, the, As SACOM kind of just sort of overshadowed HF, like, you know, the skills needed to build antennas and that kind of stuff, wave propagation, all that stuff you were taught is just eventually kind of atropies.

It's sort of like Morse code, right? I mean, it's such a rare skill. I remember what I heard they got rid of it. I was like, what? They got rid of Morse code. And one guy's like, his first sign of the apocalypse, man. I don't know. I mean, technology, you know, it's just, you know, it is what it is.

Justin, I got a couple more questions here. Could I ask you to stay a little bit after for the bonus segment to talk about, I want to hear about asymmetrical warfare group. Yeah, sure. Connor asks, could Justin talk about any partnership collaboration with third-party nations like Iran, Pakistan during the 2001 Afghan invasion, or was that all dealt with at a higher level? So I don't know about higher level. I'm sure there were some, I don't know, diplomacy.

international diplomacy, whatever you want to call it. There was Kuds Force guys on the ground in northern Afghanistan, period. And they were, he had like a dosama had an L&O who was from the RGC Kud's Force period.

And that guy kept his distance from us, but it makes sense. Like, if you're Iran, you're going to have your guys, you know, with the Northern Alliance, right? Because you're not friends with the Taliban. Right. Remember in 98, they almost went to blows. when eight diplomats were killed in Missouri, I think it was Mazarishri.

So, yeah, but they're still our enemy, right? So they're just going to keep their distance. Yeah, I remember seeing the guy. They were there. But the whole, the shenanigans with Iran didn't emerge until later. And I wasn't, you know, that was out of my purview. Well, that was very much like, you know, Iran fighting ISIS. And, you know, certain people trying to say, oh, look, they're on our side.

I know they're on their side. Like, ISIS and them have very different, you know, ideals. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, they're going to ebb and flow. Maybe they're a common enemy. They're going to collaborate for that purpose. But at the end of the day, they're diametrically opposed in terms of their theological kind of positions, right? Yeah.

Last question here. Do you believe there is enough emphasis on language and cultural? skills or are guys who speak Dari, Persian, Uzbek, Pashto, etc. at a premium. I don't know if he's talking about in regards to the CIA or special forces. Oh, man, that's actually a great point. So that, you know, I glossed over that or I just omitted that. So in the beginning, I said, hey, J.R. spoke Dari because he had been trained in Dari to be an Afghan guy back in the late 80s, middle eight 80s. Dave was a essentially a PhD guy in Central Agent Studies, but the bulk of the military didn't train in those target languages,

nor did, as I understand, the interagency. So when 9-11 happened, we were flat-footed, right? It was in a priority. Afghanistan had been relegated to the dustbin. You know, it was yesterday's news and we were focused on other things. So those language skills were critical. The problem I have with SF, just say Army SF. I don't know about the HILS Special Warfare,

but if you're going to train someone in a CAP-4 language, you need to spend more time doing it. We try to do, we've got a pipeline, we've got to get guys through, you do six months of modern standard Arabic or six months of Russian, and then you're out to group. Now, I don't know about now. I'm sure they've, I knew they changed things over the years, but at the end of the day, six months is like the bare minimum.

So I did modern standard Arabic, in 2009, and I did Dari years later, and I did the short, like, expedited course, which was like four and a half months in Ross and Virginia. And I actually got to use my Dari a little bit in Afghanistan, and so that was helpful. But that stuff atropies pretty quickly unless you immerse. And so all the guys I've seen that are really good are guys that were able to kind of immerse. But the problem is that

they train you to do the DLP which is sort of the King's English version of things. You read newspaper articles. You're dealing with you know, the upper middle class kind of Arabs, right? Right.

But the guys in Iraq on the ODAs, the way they approached it was they would focus on vocab unless on grammar and they would crash on vocab so when they're on the range, in minimum they have the vocabulary because I always thought that was the hardest part of Arabic

was the vocabulary versus the grammar just remembering the words because there's very few analogs right you know and so you got to remember the vocabulary or you're out of schlitz so I just don't think we spend enough time I don't know if we could spend more time but you look at defense out of shades and all that

they spend 18 months going to Arabic school maybe if we focused on a couple guys these guys have the skills because not everybody, you know, it varies. Guys with the really high aptitude, you kind of earmark them and send them a modern standard Arabic or these harder languages, and they come and they embed on the teams.

And they almost invariably need to be warrants or NCOs because officers aren't on teams long enough. Right. You know. I mean, and it's challenging because, I mean, there are like, what, like 6,000, 7,000 languages in the world. There are almost 200 countries. It takes a long time to build those things.

No, and, you know, and what, you know, you train somebody in some language that, you know, we can't, you know, predict the wars of the future. And so, you know, you train somebody in language and they just sit around and do nothing in the military to, you know, have no benefit having this obscure language that suddenly, you know, becomes critical. Right, right. You know, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, you know, and that's where, like, a lot of the civilians come in and also a lot of the English-speaking. indigenous people where you know you try to recruit those people as much as you can. We'll talk about ASW in a minute, but you had a stint there after SWIC and then you

was telling where you were talking about a little bit earlier that you had a sort of like oversight position on the entire army intelligence community. Oh yeah. So I was at the Pentagon. So it was an office of secretary of defense and I was in an intel oversight job where essentially I oversaw, I did some Intel oversight for SOCOM. And most of that was focused on briefing the Intel, the staff committees on the Hill. So mainly the congressional staff committees, but also the Senate, Senate, you know, Senate Select

Committee on Intelligence. So I did that, but it was a policy job. So I went, you know, that was after I was the squadron commander and I went to War College and then I did that job. So that was interesting. It was, but you're, the Pentagon, the thing that people don't realize until you work there for a while. If you're an OSD, there's fewer green suitors than there are civilians. So as a green suitor, you're sort of, in OSD at least, I felt like you're kind of summer help.

You're coming in for a year or two and then you're gone. So regardless of whether these guys are former military or not, they're sort of like the, they're institutionalized. and you're just coming in for a year or two and then you're gone. Whereas on the joint staff, it's different because that's predominantly military guys. You're coming in and a boss is in for a year or two and then they're gone. And then so it kind of creates a different dynamic. I don't think it's pretty dangerous. A lot of I can't talk about it because it was sort of spooky.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it was, but it's policy, right? So you're editing memos, getting your, boss to endorse memos. You're coordinating with other offices and arguing and fighting them over semantics and who's going to be in charge of what. The thing about the Pentagon that's interesting is to study in internecing competition between offices, right? So they're each vying for a bigger piece of the pie. And he who, in my view, this is my personal opinion. I'm here in my personal

capacity. It's he who can sort of subsume more wins, right? Right. Now, the board cube. Yeah. Now, the flip side of that also, because especially since the officer, as you move up, the officer court is very competitive is not just the most wins, but it's the least amount of losses, right? So how, I mean, do people, not necessarily when there is an ongoing project, when a project, When a project looks like it might be iffy and people want to keep a distance from it, then if it's successful and people want to take the credit, like do you have to fight off like the flocks when something actually works that people didn't think, you know, they didn't want their name on it.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Like a defeat is an orphan, but success has a thousand fathers kind of thing. Right, right. You mean at the like policy level? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess so. but for me it was uh yeah probably uh but for me it was more you're you're a military guy doing oversight essentially checking the homework uh-huh of people that you used to work with

so you're like the high school hall monitor i was going to ask you if you felt like a vice principal you're a bit of like a nerd yeah and i mean quite frankly i mean it's it's uh you got it there's a good reason we have oversight it came out of a lot of bad things that happened and Congress you know Congress does a lot of good stuff a lot of people the politicians but you know that there's various policies and well statutory law that's in place now for good reason because bad things happened so that's where oversight is but um that was always difficult for me because they're your people right right and maybe that's why you know I you know it was tough that that you're checking their homework and digging into them

and making them jump through hoops. And, you know, there's going to naturally be some national. Sure. Do you remember you? Where do you come from, man, you know, this kind of thing. It's funny because I was going to ask you if it felt like being the vice principal, but you saying hallmander makes a lot more sense because they're your peers. They're people.

I'm speaking of myself. Right. Right. And you got to remember, too, you know, I'm not, I was brought in that job, like, kind of sight unseen, I was, I was kind of a, you know, outlier. And all of a sudden, I'm like, you know, telling these people that, that are very accomplished people like, hey, you know, this is not, you need to do differently and you need to do this different or you need to correct this thing and do that. And then they kind of, you know, very understandably get upset with it. But it's all there for good reason. It's kind of part of that whole checks and balances system.

How do you, how do you maintain your objectivity as a warfighter yourself as somebody who had been in conflict, you know, when if like you get why they're doing something even if it's like out in the gray, but it's like it does like it doesn't meet the standards. It doesn't meet the laws. Like how do you maintain? How do you maintain? Did you just kind of have to like set yourself to go, these are the laws. This is these are the policies. No, it's more, you know, in my view, it's just more interpersonal relations, you know, like tweaking things. Yeah. Yeah, you know, you know, it was more a function of being able to get along with people without, about being overly officious. Like, sometimes you had to be, you know, lay down the law, I guess. I mean, you'd be strident about things. But at the end of the day, it was sort of like, hey, I'm not. going to red ink your paper and then next week when you return the street submit the paper it needs

to have those corrections reflected you got it got it you know right but if you didn't red ink it they would have sent up the freaking grammatically correct version and got away with it right it's just like that in a sense you're helping them out really right but sometimes i mean some people but they don't see it that way well do you some people right right and you're not you know it was like i was uh I did a murder, I did a 156 in parallel with the Bellenby murder. And I had to come back to Camp Brown as the guy had been there for a year. And then like a week later, I'm back as the deputy investigating officer checking, you know, now I'm that guy. And then, you know, especially in Sawf, it's like everybody was cool with me, the, you know, the little dining facility.

And then they said, what are you back here for, sir, you were here for a year? What are you back here? I'm the I owe for this. What was this murder? Do you remember in 2012, an American sergeant shot 16 Afghans? Oh, Jesus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I got, I got, well, I got picked to be the deputy I-o for that.

The General Waddell, his breeder Waddell at the time, who later became Deputy National Security Advisor. He was... I knew that guy's PL, actually. Oh, he did? Well, I've spoken with him, yeah. Yeah, he's a nice guy. Anyway, he was a Rhodes Scholar, all this kind of stuff.

He was the I.O. and I was the SF guy that was, because it was an infantry guy from Fort Lewis who was attached to SF. And it was a long story, but I got back to the States after 12 months in Afghanistan, and then within a week, I got asked to come back, asked to come back to do the thing. And I agreed. And then, boom, I went back, went down to Canter Har and I did that. investigation and that was the thing we're in the dining facility what oh you were just here what do you back for sir oh the i-o thing they're like hmm you know i'm sitting by myself at the table right right yeah that's understandable i guess but um but yeah that one was pretty bad i mean that was that was a tough thing and you know we had to depose all these people and i had a lot of respect

for the not just the lawyers but the um the legal assistants because they had to go and and transcribe every audio interview and transcribe it in writing. And that's just tedious work. And there was like 70-something people we interviewed. I remember that. Anyway, so I did that and that was, that was, you know, that was tough. But kind of similar in the sense that you're, you're this guy, you know, questioning, questioning authority, questioning people.

And but the way it's set up is you aren't, you don't answer to them, right? So they, I remember one time I went down to Tampa and man, I got a ration from like old guys like General Kearney and went off on me. I mean, well, he wasn't going off of me. He was just going awful and like frustrated. Right, right. Like that we were, in our view, doing our job. But in their view, we were just nerds that were just being, you know, officious or whatever. Eventually you did get out of purgatory, made colonel.

Can you talk? I mean, as far as you're able to talk. to us about, you know, where you are now, what your job entails? Yeah, I mean, I'm really a military advisor to the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., which is very analogous to be in a defense attache and a conist-based assignment. So I'm in New York City at Midtown Manhattan. So I work with the various member states and every, not all member states, but a lot of them have military advisors, their colonels or generals.

and they might have a small staff and they represent their country's equities at the UN so a lot of countries, not the U.S., but a lot of countries are big contributors like Bangladesh and Nepal and Ethiopia or formerly Ethiopia, but countries like that. And so, you know, that's what they do. Other than internal to the country, they do peacekeeping and so they're out deployed in, you know, Mali or Democratic Revolution.

Congo is just in DRC, Eastern DRC a couple of months ago. And so you go out, I go out and I inspect some of these things, and then we try to correct problems and advise the ambassador on peacekeeping. But the UN is sort of understandably – the Security Council is the Tier 1, and then peacekeeping sort of is like DOS running in the background. It's just standard kind of like – we've got 80 plus thousand people deployed. they're in all these tough countries doing, you know, what they're doing. Thankless jobs.

And it's kind of a thankless job. But honestly, in my view, for some of these countries that are less, let's just say, have less resources than we do, for them, it's also a way of funding their military. It gets their soldiers paid. Their soldiers, they get reimbursed for stuff. So from their point of view, it's a, it's a transaction, right? So they go and they do this and they're able to fund their military and it works for them and it works for the UN. And the Western countries, to varying degrees, do peacekeeping. As you probably know, the U.S., we do a little bit, but mostly we support.

We do capacity building, which is very important. And so that's our role. But, you know, we're out doing a lot of other things around the world, so we let other countries do that. and it seems to work out. It's far from perfect, but, you know, it's what I do. And, you know, and it's just, it's an interesting job. It's definitely different than anything I've ever done before. Are things a little bit tense over there at the UN with everything going on in the world right now? Yeah, well, I mean, the Ukraine thing is, you know, front and center, as you all know, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon, and nor should it. I mean, it's, it is what it is.

say, you know, it's interesting. There's a lot of countries, particularly in Africa, complain they'll be like, well, you know, it's horrible what's going on Ukraine, but, you know, there's equivalent of things going on all the time where we are, and you guys don't seem to care. That's like one of the constant refrains you hear. Interesting. And I've been out to DRC and, man, Eastern D.S. I mean, it's beautiful. Like, the train and the environment, the weather is actually very nice because it's high altitude but tropical.

But, man, there's some bad stuff going on there. And so I find that piece fascinating. I like going out to those kind of places. I've always liked the developing world. I just find it interesting to go out and see that kind of stuff and fly around into my 17s and into the jungle and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, I'm an old guy now, and my days of being a team leader are long and long gone, right?

So this is the closest thing I can get going on. You've had an amazing career and now you're less than a year away from retirement. Do you have any inkling, any plans of what the future holds for you? Yeah, I mean, for me, I'm pretty anchored to the area here. My family's from the area. But, you know, the gravitational pull for guys like us with military backgrounds is sort of the beltway, right? But I don't want to do that. So I'll probably end up in, you know, one of the financial institutions here.

There's a bit of a... You come down here on the team house and work with us every so long. We'll have you. Come on. You think that J.P. Morgan gives you LaFroy? Well, I don't... I'm scared, man, because I don't know anything about that stuff, but there's a network of vets in New York. It's not big, but it's strong.

And so it's something I'm going to leverage. Yeah, those organizations, a lot of these organizations have, like, very strong. veteran hiring programs. Yeah, Bank America. Particularly for officers. Right, Jack? Yes, sir. I mean, I don't know yet.

I'm looking at a couple options. I'm a member of the American Legion over the New York Athletic Club, which is great. Oh, at NIAC? I didn't know there was an American Legion chapter. Yeah, the NIACs sort of, the American Legion is under the NIAC, and there's, there's. I'm a member of the one in Hoboken.

Oh, really? Okay. Okay. I haven't been in that one. Is that? It's very nice. They just redid it. Really nice place.

The top four of it is like housing for homeless veterans. Yeah, they do a lot of good stuff. Yeah, I think we were pretty relatively, well, COVID really was tough, right? Yeah. So the core group of people that come out, but it's great and they're pretty tight. Actually, my old group commander from AWG has brought me in. Oh, cool. So that's how I got pulled in, and he's from Staten Island.

So it's good. Let's, we're going to cover this in the bonus segment. So for our Patreon subscribers, you'll see this. Link is down the description. And if you're not, hey, join us. You know, support our booze habit, pay our rent. You know, help us out. Help a brother out.

You know, you can get in cheap, ground floor. But tell us a little bit about asymmetrical warfare group because we'll talk about this more in the bonus segment. So asymmetric warfare group was inactive in the past year, unfortunately. It was a great experiment in kind of a unicorn sort of unit. I came in in 2013. I was not a former unit. I was brought in as to be the three. So Colonel Pat Mahaney, the American Legion,

he was a group commander. He was looking for some fresh blood, so to speak. So he brought me in from outside. I became the three. and then I went over to one of the squadron battalions. It was an exigent, initially, of the Iraq and Afghan wars, mainly Iraq and then Afghanistan. When I showed up, it had a strong presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We had hubs in Baghdad.

Well, that one was actually reduced when I got there. I'm sorry. We'll hit this up in the bonus segment. But just an overview. It started pretty early, right? Yeah, like 0405. The first time I heard about it was in late 04. They started recruiting people.

I didn't go. I thought about it, but I didn't go. And a couple of guys I knew went. But they were, you know, the two-man teams would go out, and they were operational advisory teams, and they would advise units on how to overcome asymmetric threats and stuff like that. It was a product of the whole evolution of IED. It was a lot of guys from like Tier 1.

It was from Tier 1 units. It was a very interesting experiment. We'll get into that in two seconds on the bonus segment. Here, give me your glass. I'll fill you up there. Next week, next Friday, we're going to have a former CIA paramilitary operations officer on. Kim Kipling is his pen name talking about another legendary paramilitary officer, Dutch. So we'll have him on the show next week.

And that's it. Until next time, we'll see you guys then. Thank you for joining us tonight. Thanks, everybody. We appreciate it. Thank you for having me. And, hey, check out Toby's book. Yeah, definitely.

Justin's full story is in there. And, I mean, Toby obviously interviewed all the other OGA guys who are out there. So it's a really well-done book. So we'll see you guys next time. Take care.