The Team House - The Most Underrated Special Ops Unit (MARSOC) | John Dailey | Ep. 295

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseJohn A. Dailey joined the Marines at seventeen, leading to a career of over twenty years spent working in special operations, with tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was in Force Recon, Det-1, and is a plank owner of the Marine Raiders (MARSOC)Get John's book here:⬇️https://www.amazon.com/Books-John-Dailey/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AJohn+Daileyhttps://scoutsniper.orghttps://www.jadailey.com—————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:____________________________________Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️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/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#forcerecon #marineraiders#marsocBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to. And we really appreciate that. So go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. Special operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 295 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park and our guest on tonight's show is John Daly. He is the author of Tough Rugged Bastards. It is a memoir about his time in the Marine Corps, his service in force recon, detachment one, and then helping to stand up Marsok in the very beginning years. And he continues to work with Marsok today as a

civilian. John, thank you for coming on the show and sharing this, your history, but this slice of Marine Corps history also. Thanks. Well, Jack Dave, I appreciate you having me on. I'm excited for the chance to talk with you guys. So let's start at the beginning of your story. Tell us a bit about, you know, your upbringing and how that kind of took you towards the Marine Corps. Yeah, I grew up along the Virginia, West Virginia border on both sides at various times. And the Appalachia foot heels and, you know, a great way to grow up, you know, in the 70s, 80s. You know, I had not a lot of neighbors, you know, not a lot of other kids. It was a whole lot of me, you know, out in the woods running

around by myself. But it taught me a lot of things, you know, you know, learned about not living off the land necessarily, but, you know, just being very comfortable outdoors. You know, I think the, I was, I think it was eight the first time I told my dad I wanted to go camping out in the woods by myself, you know, and went out, set up my tent, got everything ready, you know, at about like two in the afternoon. And, you know, it seemed like an eternity before the sun finally went down. And when it did, you know, it was, it was probably the, you know, I was a stubborn kid. But, you know, it gets dark and I've been camping plenty with my folks, but the, you know, all the sounds of the night. time start coming out and I really, really, you know, wanted to go back home. But it was, it was just,

you know, the stubbornness that kind of kept me out. And I think that's probably one of the things I learned kind of growing up that way. And it's stubbornness was absolutely a skill that paid off and big evidence in the Marine Corps. And so as you grow up, you start hitting like your high school years. What's, you know, how is the Marine Corps starting to enter into your life? Yeah, I had, I kind of known. I learned about the Brink Corps at a really early age and kind of had it in the back of my head that that's what I wanted to do. When I got into high school, we moved.

My parents got divorced and I was on the West Virginia side now. And just as like fate would have it, the recruiter in the recruiting office that was local was a force recon Marine. And he had, you know, it was a sniper. He'd kind of everything that I, wanted to do and he had the pictures up on his wall in his office and he kind of took me under his swing and you know and started teaching me

prepping me and so throughout my my high school years the decision was made I didn't have the the grades really for anything else so that that made life a little easier we didn't have the money for college even if I would have so it was it was a pretty easy decision but it was it was one I was you know when I went in, I operated on the assumption that you joined the Marine Corps and you stayed in forever. You know, I didn't realize that there was, there were enlistments, right? And when they,

they told me, they're like, hey, how long do you want to join for? I was like, yeah, until I die, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, well, that's pretty much what you signed up for as it turns out, John. It did, yeah. I mean, it, you know, I loved it. I mean, I can't say that I loved every minute of it, but, you know, I can't remember the minutes that I didn't love. And the thing that I learned that, you know, it seems to be common among, you know, special operations guys is that, you know, the times that you really love for the times that really, really sucked, you know, and you don't love them at the time, they're sucking, but, you know, when you get back to, you know, the rear,

you're cleaning weapons and cleaning gear, and you kind of get to talk shit to other teams about how hard your patrol was or how, you know, how bad the mission was, or who ran out of water, you know, with 24 hours to go or ran out of Chow. And then had to Exville, you know, those sorts of things that build teams, build communities. And that's what I loved about it. And so you come in, what year did you join the Marines and tell us about those early years what it was like at that time? Yeah, I joined in 87 right out of like two weeks out of high school. and it was, I think, an interesting time.

Of course, you don't know it then, but it was far enough post-Vietnam where a lot of the disgruntled veterans that I had heard about, they weren't anywhere to be seen for the most part. There were still absolutely plenty of Vietnam vets, but most of them were first sergeants and sergeant major, master gunnery sergeants,

things of that nature. That, me, as a PFC, wasn't talking to anyway. You know, I would get my ass chewed by one occasionally. But so there was, but we were still absolutely, you know, learning or practicing all of the, you know, we were preparing to fight another Vietnam, right? So all of the lessons that they had learned.

I remember and I just, I still have, I pulled out and made copies of the other day, a relatively thick document that, Ketto was just patrolling tips from, from, I think it probably was compiled by SF guys, but everything from, you know, taping on your mags, you know, tabs on your mags, you could pull them out quickly to cutting down the mag pouch in

inch so it's easier to get your mags out, you know, taping the spoons on your grenades. And all of these things, we were just all over them. You know, we were, you know, expecting or hoping or whatever for another, you know, Vietnam. And so that's kind of my formative years in the Marine Corps. in early years, I was in a scout sniper platoon. And that was, you know, Carlos Hathcock. But, you know, his book was passed around. And getting the opportunity to meet him, I got to meet him.

It was like meeting, you know, a freaking rock star. Yeah. Chestie polar. So it, I mean, it was really, I think, a good time. There wasn't a lot of money, you know, there was a whole lot of, I mean, life in the infantry, really at that time on Monday morning you'd you know

throw your ruck on and you'd you know hike out to the field and you'd set up a camp and you do patrols you know Tuesday through Thursday if you're lucky you know Thursday you'd

hike back clean your weapons turn them in you know go get drunk Thursday night and usually they just give you off Friday so you get a three day week and, you know, a three-day weekend and back at it the next week. And that was just, you know, week after week after week. So, I mean, you got really, really good at the basic, you know, infantry activities that, you know, lead to success.

And then as we get towards the 90s, were you, I'm trying to remember, were you a Marine Embassy Guard for a little while? I was. So I was, the unit that I was in, and I had initially started out in a sniper platoon. had got the opportunity to go to sniper school, but we weren't doing a lot. So there was, I kind of got suckered in by, I think, we call them career planners. I think in the Army they might be called like Detailers or whatever, but the guy in the unit whose job it is to get people to sign up for special duties.

And I ran into a little bit of party, you know, in the barracks. And he was, you know, found out that I was a sniper. And I'm sure I didn't make it hard for him to find out. I just graduated from sniper school. So I'm sure I was spouting off to anybody but listen. But he was like, hey, man, I got a deal for you. There's this duty where you go and work at foreign embassies. And, you know, with your with your background as a sniper, you know, you'll be, you know, working to the CIA in no time.

And I was like, what? You know, like, that sounds awesome. I'm like, sign me up. So, you know, the unit was actually kind of pissed because I just got back from sniper school. You know, there's some expectation that I was going to. to help train some other guys. And I was on the next thing smoking to the Marine Security Guard school, which, as it turns out, does not involve, you know, targeting people for the CIA whatsoever.

It's a whole lot of wearing your dress uniform and kind of greeting dignitaries and just basically standing guard over an embassy at night when everybody goes home. But it was a really great learning experience. while I was in in Budapest was my first duty station and that was right as the wall was coming down in 89 and the Soviets were leaving Hungary. I met the chick who would become my wife some years later, an American school teacher. So that was, you know, that panned out. So we've been married for just over 32 years now. So that worked out pretty well.

And then from there I went to Buenos Aires, Argentina. I missed the first Gulf War because, you know, during that interim period. But I don't think I talk about it in the book. But one of the kind of funny stories to come out of that is when I got to, I left Budapest right as the buildup for the Gulf War was happening. And so by the time I get to Argentina, it's getting ready to kick off. And there's a form in the Marine Corps called an administrative action form that you can fill out and request anything with it. And so I would go into the embassy every morning. I'd fill out one of these forms and say, hey, I want to go to any unit that's involved in combat.

and I would turn it in to my, you know, my boss who was a gunny, an E7, and he would, I don't know what he was doing with it, but it was. Sliding them back across the desk tier. They would disappear, and the next day I'd come in and I'd fill out another one. So apparently what he had done with him is he was taking them and passing them on to the kind of our next boss in the State Department chain of command was the regional security officer at the embassy. And so I had been there for a couple weeks, filling out these forums, and the President Bush, the senior President Bush, came to visit. And we had the opportunity, all the Marines out there to meet him, and he's shaking our hands, and we're getting our picture taken.

He's getting ready to go into, like, a press conference. And he, when I shake his hand and say, you know, hey, Sergeant Daley, sir, he's like, Daley, are you the one who keeps trying to go to Iraq? knock it off you're not going so I'm sure somebody had put it in his ear but it was I was like well I guess

I guess I'll give up out of curiosity well two questions one anytime somebody met you and didn't see how your name was spelled did they ask you if you're related to Dan Daly? Oh all the time

even regardless of how it spelled yeah that was like boot camp was kind of a horrible thing because i was just always you know they come up a day and day and they come up here and go charge that machine gun nest or whatever you know you got to share this you got to share this piece of marine corps war your name is spelled like his i'm sorry about that i for some reason in my mind it was spelled differently you got to it is yeah his is uh d a l why oh right it is this is a different yeah he's a medal of honor recipient?

Do you, I don't recall my, I'm, I'm embarrassed, but I don't remember my Marine Corps lore. So yeah, Dan Daley was actually one of two, two Medal of Honor recipients. So he was, uh, got the first one in, uh, China. They're in the Boxer Rebellion. Yeah, like 1905. Holy shit. But apparently just, just they put him out on a post and he just stacked bodies. I mean, to the, to the point where he literally had like given a wall out of the Chinese that he was, they were attacking.

And then the second one, the second was actually down in South America in the Banana Wars. Yeah, it's Haiti. Nicaragua or Haiti. Yeah. I mean, according to Wikipedia, but take that. Yeah, you're right. he was I think a couple of machine guns had been lost in a river and he went back like under fire and dove they're like 50 cows and he went and swam him up but he was kind of more famous for during World War I in Bellowood in France he the Marines were going to stuck you know behind a hedge row and the Germans who just kind of laying waste to him they've got to a big open field they have to cross and his famous quote was he stood up with his pistol

started charging i think he was a purse sergeant at the time and said uh come on you sons of bitches you want to live forever so that's of course everybody jumped up went after him and that's uh that's kind of the day and so a lot for you to live up to john yeah yeah and i mean well isn't that also the battle of the woods if i remember right that's where the marines got the nickname Devil Dog, right, from the Germans. Yeah, and how much of that's accurate? I've come to understand that, you know, I mean, the Marine Force always been very, very good at their own publicity, you know.

And that's one of the things. I'm not sure that's 100%. I'm not sure that it matters, you know, if it's 100% accurate. Yeah, right, right. But, yeah, the story was that the German army had awarded the, the term. term two four hundred to a unit, the hardest fighting unit every year, within the German army. And after meeting the Marines, they decided that they would have bestow that name on the Marine Corps for that year. So that, and then we took that name and earned or not, or, you know,

made up or not, and ran with it. And then my second question was, you were, you were not in a combat position when the first Gulf War kicked off. Did you feel crushed when it first launched? Yeah. Yeah, that was, you know, I mean, it's kind of indescribable, right? You join, you know, especially, I mean, I had filled my head with, you know, growing up at the time I did, like, you know, Rambo and Chuck Norris missing in action and just everything was, you know, these combat movies. And then, you know, books, you know, it's devouring books, the long run, you know, Lerp books and, you know, Forst Recondyriegand Diary and just, so, you know, everything that I had done was to prepare for combat, you know, and then to have it happen.

And, you know, you're setting it out and especially setting it out, you know, beside the pool in Buenos Aires at the Marine House. Right. You know, if you had to set it out, it was a pretty good place to be. but it still, it really hurt me. And then when I got back to the States and back to an infantry unit, the fact that there were young guys running around with a stack of medals,

you know, a ribbons from, I'm like, man. You know, so I definitely felt that I had missed, you know, my calling, you know, and it didn't seem that there was, you know, anything else going to ruin on the horizon. So it was, really at that point, it's like the only thing that I can do is keep

kind of moving up to units that will offer me a better opportunity. So that was why you went to force recon. That was definitely a part of it. But I really enjoyed being in a sniper platoon. I really loved the

work, you know, all the discipline, the long-range shooting, everything that goes into that. But I had always you know, recognized that force recon was, you know, the, kind of the tip of the sphere of what the Marine Corps had, in my eyes, at least. And the problem that I had was that I really was not a great swimmer. And I mean, I could swim, you know, well enough to get in the Marine Corps and well enough for most things. But Force Recon, it requires a pretty high level of swimming ability. And so I had tried out once and didn't make it.

And it's, it's tough, you know, it's a tough thing to learn how to swim, you know, when you don't. The rain court doesn't give you a lot of access, surprisingly, to, especially I was stationed at this point at 29 Palms, so the middle of the desert. You know, they did have a swimming pool, so I started, you know, hitting that up and working on that, but then I had the opportunity to try out again and made it. Can you real quick tell us the difference between battalion recon and force recon, both in their mission and capabilities, things like that? Absolutely.

So training, at least initial training, is the same. And throughout a Marines career, quite often they would start out in battalion recon, move over the force, you know, maybe be an assistant team leader and then go back to battalion and be a team later. You know, so some people would kind of have these careers where they bounce back and forth among units. I didn't. I came a little bit later. I was a sergeant when I got to force. But the battalion recon is the asset of a battalion level commander.

So it's there, he's there to answer that commander's information requirements. Generally speaking, you know, within five to ten miles of their kind of area of interest. Um, force recon, on the other hand, works for the, the force commander. So it's, you know, whoever the kind of the big big wig is, uh, you know, when we got into Afghanistan, it wound up being Mattis. So he was the task force commander. So we were tasked with answering his requirements. So because of that, if you're more likely to, to have like a free fall capability in, uh, it's no, it's not exclusive to, to force triecon. but it's more likely to have a more advanced freefall capability.

And Force Recon also had the direct action mission. At the time, when I was there, is IHR, an extremist hostage rescue. Yeah. Now, force was, by all measures, a special operations unit, but was not fortunate enough because of the Marine Corps. Can you tell us about that why they weren't included in J-Soc or EuseSock or anything like that? Yeah, so the whole story obviously goes back to the founding of Socom and after the failed attempt to rescue the Iranian Americans in the Iranian hostages.

So in 1987, you know, based on kind of that all of the failures that happened there, the military was told, hey, you need to create a special operations entity. that oversees all special operations and coordinates them. The SF was like, Roger that. They jumped over the Rangers, the Seals, Air Force Special Operations, PGAs, Pararescue. And the Marine Corps was invited, but the Commandant at the time said no. He had a different vision for the Marine Corps, and that was a great vision.

But the Marine Corps formed at that point the Marine Expeditionary Unit. So at any point in time, there are generally two marine expeditionary units that are on probably three Navy ships. So there's three or four thousand sailors, three or four thousand Marines out at sea. And that's kind of when we came up with America's 911, you know, a little nickname for ourselves. So because of that, the Force Recon assets were held to be a part of that. And so, and we were, I was just joining the Marine Corps at that time. And, you know, it would, you know, later when I got the force, like I said, it was, it was not uncommon, you know, an uncommon topic to have, you know, when you're sitting around

drinking beer to bitch and moan about, you know, us not having access to the, the missions, the money, you know, the training in some cases. Yeah, sorry I said you suck. I meant so calm. But, yeah. Tell us then about what force was like in those days, in the 1990s, what you guys were up to, kind of the training and deployment schedule. Yeah, it was, I mean, that was, in my opinion, that was a heyday of, but it was, it was, it was, they started, first force recon, which I was a part of the station and capital. Pendleton, California had been done away with after Vietnam.

And they didn't stand back up until 1987. Wow. And they stood back up with this direct action mission. And when they started that, that was really a wild, like kind of wild, wild west. You know, they were, you know, we were bringing in LAPD SWAT, who was kind of, you know, new. And LAPD SWAT was bringing in FBI HART. a lot of other people from a lot of places were coming and the level of training was incredibly high but it was also like we were talking about a little bit before we came on camera

like a lot of point shooting a lot of some trick shooting was kind of the order of the day in some in some places and you can you can be really really good at that at short range and as long as you are practicing every single day. You know, like we were, the early days, they were bringing back from, from Vietnam. They'd actually developed the OEG, the occluded eye gun site. But we were throwing those on our M16s and MP5s, which requires you to shoot with both eyes open, right?

Because it's like a clear or not a, not a, clear test tube essentially with a red dot in it. So you can't see through it. You know, you had the keep both eyes open. Oh, really? Which is, yeah, which is good. I mean, it's, it's helpful, obviously, to shoot with both eyes open. But it was, it was based on this idea. It was called the binion aiming concept, right, that if you keep both eyes open and shoot that way long enough, it becomes natural. So there was a lot of, you know, testing and experimentation going on. So it was a really cool time to be there. By the time I rolled in, I think things had settled down a little bit, and in my opinion anyway, First Force recon was recognized, certainly in a Marine Corps,

as the pinnacle of what Marine reconnaissance could be. So I had arrived with the kind of pedigree of having spent time in a sniper platoon, you know, been a sniper, been, you know, a sniper, been to the scout sniper advanced course that the Marine Corps just puts on once a year. And I had also had the opportunity to go to Ranger School and Jump School, which was kind of unusual at that time. And it was unusual that anybody outside of Fortry Khan would have gotten to go to Ranger school if quotas were available. So when I checked in to First Force in 92, I got.

one of the Marines was asking me, you know, asking me who I was and this and that. And, you know, it was forgot. I couldn't remember my name. But he was like, hey, you know, he was telling his platoon sergeant. He was like, hey, we should grab that guy, the Ranger. So I became Ranger Daily after that. And that's a nickname that stuck with me now for 30-some years. And people always, you know, really curious, were you in the Rangers or, you know, before you

joined the Marine Corps or were you a Park Ranger or whatever but no it's just somebody couldn't remember my name it's like when when Marines attend Ranger's school they all get called gunny yeah so as time goes on I mean as I understand it and jump in if I'm a misunderstanding because the Force Recon and Recon guys were not part of special operations per se technically At that time, those guys had to cycle back into infantry units, conventional units, and hopefully come back again at a higher rank. But it sounds like you got to stay there pretty much through the entire time up until Debt 1 came around.

Yeah, I was lucky. There's a couple things that happened. Initially, the MOS recon Marines, 021, it was not a primary MOS. So you were, when you became a, and in the Marine Corps, if you're an infantry, MOS, O3, doesn't matter what you are within there. You're a grunt, you're a machine gunner, mortarman or a recon marine. When you become a staff sergeant, in E6, you become an O369, which is an infantry unit leader. And at that point, you can be, you could be moved anywhere. And so quite often that would happen to recon, Marines.

when they became promoted to staff sergeant. They would get moved out to the infantry, and they would do some time there and come back. I was fortunate. I mean, I think there was, you know, it was known that if you were, you know, somebody that really put out was good at your job, then there were ways to find a way for you to stay.

And often as long as you kept deploying, you know, you were staying active in a platoon, then you were you were kind of safe. So at that time, there were a lot of guys who were staying for a good while. And I was able to stay for about 10 years there and work my way up from point man to platoon sergeant. And would have stayed, I think, longer if I could have. Tell us where you were on 9-11 and sort of that run up to, you know, for Afghanistan.

Yeah, so that is always kind of makes an interesting story on 9-11, you know, in the moments before the first plane hit the first tower, I was sitting in a pub in Darwin, Australia, you know, with my team leaders, drinking beer. So I was the platoon sergeant for a force-recogned platoon, and we had just left on deployment on the ships with the Marine Expeditionary Unit that I was. I was talking about. Our first stop had been Darwin,

and we spent a couple of days there training with the Australians, some snipers. So we had a range. We were out shooting. We finally wrapped up, came back, cleaned up, and had our first night out on the town. And so Australia, if you haven't been, and I haven't been back in a while, but, you know, there's the woman-to-man ratio is out of kilter, right? So there's all of the young guys were like super excited because there's, there's tons of,

tons of ladies running around. I had, you know, I was married. I had the, my team leaders were all married and we're like, hey, let's just go find some place quiet,

get some beers. So we find the, an Irish pub, of course. There's one everywhere. Kitty O'Shea's Irish pub. So we're kind of tucked in the corner, drank a beer.

And, yeah, there's playing soccer on the, the big screen above the, the bar. and then it switches to the first tower. And within minutes, the Marines who were designated as the shore patrol to try to keep people out of trouble, come running into the bar, yelling, get back to the boats, back to the boats.

And then they were just down the street yelling at every bar. So we eventually, we finished our beer and then kind of finished all the beer they would let us buy. And then eventually made our way back to the boat. And when we woke up the next morning, they had somehow managed to wrangle, you know, everybody, and we were out of sea. And so what was, you know, your unit's mission at that point? I mean, were you kind of just like out at sea waiting for further waters? What happened? We had already had a prior commitment to go into East Timor, which is just kind of off the coast, a little tiny country.

and they had just been on the back end of a pretty nasty civil war. And they had won their independence, and they were going, I think it was on the, it was about this time. It was just before, it was maybe the 10th or the 11th or not the 10th, the 12th or the 13th, they were going to be signing their constitution. And so it was a big event. the Navy Commodore and the R commander, the Mew commander, had to attend this thing. So there was obviously security concerns. So we wound up providing a security detail for our commander,

and the SEALs provided one for the Commodore. So we were kind of running around East Timor with those guys for the day. And then from there we kind of headed straight for the, the closest coast to Afghanistan, which was Pakistan. By October, we had established some farps and it's got a staging basis and been around Jalalabad and then by November we were in Afghanistan.

Cool. So after so many years of waiting, finally got to answer the call that you had heard. The balloon went up. Yeah. Yeah. And I still, you know, we got there, we were kind of got our feet unders for a couple of days, and we're tasked with doing a vehicle reconnaissance to find a route from where we were,

which was called Fab Rino, got out in the middle of nowhere, up to Kandahar. And so me and my boys went out, you know, left at night, spent two nights. nights, about 100 miles of kind of cross compartment going through the desert, finding a route, and eventually brought up a larger unit to just kind of establish essentially a big patrol base and start trying to stir some shit up. We spent, you know, we were going out every night looking for, you know, at the time, really bad satellite images of, you know, expected. you know, Taliban positions, and we'd get there and it'd be, you know, a bunch of rocks and a couple of trees.

And we, they thought there were vehicles. And it's the, you know, things have absolutely improved over the last 20 years. But we got, I got pulled in on the December 7th and by the battalion commander that we were, we were out with. And he's like, hey, I need you guys to go out and, and, um, interdict traffic coming between Kandahar and to the to the west out towards Lashigar. So we, you know, kind of came up with a plan where we weren't going to, at the time, everybody was declared hostile. So, I mean, and, you know, we were within our rights to just, you know, set up machine guns and blast any car that went down the road. And, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't cool with that. You know, I could imagine, you know, I didn't want my guys, you know, approaching the vehicle that we shot up and find him in a bunch of, you know, a family that was trying to get out or whatever.

So, you know, they kind of, Afghanis had been to enough of that with the Taliban. So we, you know, I put it to the team leaders. They came up with a plan to execute a, essentially what was close to a mission that we trained for quite a big. take down, you know, when you have a vehicle that you got to stop and then you've got to determine whether the bad guys are not are in it and then, you know, shoot them if they are, right, or snatch them up. And that's what we wound up kind of setting up. We strung Constitina wire across the road, kind of positioned ourselves off. I put one of my other vehicles on a base of fires in case things went to shit. And I was talking with air and pretty soon.

they let us know that there was a small convoy that was headed our way out of Kandahar. And at that point, you know, sitting there, and this is December, Afghanistan, it's fucking freezing cold. We're kind of sitting there shivering, you know, and I told everybody, I'm like, hey, man, I think I'm like an anti-bullet magnet, right? I've been in the Marine Corps at this point for 14 years, and I've barely heard, you know, a couple of shots. fire and anger. And, you know, I haven't returned fire on any of them. So I don't, I don't know that it's going to happen tonight. So I was, you know, kind of talking to, I didn't want guys to, you know, I wanted to,

one, kind of keep it light, you know, because we were either going to, you know, do some shit or we weren't, right? And you don't want, you know, you don't want guys so hyper that they're, you know, jerking the trigger at anything. So, you know, we talked just about, hey, you know, we've trained, we've done this shit a million times and practiced, right? You know, there's nothing different than that. So let's just trade it like that. You know, we've rehearsed it, not, you know, that was one of the things that was kind of pounded to my head as a young guy.

You don't rehearse until you get it right. You rehearse until you can't get it wrong. So, you know, and I kind of tried to push out on my guy. So eventually the lead. vehicle of this convoy, the other two vehicles, which were larger, like five-ton trucks, had pulled off, and the lead vehicle was kind of scouting ahead. And it pulled up, you know, shot past us, saw the Constitino wire because we had hung Kenlights on it, and it said, screw it, I'm going for it.

And watching a vehicle, you know, 60 miles an hour hit Constitino wire is pretty fucking astounding. I mean, you don't get far. man it didn't get far it's got it snatched up you know as soon as that wire

wraps around the axles it shuts them down pretty quick we had you know popped up onto the road way behind them and as soon as we did I could see you know sitting in the back of this

duly or a dual cab truck there were you know three guys you know with AKs the front was was stuffed

full of guys. You know, it was like a clown car. The back of the bed of the truck was packed full of, you know, boxes and crates and things like that, so we didn't know what it was at home. But my vehicle stops. I jump out of the vehicle commander's seat, kind of rush up and, you know, my guys kind of roll in behind me. And I yelled, hey, put your hands up.

I don't quite know where that came from. But, you know, it was giving them a chance. The funny thing is that at that moment, and it was the first time I'd experienced it, but I had read about it, you know, like Grossman and on killing, like, time distortion, how time, you know, changes, and how, like, a lot of, you know, once loud noises started, once shooting started, it didn't sound like shooting, right? It was just like little pops, kind of the visual perceptual narrowing where you kind of, your world kind of starts to collapse down under the threat in front of you.

And so all of these things started happening. And luckily, like I knew what they were because I had, you know, like I said, we read about it. I talked to guys about it. The three guys in the bed of the truck were obviously the primary threat. The guy in the middle, the guys on either side had, because it was so cold, had their AKs bundled up in blankets and their hands bundled up. and the guy in the middle who was an old, you know, Muge, you know, he'd been, it wasn't his first rodeo. You know, you could see his hands were red, you know,

but he had his hands on his weapon. And it was, you know, it was comical how slowly he was, like he seemed to be moving trying to bring his weapon up on me. And so, you know, I shoot him, you know, and, you know, one of the weird things, you know, that there's a thing called persistent shooting, where if you shoot someone and what you expect to happen doesn't happen, then you just keep shooting, right?

You expect the guy to fall down. He doesn't fall down, and he couldn't because he was propped up in all these crates. But I shot him a number of times more than enough before I went ahead and did what we had been trained to do and shoot a turn it into a box drill. But by this point, you know, I've got, you know, my other guys are up there with me. they're engaging and then the the Constitina wire had run down the length of the

vehicle so they were having trouble opening the doors. They're trying to roll down windows and jump out the windows and it was it turned into kind of a comical scene but the about that time the bed of the truck burst into flames and it spread very very quickly. I mean it was which

led the people that were still in the bed or in the cab of the truck to really try to get the hell out. So now They're climbing out and we're popping them. They're falling in the Constantine wire, and it's just turned into kind of a shit show. But some rounds start popping off. And at the time, I thought they were, you know, being fired.

I didn't realize that they were cooking off that quickly. So we start bounding back. And then, you know, RPGs, rocket start sailing, you know, fill in the night sky. They're not armed and they, you know, they weren't launched. They were, you know, they were cooking off. So they were like spiraling, you know, through the air. So it got a little, a little spicy, I guess, for a little bit.

But, you know, we pulled back, you know, made sure we had, you know, got our men, weapons, equipment, got a check. And that was, that was really it. We brought in fast movers on the other two vehicles that were sitting out in the desert. And really that kind of, you know, other than the fifth group, guys that were up in the mountains. That was the first kind of engagement of Afghanistan. So as you get back to the United States after that deployment, tell us about how this bold new experiment called Detachment One comes about. Absolutely. So we started, I mean, by, what we didn't

know is by that time, by, you know, middle December, the Secretary of Defense had already made the decision that there needed to be more special operations. Special operations command was going to take the lead for the war on terror. So, you know, the Army was told, you know, make more Green Berets and, you know, Rangers, the Navy, more seals, Air Force, more CCTV guys and PJs. And he said, hey, Marine Corps, this time you guys are going to participate. And still, the ring corps was like nah man we're uh well rummy we're good uh we don't don't want to do that and uh it took some doing uh eventually and to be honest socom wasn't too eager to have marines on board either from you know everything i gathered um so there was there was actually about a year

time kind of gap between the time i got back in 2002 and the time that one stood up. So there was a lot going on kind of behind the scenes that I didn't know about, but ultimately the decision was that the Marine Corps would provide a small unit that would serve as a proof of concept for a couple of years. So they would train, deploy with a special operations architecture over top of them and then be evaluated on how well they did. So when I got back from that deployment, I was told that, hey, you've really been here now too long.

You've got to go somewhere. So luckily, I just went down the street to the Special Operations Training Group and ran the took over the urban sniper course, which was great to get back behind the gun seriously and got to re, you know, definitely bust the rust off on my shooting skills. So, but that job only lasted for about a year because, you know, I got kind of tapped on the shoulder at a meeting. And Colonel Coates, who was our, was selected to be our boss, it was like, hey, you know, Ranger, do you, you know, I've got tapped for this thing. Do you want to end? And of course, you know, it's, you know, not a hard question to answer. Right. Well, yeah.

I went in. And, you know, he asked me to be a team leader. So they were going to be initially. four teams. The charter was for 78 men that eventually grew to closer to 100.

But of that 100 men, it was roughly a third were forced reconnaissance Marines. About a third were Intel. And that's really what kind of set us apart was the huge intel

support that we had. And then the other third ran the gamut from you know, communicators and fires guys and administrative guys and mechanics and everything else that you need to run a unit. So that's small an element, I mean, then we're talking about like 35, 40, like a platoon-sized element of operators and then the rest of the unit is enablers.

Yeah, we were, I think, about 30. So, you know, and that was with our Navy corpsmen that are, you know, each team had a corpsman. So initially, I think I had a seven-man team. I had me, five guys, five Marines at a Corman. You know, one communicator was in there. And, you know, I was the junior guy. I was an E-7. You know, I put on, got promoted to Gunney right before 9-11.

But the other guys were guys. that I had kind of looked up to as being like the, you know, like the next senior class or whatever, you know, guys who had a couple of years on me. And so I was, and I don't know if it was, anybody else felt that way, but I've, you know, and I talk a lot of in the book about the idea of imposter syndrome, all right, not quite thinking that you're, you deserve to be where you are.

And, you know, people bitch and moan about it a lot. I mean, I'm thankful every day for it, you know. I think it pushed, push me to, you know, kind of, you know, or strive to be better, but to prove myself. But so I told my team very early on, like, hey, guys, we're going to do whatever mission, you know, shit mission needs to be done. You know, we'll be the ones to do it. So, you know, particularly as we started, I mean, because I was coming from that role as a sniper instructor,

you know, I got put in charge of all kind of sniping, overseeing our sniping program. which led, you know, came in handy later on. And I had picked, a couple of the guys that I picked had worked for me in that, in that role. So we had a very robust, you know, sniper capability that wasn't as terribly common. And so then particularly once we started doing direct action missions, you know, everybody wants to be, you know, the guys blowing the door off and clearing the house. I was like, hey man, we'll do the, you know, we'll do the R&S on the objective. We'll, you know, which my guys would bitch and moan about sometimes. But, you know, be the guys who, you know, went in two days before, laid in the snow or the mud or whatever and took pictures and reported back.

And that ultimately kind of just led to my team, our team, being the go-to guys for anything that was, you know, more challenging or kind of. out of the ordinary. And at this time period, I mean, it's very interesting what you write about, you know, the whole process of standing up that one. You were also involved in like some R&D and like going down to, you went down somewhere and we're working with a with an R&D guy, developing new gear and stuff. Yeah. So I had one of the great things about first Fort Freakon during that time when Colonel Coates was the CEO, was that he was always pushing us to, you know, go out and find new stuff, right, new gear. We were, within the Marine Corps, we were the, you know, the, I'm pretty sure the first guys to start, you know, running aim points on our, first on our MP5s.

And then, you know, when we got in fours, throwing them on on M4s, there was just a lot of firsts and a lot of equipment. Why can't you just use iron sights, John? Well, you can. What's wrong with iron sights? You can do that. You've got to be able to shoot with Iron Sites, but I'm always a big fan of anything that makes the job easier. So we had a pretty, we were accustomed to doing that, to going out, like, seeking out vendors and things like that. And we had had a really bad helicopter accident a couple of years before when I was at First Force, 99.

and a helicopter was a bunch of our guys were going to do a ship take down and so they were going to fast drove onto the deck of a ship the pilot came in and misjudged the heights and caught his skid on a net the big steel net flipped the helo over and they sunk so we had a bunch of our guys died a crew chief and the helicopter died and one of the things that came out of that was that the equipment that we were wearing was crazy heavy. Our bullet bouncers and everything were very, very early

generation stuff. So when that happened, I got grabbed to go and work with the Marine Corps to build a better suite of kind of amphibious, capable. More survivable gear. Yeah.

And that definitely kind of put me in that world with sort of Natick laboratories is the Army Research Center where they make MREs and boots and everything in between. I got to go up there and got to make a lot of contacts and friends. So they came in handy when we came time to start kicking ourselves out. Because even in 99, when we started building that equipment suite, it was green camouflage.

You know, that was, that's what everything was. We still assumed that we're going to be in the jungle somewhere, you know, even though we'd had, you know, the previous war had been as short as it was in the desert. But so that was, you know, making, you know, building out a flat earth or tan, you know, sweet of gear and taking a look at it after some time. We had in the interim, we developed a cutaway process for body armor that hadn't existed before that. You know, they used to spare air bottles and kind of a litany of one of the Marines that in the old days we used to back when telephones had cords on them, we would go into offices and steal their phone cords and use the phone cord to make a lanyard for our pistol. a couple of fishing leaders you know flex cuffed with little tonic flex cuffs

and that was that was how you secured your because if you're fast roping you know onto the deck of a ship your pistol comes out you know it could be disastrous so you know one of the Marines was very fortunate that he was able to break that

the telephone cord or the connection on that telephone cord So, you know, we got people to make breakaway landyards and kind of the list went on of innovations that came out of that. And so tell us then about, you know, the first and really only deployment that Detachment 1 did to Iraq. Where did you guys deploy to? And sort of what was like the idea of what this deployment would be versus what it was when, you know, you guys leaned on the ground and things start to change? Yeah. So we stood up in, I should know the day, March 2003.

And for, like I said, we had no equipment and things for a while. But as we started getting outfitted and started prepping, we really believed, and I don't know if we just, it was our own what we wanted to believe, but thought that we were going to Afghanistan. And it kind of assumed, I think, because we were, you know, reconnaissance was, one of our missions, that that's what we would do. So we started doing a lot

of preparation for that. A lot pretty heavily in sniping, heavily in deep ground reconnaissance, vehicle-mounted reconnaissance. And about halfway through the time that we had to train, the decision was finally made that we would be going to Iraq, much more

kinetically focused deployment. And we were going to serve essentially as a seal or NSW task unit. So we would be a task unit underneath the Navy Special Warfare Task Group. That's who we would report to. So we get on the grounds in early 2004 and are assigned to hang out kind of in an area around Baghdad. So we were near one of Saddam's, kind of near the biap, the commas.

compound the airport in Baghdad. That's where we lived and we're, we got on the ground to find out normally, you know, when you do a turnover, you know, you get in country, you do a turnover with another unit, right? Riptoa do a relief in place. And they're like, hey, here's all of the information that we have. Here's all the bad guys that we haven't gone after.

So we didn't have that. There had not been a seal platoon in place. place there. So we were really kind of put in a position where we had to make our own luck, right? We had, and we weren't, you know, it's a weird situation. And the seals wound up being great. The commander that we worked for was very supportive and, you know, a straight shooter. But you also didn't quite know who you could trust, you know, who had your best interest at

Hartman, who was hoping that, you know, you wouldn't be successful. Yeah. So we had, you know, one of our, and it's really where those big crew of Intel guys came to play. A couple of things happened that seemed to be, you know, unfortunate initially, but we wound up being the best thing that could have happened. So the seal commander that was owned us was like, hey, you guys have got like 30 Intel dudes. you know, I don't have that many, you know, in my whole task unit. So he was, as was his right, he was like, hey, I'm going to take some of these guys and send them over to work with one of my seal platoons over here and these guys over here.

Of course, we're pissed because with my team, I had my own human guy, my own SIGA guy, my own geospatial guy. So that changed the way that we operated. But what we quickly came to realize was that now we had our, eyes and ears, you know, attached to everybody all over the country. So it wasn't long before, you know, these guys are just, you know, talking and, you know, realize that, hey, we've got probably a better kind of overall picture of intel of what's going on in the country than anybody does. And one of our Intel analyst was bored, you know, just kind of digging through

Intel reports and found a report that about a Iraqi interpreter who was working for the U.S. that had been executed. And he started here. He thought he had read something else. So we started digging back through these intel reports and realized that over the span of the past six months, there had been like 20 of these interpreters who had been killed. And being a, you know, an intel guy, he started, you know, trying to. to connect dots and, you know, it's like string and yarn across the wall or whatever with

pictures and things. I don't know how he did it. But ultimately, he came up and was like, hey, here's this one interpreter that's like connected, you know, to all of these dead interpreters. So it was, the interpreter was a woman. You know, the only way that we knew to get her was to go to the place where she was working, you know, during the day, which meant, you know, low profile, you know, civilian vehicles kind of going in low profile. So that's when all of the, you know, taking the, taking the missions, nobody else wanted, kind of paid off. So, you know, all of us team leaders gather around.

And, of course, it's the first mission that we're doing. So everybody wants it. And, you know, the decision was they're like, hey, daily, you know, you're the guy for this one because you've done all the, you've done all the, uh, the odd, you know, one off type of things.

So I was, I had, because there was a female we were going after, I had to take a female to search her. And the only female we had available to us was a Polish grom operator. And she was the only female operator that they had. And she was, uh,

uh, uh, phenomenal. Or she was, you know, would put, you know, any,

um, you know, I always think of her when people talk about what women are capable of, right? She had, it was, I think their most, you know, lethal sniper that they had. She was incredibly talented. But so she came with me, another Marine, and we had to take a seal, kind of a human guy with us.

And, you know, one of our intel guys, civvies in a vehicle driving around Baghdad. And it just so happened that we kept, like, we were like five minutes behind her, you know, everywhere we stopped. Or we missed her by like a day or two. And so we finally get to a place where she had most recently been and were able to get her to come in, you know, under the, like the guys that picking up a paycheck or whatever and grabbed her and grabbed the man that was driving her. And then we get her back.

And at this point, this is before the Abu Ghrae, Grabe thing, just like weeks before. but we were able to have our own interrogation facility and brought her in. And once they started talking to her, pretty quickly realized that she was the one. She was responsible for all these deaths, but she was unwittingly responsible. She had a hot-looking Iraqi dude had approached her and they hit it off. And she was not deserving of a hot-looking Iraqi dude. She was an elderly, not elderly, but an older, you know, an older lady. So there should have been some red flags.

But, you know, and he, however, got her to hand over, you know, phone lists and information for other contracted interpreters. So when she found out, she was, you know, there's the saying, hell had no fury like a woman scorn. She was, she was fucking pissed. like like really fucking pissed so she was like hey here's his address here's his friend's address there's this other guy and so that night you know we went out uh hit hit his house his place of business and his place of business uh the business that he was in was apparently making bombs because it was just a bomb making factory um and then from there you know you grab computers you grab explosives you grab paperwork

and then starts leading mission to mission. And after that, we were like, you know, just every night we were out and about. John, out of curiosity, was one of the reasons where you guys kind of had to pick, you know, whatever mission you get is because you were late to the party when it came to Socom and that people, like, I think some people think you guys are interchangeable with Seals, right? And if Seals already had this mission, why are we going to give it to this new group of guys? I'm not saying you guys are interchangeable with SEALs. I'm just saying that sometimes I think that's the... Yeah, I don't... Well, I think like I was willing to take any mission that, you know, in training

because I wanted to be the guy that they relied on, you know, when it wasn't. In this case, you know, I think we were, we just, we wanted to prove ourselves, you know. We were so we were going to take anything that they came down. And we really, we knew that it was going to have to, you know, Intel was going to have to drive ops and then ops Intel. So we were going to have to, you know, make our own luck, build our own target packages. And really, once we got that, that got a first one knocked out, it was, like, we were, you know, as busy as we could be. We were turning stuff away. And then I think we pretty quickly established a reputation as being a unit that would,

you know, do a good job, not step on other people's toes. Right. There was a lot of, especially at that time, it was a little wild west in Baghdad at that point. So there were, you know, we started, you know, working with ODAs that had, you know, tons of, of, you know, sources and tons of targets. But, you know, because of the way they were split up, didn't have the ass to action them. Right. So, you know, they, you know, they would say, hey, we've got to hit this guy's house, but he's one of our sources. So, you know, please don't blow his door off, you know, or please don't.

And so we're like, hey, man, yeah, we can, you know, don't fuck his house up too bad. Yeah, we can, we can do that. And so we pretty quickly got a reputation of being somebody that other people wanted to work with. And then, like said, it just became the point where we were incredibly busy. But I don't. I'm sorry, I was just going to ask, who were you guys using as like your blocking positions and security and stuff like that? Was it other Marines or were there like Army units that you guys would use? Most of the time, it was the other 60 guys in the unit.

So we had one of the things that one of the things that absolutely made the unit, you got as special as it was, was that Colonel Coates's philosophy was that, you know, everybody, everybody fights. So we would, you know, run, you know, he would have us put on shooting packages for the, all the support guys, you know, all the enablers. All the Intel dudes were, everybody was kidded out the same, right? So there was, yeah, there were times when things got a little bit dicey. You weren't quite sure about the reservist that had been attached to us as an armor who was man in the 50-cow. But it, we would. always keep one of our teams kind of in reserve and with the vehicles. So usually we'd have

like one operator with each vehicle to kind of just control the fight in and around that vehicle. But there were occasions where we were able to bring use Army units or even some Iraqis once let's say got up and running or other Marine units. The push, the push, There was kind of a big push to keep us away from working with other Marines because it was kind of the proof of concept that was supposed to determine if we could work outside of the Marine Corps. That was when Fallujah kicked off and about that time, you know, we were, you know, a lot of our buddies were there in force reconplatoons

and we really wanted to go in and they were, you know, because of that, they kept us out of that fight. I was really impressed with the, myriad of different missions that Debt One did during this single deployment from intelligence gathering, sniper operations, personal security detachment work, high value targets going after HVTs. Pretty wild. If you tell us about the hunt for, as you call them, X and Z in your book. Yeah, that was the one piece of information.

that we were given when we got on the ground was that there were these two guys, both deck of card guys that were, for whatever reason, we weren't given their names. We were just ex and Z. And they were,

nobody knew anything about them. They were just guys who were always on the move, but they were really kind of the shadow guys running the show. And Z was the senior guy. X was one of his boys, but

everybody had been after these guys. So we first started getting some info on X and our intel guys were just churning on them. We were getting able to get some sources pretty close to them, but when we would, you know, that guy and his family would be So it was challenging.

We wound up getting pulled off for a while, as you mentioned, to do this security detail. And I say that only because the guy that we were guarding was a Kurd, the Kurdish vice president of Iraq. And then, you know, the threat was becoming, you know, significant enough that as they started progressing towards the election, that they wanted us back on going after bomb-makers. So eventually we roll up this guy that we believed to be X. He, you know, a couple of days in interrogation and he won't admit it. We bring in family members and they're like, yeah, that's him. That's him. And the guy, there's no way this guy was going to talk.

And we'd gotten to a point with the Iraqi interim government having taken control that anybody that we were rolling up, if we wanted them to do any serious time or be put in prison, they were going to have to go through the Iraqi court system. And we had already, I didn't do it, but a couple of our guys had to go and testify against these people. And here's what we found. They're inside exploitation. Here's where it was.

So this guy had been, you know, once we started kind of getting his backstory, responsible for the deaths of a lot of Kurds, as part of the Saddam's research. regime. And so we're like, how can we get this guy to talk? We're going to have to let him go if we didn't. And somebody came up with the idea. Let's, you know, hit up our new pal that we've been protecting for these weeks, the vice president who's occurred and ask him if he'll join us on a little trip out to, you know, his kind of hometown territory. You know, they're like, what would happen,

right, if we turn this guy over to the Kurds? So, I didn't go on this particular mission. I wish I would have, but fly out with the vice president of Iraq, this dude with the bag on his head named X and then a bunch of our guys. We get him to a location where we turn them over to some Kurdish militia guys. And they pull off the bag. He recognizes kind of the, the shit show that he's in.

And we were not, the point had been made very clear. He was safe. No one was going to do anything to him because we were, you know, our guys were hanging out in the back. But, you know, once they started making their displeasure with him, you know, known, he started coughing up, you know, plenty of info. So more than enough to kind of seal to make sure that he was going to be trapped for a while. So, and then once getting him. kind of helped lead to this next guy, Z,

and he had been someone that all of the OGA organizations had been, everybody had been after this guy. He was a former regime guy, bath party dude that's on the deck of cards. Yeah, and he absolutely had like incredible tradecraft, right? He was never in the same place. But we want to, again, one of our human intelligence guys, was able to get a, and it took like a source to get another source closer, to get another source closer, and eventually we worked this young guy that we just, we called the kid, in as this guy's

kind of gopher. And the kid eventually got to work his way up to the point where he was driving, you know, Z around. And, you know, we found out, I didn't know it at the time, but Z had been responsible for killing this kid's family. He wasn't a kid. He was probably 20 years old. Which was, you know, why he was, I know, wasn't about money for him. So we get, you know, a text or some communication that the following day, Z is going to be having lunch with some other bigwigs in this very, very busy restaurant and a very, very bad part of Baghdad. So it was a place where he could kind of walk down the street, you know, with without fear.

And we knew that they were going to have, you know, lookouts on all the corners. And across the street, there were a couple of mosques that were kind of known to just be full of fighters. So it was dicey, you know, especially, you know, we made, had all of our success by trying to hit a guy's house at two in the morning, right? You know, and it doesn't mean, you know, you get sleepy. So this was kind of a middle of the day thing. Somebody came up with the idea of, you know, instead of trying to, there's no way really to come through and come in at Helos, you're going to be heard. You know, you come in and in military vehicles, you know, you're going to be seen identified far enough out. So we got a bunch of fans, you know, just used a bunch of vans, you know, just used a bunch of vans, you know, no arms.

you know, no armor, so it was a little dicey, but took the, you know, the darker skins, the dark-haired guys threw them and, you know, headdresses and everything and had them behind the wheels. And when the kid arrived, you know, he gave us a code word that they were heading to the restaurant. And then when they got to the restaurant, he went into the, to the bathroom and sent a text. And we were about five minutes out. So we were, able to roll in and we brought in some of the Polish grom with us for external security on that and and rolled into a restaurant where pretty much everybody there was an anti-coilition pretty much everybody there had a gun you know and then we had to figure out you know

obviously we found the the driver you know or the kid we knew who he was and then as we at this point we didn't even know what have a good photo of of Z. But, you know, we come in, roll them up. We're able to, you know, move quickly, kind of get everybody out before any, any shit kicked off. And, you know, by the time we got him

back to, you know, back to our base by the airport, we were told that, you know, he was being taken away from us. Right, right. He was such a big, a big name that the big eye in the sky wanted him.

Yeah. You also had this experience that I think is worth looking back on. As you were doing this HVT targeting, you relate in your book about bringing one guy into the interrogation room. And you know, you wanted to choke this guy out and kill him but didn't because, you know, you knew it was the wrong thing to do. But it was sort of like this moment, like you had this sort of like realization about, you know, who you are, but also who we are as people, right? Yeah. I I uh

so the whole story kind of goes back a ways but uh there was an American contractor who was working and he was like a

a cell phone contractor his story is sketchy right there's some some strangeness in his story so I'm not really clear on it but he was in Iraq supposedly you know working on cell phone towers

he gets uh and this was right as the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. Right. Right. We were, you know, we had the ability to interrogate our prisoners for a couple of days. And when we were done with them, we would take them and drop them off at Abuji, which it wasn't far away. So after the story broke of all of the kind of bullshit that was going on there, this kid was

found with his head chopped off on the side of the road and then shortly thereafter a video of him getting his head chopped off, you know, surfaced. So we, this was happening, I think it happened like right as we were arriving in country when he went missing. And then it was, you know, we were up and running by the time they found his body and then the video was released.

then there was I think it was solder that was chopped his head off but I thought it was Arcali no you're right

I'm sorry yeah yeah so at any rate we wind up getting a lead on the guy who's who was

or a guy who was involved in this so we wind up you know rolling up he lived in an apartment building hid his house in the middle of the night like we did.

And we found a bunch of bloody clothing in bags and just CDs, you know, stacks of CDs of the beheading. Right. So kind of fucking banning. Clean bust. Yeah. Yeah. So we bring him back. And, you know, we had National Guard soldiers that were used for security in the interrogation facility.

but that you know that's time I was really fucking curious right I was like hey man can I like just be your security guy one of our interrogators was going to go in with him and he's like yeah yeah man

and I don't I don't know I had I had seen years before a video of a Chechen cutting off ahead and I mean the amount of of I mean fuck that's

you gotta really want to fucking take a guy's head off right to do that so there's got to be some fucking hate involved in that and I didn't get it I was like man I just I kind of want to get it I want to see this guy and see what what he has to say

and so I'm standing in the back of the room just really my job is kind of be intimidating and the guy gets just brought in sat down he's got a bag on his head they pull his pull the bag off and you know

looking at him you know he's like fuck this guy looks like a normal fucking dude you know what the hell is he doing you know

involved in this in this bullshit um so you know they's interrogating him and he's innocent of course you know he didn't do anything

he doesn't know how the all the bloody clothes got there or how the CDs or got there but the interrogator sets a laptop down on the table and pushes the button. And I had been standing in the back of the room. And at that point, I kind of just got like pulled forward, right?

And I don't want to sit there and watch this video again. But, you know, I find myself, kind of with my hands on the chair. And I talk about that there. And then there are a lot about it because it was kind of a moment that, I mean, I would have paid money to, you know, a paycheck. to have been allowed to just choke that fucker to death. I didn't. And obviously, you know, I didn't want to go to jail either.

Right. But, you know, it just made me realize that, you know, everybody's capable of killing people. You know, sometimes we think because we're, you know, Marines or special operations or this or that. But I think anybody's capable of, you know, killing somebody if, you know, you push the right buttons. Speaking of which, the sort of last hurrah for you and with that one, at least, was you got called up to do some sniper operations. Was it up in Najaf? Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. And that was, that was a blast. That was, you know, when Najaf had kicked off a couple times, right? I think 2007 there was another big battle but 2004 the Senachaf is one of the oldest cities in Iraq

and within it as the so the it has the like on the outskirts of the town is the largest cemetery in the world I mean it's like a city this place and there's underground tombs

there's above ground there's just it's like a massive city made out of way. Wadi Ah Salam, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And that's called the Valley of Peace is what it means, which was funny because we had the Marine Expeditionary Unit getting ready to go head to head with the Madi Army in the Valley of Peace. And the Valley of Peace. But so we got called up and it wasn't just us. So there were SEAL sniper teams went up. The polls sent a team. And we wound up running into an S-F teen that was running around.

But when we got up there, at the center of Najaf is the Ali-Amam Ali Mosque. And it's the, I think it's the second or third holiest site for Shia Muslims. Right. So it's, you know, no matter what you do, you can't fuck up this mosque. All right? It's got, like, dome is actual gold. They're like golden tiles on top of this. And it's, you know, no.

nobody was willing to do anything that might risk damaging the mosque. And consequently, the mosque complex was where there were a couple thousand dickets. So the only people that were able to move beyond a perimeter that had been set were snipers. And so we got up there, wound up connecting with the two six cavalry. in their sector and they were like hey, well, you know, we can't go beyond this line.

But we'll throw you in the back of vehicles, we'll get you up as far as we can and then we'll provide a QRF in case shit really goes to shit. So we were able to move in as special operations sniper teams. And for the first couple of days, it was, you know, because we all got in

position kind of surrounding the city about the same time. the seals on the far side, the poles were over here. And the, you know, they, the insurgents assumed that they knew that nobody could come beyond this line because that had been the way that it had been. So, you know, sun comes up the first morning and it's just like fishing a barrel, right? I mean, we were just crushing. You know, you just hear sniper shots, boom, you know, all kind of ring in the city.

You had the Shaitak, right, which was a new new thing at that. time. Yeah, it was. We took it. We shot it a couple of times. It was really too much gun for what we needed. There were a few times where we needed the Barrett, the Fitt de Cal, you know, to punch through things, but the Shy Tech wasn't quite enough ass to really punch through things, and it didn't, you know, know, the Raffis ammo that we had for the Barron. But primarily we were carrying, you know, 762 gas guns. Yep. The Mark 11th.

And we had some M40 bolt guns. We kind of had. I took about seven, I think it was seven snipers with me and a J-TAC. And then later we brought in some more guys. But for the first couple of days, it was, like I said, just shooting nearly as fast as you could, you could reload. After that,

you know, they started pulling out some pretty talented snipers. So we, you know, wound up with, you know, a couple of occasions,

you know, really, uh, calling, you know, thinking back to the things I'd read about Leningrad and, you know,

the sniper battles in World War II. And there was a lot of, you know, little, you know, putting our hats up on sticks and, you know, trying to get a hold of periscopes to use.

So a lot of things. that are in use now. Every sniper runs around with a periscope. Like that was not something in the arsenal, you know, back in 04. What were about the average engagement distances? A lot of them were 100 and in. I don't think anything much more than 300. So you were right on top of them.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so you had to start, like, using a lot of deception techniques as they got wise to you guys being out there. yeah we would move every um you know move every night move to another building and uh yeah try to you know had the army do you know things to you know kind of make it seem like we were you know somewhere else uh there's whatever we could think of to to kind of keep them keep them on their toes, but we'd worked our way up and kind of started, you know, with all the other sniper teams, moved in to where we were, you know, looking into the mosque compound. And it was

at that point that, and I think somebody, I'm not, you know, I don't quote me on it, but I got a report that, that total, the snipers, we had been responsible for 300, killing 300, all of the soft snipers and like 30 or 40 of their snipers. So it's pretty pretty... Turning the handle on the meat grinder. Or at least, you know, guys. And some of them, like I said, some of them were pretty talented. There was a guy that, you know, every time we'd poke our head up, you know, a shot,

not terribly accurate, but, you know, a shot would come close. so we got down and we're finally able to pinpoint him to a building and what we discovered he was doing was which was a World War II tactic was he had chipped out bricks in a couple of different rooms and he would pull the brick out take a shot put the brick back in moved to another room and so we brought in that's the time when the two sassers came in handy so we brought in two 50 cows and just dropped the wall on him. Oh, shit.

That's awesome. So after this one, you guys get returned back to your home station and then really redeployed back home. Yeah, so we get back in this late

2004, I think it was still 2004. And then we're kind of twiddling our thumbs. It was sort of like good job, that one, you guys are awesome. Awesome. Also, we don't need you anymore. We'll call you. Well, we didn't know. We didn't know what was coming. So there was a new rumor almost every day.

So we get back and we just, we assume that we're probably going to deploy again. So we start training. And the smart money this time was on, you know, hey, they sent us to Iraq. This time they'll send us to Afghanistan. So we start getting back into reconnaissance training, you know, spending a lot of time up in Bridgeport, California in the mountains, and trying to, you know, what we saw is the issue with reconnaissance missions in Afghanistan at that time, especially, were that, you know, you can't stay out more than like 24 hours without compromise. Right. Right. It's just, you know, you couldn't do it. So, you know, so we'd come up with the idea of being able to go out, do your own reconnaissance, and then, you know, be light enough, but, you know, have enough that you could go do a direct action mission, you know,

from your observation post, you know, and just cut down that time. So, you know, we started really, and it was really a really cool time experimenting. We've got a lot of time up the mountains just seeing like how light we could go, how much ammo can you carry different ways of cash in ammo and things how you know experimenting with like we're eating sticks of butter and just high calorie food to keep you going it's just really like nothing was off the table so it was just kind of this cool think tank of you know hey let's find ways to get lighter and lighter and be able to sustain ourselves for for a long period of time so while this is going on kind of unbeknownst to us

us. There had been a couple of organizations that had done the Center for Naval Analysis had done one. Somebody else had done an evaluation of our deployment. And it was all glowing. Hey, that one did great, you know. And so armed with that, the commandant of the Marine Corps and the commander of Socom go into Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, and say, hey, yeah, great.

Everybody had a great, great, great experiment. but we don't want to continue it. And, you know, Rumsfeld was, you know, to his credit, was, he's like, well, you know, you're going to do this thing. I keep telling you. And they're like, no, no, we're good. We tried it. You know, it didn't like it.

And so he eventually said, hey, you're going to, you know, instead of kind of letting you grow this small unit into a little bit bigger unit, you're going to form a two-star level component to so calm. So instead of being 100 dudes, it's going to be a couple thousand dudes that the brink board would have to take out a high. So it took about a year for that word to finally get down to us. So in the interim, like I said, we're just experimenting with stuff, training. You know, some of our guys were at retirement age and said, screw it, I'm out. You know, we had some guys that had moved on to other units.

And so there was a little bit of attrition, but for the most part, you know, we were just kind of sitting there with our fingers crossed hoping that we're going to get called to go out again. And that when it became clear that that wasn't going to happen, they told us that we were going to be disbanded about the same time that Marsoc was activated. And so I started, you know, looking for a way to end Marsoc was going to be primarily headquartered on the East Coast. You know, I had spent, you know, debt one, and most of my life had been out in California. Tell us about that first interaction with Marsock, where you show up and they throw the newspaper on the desk that says disgruntled debt one. Yeah. That was, yeah, it was, I had not, there's a different mentality on the East Coast, you know, for FreeCon than there was on the West Coast. You know, we kind of, well, there's some guys that would cross over, you know,

a lot of us kind of stayed in our lane. And so you might go to school with an East Coast guy, but we just didn't mesh a whole lot. And that one had been mostly West Coast guys just by virtue of that's where the unit was, although we did have a few guys from the East Coast. But, yeah, so I check in, you know, everybody I meet is great. You know, they're heavy hitters. I'm, you know, excited to be working with them. And then this captain comes and it's like, hey, I need you to get in the car.

Drives me to the base headquarters. And Marsok was using some office base in there because we didn't have any of our own. And I get drug in to what was, I think, the deputy commander of Marsok's office. And, yeah, there's this Marine Corps newspaper that says, you know, the article is disgruntled debt one. And it, you know, somebody or more than one person that talked to them and kind of said, hey, this is, you know, this is bullshit. You know, we, we did a great job. And then we kind of get, you know, unceremoniously disbanded.

And I hadn't personally felt that way. You know, I, you know, we were going from a hundred dudes to a couple thousand dudes. I saw that as a win, right? And that was based on all the work that we did. but I was not terribly thrilled when when I get drug you know from

my my range you know when we're out we're out on the range out to this colonel's office so that he can like yell at me you know and slap this this paper down so he was like you know are you disgruntled and I'm like I wasn't

two minutes ago you know when I walked in here but it's it's changing pretty fucking quickly And the conversation deteriorated thereafter. I wound up, you know, wound up becoming good friends with a guy. And he's a good guy. I don't know. He felt he needed to put his foot down or make a statement, I guess.

But, yeah, yeah, the early days, there were a lot of, I mean, definitely, you know, starting a new organization of any sort, but especially, you know, starting a special operations organization within the Marine Corps was, was challenging, you know, because there were still, there were a lot of Marines that were opposed to it, and a lot of very senior Marines that were opposed to the whole idea that didn't think it would last, and that, you know, now we just, just celebrated our 17th anniversary at Marsok, so I think we're doing okay. And so you have this very interesting experience of, you know, force, that one, helping to stand up Marsok the last couple of years of your career.

and now continuing to this day to work as a civilian employee there, helping the train the next generation of Raiders. I would really love to hear any insights you have about that experience. From standing up Marsoc from almost nothing to today, any insights about that progression and evolution of a unit and what it takes to stand up a unit and create a capability. Absolutely. Yeah, I was primarily responsible for standing up to school.

So when I came out from Debt One to here, it was initially to run the CQV training. I got here and I had been promoted to Master Sergeant, and so I quickly kind of got rolled into the position that's at the time. It was called chief instructor. So I was kind of in charge of all of the courses that we ran. which was great because, you know, I had absolutely, you know, we'd kind of innovated some, some things with CQB. We brought in people to help us innovate. So we had a lot of ideas about, you know, ways to do things better than we had been doing them. I brought, or I didn't bring him with me, another one of the Marines who had been in my team and had been my sniper partner and my team came with me as well.

and was assigned to the school. So, you know, between the two of us, we, we had like a big checklist. Like, hey, you know, here's all of the shit that we're going to, you know, stop doing. Here are the things that we're going to start doing. And it was a little bit of a rocky road. But, I mean, we were really spilling from a cadre of probably, you know, 20 instructors, if we were lucky to, you know, today where I have 250. So it's grown exponentially and obviously we've added, you know, in the, in the, when we started, we taught CQB and sniping and urban reconnaissance.

Yeah, that's, that's grown now to tell language courses and Intel courses and, you know, kind of what have you. Along with our assessment and selection program and our operator, the individual training course that trained traders. So I think to answer your question, it was, you know, the opportunity on a small scale to kind of start up debt one, you know, those lessons definitely paid benefit, you know, when it came time to start up something on a bigger scale. But it's a whole different piece, like I said, when you're trying to develop the, you know, a training program that's going to take, take Marines from any military occupational specialty and tournament rangers. and it was a unique opportunity.

And I got to travel down to Q-Course and out to buds and talk with guys out there and see the way other people are doing it. So it was a really cool time. How do you see and have you seen over the years? I know the Marine Corps has this storied history being very regimented and rigid, but also throughout Marine Corps history, there is a lot of irregular warfare there. I'm curious to ask you, you know, how you saw these Marines kind of slotting into a special operations role and sort of grow into a more unconventional role.

Yeah, it's the Marine Corps is an odd beast. In a book, I call it a cult, but a good cult. but a good cult but it's you know like said the the Marine Corps

considers itself you know a special operations organization but you know hates it if someone else in the Marine Corps

is considered more special but the Marine Corps is a long history of you know irregular warfare like you said

I mean we wrote those the small wars manual the you know we stood up the World War II Raiders, the first you know,

the first special operations unit in U.S. history were heavily involved in the OSS. You know, when that was stood up and there were, you know, the OSS was almost the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps was also almost given that mission.

And they fought it off. And that's how they kind of got saddled with forming the Raiders. It's a fascinating history. If you read the president Roosevelt wanted to to bring

Bill Donovan into the Marine Corps and make him a general and there's I have copies of these letters typed up by generals in the Marine Corps like pitching and moaning to each other about it that I was able to find

in an archive but so yeah the Marine Corps during the banana wars and you know in and around World War I they were you know Chesty Puller was the military governor of Nicaragua you know so we had

guys who were you know operating at incredibly high levels you know thinking way outside the box you know doing things that seemed to kind of be unmarine-like in some ways but you know Vietnam the you know

force recon guys were, you know, on par with anybody, you know, it was working. So the, it's been, it's been odd. I mean, early, in the early days, we were getting a lot of, especially infantry officers that would try out and just could not wrap their head around the idea that, that I'm a great infantry officer, but I'm not making it here, right, because I'm not, able to think, you know, differently, right? Not able to look at situations, you know,

through other lenses, basically. What about the younger enlisted guys? Do you think they had an easier time, like, adapting because they were more malleable? Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, especially, you know, people always say the younger generations, this or that, you know, the guys,

guys that we have coming in are, you know, a hell of less smarter than I am, you know, fit, really fit and definitely able, you know, obviously much more computer savvy, but able to think, you know, laterally, you know, outside the box, whatever you want to call it, you know, critically and creatively more, more than kind of was the case, you know, 10 years ago. I think the one thing that they don't, and it's not their fault, it's just kind of a product of the world that we live in is just sheer mental toughness. You know, like they, in most cases, they haven't had situations where they were training, you know, in their Marine Corps careers that was quite as austere as, you know, was common, you know, 20 years ago. before the war. And how do you see, back to the sort of issue of the evolution of Marsok, like capabilities-wise,

how have you seen it go from, you know, working out of a couple of Connix containers to today it's an institution, right? Yeah, yeah, I think, I mean, we've had our own, you know, commanded Sotafs. We've had, you know, T-Soc commanders. we've pretty much, I think we're pretty well inculcated, you know, across the board within Socom. And there was, you know, early on there was definitely some pushback in the early days. And most of it came from the Army. The seals were always, I think they realized pretty quickly that, hey, if we can, you know, get these guys on our side, you know, we're persistent.

Mr. Naval Service guys, we can at least have a little more ass to fight back because the joke goes that Socom has spelled A-R-M-Y. And I think the Army makes up like 60-some percent. Yeah, yeah. Or three, three percent. And, you know, before we move on to some questions that a viewers have for you, last one for me at least. Oh my God, it just escaped my mind.

I wanted to ask you, oh, I wanted to ask you about roles and capabilities. Like, I know there's maybe some OPSEC issues, but maybe at a more general level. How do you see MARSAC like slotting into the larger special operations community over? I know they're already there, but also in the next like 10 years. I mean, what like unique role do you see them filling that maybe the other units aren't? Good question. that's a part of a really long and ongoing process within Marsok to you know kind of figure out what is the way for both you know making sure that we kind of tie into the Marine Corps force design that the other way they're looking at the at the future I think there's absolutely a it's not a secret that we're shifting focus back into our kind of background in reconnaissance,

littorals, you know, in the waters up to the, you know, onto the beach and inland. So I think, yeah, more focus on that reconnaissance, you know, technology is growing by leaps and bounds. So, you know, watching what's going on in Ukraine, you know, there's obviously a lot of lessons learned there that we're taking, you know, to heart. I would, before we get your questions, I wanted to ask because the Marine Corps got rid of their scout sniper platoons, which almost feels blasphemous, right? Because, I mean, the Marine Corps, one of the things they were known for was their scout snipers. Now we have Marsock, which fills this very vital role.

but you still have Battalion Recon, I think, right? And still have Force Recon. And Force Recon hasn't, to my knowledge, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but they haven't been brought into the Socom umbrella. So where does that leave these sort of in-between units? And what do you think of the stapletunes going away? So, yeah, yesterday I was trying to rep the Scouts Knife Association

by wearing my shirt today. Yeah, I had the operatives. opportunity to go to the final Ska Sniper graduation last year and it was a sad sad day but so there are still we have a sniper course the

the Marsok advanced sniper course and recon has sniper course the called the recon sniper course so there's still snipers in the Marine Corps but in reconnaissance and in Marsok the state

platoons or the sniper platoons within the infantry battalions are being converted into scout platoons. So they, it's, I don't fully understand it. They're not, there's not a sniper school and they're not going to train snipers, but they

still have scoped weapons. And they still have a, you know, a really similar role. They're beefing them up. So they're growing a little bit. I think that the sniper school has been, you know, and it's the

same reason. The Marine Corps just banned it post World War I, post World War II, post, they didn't even have, really have a much of the way of snipers in Korea and then post-Vietnam again. So I think, you know, I think they'll make their way back and then hopefully they will. But at present, you know, recon battalion is still filling, you know, the same role that they always have. Force recon has, is smaller than it was. It used to be. a company of anywhere from five to eight platoons. And now it's a much smaller footprint. But they still will continue to be heavily involved in the Force Design, 2030, and

heavily involved in providing commanders, you know, serving commanders' eyes and ears. So we got a bunch of Patreon questions for you. And for people who are watching, there's a link down in the description if you want to subscribe to our Patreon and ask our guests' questions. You also get access to all these episodes ad-free. Brian asks, when standing up a force during active conflict, how did you balance existing needs versus future requirements? Ooh, that's a good question. I think we were only able to see so far in front of us for future requirements with debt one. Anyway, I mean, we were, we knew that we were going to have a life cycle and then we were going to be over.

I think, you know, possibly talking to it from the perspective of Marsoc is a little more apropos. But there, you know, I think we didn't do a great job of that, of really thinking towards future requirements just because we really didn't. A lot of people didn't know how long we were going to exist. You know, there was always kind of the threat that, you know, we cost too much money and, you know, Socom doesn't want us, and the Marine Corps is going to get rid of us. So a lot of, you know, when you're being built in the middle of a fight, you know, you've got to focus on what you need for that fight. I think as we've, you know, things, you know, the situation changed both in Iraq, Afghanistan, San Syria everywhere.

We started, you know, adjusting with that. But over the last 10 years, I think we've had enough time to sit back a little bit and start looking at, hey, how do we make sure that we're building the unit, the organization, you know, for the missions of the future. Norm has a great question that reminds me of a funny story in your book. He says, does meditation really work or is it all in my mind? I don't know. I think it does.

The story, though, is, it is pretty funny. I've always been a, I mean, I'll try anything, right? And I've always kind of felt that there's got to be, you know, more to it than just the ability to shoot, move, and communicate. You know, from that gunfight in Afghanistan, I realize that, you know, there's, you know, there's, you know, I need to get a lot smarter, right, about, you know, the psychological effects and the physiological, you know, impacts of a gunfight. But, you know, look for ways, you know, I always wanted to look for ways to make myself and my guys more capable. So, you know, for a while, I was really hell-bent on speed reading software because I thought that would help, you know, just speed up our ability to see, speed up your ability to identify a target and shoot. you know we any if there's something kind of new you know I was going through I was in a phase where I would try anything

and you know meditation became became one of those so I started getting into it and and I wish I was into it a little bit more but you know I still believe in it but I right the first group of guys who were going to be Marsox instructors I brought him into a room and I brought this lady really nice lady who had volunteered meditation instructor, you know, her time to come and teach. So she talked for a little while and all the instructors are kind of sitting there and nod in their heads. And then she was like, hey, so we're going to all sit down and do like 20 minutes of meditation, close your eyes. And so I'm sitting there in the front, you know, with my eyes closed. And like I hear the door. And then I hear the door again. And I'm like, all right, you know, focus on my breathing or whatever. And, uh, but

time the 20 minutes is up. I open my eyes and I'm the up me and her. I'm the only ones there. Everybody else had left. Yeah, you win some, you lose some. Yeah. Jefferson asks, did you serve with now Lieutenant General Donovan? If so, what was he like back then and in such a new unit? So yeah, oh, Frank Donovan. I served with him first at First Force. We're not in the same platoon together, but he was a platoon commander there. And then with Dead 1, he arrived after our deployment. So he, when we thought that we were going to, to recock and deploy again, he got there.

And he was the one who came up with this idea of, of patrolling a deep reconnaissance mission into an assault. He was, his term for his pursuit operations. So, and then, yeah, he's done pretty well for himself. I just had the opportunity to see him and have dinner with him a couple of. of months ago. He was incredibly driven as a young captain and major.

I remember he used to, at first force, he used to set up these orientering days where it was usually there'd be a helicopter you'd, you know, helicast in, swim into the beach and then you and your teammate would, you know, have to, you know,

move around and navigate, you know, like a 20, 30 mile movement over the course of a day, find points. At each point, there would also be, like, some questions you had to answer, or like a Kim's game thing that you had to remember. And, you know, if you won, you got bragging rights. But he's still pretty damn fit last I saw him. And, you know, he was always an excellent reconnaissance Marine

and a good leader, and somebody that you knew was going places. That's all we got for Patreon. Okay. So real quick, I saw a couple of people. Daniel Kirby says, hey, Ranger D. My cousin Grasshopper says, what's up? Enjoyed your book. Excellent. And then Andy also said hello.

Andy Milburn. Oh, howdy, Andy? Yeah, thanks Andy for chiming in. Yeah. Joe, thank you very much. Do you foresee Marsock getting their own Tier 1 unit? What is holding back so calm from forming a CAG-Seal-T? Team 6 type Marine unit.

Spicy. Yeah. Yeah. That's been, I've heard talk about it. You know, and that talk is extended back a couple of years. I don't know if it'll happen. I mean, I know there are a lot of Marines that would be thrilled if it did. That's, I would not think it's something that's going to happen too terribly soon.

I mean, we're small, right? you know, we're, like I said, we're 3% of so-coms manpower. Although, according to last check, I think we do 10% of the missions. So, you know, it's the thing that Marines kind of have always done punch above our weight class. But, yeah, I don't, I wouldn't hold your breath too long for that one. But I'd love to see it. Yeah. And also, Joe, thank you very much.

where do you see the Raiders going in the future ideally ideally would you want to see the program unit oh ideally where would you want to see the program unit going why and what changes would you like to see good question the one thing I should have said earlier is that obviously in all of anything I'm saying in my opinion right and it doesn't represent Mars Ox or so comes I am a big believer in, and I always have been, in us getting back to the roots of reconnaissance and really becoming, you know, being the best at that.

And I think the definition of reconnaissance has expanded hugely over the past decade with the avenues that have been. opened up through technology. So I think that's the direction. If I were, you know, the commanding general for a day, that's the direction I would like to see. And the last question is the spiciest. High ready, high ready or low ready for standard position moving through a complex? Low, always low.

The right answer. The right answer. So tough, rugged, bad. Astards is the book. I hope you guys will go and check it out. I finished reading it last night. There's a link down in the description. It's a terrific piece of history and a really well-written, insightful memoir. I hope you guys will go check it out. John, is there anything else you want to tell people or anything you want to plug? You want to tell folks where they can find out more about the Scout Sniper Association? Definitely what we're pushing right now is actually the Scout Sniper Heritage

organization, which I think it's just Scouts Sniper Heritage. heritage.org. One of the projects that we're working on is trying to get a scout sniper memorial built at the Marine Corps Museum in Guantico, Virginia. So scoutsniperheritage dot org, you can check that out. You can buy a brick to commemorate a sniper that you knew and make donations. I say my website is jadaily.com and there there's info about the book, obviously, but I also write a couple of weekly e-mails. hills that go out. One's just called Walking Point. It's kind of translates some military things into ways to make yourself better. And the other is called Ruck the Fuck Up. And it's strangely enough

about rucking mostly. Yeah, because you've become a ultramarathon runner in your quote-unquote retirement. I have. I've kind of stopped becoming an ultramarathon runner recently. But yeah, who knows? up again. And real quick, I want to tell people out there, please go and check out my book, We Defy the Lost Chapters of Special Forces History. It's up for pre-order now, be released on December 9th. And next, actually this Friday, this coming Friday, Joe Musia is going to be on the show. He is also a former Marine and the author of Cry Havoc, which is about the Rangers that jumped into Grenada in 1983. I'm super excited to talk to him about that. Kind of an untold story. Another, untold chapter of special ops history. John, thank you for joining us tonight, man, really.

Man, thanks for having me. I had a blast. Fantastic. All right, we'll see all you guys on Friday. Take care out there.