The Team House - The Legacy of Mike Spann: The First Casualty of the GWOT | Justin Sapp & Toby Harnden | Ep. 216

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

Justin Sapp was the first green beret in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. He was on the mission that saw the first American Casualty in the Global War on Terror Mike Spann. Toby Harnden is a journalist and author who wrote the book on the incredible story of the CIA team Alpha that were the first boots on the ground if Afghanistan. Toby's book:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/First-Casualty-Untold-Mission-Avenge/dp/0316540951 Badger Six:⬇️ https://badgersix.org/the-team/ Today' Sponsor: The AARP Veteran Report⬇️ https://aarp.org/VETREPORT Free, Twice Monthly email newsletter that salutes military service & provides a mixture of inspirational human stories and practical info for vets. https://aarp.org/VETREPORT To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #mikespann #specialforces #ciaBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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

why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, covert ops, espionage, the team house, with your hopes, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey everyone, welcome to episode 216 of the team house. I'm Jack Murphy. Dave Park is all the way on the other side of the set today. And we have two guests in studio tonight.

We're really happy to have returning to the show, Justin Sapp and Toby Hardin. Toby is the author of First Casualty, the book about the CIA paramilitary team that Justin Sapp was assigned to at that time. He was a Green Beret with Special Forces. assigned to the agency paramilitary team that J.R. Seeger was in charge of. We've had him on the show before, awesome guy. So we've had you two on the show independently, but never together. So we're really

excited to have you both here, you know, in person. Yeah, exactly. It was on Zoom last time. Yeah. Yeah. I love the new studio. We had Justin in our old studio when it was a little more haphazard. I mean, this is pretty haphazard. No, this is great. Thanks for having us back. Yeah, thanks for coming on, man. I really appreciate it. Well, we found it because we bumped into you bringing out the trash. So, you know, that was hilarious. Yeah, I was bringing out the trash to throw out.

And I was pushed open the door and these two guys are standing right. We're just walking by. Literally, we just walked up. But it looked like we were standing there. I mean, the camouflage netting on our door outside should give us away. The NRA bumper stickers. Right, yeah. So you've both been on the show and, you know, we've had your origin stories.

But for people who haven't had the opportunity to, to watch those yet. Can you guys kind of give us a rundown on, you know, like who you are and, you know, a little, yeah, a bit of backstory. Sure. Well, so I'm obviously, you can tell from the accent,

not originally from these parts, originally from the South. The UK. Oh, UK. The north of England. Although I haven't got a particularly north of England accent. My dad was in the Navy. We moved around a lot.

when I was a kid. I joined the Navy, got a sponsorship through college, studied modern history, then went back into the Navy, spent 10 years in total. And after that, became a journalist, got posted to Northern Ireland pretty early on. And that kind of, it was kind of a transition, really, from domestic reporting to sort of being a foreign correspondent.

From there, I got sent to Washington, which was where I was on 9-11. getting a little bit bored with covering just politics and eventually wound up like so many other people in Iraq, then Afghanistan. I wrote a book about a British battle group in Helmand in 2009. I'd already written a book about the IRA called Bandit Country, which is actually about to be reissued I think in probably in November. So I was running the sort of, you know, journalism and books alongside each other. I went back to Washington.

I covered way too much American politics and presidential campaigns. And then 2021, I guess it was in the end, I wrote first casualty, my third book, which was about really centered on CIA's team Alpha, the first team behind enemy lines, after 9-11 and that got me you know in contact with people like Justin and the rest of history that's fantastic well thanks for having me back i'm justin sapp i um been in career in the

army i've been in the army over 28 years and i'm getting ready to retire soon i started out as the son of a CIA officer so we moved around the world mainly in the middle east and south asia and And we came back when I was a senior or junior in high school, graduated in Atlanta. And I went to University in Virginia, Virginia Military Institute. Took a commission in the Army, went in armor initially. And then I ended up going to special forces. I was in a very cool unit in the 82nd called 373 Armor, Airborne Tank Battalion. My understanding is they're back now, not with tanks, but, you know, they're back as a unit.

And from there I went to the Q-course and all that training that goes into the pipeline, and then I went to FIS Special Forces Group. And I was there as a team leader in First Battalion, had a great time. I was on an ASAT team, an urban UW team, is what the term they used at the time. Did some deployments, did a J-SET to Uzbekistan, deployments to Kuwait, this sort of thing, and then 9-11 happened. And I was at Combat Diver Course in Key West when 9-11 happened. when I came back to group, obviously things had changed,

and then I was one of three individuals picked to join the Central Intelligence Agency and deployed Afghanistan, which is a subject of first casualty. That whole story is related in there by Toby. He does a very good job of that. And I came back, and like many of you, I spent the balance of my career in Iraq and Afghanistan in the Middle East, and now I'm here in New York. I'm actually the military advisor, the U.S. ambassador of the UN, and I work for the joint staff, and I'm looking forward to retiring here in the near future.

That's fantastic. After your time, because, I mean, first casually, if you guys haven't read it, everybody needs to read it. It's a fantastic book. It's a fantastic account. I mean, and you had a lot of access. Well, yes. But it wasn't like somebody saying, here we're opening the doors, come in, and you've got access.

It was sort of painstakingly built up. And I remember, vividly, you know, it was probably about three years or so ago, meeting Justin for the first time. Now, we've been in email contact around about 2013, 2014, when I first got interested in the subject. But we met outside a sandwich shop. It was the height of COVID. And, you know, we were sitting outside this place.

And Justin started talking about what he was. was doing on 9-11. And so not only was he at the school in Key West, but he was underwater, you know, when the first plane hit. And so he was just telling me this story. And I just remember sitting there thinking like, wow, okay, so there's the opening to the book, you know, because I knew that David Tyson was in the air flying from Tashkent to London. I knew that Mike Spann was on the ground at CIA headquarters and now had somebody who was underwater. And the other thing I remember about that is it went way, way, way longer than we planned. You're saying that Justin talked way too much?

Well, so Justin said to me, he said, so he was in full flow, and I'm just like lapping it all up. And, you know, obviously I've got my tape recorder on. I'm thinking, this is just fantastic. And he says, and he sort of says, hey, I'm not giving you too much detail up, am I? And I was like, no, you are not giving me too much detail. And so it was It was really a process of going from person to person from Team Alpha and also Green Berets, people like Mark Mitchell, people from ODA-595, Brits from the SBS, Special Boat Service, like the British Seals. And, you know, I was coming into it pretty cold.

I mean, I'd been a foreign correspondent for a long time, spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I had a couple of books under my belt. But they were British books, basically. So it was pretty unknown quantity. And so it's just a process of just showing up, doing your homework, doing all of the background reading, and just winning people over, in the hope that they will say to the next person,

well, this guy, you know, you're not going to waste your time if you're talking to him. He seems like the real thing. He's knowledgeable, he's, you know, he's, you know, knowledgeable. he's respectful he's you know he's fully invested in this

and so that's where the sort of access came from really it was I felt there was sort of a tipping point after speaking to David J.R. Seeger who you mentioned who was you know writing

thriller so you know read his thrillers and went and interviewed him about the thrillers and said and by the way I'd also like to talk about this because I'm you know thinking about doing a book so David Tyson who had just retired

and I'd been pursuing for years, really about seven years. And finally, we'd to talk to this, David, Justin and JR. Then it became more difficult because there were people who'd been senior, you know, very senior like Scott Spelmeyer, who was Carbill Station Chief and the senior CIA guy on the NSC at the end of his career, just retired, people contracting. And so at that point, I knew I had enough to write it. And I went to the agency and said, hey, you know, I'm doing this.

And I said, yes, we already know. And I said, you know, if you can give me, if you can sort of vouch for me, give me access, allow people who are still serving to speak to me. That will be much appreciated. And they did help. They did facilitate a number of interviews. And so, I mean, it's interesting, Andy Hartsog, who was just Andy in the book with a bar over his eyes. You know, I interviewed Andy.

It was COVID, so it was, it was. on the phone. But they facilitated that even though he was a serving officer and he's since retired just very recently. His cover's being lifted so he's sort of out in the open. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's how the sort of access came about. And, you know, I'm now working on another book as well as doing other things, including editing, ARP Veteran Report newsletter, which we'll talk about later. But it's another CIA related project. And I, you know, I look at first casualty as, I guess, in a way, me introducing myself to the agency and the community and that sort of readership. And hopefully it's a pretty good building block.

Justin, what was it like? I don't know if you had journalists and authors reached out to you prior to this. But how did Toby come on your radar and what were your initial thoughts? Well, that's a good question. And so I think originally, initially, Toby had met with a fairly senior individual that had been in my unit, Mark Mitchell, who was at the time working at the NSC. And he had recommended, told Toby, hey, Justin Sapp may be a good person to talk to. So if I recall, like 2013, we established contact by email or on the phone, and we chatted a bit. And so I, earnestly, I went to the PAO folks or whoever the contact was.

I think Jerry gave me the email. And I went to the agency and said, hey, look, I've been contacted by this individual who's interested in writing a book. I'm mindful of the security concerns, you know, and the fact that it's still classified, et cetera. although I'm told that maybe there's an opportunity to tell the story here, and I never heard back. And then fast forward until, was it 2020? Yeah. I can't remember.

We were established contact, and then you were up in the New Jersey area where I live, and then we met at that restaurant, and then we had a chat that lasted quite a while. So that's really how it unfolded. I think there's a couple years that interested. intervened and then we reestablished contact and went from there. I mean, it's a really interesting process because you're total strangers but you're talking about stuff that becomes quite intimate. And people are placing a lot of trust in you.

And at the same time, you know, you want to encourage people to talk. But you want to be kind of true to them and true to their story. And so you want to persuade them that you are without being veiled. and so it really is a sort of a process and then one of the things that I found has found interesting about this is it's sort of continued really because it's because it's through the the publication of the book and so you know there's a level in trust with giving people draft access to drafts and stuff and you know I mean I gave just in a draft and at a certain point and that's for me for

any writer, it's just you don't like to do that. But at the same time, you don't want to make any mistakes. And sometimes you can inadvertently sort of reveal something or touch on something that's very sensitive. Or you can just get small details wrong. And so it becomes, there's an element of collaboration about it where, you know, I mean, Justin had a number of things like, that's, you know, that's right, that's just a little bit awful.

I think that was this person, not that person. And so, you know, it's interesting. And then because of what happened in Afghanistan, which again, I'm sure we'll talk about in August 2021, which was just before publication, I think what happened with the research of the book is sort of team starts to get back together, back in contact, because the story is sort of being told. And then obviously what happened in Afghanistan in August 2021 happened. And then there's sort of a new mission, if you like, in a new phase. And so I've got to know, I've continued with Team Alpha and others to get to know them even better since the book was initially published. You know, I did an epilogue which was about the start of helping the Afghan allies and the collapse in August 2021, which wasn't covered in the book because it's gone to press before then. So it's really interesting. It's not just like a sort of a fire and forget where you just do the interview, you write your thing and then you move on.

sort of much more sort of ongoing. One of the things that we know, like memory under trauma or memory under stress, everybody has like different memories of an operation just because of like an assault or whatever, because that's sort of what our brains do. Were there like times when guys were like, were there, I don't want to say disagreements because that seems like it's disagree. But when when people's facts were. different just because of distress.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, absolutely. I mean, with anything, you know, I don't know, a discussion you had with your significant other sort of breakfast today. Every day, yeah, right. There might be different perspectives on what was, not only

what was meant and what was fell, but what was actually said. And so, as Jack says, you know, if it's a very traumatic incident or a very kind of significant incident, then I guess that factor of memory and perspective is sort of magnified sort of hundreds of times. And so, yeah, I mean, I was constantly trying to sort of, you know, I remember, you know, in the Navy navigating, you have like three cross lines and where they meet is where you are.

And you're always trying to cross reference and to work out what happened. And then obviously, if you get documents, which I did, you know, like David Tyson's diary, for instance. some other documents, that really, really helps because that's more sort of reliable in terms of timelines. And then, you know, it becomes not just a sort of process of interview, but also a process of discussion. You know, I might say to, you know, Justin, you know, actually Justin has an incredible memory for sort of facts and also even sort of dialogue. and so actually Justin was a huge resource but I might say

you know well you know Dave said this and Scott said that and you said that what do you think and you sort of tease it out and you know but there's some things you can't ever really get to is to exactly what happened I was going to ask were there times where you were you ready to just like throw this manuscript across the room because you're like going through it again

and going through it again and going through it and I mean I know how difficult that it is to write a book like this I don't think I ever got to that stage, but you know, you do get to a stage where it feels sort of overwhelming. Right. And you can never, and also, you know, you have a, you have a deadline.

You know, you have to get this. Because I can still be writing this. And there's still, you know, even after publication, very occasionally I'll hear something and think, well, that would have been a good line, you know. Right. I wish I'd have that. Right.

But thankfully, nothing sort of huge. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's frustrating. but it's more exhilarating because the further into it you get, the more it starts to... Yeah, the pieces sort of start to fit together and you're like, yes,

and sometimes there'll be something that I didn't understand fully to quite an advanced stage and then it'll be like ah, now I know, now I know, you know, so I'd say it's more, more exhilaration than frustration ultimately. But I think you

reached out a lot to confirm things. I mean, there was a constant sort of assessment check there. I remember you would text me and you'd ask for, hey, can I, what was this? What's that? And you were not only cross-referencing my memory with other people's in validating it or just checking it, but also other details, which in our community amongst military guys, SF guys, were notorious for being critical about accuracy, technical accuracy and all that. And so when I eventually saw your manuscript, which is great, there was just a couple little things.

And I thought, well, you know, at first I wasn't going to say anything. And then I thought, no, it's important because it's just the type of people are going to read this. A lot of them are going to go, okay, the Dregor, for example, is worn on your chest, not on your back. You know, little subtle things like that, like when we watch war movies. You go, that's not accurate, you know, that enhances things. And so that was, I think, important. And you were very mindful of that and the details. I can imagine how some of those conversations must have been with JR,

who's literally like a walking encyclopedia of paramilitary operations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also, JR's, as Ewan said to me himself, that, you know, you have a conversation with JR, and he'll start talking about, you know, the formation of the earth and the alignment with the planets. It's important to understand. And, you know, by the time you get to the great game in Afghanistan,

maybe talking for an hour already. So we're talking about like Albania in 1957. But Justin, like what you said is very accurate, especially for a large part of the audience of this book, is that, you know, when somebody from the military community reads a book, and if there's one thing like that's out of place, like where a Drager is located on the body,

if that's wrong, then people go, well, how do I know anything else in this book is accurate? Like what else is, is, you know, accurate. Yeah, it's really, yeah, it's very important. And that's why, I mean, that's why it's important for me to do it. And I also think that if I don't understand, you know, on the, you know, outside the, beyond the detail, if I don't understand something, then the reader's probably not going to

understand. Right. And certainly if I write it and I don't understand it, the reader certainly isn't going to understand it. And, I mean, it was, I mean, I was very appreciative of the amount of time and an effort that people from Team Alpha, Justin and David and the others, would spend on helping me to get things right. Let's take a quick pause here.

We've got to give a shout out to our sponsor for this show, which is the AARP Veteran Report. And so I have all the talking points here, but I feel kind of stupid telling you what those are. Do you want to tell us, Toby, since you write for it, what is the AARP Veteran Report? So, sure. So I'm a contractor at ARP and I'm the senior editor of this newsletter which we launched last August and it's for veterans. It is what it says on the tin and it goes out twice a month, second and the fourth Thursday of the month. And it's a mixture of sort of human stories. Justin wrote for it last week about Badger Six. And it was actually one of our regular features, which is then and now. back somebody back in the day, so we've done once from Vietnam and even, we've even done one World War II one.

But in this case, it was Justin back in 2001 and Justin now, you know, he's a captain in his late 20s, he's now a colonel in his early 50s, I guess. And, you know, and a new mission, you know, with, so it's connected. So the point is connecting what you're doing now with your service. And Justin actually is still serving about to be a veteran. And so that was about Badger Six and the new mission to rescue Afghan allies. We have a feature called My Hero, where it's somebody talking about the service of a veteran. It might be a gold star spouse. It might be the daughter of a veteran.

It might be a parent of a veteran or a brother of somebody who received the Medal of Honor in Vietnam and was killed. And so there's that kind of human story. But then there's service stories about discount. and benefits and how to navigate VA healthcare. And so we found, you know, we've got, you know, I think last time I looked it was, you know, almost 70,000 subscribers. And so we find that the mix is successful,

that you don't want all of just one thing. And so, you know, 700 word articles, email newsletters so you can, you know, most people read it on their phones. It's not in print. and you don't have to be an ARP member to subscribe. It's free to subscribe. But it's also a way to get veterans to tap into ARP results.

Right. Some of the things we were talking about, because I'm a member of AARP. And, you know, I didn't know that there was veterans discount for AARP. I think it, I've seen 43%. That's amazing. And so if you go to AARP, is it aapr.org? yeah, dot org

slash vet report you don't even have to be a member to subscribe so everybody watching now should subscribe. They don't spam you. It's just the articles and it's, I mean they're great stories, human interest stories and particularly if you're interested in

the military. Yeah, you know. And it's for veterans but also families of veterans, people who support the military. It's got a kind of generally sort of upbeat sort of vibe. I sort of feel it's like patriotic but it's not rah-rah.

Right. It's human some quite sort of sentimental stories about people discovering the sort of war letters World War II letters written by their parents but it's not cheesy. So you know

I write for it sometimes I did a story about war dogs you know, K-9 heroes recently. And we have a, you know,

a whole bunch of freelancers, many of them, veterans. So I like it because it's, I feel it's, it's meaningful.

It sort of helps people. You know, I've covered a lot of negative stuff in the news business in my time. This is, this is positive.

And I'm always, you know, finding stories, telling stories, helping people tell stories from some incredible people that I, otherwise, you know, might not have contact with.

That's fantastic. Check out AARP.org slash vet report. You can sign up for it. And I also want to give a quick shout out to our Patreon. The links down in the description. If you guys go down there and help support the show, it starts just five bucks. You will get access to all the episodes of the Team House ad-free. So please help us out.

We really appreciate all you guys who subscribe to our Patreon. And please make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel, too, if you haven't already. We're on that March to 100,000. We're getting there. We should have a competition. We're on for 100,000 as well. Really? How long have you been working on this?

Since, so we launched last August. Okay, we've been working three years, so we think we know who's going to get there first. Justin, can you, you know, we talked about it on your show, but a lot of people maybe, you know, haven't had the opportunity to see the show. Can you tell us about your introduction to Team Alpha, how it was. formed and like... Yeah, that's an interesting story. So it was very, in my view, kind of ad hoc and it was in extremists, right? So I graduated dive school on, I think it was 20 September.

And I got, I believe that was a Friday. I got back to group. And the next morning was a Saturday, the 21st. and Kroa Hall and told me, hey, there's three of you going to go and you're going to be detailed to the CIA and you're going to conduct an unconventional warfare assessment and get to it, get busy. And we left the following Monday, if I recall. And anyway, we got to headquarters. We got to Special Activities Division. We got a quick and brief.

And I didn't know anybody. I mean, I had interned there in college, in D.I. and Director of Intelligence, but it was a totally different kind of world there. So I didn't know any of these folks, and so we were sort of kind of felt a little bit, I don't know, like outsiders, and we kind of stayed out of everybody's way for a couple days. And then eventually we got introduced to members of the team, but it wasn't like, here's the team, and there was six of us or seven of us there. It was sort of here and there.

I met Alex Hernandez. as I met Mike Span, but I didn't know that they were going to be on my team because things were so heady at the time in such a state of flux, you know, at all levels always the National Command, that we didn't know who was going where and what teams. Alex, I think, knew a little bit more, but things were being formed on the fly. And so we at one point went from being last or close to last in the order of March to being first or second of the order of March. And so some people know, you know, the NALT team went in, you know, before us into the Panshir Valley.

And then we quickly followed. But our team and the fact we were going to link up with Ablushcheed Dostum, I didn't know that we were going to link up with Dostom until we arrived in Afghanistan. Now, I think Alex knew and a couple other people knew, but I literally was so fixated of getting my stuff together, getting to the, packed and then we literally got in a van outside of CIA headquarters and we drove to the point of the departure got on the aircraft and then we flew to Uzbekistan and i met the first time i met everybody with the exception of day because we picked up dave and tashkin at the embassy was in that van headed the airport and so that was my entree that was my introduction to everybody and that's not the way it's supposed to work but at the time it was

You know, it was a different time. I mean, you know, it was like go, go, go. And I don't know what else could have been done. I mean, it was just, it was a different time. It was an extreme situation. And so we got to talk and we got to know each other in the flight over there. And then we had a couple days, two or three days in Tashkent, where we staged out of the warehouse there.

And that was all day, you know, together maps and radios, putting radios together. We had the new invidderers, a sack capable. weapons, all that kind of stuff. And so by the time we got to Karshi Khanabad, I had a pretty good feeling. I mean, everybody was prior military. So there was that bond there,

that sort of that bond, that prior service bond. It seemed really natural to me. And that was, I don't think that was typical. I think they, I realized they picked some really good guys for this. So that's how I got to know everybody. And then, you know, we infiltil shortly thereafter.

You gave Dave twice. a familal on the AK-47, which I never, you know, So I didn't know everybody had been in the military, and Dave had been in the military, but Dave, I had actually met when I went on a joint combined exchange training in May and June and July of that same year. So I had just been in Uzbekistan a couple months before.

I had actually incidentally met Dave. He gave me a ride to the embassy, picked up some people at the hotel. I didn't know who he was for sure, but he like, I kind of got a vibe. You know, I just got a vibe. And, you know, my dad was an agency guy, so I just kind of knew. But it would have been, you know, long since forgotten. And then he shows up and they introduce him as, hey, he works the station here.

And I'm like, wait a minute, you look familiar. And then we figured it out. He had given me a ride to the airport. And we went one of the days we were there. we had to do the fanfire, so we took these AKMSs down to what I think was a parking garage that had been converted in and into a range. So it sort of went down on the ground. So it was impossible for any stray rounds to fly out.

And we did a fan fire in the basement with the AKs and the Glockes. And then Dave had a burning high power. I remember that. And we did that. And wasn't the best, the most, you know, like no ventilation or whatever nowadays. We did that and then we left and then, you know, it was just one thing after the other. But you were so excited about being part of this mission that you didn't really think about. Everything was new and exciting, right?

Yeah. So it was a different time. And a lot of people who were adults during 9-11 and remember it, you know, the atmosphere, the zeitgeist in the States was totally different than this night-gice. You know what I mean? It really was. It's very much like, let's get some. Yeah. Take the gloves off.

Yep. No time, no patience for excuses. I mean, you're all in or not. Now, was there, were there discussions at your level or higher that you know of about follow-on forces, conventional forces? Like how, so you've got this small team of Americans who are basically charging a country. So the plan was, as it was briefed initially, it was all broad conceptual. When we first got to headquarters, I was brought in, I was told a couple things. One is you no longer work for the Army, work for us, because that's the whole Title 50 thing.

So that was very clear. I said, fair enough. And then the second thing was, hey, we're going to try to get you in to link up with this array of warlord. So they had Ishmael Khan, they had dozed them, and they had a map with the pictures of these guys. but it wasn't explicitly stated which one you're going to. So that was kind of, I was like, okay, we're putting this plan together. Like, it's still, like, not, it's in the oven getting baked. There was no discussion about conventional following forces.

I assume that there would be some sort of airfield seizure at some point, because that would be logical, right, but that was not discussed. What was discussed was you're going in, you're going to do an unconventional warfare assessment, then you're going to come out after two weeks, which was roughly doctrinal, right? So that's what a pilot team would do. To me, I was like, okay, this is familiar. This is a pilot team operation.

But that changed quickly when we got to Uzbekistan. The timeline got compressed to the point where it went from a week to four days to three days. And so, what do you, you know, okay, fine, it's not doctrinal, whatever. Let's roll with it. But, yeah, that was the plan. But what was crazy about it was some of the discussions about how we were going to get into Afghanistan at the time. At one point, they talked about flying off the carrier into southern Afghanistan wearing burqas. They had an idea to smuggle us in vehicles that people had contacts with these folks that had hidden compartments.

So we would be somehow smuggled into Uzbekistan in these vehicles and then driven across northern Afghanistan, a link up with those to them. And then the agency was going to fly us in. And then they realized, well, wait a minute, we have these MH60s that are here for CSAR, along with 47s. Let's ask SENTCOM, General Franks, to use those. And they did, and that was approved after a couple days. So the actual delay was associated with that request. Can you imagine doing 400 miles in a cutout in a jingot truck over Afghan roads? But to give you an example.

Take your Drameamine. Yeah. I was trying to imagine. river was part of it at one point as well the point well or at least going on a barge or something because the the termus bridge was blocked it looked like the Maginot Line when I went there it had all these obstacles and stuff

and they had ferries that would ferry people across Amadaria River so my understanding was these vehicles would have to be ferried across and then disembarked what could possibly go wrong yeah nothing but at the time we were like

okay cool yeah it just seemed like all right, that's the plan, let's go with it. No one, no one, and let me tell you, you didn't want to be too negative about your prospects because they had zero patience for that. People were fired for that. The ODA that was in line before ODA 595,

Mark Nuchin and the whole soldiers, the ODA was fired by General Hall and Colonel, Colonel Mulholland then because they were just two. sort of negative. Like this won't work. Well, what about this and what about that? What's the, you know, what's going to happen if this happens? Whereas Mark Nuch's team was not like that.

And the other thing that just kind of sticks in my mind from what Justin said was, there's a guy called in the book of Bob, who was on Team Bravo, who was a three-man team that came in and actually linked up with Team Alpha. And Scott Spellmeyer went over to command them. but Bob was actually the only one of the I guess the 11 in total who had no prime military experience and when they asked him about the he'd never parachuted before and they said you know there's a clan here

that would parachute and he's like fine by me hard-gore he was going to parachute having never jumped out of a plane that was the first time I heard about the was it the 10 alpha simulator for the parachute at the time it was a new parachute adapted off the smoke jumper rig. Yep, yep, yep. And they had a simulator that I'd never heard of it,

and they said, hey, the simulator's in this tent, and we have it here for training in the event that we decided to do, static line input. And so that was on the table until General Franks agreed to cut the helicopters for that mission. Have you seen the new free fall simulator?

No, I haven't, no. Yeah, it's pretty cool. You're actually suspended. Oh, really? Yeah, wearing VR goggles. And then when you actually pull your rip cord, you come down vertical and pull your toggles and move into the drop zone. I saw it at a soft week a few times. No, I haven't seen that.

I remember the old generation one that you were like landing on aircraft carrier. It was a little preposterous. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I remember the instructional video for that. It's a smoke jumper telling you what to do. how it works and like you see the guy's eyeballs moving as he's reading the cue cards and it just sticks out my mind for some reason well jocelyn mentioned alex hendez who was the deputy

chief of team alpha um Alex has just returned from normandy from doing static line jumps there so he he's uh with the um the round canopy parachute team commanderating the uh the normandy invasion yeah yeah yeah yeah so he's still you know Alex was you know do this the math he was 48-49 in 2001 he's still he's still jumping out of planes that's pretty hardcore yeah yeah yeah I imagine that the uh

the military guys were really pushing for that jump you know to get that mustard stain and the agency guys are like yeah whatever we do we do well wait would you get it because I I don't know that's this one of those questions about I'm sure well really what happened I think I would have been yeah

they would have just added me to the fifth group you know whatever the memo was that had to be signed you know and the orders or whatever. But yeah. No, but that didn't last very long. Yeah. Why are we going to do that? When you can land at birds.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people don't understand that the idea of airborne operations, especially, I mean, even on a tarmac, which is. Unmarked drop zone. Which is generally clear, but in a, you know, I mean, generally clear, unless you go off. But in terrain like Afghanistan, like then what do you do when a guy breaks his leg?

I'll spread across the mountains? And when we saw the, well, after the fact, the next morning, when I saw the site that Dostom is selected for the helicopter impel, yeah, I kind of scratched my head a little bit. I mean, I understand why he selected the area, but that actual spot was pretty tough. It was like a gorge. Someone was telling me, it was later on during the war that either a Delta Trooper,

maybe squadron even was going to do a free fall jump. And the mission was going to be called like Angry Horn. it or something like that and they ended up calling it angry squadron because it got kanked so many times but they ended up realizing like yeah the wind is just going to spread us out all over this entire valley yeah so yeah the environmental conditions

have to be right can you pass me the booze yeah like makers mark or whatever um so one of the uh I think it's one of the stories in the book and I'm not sure if you were there at the time just because you mentioned Doston who was quite a character

but the Air Force, the female pilot. Yes. Were you there for that when I was going? So that was around Condus, if I recall. Well, so there were two. That was the angel of death. In Condus. In Condus, yeah.

This was an F-16, I think. Maybe an F-18. That was David Tyson. That was like the Psyops where he was getting that Dostom was arranging, I told the Saturday that last time I was here. on the walk. It is a sciops.

It's a great story. Taunting the Taliban. Yeah. You know. You all get into heaven. Questioning their manhood, you know, full range of. Yeah,

because these guys were, so the, you know, there weren't like, encrypted comms. So these guys were basically, well, he was,

yeah, like, I guess what we call icons? Yeah. They put them up, yeah, yeah, the,

well, Dostom had this, God, you probably know, I kept freaking the gentleman's name, but he was, He was responsible for managing his comms. Oh, yeah.

And he had, like, a battery-powered disk, and it was all sort of like expeditionary, and Dosten would stop, and he would put out a carpet and the battery, and he had the scanner like you'd buy at Radio Shack. And he would just scan the freaks, and then if they were there for any length of time, Doestim had that, and he would taunt these guys, they would all taunt each other on the radio. And then at one point, and I wasn't there for this, but you related in the book that I think they just keyed both radios to each other and said, hey, I want you to hear what the angel of death sounds like

or something of that effect, right? So this female pilot or navigator, I can't remember which, so they had her singing the Navy song. And then Dustin through David sort of translated, but it was not a word-for-word translation by any means. In fact, Dostom completely made up the translation, and it was all about, you know, she's going to kill you,

and she's going to do this to you and that to you. So, yeah, I mean, you know, Dostom's obviously fascinating character, a guy who's done some terrible things in his life. Oh, yeah. To put it mildly, and I keep on hearing new things, actually. But, and, you know, whatever, I don't know, fourth grade education and there's debate about whether he can even really write. But, you know, he's spent his whole life

fighting. And so in the moment, in the, you know, I guess the hour of need of the United States thought he was the guy. And he had the men and he had the resources and he had the will to sort of fight the Taliban. And he certainly understood

warfare in the mountains, I think it's fair to say. Yeah. Just what were you, because you worked with, what were your impressions of Dostom? So it's important to note, like when I was, I mentioned I was an intern at the agency and Director of Intelligence. I happened to be with the South Asia and Central Asian analyst. So I was around stories about him back in the early 90s.

So I knew who he was. I was aware of his sort of his background. Anyway, so fast forward how many every years. He was pretty much what I expected. I mean, he was this sort of this commanding, dominant sort of figure. He was a little bit taller than me. the average Afghans who he's like an imposing guy he wasn't mean like the stories

from particularly from the U.S. side had been pretty bad like he had done this and there's reasons why these stories were promulgated but his reputation was horrible but when I met him he was quite friendly now I think he's got a ability to kind of like he's very smart very intelligent that that he's going to treat us differently

he's going to treat his lieutenants or whomever. But I never had a, I never saw him ever have cross words with, with us. I know Jair on a couple occasions had to sort of lay down the law with him. But I didn't see that. He was always well behaved in terms of his conduct that I saw. I've heard all the stories later before and after. But most important, he was the right guy at the right time. was a good commander and he was an effective commander particularly relative to some of the other

groups and you know and so everybody wanted or assumed that the panch year was going to be the main effort that that's where the battlefield success would come from that's where the decisive maneuver would come from but that's actually not what happened what happened was do stum was much more dynamic and aggressive and he seized the opportunity enabled by oda 595 and 534 and all these the our team to take the fight to the Taliban, and he was successful. And it was his success that really was the impetus for the panchiri's under Fahim Khan to advance on Kabul. Because Ahmed Shah Masoud had been assassinated by al-Qaeda on September the night. So they, and he was, you know, the leader.

And he was the leader that the agency dealt with in MI6 in Britain. And so there was some sort of disarray, I guess, some jockeying for position amongst the Taj. and certainly mean general Tommy Franks you know lost his temple with him on one occasion and you know there were lots of demands for money to do stuff and for the Americans to sort of kind of carpet bomb a path to Kabul before they did anything and so yeah so Dostom and the Uzbeks and T. Mal from 595 and 534 alongside him kind of stepped in into the breach. Now there were a lot of warlords

and they weren't necessarily allies except for in their fight against the Taliban. Mouss assassination was very sophisticated and very timely. Was there ever any evidence that

I saw that somebody had helped them with this? With the assassination? So all I know is what I read and there were two guys who were masquerading, I believe, is Algerian reporters.

And the story that was related to me is that one was the bona fide attacker and the other one was apparently unwitting. And he clacked off something in his camera that killed, that would eventually kill Massoud because they evacuated him to Tajikistan, I believe. Yeah. And then he passed away later. Well, I think he may have already been dead. He may have already dead. And they put him.

in a freeze of kind of you know they didn't want to announce that he was dead and then the other guy ran for it and his personal security attachment gunned him now is what I heard but I don't I don't know anything about ISID I know ISID was in condues with the Taliban when we were there and that they were they were they were able to leave but I don't know if they were complicit in any sort of plot against Massoud. And I've always thought and you know I've talked to a lot of people

about this that the two operations were in were independent like 9-11 and killing Massoud. I mean it seems like you know that there would have been sequencing because there's two days. I actually think it was a huge mistake for Al Qaeda to do 9-11

two days after they'd kill Massoud because if they had been two months then they'd probably would have cleared the Tajik's out of the Pancheo Valley and left the United States with no foothold in Afghanistan at all. So I think, and I also know, you know, knowing to an extent how Al-Qaeda and these groups operate, these two things were independent. And it was just,

yeah, and it just so happened that they both kind of worked at that, you know, on those particular days. Yeah. I mean, we had that interesting conversation with Chris Miller about, you know, that whole decision, you know, in southern Afghanistan, like, do we cut the road or not that one night? And that was the night everyone flowed down into Pakistan. There's some coordination taking place. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about, about span, if that's okay.

Absolutely. Yeah. So, Justin, when you met him, oh, did you? Like what were your impressions of him in particular? So my first impression was I knew he's a Marine. So, you know, that I knew his bona fides in terms of his military sort of professionalism. But he was very quiet.

So, and I sat next someone in the band, if I recall. And then we chatted. And then slowly he kind of opened up. But it turns out that was his nickname at the farm was like Quiet Mike or something like that. So he was just a quiet guy. but once you got to know him, he opened up pretty quickly. But his default setting was quiet.

And so, but yeah, he was great. I mean, and we were, you know, doing the name-dropping thing because he had been an Anglo officer, so Aaron Naval, Groundley, Gunfire liaison officer. And so I knew some guys from school that had gone that route. And, you know, I was comparing notes in the van ride to the aircraft. and then chatted with him a bit on the airplane, but I didn't really get to know him until we parted with the rest of the team

because the team split, this detailed in the book, from Dei, where we initially, near where we initially landed south to Yacalang to go to Kareh, who was the Hazara leader. It was myself and Mark, who's the medic, and Mike who's a team lead. That's when I really got, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, no, sorry, just Mark Rousenberg, who died in the Philippines in 2016. He passed away a couple years ago, and sadly, and he was phenomenal, great medic.

So it was like Silent Mike, and Dark Mark was one of Mark's in face. Mark. Mark, he just had this, but they were all, they had a great sense of humor. That was the key, and in those kind of situations where there's a lot of, I mean, let's be honest, there's a lot of downtime that's boring and you're in these like austere conditions. And so you got a laptop and you got each other to sort of pass the time and talk. And they were, they were actually, they were great. It really was a good time.

And we had a lot in common. It turned out. Can we talk about like the events that led up to his death? Like where, what was going on at that point in time? So, well, Toby, in terms of all the chronology of it, has put it all together remarkably. So leading up to it, I had been with Mike from that trip to Bamion or to Yakulang. Then we came back, and there was this period where we were sort of getting settled into Mazar Shari. The Taliban had evacuated the area, and they had moved to condues.

we were tasked to go to uh... uh... uh... poli kumri which is a town kind of south of condos and and try to rally the forces there to block a southern escape route

so if the the advance offensive went against condues from from uh... west to east that they couldn't squirt down south towards the slaying pass and get away right so we had some problems convincing the guys sitting in town, the war, the sub-warlords, the lieutenants of the warlords to do anything. Because at the time,

I think in their view, they had no incentive to do that because it was now the, all the parochialisms of like the Tajjiks versus the Uzbeks and the Hazars was playing out, and they wanted to basically seize real estate. So Mike was really frustrated with that, understandably. We had a night with Alex at this sort of bourgeois villa that had been built in the 70s by the Soviets, and then Mike and I went back towards Mazar. And on the way back, this is the day before he passed away, that we got word that there was a group of foreign fighters, but the way the Afghans are related, it's always that they're Chechens at the time was like they're Chechens. Okay, there's 300 Chechens. So we were

very interested in figuring out what the truth was, and so we were moving forward heading back to So we're like heading northwest. And we run into the main body of Dostom's guys with JR and everybody. And then we conferred with them. And then we found out that these guys in fact had surrendered and that they had been moved to the compound we stayed at, the Klai Jungi, the so-called War Fort, which is this 19th century, mainly 19th century building, giant complex. And so we were, we decided that we were going to interview the prison. And we got there the night before, right at dusk, and the Afghans told us to come back.

Dave was with us. So we had Dave, because we picked him up. Dave spoke the languages, so he had to be there. And then Dave talked to the Afghans, and they were cagey. They said, don't, now is not good. Come back later. We had a suicide bomb. Yeah, I'm sorry.

There was a guy lying there on the ground with a tarp over him or like a quilt or something. And I'm like, who's that guy? Is that the guy he killed himself, clacked off, where he blew himself. up the frag. And took out a couple Dostom's commanders. One of them who was a really, really good guy, Ammanalal, right? And he had been Dostom's like 2, S2, J2, whatever you want to call him. And really a nice guy, big guy, like 6'4 and just a genuine nice guy. He was very pious Muslim and he treated the Taliban prisoners with dignity, right?

He didn't abuse him or anything like that. it and I distinctly remember that. And he was killed. And so we left. And then we went back. And then the very next morning, early in the morning, I was watching the radio. So we'd pull shift. And around 7.30 in the morning, and I didn't expect this, Alex called.

Alex was the deputy. He was back in Pullicamri or down that way. And he said, look, I don't have wheels. We just got this vehicle delivered from Uzbekistan. It was a Waz, Russian Waz truck. actually a Jeep, like a four-speed, can you please deliver us to it? And so the plan shifted from I'm going with Mike and Dave into this compound interview of the prisoners to I'm going with this gentleman Greg, who was another G.B officer, seal, and we're going to go,

we're going to go deliver this vehicle. And so that's where I parted Waves, and that's the last time I saw Mike alive. and then later that day and I'm sort of compressing the time I very quickly the vehicle broke down there was this whole side story on that we come back I'm completely ignorant of what's going on to the compound things started late morning

and word eventually trickled back to where we were staying which was called the Turkish school that was in a boarding school built by Turkey with Turkish money and then we were staying there and that, you know, hey, there's this thing going on down to the Klaijungi, which was on the south side of Nazare Shari.

So, yeah, go ahead. So, yeah, so basically what had happened, so Justin's going off with the vehicle, David and Mike had gone to the fort to question these Al-Qaeda prisoners. These are the first Al-Qaeda prisoners that were being questioned by the United States after 9-11. and, you know, it was clear from seeing them the night before, the day before, that these were all foreign fighters, they weren't Afghans. And, you know, David describes as the smorgasbord of Al-Qaeda, you know, every nationality you could possibly imagine, you know, including American. So, although they didn't know that, but John Walker Lind was in there. And I think it's, you know, it's interesting, you know, you ask about Mike.

and obviously I never met him but he's a 32 year old former Marine who I sort of envisaging him and I think in a way he was quite similar to you Justin in terms of

kind of mentality and kind of you know I feel like the personification of 9-11 you know it was there at the tip of the spear to get to al-Qaeda to kill capture it stop it happening again And I think Mike of everybody on the team was kind of the most kind of, I don't know, how you would hardcore or, you know, kind of.

Serious, not someone to be trifle with. He was a serious guy, but he wasn't, you know, that was, there was much more than that, but that was the main ethos. There was like, we're here to do the job. We have a mission. And, you know, we're going to get the job done. And it was very, very much serious approach to things. and a real focus, like don't forget what happened,

and don't forget why we're here. And people forget that nowadays. I don't think people realize at the time, right? It was to go in there and, yes, deny Afghanistan as a safe haven for Al-Qaeda, but it was first and foremost to try to find Al-Qaeda and destroy it, to remove the Taliban because they were obviously supporting al-Qaeda. but also, I mean, let's be honest, there was a revenge element to this.

I mean, they had murdered 3,000, early 3,000 people right across the river here. And, you know, and folks in the Pentagon and the plain of Pennsylvania as well. And Mike was, he imbued that, that sort of ire, that energy. So I always remember, and Shannon Span,

Shannon Span de Bruy now, she's since remarried. She spoke, and she did an actually, she did a beautiful article for Memorial Day for ARP Veteran Report about Badger 6. And incidentally Badger 6 was the call sign when Justin,

for Justin Mark and Mike when you went to Yakalaam, wasn't it? That's where the name for the organization. Yeah, when we split from Team Alpha and created a separate element And of course, Scott Spelmire and every day they had split as well. They had to come up with call signs. And I don't remember the genesis of that term, but we just decided on it and then it became our call sign.

Badger Six. But the thing that Shannon said in her eulogy, Arlington, Mike, was that he was in the right place at the right time, which obviously the sort of cliche formulation for people die there in the wrong place at the right time. But she was very kind of specific about that and I think that was very sort of true to Mike. And it's just very interesting to me that it was David and Mike. It was just sort of happenstance in a way that they were the two that went there that day. But you have David, you know, David was 40, Mike was 32. So David, a little bit older, but vast experience in Central Asia, all these languages. Mike had its, and you know, David,

with sort of, you know, knowing all about the culture and the sort of nuances and the different kind of tribes and the different kind of ways of behaving in that part of the world. And Mike wasn't that at all. He was sort of the opposite end of the spectrum. It was very direct and focused, as Justin said. But they had worked together before with prisoners in the Dariusu Valley, you know, generally speaking to the low-level Taliban prisoners. and Mike was very, very precise about, you know,

his questioning kind of relentless about, you know, writing down the questions. David, I think, are more sort of free-flowing sort of character. And they would knew how to sort of play good cop and bad cop. And, you know, people often ask about the risk they took that day. And, you know, some people will say things like, oh, you know, it was stupid. They went in there without protection and all like. Well, they did have protection. but it was the Northern Alliance.

But, you know, in this, I don't know, across six provinces, you had, you know, 13 CIA officers, a couple ODAs, a few people from the ODC. Just the name of the game at the time. I mean, everyone was taking big risks every day. Every single day. And I do vividly remember, actually, when we first spoke, Justin talking about, you know, on that journey to Yackelang, thinking about, you know, if something happens here, we'll just be, you know, a bunch of bleached bones,

you know, in the desert, you know, bound decades. later and so the incredible amount of risk every day was a sort of a feature of this and this was not just any other day it was going into question 400 al Qaeda so they certainly knew it was dangerous but there was this sort of imperative to find out who these people were and and indeed many of them including lynn's had trained al-Qaeda camps like al-Faruk and trained in sort of assassination operations and chemicals and and and top since I read the part of the deposition on Lind and he it was yeah I mean it was the the sort of story about he got there and in a way it was sort of indicative of all the other guys like all these guys whatever country that came from Malaysia Indonesia the United States the Australia yeah they all were drawn to Afghanistan and because they had this interest in jihad, etc.

And it was kind of interesting to see how he went to Yemen. He was studying the Kran in Yemen. And then he met some people there who kind of drew him to Afghanistan. But what was interesting was the initial drawl was not to fight in Afghanistan. It was to go to Pakistan. And then he was going to be used in Kashmir. And apparently he didn't like that idea. And then he made his way to Afghanistan.

he ended up in southern Afghanistan where he actually met bin Laden. And so, and then he, what bin Laden did was he gave these foreign fighters as a fighting force to Mulamah Omar, which became known alternately as the Alansar Brigade, the Helpers, or the Zero-55 Brigade. Because I think from Belan's perspective, they couldn't be trusted in the inner circle. They weren't Arabs. They weren't part of that inner circle, but they were good fighters. They were zealous, etc.

And so they would be great for Molamahadam and Omar as shock troops, which is, as I understand it, kind of how he envisioned them and how they were implemented in the fights against the Northern Alliance before we got there. And, I mean, on that day, November 25, 2001 as well, I mean, it's incredible resources available to, sort of journalists and authors. I mean, there was a video taken, well, certainly there's some video

that David Tyson took where you can see the prisoners out in the courtyard. But also, one of Dostom's intelligence guys was taking video of the whole thing, which it just cuts, right, at the moment of the uprising.

But, you know, you had all these 400 Al-Qaeda in the basement of the pink house, which was the sort of Soviet-built school house in the center of the southern compound split in two. And they're brought out in ones, twos and threes. David, who's working with Dostom's intelligence people. So all the sort of many languages are kind of covered.

David's focusing on the people who speak the language is he speaks like Uzbek and Russian and Turkmen and and Dari and Mike, you know, is kind of a sounding board, but he's focused on anybody that might speak English or be Western. And it's, I mean, it's eerie watching him, Mike on that video, like focusing like a laser beam on John Walker Lind, who didn't say a word. And almost, without exception, these guys were talking. Now, a lot of it was, sort of propaganda, just kind of rubbish. You know, I'm here, I'm working for Mossad, oh, I'm working for the CIA, I'm a journalist,

you know, I'm just a hitchhiker, all this type of stuff. But Lind, completely silent, even though David and Mike, and this is captured on video, are, you know, they're clearly American, and they're giving him a chance, and they're questioning him, you know, really pretty fiercely.

And Mike, you know, Mike had honed in on the fact, first of all, you know, he looks, he was dirty and had a heavy beard. But, you know, clearly Caucasian, not Arab or not from, you know, Central Asia. But he had this sweater on and actually to me, interestingly, kind of looks like a Royal Navy sweater. like it's navy blue with these patches on the elbows and on the shoulders and Lind had been instructed by Al-Qaeda

at the Al-Farut camp to tell the other Al-Qaeda fighters that he was Irish not that he was American and so Mike and David picked up from one of actually I know which prisoner it was as an Iraqi prisoner weirdly there are some weird people

there. This was an Iraqi Shiite that somehow ended up here. Wow. Yes. Yes. You ended up at Guantanamo for his sins. But he had told them about the Irishman, you know, talked to the Irishman. And so

and actually this is a chapter in first casualty called the Irishman. And so, you know, Mike sadly died, you know, in the first few moments of the uprising, you know, thinking that, you John Walker Lynn was an Irishman because John Walker Lynn hadn't said anything. But yeah, I mean, so Lynn was out in the courtyard.

There was just, I think, 18 or so prisoners still left in the basement of the Pink House. And you see it on the video where there's a couple of prisoners being led out. And all of a sudden there are shouts, explosions. And that's, you know, hand grenades growing off. so the prisoners had kind of rushed the guards inside the pink house at the top of the stairs overcome them started killing them I mean I think there's that actually I remember Justin talked to me about that there's this moment you know when everything kind of goes south where you can keep you can take control of it or not and if you don't you've kind of lost any

chance of regaining the momentum. And, you know, one thing David and Mike didn't really know was that Dostom's Guard Force that day was, you know, the sort of B team or the C team. In fact, I spoke to one of them who told me that the day before he'd been an onion farmer and he'd never, you know,

never fired a weapon in his life. And he's on the video actually sort of manhandling John Walker Lind with his AK-47, but, you know, he was not a soldier. at all. And so a lot of the Afghans fled and Mike was much closer to the Pink House. He was near a couple of doctors who I interviewed

in 2020. And so they saw a lot of what happened in those early moments of the uprising and basically Mike sort of wheeled around. He had an AKMS kind of hanging it on his back

pulled it over to his shoulder started shooting taking out some of the al-Qaeda guys that were rushing towards him but the guys with their they had their hands sort of tied behind their back but just with turban so it's pretty loose their feet weren't tied

they started jumping up and kind of jumping on top of him from behind he pulled out his Glock took a couple of them out but disappeared under this sort of melee of al-Qaeda prisoners slash fighters, you know, they were really no longer prisoners at this point.

David was much further away, but he hears Mike shout, Dave, Dave, Dave. And so David's kind of frozen to an extent. He described this, you know, to me, it was incredible, like the psychological kind of transformation that you want to go when something like this happens you know time slows down loss of hearing tunnel vision yeah but it's almost like your your body is deciding what is important and what's not

and so he he lost his sense of hearing but he heard Mike shouting his name and David I mean it's incredible and I hope at some stage he'll be on here to tell you about himself and I know he'd like to

but to me to run I mean the Afghans are going the other way you know, there's one guy with a note, one of the other intelligence guys is holding up his notebook so that David doesn't shoot him because David's got his browning out and he's like in Dari

he's like flee, flee. And he survived. But David runs towards Mike and there's this pile of bodies on top of him and you know Dave shoots there's a guy with a Macroft pistol who's shooting David you know on his way to

of the pink house, shoots him twice. You know, he crumbles and David gets to where Mike is and shoots the four Al-Qaeda fighters on top of him. You know, one, two, three, four, four, three, two, one, you know, like, so each of them get two bullets. And then, you know,

David, like, kicks, you know, Mike, you know, he sees blood on the ground, Mike's not moving. I mean the presumption and I was given a copy of the autopsy report and he he was killed by two gunshot wounds of the head

one of them are contact wound so the presumption is that it was his own Glock pistol that he was killed by and of course David can't take any of this in but he grabs Mike's

aka MS and then he's in a whole different world with guys you know he's got grenades bouncing off him guys flinging out, flinging themselves out and headbutting him and he's shooting them

at very close quarters sometimes kind of just over his shoulder and you know he eventually makes it out of the southern compound and gets to the northern side of the fort and so all this is happening while

I guess Justin's sort of making his way back to the Turkish school and the SBS with Admiral Calland, who actually died, sadly died recently. He was the, I guess, was he a one star or two star? He was one star. One star. He was Soxen.

Yeah, that's right. He was Soxen. He passed away. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, just a few weeks ago. He was going to inspect a hospital with some SBS guys who were kind of a bit disgruntled about not being Kunduz and didn't really like being the personal security detail for a Navy SEAL. and they hear the gunfire

and then when they get back to the Turkish school the kind of the 15 man rescue team is being put together so it was an incredible amount of things happening that day I think there are a couple really important points that one that when Doston forces received the surrenders

they didn't search those guys so those guys were down there and I don't know if you guys With hold out weapons Well they did like a they didn't search them properly Right you're actually right So when they came out, some of them already had their weapons. Like they had stuff.

And the other thing is that, you know, we're talking about, you know, team out. We're talking about paramilitary guys and you, a special force guy. That wasn't, that wasn't Dave's background. No. You know, you know, the heat, like, you would expect a guy with a spec cop's background or an infantry background to really jump into action like that. But that wasn't his background. And like he really displayed a great deal of valor for somebody sort of out of, I want to say a little bit out of his element.

I think that's absolutely right. So, yeah, I mean, I think of all of the eight of you, David, he'd had two stints in the army. He'd been an artilleryman, you know, as Scott likes to joke, you know, playing a lot of basketball in Germany. You know, and then he'd been an ROTC commission intelligence officer. But, you know, he'd never done any operations. I mean, he had paid attention in his weapons training and certainly the session that Justin gave him. But if you had to pick one person

who you wouldn't want to be involved in that situation out of the scene, you probably would have been David by his own kind of admission. But to me, that's one of the things that I find so fascinating about his experience is you don't know. I mean, you can be the guy that's the goal golden boy, you know, who's done, we know people like this who are the superstar who does everything in training and, you know, he looks apart and has the sleep tattoos and then won't

get out of the truck on the operations. Exactly. And I kind of, you know, I mean, it's not really a comparison, but there are journalists who are like that as well, you know, who are sort of great, you know, in the office and stuff and talk the talk and look the part and everything, but when it actually happens, they just kind of go to pieces. And so, you know, I've thought about this a lot. And it's sort of in a way connected to the next book that I'm working on is how people react in extremists.

And David in some ways doesn't sort of really like me saying this, or he always kind of, I don't know, he just rolls his eyes or whatever. But to me, I think it's the sort of, and maybe Justin has thoughts on this, but, you know, the sort of the core of your character, that when you're in a situation that most of us will never, thankfully experience. You don't know how you're going to react. Nobody knows. But, you know, something clicks in or it doesn't. And in David's case, I don't know, he's from a, I mean, his mother's still alive in her late 90s. And she's from, you know, a very simple person in the best sense of the word,

sort of like a Mennonite sort of background, plain people and no fuss and not. and no drama and, you know, to David, David's father was a veteran, U.S. Navy veteran in World War II. You know, he was on a ship that was hit by Kamikaze planes. And so he, you know,

he comes from a sort of heartland, you know, solid, patriotic sort of background. And he's a very sort of understated, easy to underestimate kind of demeanor which works very well in the CIA. But,

in that moment, you know, he, you know, I mean, he says it's autopilot, you know, you just do what you have to do, it's not bravery, you don't even think about it, but I guess my assessment is it's sort of the core of your character and who you are that just kind of comes to bear when you're in an extraordinarily extreme situation with, you know, I don't know, 5%, 10% chance, of survival. I mean, it's just, it's incredible that he lived through that. Yeah. And, go ahead.

And you saw David in the immediate aftermath of this. Yeah, so he came back, the long story, of course, it's really in the book, but he, the element that went into the compound to locate him and Mike initially missed him, and he

was able to get out of the compound, and he made his way back to the Turkish school. which was our MSS. The battalion was there, everybody was there. And then I ran into him, and he was shaken, you know. I mean, it was clear that you got to remember I was, you know, blissly ignorant of everything that was going on. So when he showed up, I was interrogating him to figure out what happened.

And then I quickly realized that he wasn't in the right state of mind. He had just been through this, you know, this horrific event experience. and I remember I grabbed his AKMS and it was encrusted with like dirt because he had scaled this wall to get out of the compound and it was just you know the dobe kind of dirt clogs in it and I set that aside and asked him what happened

and the first thing he said to me was something about the Chechens and that PKM and he just kept going on about that and then when he stopped I asked him you know, where's Mike? You know, that was, of course, the logical question. And he said what Toby related about, you know, the broad contours of that story.

Hey, he was on the ground and these guys are coming at me, et cetera, et cetera. And then quickly after that, the SBS detachment and the SOTF came back, the battalion, SF battalion, third battalion. And then I didn't really, that sort of interrupted the conversation and i was talking to them and they were like hey dave you made it they didn't know dave they met him and and so dave uh but dave i think that night or the next

morning he jammed out a cable where he told the whole story uh and uh and that was sort of i think cathartic for him that was the sort of way of getting out of but which is the cable at tenet took into bush in the other president yeah mike morel was the briefer was my god i don't know yeah that's right okay yeah Wow. Yeah. So, yeah, there was, he was, he had, he was definitely, he had seen the white elephant, as they say. And he, um, uh, I think you said he was like a horse that just completed the Kentucky Derby, you know, it was just. Well, he had, yeah, I mean, he was, I mean, he just come out of this thing and he was, you know, he scaled this wall and he had been through this experience. And yeah, he was, you know, it was, um, it was rough day. I mean, like, the toughest day of his life, obviously. And I just happened to bump into him, not knowing that story. And then you're asking him questions, not realizing what he had just been through.

Right. You know. Yeah. And he, I mean, he talks about, you know, it's in the book about how going back into the fort on the 27th. And because they needed it. Because he, he knew where Mike had fallen. Although Navy SEAL, Steff Bass had identified that as well on the 25th. he was in the SBS team he was on an exchange with the SBS

but they needed him for his languages and David just didn't he just didn't want to go back you know and he also said at one point he was next to a T55 tank and he heard this like rhythmic knocking on the tank and he was like what's that and then he looked down and it was his rifle

and he was shaking so much and his rifle was just knocking against a tank so I don't know an incredible thing to have survived and you know very very few people have lived to tell a tale of sort of operating in extremists like that

it's an incredible story man and I mean I've heard I think I've heard you guys tell it a couple times now and it's still like so horrific you can only imagine what those guys were going through and there's so many sort of layers to it as well you know I mean I mean dozens and dozens of hours talking to David

And he still is sort of grasping for what really happened. Right. And, you know, he's been to, you know, psychologists and stuff. And, I mean, he still has nightmares. But, you know, he talks about wanting to, you know, sort of watch God's video of what happened. And then he told me that one psychologist said to him, you know, it's like it's been erased from the hard drive. You're never going to get that.

Right. And that's the thing is it, you know, you like said in combat ops like when you do an aAR somebody will say yeah I shot the guy in the left side of the building people go there was nobody on the left side of the building you shot the guy on the right side of the building and it's just like you know when we're when people or when human beings are under duress like that

like memory is such a frail thing and I'm sure that like he you know that it's tough to put it all together and then he start hearing things from other people so it gets you know i mean obviously the police sort of deal with this all the time yeah and as an author you deal with it as well you know kind of memories get contaminated because people start talking but yeah yeah yeah so let's if we're can fast forward a little bit to um you know the

evacuation if we can call it that of of cabal everything that happened a few years back and then the formation of badger six and uh you guys you know recently had that event at the New York Athletic Club that I got to meet David and I got to meet Andy and Shannon and all these people's and Mark Neuch was there. That's awesome. Bob Pennington. Yeah, yeah. Tell us about what Badger Six is and what you guys are trying, how that came together, what you guys are trying to accomplish with it.

So Badger Six is the charity that we founded to help Afghan refugees that are particularly from the families or the principles that have worked with us back in 2001, 2002. And the idea was after the collapse in Kabul in August 21, it just happened that we started, I was actually at Bethesda at this program called NICO. It was a TBI program. And I started getting emails. And then Shannon, I believe, emailed me, hey, I'm hearing from so-and-so. So we just got this deluge, deluge of emails from Afghans that we had known. Some of them we hadn't heard from or talked to in ages and years. And it was just, and many of you were involved at the time.

It was just this sort of like, I mean, just a maelstrom of like inundated with emails and concerns, help us, help us. And so we decided that we were going to do it. but it just sort of, it was a natural reaction to help. Do you remember this guy? Do you remember that guy? Do you know, and we were sort of vetting these requests? And then eventually we decided that, hey, look, we need to provide some order and structure to this. Once we established who the people were, they'd worked with us, who was in duress and so forth.

There was a lot of paperwork done, as you all know, to try to get them some sort of status in the U.S., whether there's an S-I-B or P-1. status and some of them made it out a lucky few Shannon was was deliberately and directly involved in the actual evacuation of certain people and this was all done through the social media means

separate from Pineapple Express but it was very much in parallel with that effort and we got some people out not many but we got some out but the rest that are stuck in Afghanistan were the focus of Badger 6. So we realized, okay, these folks are under duress. They're in Afghanistan. Some of them are trying to get to Uzbekistan.

Some are trying to get to Pakistan. Even some of them going to Iran. So we need to help them. What do they need? So we established Badger 6 to help them, mainly to buy them time until they could get status. And so what that means is sustenance. How do we sustain somebody?

How much does that cost? how many family members do they have? And that was the aim, and that's what we've been doing, is sustaining these people. And then in parallel, trying to get them the paperwork processed, which is a whole other parallel effort, so they can either come to the U.S. or come to a third country and get out of Afghanistan and in certain cases, other countries.

But the focus is sort of tiered. So it's Afghanistan folks, the folks that are really stranded into Uzbekistan, in Pakistan and then last and least priority are the folks who've already made it to the states. But we take care of all of them. How are the Uzbek government and the Pakistani government like dealing with refugees from Afghanistan? So that's actually a great question. It's a complicated question. I think I'll try to answer it big to small. So I think initially they realized that they weren't, they didn't, I don't think they wanted the refugees, all right.

They couldn't stop it. So because particularly in the north in Uzbekistan, there was sort of a group that had quickly crossed. Some of them were pilots that flew into Uzbekistan and landed there. They couldn't stop that. But what they wanted to do is they didn't, the problem is they didn't want to be seen to act. actively push refugees out or prevent refugees, but at the same time, they didn't want to do anything that encouraged it.

And so that created a problem. So you had this sort of weird situation where they had refuge in Uzbekistan, for example, but there was always this looming threat of like, hey, are they going to be evicted? What's their status? And so forth. In Pakistan, it was, I think, similar, but our initial group of people that we knew went to Uzbekistan.

Slowly but surely other smaller numbers went to Pakistan, and then a few went to Iran, and then in one or two cases we had folks in Turkey. So Uzbekistan, Afghanistan was the largest group, Uzbekistan was second, and then now we've been able to get, fortunately, some people in the Pakistan. I hear different things. It changes kind of month to month, but the latest I've heard, sadly, is that in Pakistan, there's sort of pressure and people aren't being treated particularly well

and there's pressure to sort of get these Afghans moving along. And I think Uzbekistan has the same pressure. I think part of the problem just candidly was trying to get a hold of the embassies because under normal conditions, These refugees are supposed to apply for this status through the mission in that country, which I was trying to get hold of people and wasn't getting a lot of help. There was a lot of confusion.

There was multiple simultaneous sort of efforts with paperwork, you know, and you wouldn't hear anything. And you realized that they were just getting overwhelmed with these requests. I mean, the state was not prepared for it. and so it all became really the outcome was those who were fortunate enough to get to Kabul or get out through Mazar Shereef in a case with some of our folks

were the lucky ones but once that we went wheels up at the end of August that was it and then those who were left behind had a genuine case of hard luck and those are the people were really trying to. And is State Department cooperative on that or do they care? I think they care. They just were overwhelmed with the sheer volume, honestly. And then honestly, there was just some disorganization. I mean, they weren't prepared for this. That's my criticism is that when the evacuation, when things started to collapse in Afghanistan, there was no real plan.

to deal with the sheer volume of people that we're going to be looking for help and who are under duress. I mean, I just don't think anybody can argue any other way. I mean, that's just a fact. They weren't prepared for it. Can't we just fly them as undocumented workers or undocumented workers? Yeah, no, no. That's called human trafficking, by the way. I mean, if that's a problem, you have to have status.

And then a lot of people were, you know, like, well, you know, what about the people from Vietnam that we got out, all this kind of stuff. Some of them went to Guam and certain cases. The bottom line is this. You have to have legal status in some fashion to get out of Afghanistan. Right. In order to get out and get to a third country, you have to have a passport. There's all these prerex that you have to have.

And with the exception of that initial sort of exodus from Kabul and Afghanistan, after that, there were some people who got out, but after that it became, hey, you got to have a passport, So we've spent an an order amount of time helping people with that paper. I saw that it was a Secretary of Lincoln recently signing an updated memorandum of understanding about this issue. But I mean, have they sped up the processing of the visas? I mean, we're... I mean, no one's ever going to be satisfied with the speed.

Sure. They have, they have a dedicated effort. But I think that it just like with all visa processes that you always... always it's first come first serve. So you get in the stack, and then they're just working down the list of folks and based on who applied and when. And it just takes a long time.

It's heart rent. I mean, it's really traumatic for these folks because some of them are in the states and some aren't. He was my interpreter in 2012. He got out of Afghanistan, where he got an SIV that I helped him with, and he was a successful businessman, but the rest of his family was stuck in Afghanistan.

His brother worked at the U.S. mission in Kabul, and then we're trying to get him out. And so there's so many stories. Each one is complex as in a way, but the bottom line is it just, there's so many of them in the paperwork process as such that it's just taking forever. and I know myself included is hugely frustrating.

And Shannon and I and everybody in Badger Six are doing everything we can to facilitate the process. But we realized quickly that while this paperwork process was, you know, unfolding, we had to sustain these people. And we learned that really most Afghan families are kind of large, right? we're talking six to 10 kids is not unusual. So you have these large families and they're trying to survive. And so we figured out basically that, I'm going to say, $500 to $600 a month, you could sustain one of these families. And so what we do is we raise money through various events.

We did the Badger Six event at the New York Athletic Club where George Tenet was a keynote speaker and I moderated. the money we received in that fundraising effort is used to support families directly under duress in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan or Pakistan until we can get them out. It's a relatively, in my view, it's relatively cheap to support them. You know, considering you're talking five to ten people in a family and you're supporting with $5 to $600 a month. but it's a continuous process and there's no end in sight

so we have to do this for perpetuity at least and not perpetuity but I'd say another year or two we have to be prepared to do that and the way we do that you know Dave and other folks in Badger Sixth handle and that has its own

sort of process is kind of complicated as you're ho wallowing money or you're sending money and you have to find an individual that's trusted and who can serve as the interlocutations tour for the money and then there's of course a transaction fee associated with that so all that adds together but we're um we do it without uh any real overhead no one gets paid all the money all

the proceeds from fundraising go to support afghans or go to say you know transportation costed to get someone to a fundraiser that that is about it there's no fat there's no overhead it's a very lean and very efficient organization. To me, it's been fascinating and kind of very moving to watch this happening. Because, I mean, the members of Team Alfa, Green Berets, Shannon, everybody associated with, you know, absolutely devastated and sort of almost kind of bereft and angry and frustrated about what happened in August 2021. on. But instead of, you know, going on cable TV and complaining about it and stuff, I mean,

I sort of watched this grow up where it's like the team getting back together for another mission. And I see it with David, you know, using his languages. And we have Dr. Azim, who lives in New Jersey, who's an Afghan emigre from the 1990s. And he's the main kind of link person along with David, with the families. And, you know, I mean, there's a same. stuff I kind of hear about and know about the angles that have been worked with different organizations and agencies in this country I mean there's back channels there's personal relationships and it's just you know it's not unlike the spirit of after 9-11 of just let's just get it done right whatever

it takes will improvise you know it's sort of kind of on the fly it's it's kind of very you know kind of modest resources, but they're just doing it. And I mean, the other thing I think is interesting about Badger Six, which is why I think it's something really people should support, is that as Justin said, it's finite. It's like 30 or 35 families, and these are people, Badger Six is about these allies and their families from 2001,

specifically about those. And it's not, so it's not something that's just going to go on for decades and decades and it's just sort of never ending. Like, hopefully it'll be wrapped up in a couple of years. And there are, I mean, today, you know, we heard that nine passports had been issued. So there's slow, there's kind of, there's, you know, there were setbacks. But it's building. And delays.

But there's also. steps forward and sort of breakthroughs, you know, almost every week. And, I mean, Jack, you were there, and I was there at the fundraiser with George Tenet, you know, incredible American talking about Badger Six. And, I mean, for me, the highlight of that night, and it kind of connects to what we were talking, it connects directly to Mike Spann, is Commander Fakir. So Muhammad Fakir al-Jalzjani is his full name. And I met him in 2020 on like on a sort of dusty airstrip in Shepaghan in northern Afghanistan.

That's the last time I saw him. The next time I saw him was probably about a year ago now where my doorbell rings. And it's David Tyson saying, hey, I've got somebody to meet you. And so he got out. his family got out. Now, Fakir, I mean, Justin obviously remembers him, but he was Dostom's kind of,

I mean, he was relatively young guys now in his late 50s. You know, he'd been a warrior for 20 years, but he was Dostom's cavalry commander. Holy shit. Yeah. And so he was the guy in the mountains. And he was the guy who located Mike Spann's

body. So three days after he was killed, he was the guy who led his men into to the southern compound. And it's just a sort of a scene of almost medieval carnage there. There's bodies everywhere that AC130s had been in. I mean, the place had just been pounded. And Fakir came up to David and said, you know,

was Mike wearing cowboys? Cowboys being the Afghan term for blue jeans. And of course, none of the al-Qaeda guys have been in blue jeans. And so that was Mike's body. He located Mike's body. And he was also, Fakir was, so the 15-man rescue team on November 25th, it kind of split when they got to the fort. And so I think there were five.

There was Tony from the SBS. There was Steph Bass, the seal, Mark Mitchell, Glenn Riccio, who was the CIA medic from Team Bravo. and Fakir, who crept around the outside of the fort, like counterclockwise, across basically a minefield, clambered up the side of the, of the fort using unraveled turbanes, like kind of Rapunzel type sort of style. And that was Fakir. That's unreal.

And so this guy is, you know, one of the good news stories out of this and his family, this guy is now living. in New Jersey. Now, I mean, he doesn't speak a word of English. So he's like one of the classic American immigration story, really, that it's for the next generation. But, you know, I think he's got nine kids or something. But he's now here.

And so he's sort of an example of, I mean, you know, and he'd spent 20 years fighting and also holding senior positions in northern Afghanistan. You know, police, I think he was a police chief of Kunduz province at one point.

And so these are the people who Badger Six are helping. And they were the allies. It weren't just, not just some random Afghan that they've heard about. These were the guys they were fighting alongside in 2001. So it's kind of an incredible thing to see. Yeah, it's not a, I mean, it's a very select group of people. the folks that work with us and then of course their families dating back to 2001 and early 2002 but mainly 2001 fakir's a great example another individual that got out was fortunate to get out through the lily pad system

was a sultani a mullah sultani who had actually infilled mike mark and i into bami on so he was the guy dispatched by Mr. Well, you know, he has been dispatched to pick us up and take us to Kareem Khalili in Bamiyan, in the Bamiyan area. He had done everything right, everything we expected

of him. He was a loyal ally and a partner and he was with us the whole time. And then he rose within the Afghan government system all the way up to I think at one point he was a parliamentarian. And then he came back and he was

district governor in some ungone when the collapse occurred and so he had to flee for his life and his family was able to get out as well fortunately they were very lucky they burned his house he lost his passport everything was was destroyed the house he got out and then he ended up in doha i think for a while then they went to um uh germany and ramsstein then they went to uh New Mexico and then at that point, I mean, they didn't even know where New Mexico was. I remember he texted me or WhatsApp me, his son actually. Here's the other thing. So these guys are, you know, senior Afghans.

Right. In some cases, generals and some cases senior government officials, they were invested in the Afghan government, Jeroa, and then all of a sudden everything just the rugs pulled out from under them. They don't really speak English. Well, fortunately in Sultanese case, His son is speaks English very well. So I communicate through his son a lot, particularly when it comes to complex stuff like paperwork and stuff like that. But I remember he WhatsApp me and he goes, we're in New Mexico.

I'm not really sure where that is, but we're in New Mexico. And I said, okay, you're, okay, don't worry. You're going to be there for a couple weeks and they're going to find a place for you to stay. and I thought they would settle him in the logical, the big Afghan hubs. You know, there's Fremont, California, I think. There's D.C., one of these areas. And then we get this, I get this WhatsApp that says, we're going to Boise, Idaho.

And sure enough, they resettle in Boise, Idaho. But what's amazing is Shannon had, through her contacts, was able to locate this very generous business. businessman in Boise who was able to help Sultani and his family right off the bat until they get a good setup and they work through a Christian relief fund in Boise to help them with their paperwork while we were also putting them in for SIVs and so forth. So this was like a number of people working in parallel in this effort. And so now they're settled in Boise. They're employed, their SIV paperwork, has made it to Chief Emission approval level, which is one of the big steps in the process. And so we're hopeful that that paper will be finalized,

and then they will be able to have that permanent status, green card status. But they're the lucky ones. The ones that we're really focused on are the ones that are still stuck in Afghanistan, in Uzbekistan, and Pakistan. and they're the ones that Dave and Ms. Dr. Azim send money to and are able to communicate with and vet and so forth. And some families in Afghanistan itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Justin, earlier you mentioned, like, Vietnam, and it was really like special forces soldiers that really spearheaded and advocated for, you know, Vietnamese, Monteneyards, you know, and whatnot. to get here to the states. And now after Afghanistan, it's also a special force soldiers and a lot of CIA personnel. You know, we have Badger Six with you guys. We have Digital Dunkirk with Mick Morroy and Mike Jason. We have Scott Man.

Scott Man, yep. With Pineapple Express. And, you know, what is, you know, what is. Is it about the Special Forces soldier, a paramilitary officer? Like, what is about them that makes this happen? And if they weren't the spearhead of this, how would our government, in general, our State Department in general, would they try to forget these wars? I mean, you just look at the history. I mean, going back to Vietnam, right?

So you had the Mon Yards and the Hmong and so forth that Special Forces had worked with. We're trained, you know, from the very beginning in SF to work with Indigenous forces. That's the whole purpose. We're teachers, right? Green Berets are first and foremost teachers, right? Instructors. Everything is, particularly in Robin Sage, you know, you're evaluated on how well or poorly you interact with the, in this case simulated indigenous forces.

So to us it's sort of like the core of what we do. So when you go over there, it's only natural that you build these bonds in a way that I think other Americans don't try to or they just, it's not that they don't build bonds, but we go in there and that is really our prime directive. That's what we're focused on doing.

So it's only natural that we have those relationships. And then that just seems to not go away, right? like once we you know decide hey these are our partners this is our mission we're here to help them and they're our partners then they become our fellow soldiers right and so you have that

bond with them that I don't think in the regular army they have the same bond with their partners because they're training them and all that with us it's a whole other level so when we saw the collapse in Afghanistan or you know 75 April 75

in Vietnam I just think it's natural that we feel that we are obliged to help them, right? It's not like, hey, well, that's too bad, and it was a transactional relationship. It's not a transactional relationship. You know, there are partners, they're our allies, and we're not going to leave them behind. And it's emotional. It's visceral and emotional, but it's also good policy, right? it's a good policy for the United States

to message that we won't leave you behind. I know the CIA believes that, you know, through and through. That if you come to this relation with somebody, that the understanding, the contract is that you stick with them through thick and thin. And so that's the ethos that we have, and that's what animated everybody. I know it did, whether Scott Mann or Shannon or Mick Mulroy

or whomever, myself, is all, that's the same. And it's a skill set as well. Do you think like the approach to life of getting stuff done? You're not waiting for the up order and the paperwork? Yeah, no, it's absolutely, you know, get the job done whatever it takes and don't wait for the 100% solution when a 65% or 80% solution is good enough. I think that's really where everybody, because he realized it didn't take long,

they go, okay, people are really getting it screwed in this situation. There's some people getting out, but the vast majority, and possibly the most deserving people, are not going to get out. And that's wrong, and we should help them. Who's going to help them? And then you look around, it's like, no one's helping them. All right, this is my calling. I need to help. Where can the public go if they want to donate to Badger Six? Yeah, so Badger Six.org is our website. and you go to the webpage and in the top right there's a white icon to click on donate that's the fastest way you can donate and we look forward to it

is a badger six the number badger six the badger six bad g r six one word dot org bedger six dot org on i think slash donate we'll take you yep and look if you guys are watching us or listening please just go in and donate at least a buck just a buck out of your pocket that's nothing for you if you can afford more please give more right these are people who literally fought beside us fought with us fought for us sometimes and and we've talked about mike span and um shannon wrote about this very eloquently but it's also a way of honoring mike span and people like mike and um you know shannon's you know shannon's I think Shan lost her husband, the first casualty on the battlefield for the United States after 9-11, the first of many. So she spent 20 years living with that.

And living with the anniversaries, November 25th, the anniversary of the funeral in December, you know, the anniversary of Memorial Day where in 2001 she and Mike and Mike's daughters and Shannon was heavily pregnant, you know, went to Arlington. on Memorial Day 2001. So she thinks, so she then had to deal with, as did so many families and veterans, with the sort of what she describes as the moral injury of August 2021. And so, I mean, I remember when I interviewed her in 2020,

you know, one of the things she said that she clung to about, you know, Mike's death and Mike's life having meaning, was that, you know, a generation of Afghan girls had been to school and women had worked. And, you know, Shannon more than most people knows that that was not, you know, what the mission was for. That was our goal. Right. Right. But even so, you know, she'd been to Afghanistan as early as 2002 and had, you know, women especially come up to her and thank her and holding pictures of Mike.

And so, you know, tremendously difficult. to deal with August 2021, you know, when that sort of thing that you've clung to for all those years has just been ripped away. Right. And you were like, you know, it's even, you know, same, you know, Mullah Fasol, you know, the guy who butchered the Hazaras as a Taliban commander in the late 1990s and, you know, 2000, 2001, back in government, you know. Right. And clearly the United States is not going to do anything for after. Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. So, you know, so it's even worse. And, and so, you know, again, to watch Shannon throw herself into this and, you know, relive many terrible things in her life,

I'm sure. I mean, I was there when she went to the Horse Soldiers Monument a few weeks ago. And, you know, she was weeping, you know. Yeah. But she's also thanking, I remember she turned to Andy and David and said as an ordinary American, I want to thank you for what you did after 9-11. Right. And this is somebody who lost her husband. And so she is honoring Mike and living her life the way he would have wanted her to and also continuing living life the way he would have lived life by doing this.

And so it's kind of it all comes full circle. It's all connected. And so, you know, you've got Afghan allies and not leaving them behind. You've got Americans who've died there. You've got, as Justin says, you know, you've got doing the right thing just morally, but also in terms of policy. Like when we, how do you recruit somebody and say, you know, we want you to work alongside us at great risk to yourself if they see people being abandoned? So it's all kind of knitted together. and I think something like Badger Six

allows ordinary Americans who may not have been personally connected to any of this kind of be connected to it because they have feelings about it as well too. Can you talk a little bit to your best of your knowledge? Because we've talked about it once or twice on the show before but it's not really a term that has gained popular sort of acceptance or even knowledge but about moral injury.

Justin might be better than me. I mean, I'm not a big expert on it. I know that, you know, people talk about, you know, I think it's a magnificent thing to serve your country. I mean, I serve my country in uniform. I, you know, this is now my country of American citizen and, you know, I would like my son who's 14 to serve this country. I mean, you know better than I, that sometimes you have to do, actually, Mike Spann said this, you know, you have to do the things that other people won't do. And there's a cost to that. And I think also, I think Justin should speak to this really. You know, you have, you do, you see some terrible things you experience until you might be wounded. You might have PTSD issues later in life. But you do it for John McCain.

You're still about this. A cause bigger than yourself. And so, you know, the end of World War II and the Nazis are defeated. Japan's defeated. There's a signing ceremony. And, you know, you're on the side of good and it's kind of cut and dried. It's not generally like that these days. And so you have to, I remember speaking to the families of Marines

have been killed in Ramadi in 2004. I remember one particular father whose son was killed when I was in Ramadi in 2004, calling him up in Florida, when ISIS was driving around, you know, Ramadi in American Humvees. They'd just been captured. and about how hard it is where you sort of you've to a to some degree you've come to terms with a loss of your son because you know Iraq is a better place and then ISIS is in there so it's I think it's it's difficult to deal with and I think as a service

member you have to try you know there's all these things about you know you fight for the person next to you and I think you have to in some ways you have to try to disengage from the political peace and because if you

don't I think it's tremendously difficult and I think that's where the moral injury part comes in but Justin you probably have thoughts on this well you know part of it like you said you fight for the this the old you hear this a lot from the World War II vets, Vietnam,

we fought for the guys next to us. Well, in our case, many cases, the guys next of us were our Afghan allies, right? They were 50% or more of the whole effort, and we were enabling them. And so, you know, when I was at Bethesda, the NICO program, when everything happened in August 21, I mean, it was like someone cut my heart out.

You know, it was really, it was really, tough and part of it is you felt you did something noble, right? You did something noble and in our case, we feel like we got it right, at least initially. And then years later, and I went back to Afghanistan several times, and of course, Iraq as well and back and forth, you know, you want to feel, you want to take stock of what you accomplished. And the only way now for me to feel that accomplishment is to help our allies that fought with us and we fought with them. That's how I sort of patch that up and sort of deal with the wounds associated with everything we put in and then seeing that the outcome is what it is.

It's hard to deal with. And one way you deal with it is by helping these athletes. who are deserving. Yeah, and, you know, a lot of people say, well, what's the, you know, how do you define success? I had this discussion about, well, as long as Afghanistan, it's not a safe haven for terrorists and they don't use it to project, you know, attacks, then that's sufficient and so forth. But I take a different view. I think there's more, too, than that. I mean, here we are.

We're the United States. We're the city on the hill. And I felt like we owe it to our allies to do everything we can, to not only give them a chance for a viable future, but also to imbue our values in them and share our values with them. And I think the folks that were helping in Badger 6.org are the guys who did that and carried that. our values and wanted to imbue them into their society and want to do the right thing and do everything we asked of them and that's why I feel so so much allegiance toward them do we have questions for Justin and Toby okay no I wanted to ask you Justin because you know you talk about this and you know

we have some and not a lot but some voices on the left where it's like you were waging war against brown people. And you have some voices on the right, not a lot, but when we're trying to get Afghan, it's like you're letting like these brown people into the country, right? Like, how do you address those, those sort of extremes in that view that, no, we're not over there just randomly killing brown people. And no, we're not just randomly letting like terrorists into the country. Like, how do you address that in a, from your experience? Well, I mean, I can speak from my experience. is that the we were

there actually working with the locals. So when we went in, I mean, you know, Afghan's a complicated place. There's a lot of ethnicitarian tensions. Our allies were of one group. That made sense to fight the Taliban

and so forth. And so naturally the enemy is going to be destroyed. And we were successful. And that was part of it. It was war, it was combat. But we weren't out there arbitrarily just going after people of a different, you know, different, you know, race and culture. That was not the case at all.

We were actually working with people of different race and culture to combat their enemies who happen to be our also happen to be our enemies, you know. And so I, but to your point about that, I didn't get a lot of that. I think what I got later on in like the mid-2000s, you know, 11 and 12, 8, 9 when I was a graduate school, was, you know, what do you hope to accomplish there? You know, that was the kind of thing. What are you trying to accomplish there? Is democracy going to take root? Is that really realistic, et cetera? That was the sort of attack they took. but on the other end now what you're dealing

with the folks that are suspicious of immigrants and there's a whole side of the spectrum that's very unreceptive to immigration my answer at least from Badger 6 perspective is

we're helping a discrete group of people that we know that are thoroughly vetted that you know either Dave myself Dr. Azim knows and that they are not just some

random group of people that are coming in and being passed through. That's not, they're not jumping on an airplane in Kabul and flying out. These are people we know that we vetted and they're immediate family members that we're helping. And so there's no, I don't see any risk there.

I do understand the concern that if you had just random folks surging in getting on a plane and coming in that those people rightly so need to be vetted and honestly many of them were and you know the Air Force and all that that ran a lot of these had the encampments I think they they did a very thorough and good job of trying to identify those folks I

mean that there was a bunch of people that made it out that were not vetted and we didn't know who they were and there was a deliberate effort to screen those folks our situation our case is very different we're talking about a much smaller group of people, people that we know within one point of separation or one degree of separation, who they are and what their bona fides is. I get requests all the time, and it's heartrending, particularly on LinkedIn, from people that say, I did this with the U.S. government or my father did this with the U.S. government, and you should help me. And I have to tell them, I said, our focus, our whole diopter is set in a certain way, and I'm sorry, but we're not

we're not going to help you because we don't know you and you didn't work with us. And it's really that simple. And you have to be that way. We're very small and we have to set the parameters as they're set in order to make it manageable and then help. We don't, you know, we don't want to have this diffuse effort that helps everybody and nobody. It has to be focused. So if you're watching or listening, please donate a minimum of buck, maybe a little bit more, to Badger 6

and the links in the description and please retweet or tweet or Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or whatever you do

I don't know TikTok WhatsApp I don't know but but like throw it out there throw Badger 6 out there for the people who

you know don't watch our show um hook a brother up square these people away please anything else you guys want to talk about anything that you want to direct people's attention attention to. What's the next Badger 6 event that's coming up? So right now it's sort of being formed,

but we're looking at doing an event, a sort of sporting, clay's shooting event in Southern New York in September, roughly in that time frame. We will advertise that in the near future. I'm putting that together as we speak, and we're a small team, so it takes a lot of effort. I'm actually putting the choir together. But we will advertise that and that will be sometime in the first second or third week of September. And we hope to see people out there and to shoot. We're going to have Mark Neuch. We're going to have the team leader of the horse soldiers. We're going to have myself. We're going to have Dave Tyson that we spoke about at length. We're going to have Alan Mack, retired chief warrant officer and 160th pilot, a legendary aviator in the special operations community.

We hope to bring those guys up. We're going to have a great half day of shooting, and we're going to have a fireside chat where we tell stories. But we'll follow up on that. But thank you for your interest. I think you're likely to do a D.C. area event at some point. Eventually, absolutely. TBD. Yeah. That'll be a bigger one. I don't know the timeline yet, though, were we talking later in the fall, I think? I haven't seen, but sometime, yeah, probably late fall, I would think. There'll be, there'll be iter of events, but I'd say the D.C. event will follow the one in Southern New York, and we'll continue to have events probably once a quarter, once every six months.

And, yeah, we've had Alan Mack on the show, and I'd love to have Mark on the show. I promise Mark I would read his book, so I've got to get that done for him before. Well, yeah, that's the plane down the line, too. Yeah, yeah. I know David wants to come on. Let's also do a quick shout-out for a soundoff, just because if you're a veteran or an intelligence professional and you're going through tough times,

like, sound off will help you maintain anonymity. And, yeah, it's an app that people can download, and so there's a lot of guys who are afraid that they're going to, like, lose their security clearance or something like that, if they go see a unit psychologist or something like that. So a former CIA officer actually kind of spearheaded that thing. And so you can download this app and you can talk to a shrink anonymously.

So that's out there, guys. You know, if you don't need it, you know, tell people in your unit wherever you work, you know, that it's out there so that, you know, guys who work in a covert or clandestine world know it's out there and that, you know, it's a resource. Who's the CIA officer? William Negley? Okay. Don't know. Yeah.

Yeah, we'll have to have William on the show sometime. Yeah, for sure. I met him down in Tampa. And we look forward to your future book. Yeah, so I'm working, you know, there's always, you know, the gap between my previous books was about a decade, and if I keep that up, I'm just going to run out of time. I mean, look, it's a good living.

Well, it's never been a living, I think. But, yeah, so I'm working on a project. that's connected CIA and Valor and the recognition of Valor. And it's, I mean, it's very different from, I mean, it's going to be published by Simon and Schuster, probably the middle of 2025, maybe around Memorial Day, 2025, which seems a long way off, but it means I've got to kind of deliver in less than a year. but yeah different from first casualty because that was very focused on we at its core eight people over the course of three months this is about this spans the entire history of

the CIA 75 years and and also the OSS so I've just come back from Slovenia and Trieste where I was you know kind of following the footsteps of an OSS officer who later to join the CIA in Slovenia in 94, 94, 95. Incredible, and he then spent his later years in Trieste. Tomorrow I'm gonna see in New York, I believe he's 98 years old, a guy who I've been trying to get in contact with for a long time, and he called me. I sent him a note saying I was gonna be in New York,

and he called me and he's like, this is Eric. That was like, great. And he was a POW in World War II, not too many of those alive. And so incredible kind of stories. And, you know, we discussed David Tyson. I'm very, very interested in, you know, sort of courage in the shadows, if you like, you know, where you're doing a job where you never expect recognition.

And in fact, it usually only comes if things, go badly wrong. And also the connections between the OSS and the CIA were ever present in 2001. I mean, the Jedburgh teams and particular person I'm focusing on

who was in Slovenia, you know, a stateless Yugoslav who's working with German Jews who had got out of Nazi Germany, made it to the United States and were then on OSS teams, Austrian deserters, people who've been Italian prisoner of wars, who were Slovenes, who then worked for the OSS, got the British SOE.

It's kind of incredible stuff and Team Alpha was the spirit of the OSS, improvising, working with indigenous allies behind enemy lines in small teams. So it's like it's a huge subject and the challenges. how to knit it together, but it's, you know, it's very rewarding. And I'm speaking to people that, you know, it's just a privilege to be able to talk to them. Yeah. Justin, you know, he's talking about the OSS. He's talking about, like, you know, the heritage of the Jedberkins.

Looking in retrospect now, you were part of a handful of people. Yeah. on the leading edge of history, right? A 20-year war that was spearheaded by you and the men around you and then the other teams. Did you, is that anything you ever imagined prior to that date and looking back on it, how does, do you have any particular feelings about how it, you know, about being part of history that way? Well, I was interested in Afghanistan. I was obviously as an SF guy interested in the history of SF

and the genesis with AduosS and all that. But I never, you know, I would came up in the Army in the mid to late 90s when it was sort of Bosian and all that kind of stuff. And it was inconceivable to me that we would ever go to Afghanistan. I did think Iraq would be an issue. And I was following these ideas they had of overthrowing Saddam through kind of like a soft unconventional warfare operation. But I was interested in Afghanistan sort of as a,

from a historical point of view, particularly with the CIA campaign in the 80s to defeat the Soviets. I was pretty knowledgeable about that. And I distinctly remember, I think it was in the beginning of Robin Sage, before we went out in the field, they had this classroom instruction, period and they were showing some videos from Afghanistan, the late 80s and a documentary.

And I remember thinking, you know, wow, you know, that's kind of interesting. That's appropriate. I forget the name of the instructor did that, but it was pretty prescient, right? And I was commenting on the documentary because I knew a lot about it. My dad had been the Afghan task force in the early 90s, right, in CIA. and I remember one of the NCOs or one of my peers was like you know why do you care about that or you know why do you know so much about Afghanistan and and I said I don't know I just find it interesting and then you know of course you know 2001 little did I know that did I would get to visit Afghanistan but I had no sense of the historical significance until I went in and I think when Kro-Mah Hall in the

time said, hey, I got to pick three of you guys to go. That felt like I just felt the sort of like pressure like the atmospheric pressure just increased and it was just coming down on you because you realize, okay, you better not fumble the football here. You know, by luck and pluck and timing, you've, you know, position yourself here. So now you need to get the job done. And sort of like, I think we'll use the metaphor like your surfing. some super tsunami that's like U.S. just anger, right?

And you're surfing this wave and you don't want to wipe out. And I remember I turned to one of the guys, Jim, that I was with. And I said, well, hey, I'm honored to be, you know, part of this. And we all realized it was important, but we had no idea what was going to occur. We just knew that we had sort of won the Unconventional Warfare lottery in the sense that we were, at least initially, able to get involved early on. But then years later, after going back to Afghanistan multiple

times, you know, I could see the arc of it, and there I was, and you know, 12, when there was like 100,000 Americans in Afghanistan and going, wow, I remember when there were eight of us on the ground. Maybe total, maybe 200 people in the whole country, and now we're like 100,000.

And things aren't, you know, well, you know, 12, things were not going that well. so yeah and I I never I never thought that that we would just leave you know I always thought hey there are certain parts of Afghanistan are never going to be pacified or never going to be great and those are traditional areas when the Soviets were a problem when we were there a problem

but I just I thought well you know what we're going to deal with those areas but we have our allies and we'll support them and so yeah but looking back yeah I It wasn't, I didn't get into the sort of melodrama of it. You know, you just went on because as soon as Afghanistan was over in 01, there was Iraq and 03. I mean, there was probably an interval of maybe eight months between the time Fifth Group got back, Fifth Special Force who got returned from Afghanistan.

Six months later, I was HAC Commander Fifth Group. I heard about the death ward for Iraq probably in August or September or something, and then it was all about Iraq. And so you just didn't have time to really reflect on things. It was like that was yesterday's news and now you're going to do the next thing. And that went on for a while because it was a tempo. You were there. It was just a tempo.

It was a long time before you were able to process all that. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that we ever should have, you know, not just America, but, you know, the United Nations. Do you ever, you know, given the way countries were sort of drawn up, Do you think that it ever would have been beneficial to, in the modern era, relook those areas to go, well, look, the Pashtuns don't want to be part of Afghanistan. They're not part of, they don't recognize Afghanistan or Pakistan.

That it ever would have been beneficial to look at those sort of political realities? You mean partitioning in an ethno-sectarian kind of way? Yeah, I thought about that a lot. I thought about the, you know, Pashtunistan, is the way it has been referred to, is that this sort of swat the territory from the tribal areas in Pakistan all the way into, you know, southern Afghanistan as one sort of kind of geo-potential political kind of entity. The problem you always ran into is Kabul. Okay, so who gets Kabul and how are you going to, that's the political seat?

There is a sense, the Afghans have a sense of being Afghan, but then the ethnic, you know, sensibilities get in the way of that. I was always like, well, we got to keep it together at the time. Now I look back and go, well, you know, there's another way of looking at it. You could have partitioned Afghanistan and made it into these kind of ethnic-based countries. But then you run into the issue of, you know, are they viable economically and all this kind of stuff? Yeah. And then all the mixed families.

And then all the mixed families, particularly in the Kabul area. The problem in my view was that we ran against the grain of the decentralized nature of Afghanistan, right? That was a problem. We had this centralized approach. And then you were forcing people to choose down at the grassroots level between one patronage system and the other. And so when they had to choose, like you're going to go with the government and this, because the government, would pick its cronies and the Taliban had their people. And you were forcing people to make a binary choice,

which was kind of, I think, what undermined things in the long run. And I worked developing governance for a while under General Miller when he was the Soxent, or I'm sorry, the SIFSakh commander in Afghanistan. And we did everything we could to try to build that relationship between the central government in Kabul and down to the province and the district but you're always running into these issues of like the fragment

where things rifted between the different you know the Gilzai's versus the Durrani's and that you were in fact ultimately forcing the locals to choose between one group or the other countries choose their strategic allies and the locals have to choose their tactical allies right exactly right

Right, exactly. Right. I mean, even in America, like, we see how divided we can get with the union. And there it's even, you know, our states, you know, and whatnot. But there it's even, it's, it's the tribal lines are, you know, 10 times more defined and competitive. And you really, you really need to study it because it's so nuanced that I never felt like I totally understood it in sufficient detail. to really manage things. I mean, I probably understood it better than the average bear,

but it was so, I remember there was a map that they produced. I don't know, it was a CIA map or something, but it had all these little, look like little plus marks, little crosshairs where each different tribal subgroup was. And it was all the entire country of Afghanistan, and it was just so complex. the Atschikzai and all these different groups and keeping track of them.

And then you would go into certain areas and realize that area had been Hazara area, but they had been ethnically cleansed over the years. And so the names were Hazara sounding names, but they were in fact posthum villages. And so I don't think your average American soldier really understood that, right? but there's a natural way of things there.

There's the natural societal norms there. And then we did figure it out because the guys that were the so-called power brokers that we supported were the natural leaders in those areas. So it was like, you know, Matteo Lacan up in Orr's gone when I was there and then he was killed. And then you had Rizek,

who was the provincial chief, police down in Canahar, who is a very strong leader that we supported. And so we figured that out, but we had to choose. Like, okay, we're going to this guy, this is our guy. And but as soon as you choose that side, you've automatically alienated all these other people. And how we managed that, I think, was problematic, you know. I think part of it was the centralized, very, trying to force is very centralized, very centralized, approach. Everything has to emanate from Kabul.

And then we wrote them, helped them write a constitution. I'd like to meet the lawyers. I heard they, we shipped in some lawyers to help write the constitution back in 2002. I've never met any of those folks. Probably lying low right now. Yeah. I like to talk to them. Yeah.

To see what the mentality was. But it definitely went against the grain. Copy paste. Yeah. I remember being in Helmand in 2009. And this term, which actually I heard you use earlier, adjusted like Giroa, government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

and I was like what's Giroa? And then the soldiers, Welsh Guards I was with told me and the idea of getting Pashtuns in Helmand to sort of feel any kind of allegiance or even connection with Giroa in

Kabul, kind of crazy. Yeah, but that was whatever one was pushing at the time. well guys I hope you'll pick up first casualty that's the paperback

version with an epilogue and the hardback AARP org that report and Badger 6 and I also need to

give a quick shout out to Civ group CIVGRP.com we're running a training event upstate New York this summer

go check out the website see if you're interested to sign up if you want to be cool like Jack make sure you're there yeah man

you want to like have a beard and a ball cap Yeah. Cool. So, guys, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Next Friday, we're going to have a RRC guy on the show, our Ranger Recon, or Regimental Reconnaissance Company, veteran on the show.

Really excited to have him. Actually, he'll be joining us on Zoom. But Justin and Toby, thank you for joining us in studio tonight. Thank you. Love the studio. It's great. That's great. Thanks again. You guys are welcome anytime, man. Anytime you need us, we're here. Thank you.

Thanks. Thanks for having everybody.