The Team House - The Real Marine Behind Generation Kill | Brad Colbert

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

Brad Colbert, retired Marine Force Recon veteran and one of the real Marines behind Generation Kill, joins us to talk about his path into the Corps, recon selection, 9/11 while forward deployed, Camp Rhino, and the early days of the war in Afghanistan.We also get into the 2003 invasion of Iraq, how recon Marines were used as shock troops, his Royal Marines exchange, HBO’s Generation Kill, and the lessons he carried into life after the military.Find Brad here:⬇️https://bradcolbert.us/Today's Sponsors:GhostBed ⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 10% off! Blue Chew ⬇️https://bluechew.com/Get 1 month free when you buy 2 of BlueChew Gold with code "HOUSECALL"Quince⬇️go to: https://www.quince.com/housefor free shipping and 365 day returns For ad free video and audio and access to live streams...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________GRAB JACK'S NEW BOOK "THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN" ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803651/the-most-dangerous-man-by-jack-murphy/paperback/Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featuredJack Murphy's book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial 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=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 — Start03:04 — Carry On Podcast and Generation Kill Connections04:08 — Rough Childhood and the Road to the Marines11:06 — Recon Selection and the Recon vs. Force Recon Divide15:52 — Okinawa, MEUs, and a Rare Marine Port Call in China22:37 — 9/11 While Forward Deployed25:25 — Camp Rhino and the Longest Amphibious Assault32:31 — First Real Recon Missions in Afghanistan40:34 — Afghanistan Lessons and the Ramp-Up to Iraq50:00 — Iraq Mission Changes: Recon Marines as Shock Troops55:54 — Crossing the Berm on Iraq D-Day59:07 — Evan Wright, the Embedded Reporter, and Generation Kill01:21:16 — The Royal Marines Exchange01:29:04 — Fallujah 2007 and “Garrison Combat”01:48:39 — HBO’s Generation Kill and the Legacy of the Story01:58:37 — Leaving the Corps for the Intelligence Community02:15:05 — Closing Thoughts: Standing on the Shoulders of GiantsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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Hey, everyone, welcome to the team house. I'm Jack Murphy here with our guest in studio today, Brad Colbert. Brad is a retired Marine, served in Force Recon. You did a stint with the Royal Marines. Did. And numerous other things we'll talk about. Your platoon, of course, was the inspiration for the book and subsequent television show, Generation Kill. And you have a podcast called The Carry On Podcast.

I do, yeah. Well, just right off the bat, you want to tell people what that podcast is, where they can find it. Yeah, Carry On Podcast is available either video through YouTube or whatever platform they use to consume audio podcasts, Spotify or. Apple or IHeart. And we do a couple of things in the show. We talk to guests, authors, policymakers discussing current events, treatments for veterans' health. We talk about some fun equipment things. And we also look for reconnections with Generation Killed cast members to sort of give people where they now look. And maybe some stories that weren't originally portrayed in the book or the TV series.

So you try to interview the Marines you served with in the platoon, and do you try to interview the actors also that portrayed them? We haven't actually had any of the actors yet, but I certainly wouldn't put it past them. I do keep in somewhat contact with the individual that portrayed me, Alex Garzgard. So maybe I can ask him if he wants to come on the show. All right, cool. We'll be pretty cool. We'll get deeper into all that in a bit. But if we're to start at the top, I always ask people about their origin story.

You can tell us a little bit about how you grew up. What was that path that took you towards military service? Well, I had a pretty rough childhood. Not because of my parents. I was a pretty shitty kid. And I think my parents would probably agree with that if I was to ask them. They may couch it a little differently. But I was a difficult child.

I was fiercely independent. I was probably smarter than my own good for my own good. And I got in trouble a lot. In fact, I was expelled. from every school that I ever went to. I was expelled from elementary school, which is pretty hard to do, by the way. Junior high, I was expelled from high school. I ended up finishing school at a military academy that was in Missouri. All that to say that I was very rebellious, and I did not handle groups well, and I wanted to give myself a challenge. I wanted to find a place

where I could fit in. I wanted to, I originally wanted to be, and I've told the story, story before, but I wanted to be an astronaut. And in order to be an astronaut, and I'll short-circuit the story. Most astronauts were pilots. Pilots come from the military. Okay, so I have to be an aviator. Well, what do I want to fly? I want to fly F-18. So that's Navy or Marine Corps, the Navy has shitty uniforms. Sorry, guys. Marines. Like, that's it. And this is, you know, 10, 11 years old. That's my path. And I just didn't, I didn't have the personal discipline to stay in college. tried it for a little while after high school and just said, F it, I'm just going to enlist. So I was going to say this isn't one of those scenarios where like the parents brought the

Marine Corps recruiter to the home was like sign. No, in fact, it was the other way around. And again, like, I had a rough go of it. You know, I got in trouble with the law. I was on unofficial probation. So I got in trouble and I had to sort of like keep my nose clean for a little. while. So I went to the recruiter and the recruiter says, I can't take you. You've got this thing. And I'm like, okay, cool. Well, what do we have to do to get this thing? You have to go in front of a

judge. And so I did. And I got it cleared up. But I was a recruiter's wet dream because I marched right in and said, I want to be, you know, 0311 infantry. That's one of those things with the recruits like, I don't know. I'll try to pull a few strings. We'll see what we can do. You know, meanwhile, it's like, that's the hardest thing they have to get people to do. I did really well. the ASVab and he's like there's a lot of other jobs. So I did. I enlisted. I wanted to be a recon marine. I knew it. If I wasn't going to fly, that was the only other option. It is to this day, I think one of the better decisions I've ever made in my life. And it has served me well, not just in character development, in personal growth and interpersonal, but, you know, I think it's good

for the soul. People who have done what we've done and worn the uniform, service, the sacrifice that comes with it, there is nothing else that you get anywhere in our life, sure, from that experience. And I mean, it was, it was beautiful for me. And I did it for a long time and it was, it was amazing. So what year did you enlist? I enlisted in 95. Okay. October of 95. And I left in October of 16. Yeah. So 1990s, Marine Corps. Yeah. What was that like?

You know, that was still where a lot of us expected it to be like full metal jacket. Mm-hmm. And, you know, and that is not what it was like at all. Or platoon or a lot of the movies that Hollywood dramatize as Marine Corps boot camp. I had come from doing several years at military school. And that was hard. Believe me. You know, kids can be very cruel to one.

another and when you give them implied authority over each other you talk about hazing the marine corps was was a walk in the park like i i was hung upside down by my ankles the very first day i was at military school when i was 15 years old like boot camp was you want me to stand in these yellow footprints and you're going to scream at me for a little while it so it was fine and i mean i found it i found it actually to be easy and i was also older i was 21 when i enlisted. The average age, you know, 17 and a half, 18 years old. So I had life experience. I had a little maturity. I had some experiences that a lot of the other recruits didn't. And I found it really fairly easy to be to be perfectly honest. I think Marine Corps boot camp out of all of the services

is still the most challenging. It is the longest. It has the greatest amount of attrition. Yeah. And I left knowing that this is what I wanted to do. I had no regrets. A lot of people may leave their initial entry training and say, ah, this was a mistake. No, I didn't have that. So it's good. And you shot iron sights. Yes, we did. Yes, we did. In fact, really the Marine Corps, I want to say, recently, within the last couple of years, transitioned away from the iron sites to using an optic. But all the way back from the 60s, Marine Corps shot the M-16 with iron sights. at basic training and then every year to requal.

I always bring that up. I can get Marines really wound up about the iron sights. That was pretty good. But I mean, to speak to the Marine Corps, I mean, jokes aside, they do train, what do you shoot out the 500 yards in Basic? In boot camp. And that's really good. It is.

Yeah. So it's different positions. You know, you start from 100 and then 200 and 300 and each yard line is a different body position. So, you know, at the shorter distances, you're standing, and then you're doing kneeling and then prone at 500. But make no mistake, shooting a high score on iron sights in the prone, it's still, it's not easy. Yeah, at 500, you're struggling to see the target. You are struggling to see the target, yeah.

But, I mean, shooting iron sights, again, jokes aside, like, it is really good to learn all the fundamentals like that. And the Marine Corps is huge into that. that adage of every Marine is a rifleman or rifle person, whatever the adage is today. I mean, it holds true. And I think that is something that some of the other services are struggling with when it comes to identity. You know, every Marine is a rifleman. So what about the Air Force? What do you say?

Is every person an airman? They're not. They're not. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So the Marine Corps, I think, nailed it pretty early and has kept consistent all this time. Yeah.

So after you graduate from boot camp, what unit do you get assigned to? So after boot camp, I went to infantry school because I did enlist as an 0-3-11. At that time, the reconnaissance community was what we would call a secondary M-OS. Right. You couldn't get into recon at the point of enlistment. There was a pathway. So you had to be in the combat arms, preferably 0-3-11. And then you had to try out and go to selection and pass selection, which I did.

I did that at the school of infantry, which was a... another three months of training at Camp Pendleton. And then from there, my first unit was a third reconnaissance company in Okinawa, Japan. Oh, cool. I didn't realize that back then you could go kind of like straight into the recon community. You could provided that you passed assessment and selection. Yep. Out there at Paris Island.

Well, this would have been Camp Pendleton, but they had it both. Gotcha, got you. Yeah. They had screening teams that would go around and screen people that try to get them as early as possible before the unit scoops them up because once they get embedded into an infantry unit, those units are very reluctant. Sure. You want to take our best, our highest PTs, our smartest people.

There was a GT requirement. So there's a general technical score that the ASVAB will kick out. So when you go to the recruiting office, you have to take a test and it assesses you on all these different things. Part of that test is a general technical score which rates your aptitude for. for, you know, cognition and a whole bunch of other factors. It's a number. Recon needs that number to be, you know, 1.15 or above,

and you need to have a high PFT, your physical fitness test. So if you go to an infantry unit, they're going to probably hide you. Like, no, you're not leaving. So they go to the school of infantry where you're not yet assigned to a unit and they screen you there. So you get to the recon community. Dean. Do you want to talk a little bit about what the difference was at that time between recon and force? Yeah, it was really, there was a huge cultural difference and one that was rigid. It's a lot of people at that time would say, you know, the reconnaissance community is the JV team and the force reconnaissance community is the varsity team.

And I would say that's really childish to categorize it like that. Guys, we both go through the same schools. It really comes down to mission sets. The force reconnaissance unit typically operates outside of the artillery fan. So we're talking, you know, close air support range. They support a MEP, which is a higher echelon of table of organization. The reconnaissance community works within the artillery fan, so up to 30 kilometers in most cases, and works for the division. I mean, doctrinally, that's your difference.

Now, culturally, night and day. They didn't like us. We didn't like them. We wanted to go over to Force Recon. Force Recon felt that they were, you know, we're up here. You figure it out. And there was another vetting process. You know, you have to screen again.

They usually took you when you were a little senior. You know, now you're an E5, maybe an E4. and they wanted you to have a little experience under your belt. And looking back, I understand the need for that type of progression. But there was a huge difference in culture. Now it's a little more homogenous. Both of those units are now organized pretty much under the same house because of Mar-Sox creation.

But in the 90s, it was a different Marine Corps. They also had better equipment in many cases because they had access to a little bit more money. And we were still coming off of the heels of not really understanding what would be over the horizon. Right. Right. Like, you know, we always trained for the last war. So we still did a lot of jungle tactics.

Patrol-based activities. Yeah. We did a lot of things that we did in Southeast Asia that we would not be doing in OIF, OEF. But the Forest Reconnaissance community still had, you know, the championship. or worth dune buggies. They had a lot of the equipment that we don't use anymore. And a mission set to go along

with it. Not that it's still not pertinent, but it's not as pertinent. Especially modern warfare with drones. So what did they have you doing in recon at that time? Did you end up going to Thailand anything cool like that? Yep. Did a lot of

Cobra Golds, did some marine expeditionary units. That's when you go on ship. A lot of people don't realize that the Marine Corps has an infantry battalion up to three at any given time patrolling the waters of the ocean available for immediate dispersion anywhere that the president deems that are needed and Okinawa has a mew and I did that twice I did a special purpose magtaf a marine airground task force to China so we went into China for about a week and a half into the port of Quingdao and this was the first time that Marines had been to China

since World War II. I was going to say the boxer rebellion. Absolutely. Yep. The China Marines were the last Marines to be there. And it was surreal. We could, we went on Liberty. We worked. It was a working port call, but we were allowed to leave the ship in groups, and we went out into the city. And I remember I'm wearing my, well, we would call them Charlie's, your Class C uniform. So khaki, long-sleeved shirt. No, I tell a lie. sorry, short-sleeved shirts. No tie, green trousers, piss cutter hat.

Oh, I couldn't say that. It doesn't matter. We're walking around. And the Chinese had not, in many cases, seen Americans before. They certainly hadn't seen Marines. And I'm walking, and people would come up to me, and they would stroke my arm because of the body hair.

Because they're just not used to seeing. They were fascinated. Strangers were calling us into their homes. They just wanted to talk. They wanted to practice their English. They wanted to offer us food. And so we wanted to go on liberty, but you couldn't because you're just getting mobbed. Right, right.

But it was amazing. It was fascinating. And this was 97. And I remember we pulled into the port, and I'm looking around at their ships, and their subs are just rusted at the water lines. Their surface fleet was not in great shape. I was young, but I was pretty... into military hardware, tables of organization.

So I'm looking around and I'm like, these guys are not in great shape. Now, fast forward, they are arguably ahead of us in many of those same categories. So they have incredible growth in their military industrial complex. But back then, we toured their ships. We did some exchange.

And they were not a concern. I was going to, yeah, I was going to say, I mean, first off, that's something that would never happen today. There's no way that have Marines going on Liberty and China. But then, I mean, just what, a couple of years after this, we had that surveillance bird go down with Hanan Island, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm pretty sure that's the name of it. It was a bit of an embarrassment. We did get it cleared up diplomatically. But, you know, there was also, there were some other instances as well. There were some missile tests that they had done against Taiwan that covered the strait. We did some GPS jamming that caused those missiles to splash into the water. They were horribly angry about that. They knew that it was us.

But neither side publicly admitted it because they didn't want to save. They didn't want egg on their face. So there were a couple of things. Yeah, you're right. It wouldn't get done today. But what an amazing experience for me. Out of the uniform, we got to go see the Great Wall of China, got to go to the National art gallery tianaman square the forbidden city it was that's so awesome yeah i mean like that's one of the

great things about the military is those those those those intangibles those travel opportunities you can't get that anywhere else yeah yeah it's kind of sad that something like that wouldn't happen today it is it is because i i get that there are adversary but there's a lot of opportunity there as well yeah i mean it's it's a culture that's been more or less intact for like a thousand years Right. I wouldn't, unfortunately, I wouldn't go as a private citizen. I'm afraid of, you know, it's like going to Russia. Yeah. What's going to happen to me? Not going to do that. Not going to do that at all. I'm fascinated by the history and the culture. I think it's super cool. It is. It's incredible. I mean, they do have, and it's, there's very similar parallels with Japan as well.

It's a very rich culture with a long history. And, you know, China for many centuries was the cultural epicenter of the world. They created a lot of, and as did those in the Middle East, you know. And then somewhere along the way, things just, oh, we're going to do communism. Oh, okay. Cool. Cool. So you're in recon.

When did kind of you get the opportunity to start thinking and taking action about going to force? It was actually kind of an accident, really. And I didn't spend, to be perfectly honest with you, I really didn't spend that much time in the force community. I dipped my toe into it because when I left the British Royal Marine Exchange program in 2007, 06, 2007, yeah. I was assigned to First Force, but only for about six months before Marsox stood up. Ah, got you. Okay. And then I found myself back with First, First,

reconnaissance battalion, and then they stood up the force company in first reconnaissance battalion because there was Marsock. So they took what was first force. You're now Marsock, but we need a group of you to be force. That job. We don't know what we're going to call it yet, and that's what I did. So was I still force? Was I not?

I guess it's a matter of semantics. But in very short time, I found myself as a platoon. sergeant going back over to Iraq in 07. So my stint in force was fairly short just because of the circumstances, you know, three years in England with the commandos right on the heels of the invasion of Iraq. And then Marsoc changing in 06. So maybe seven months with force. Okay, okay. Maybe another three at the reconnaissance battalion in a force platoon. That was it. A lot of people put off buying a new mattress because it feels like a hassle. Too many options, too many claims, and no real way to tell what's actually going to hold up.

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everyone has there, where were you when 9-11 happened story, right? That is the, where were you when Kennedy was assassinated version of our generation? For me, I was on a marine deployment. I was on a marine expeditionary unit. So we were in the coast of, sorry, we were in Darwin, Australia, when 9-11 happened. And as one of the platoons, I'm trying to think if the seals,

I don't remember if the seals, I'm sure they were back then. Yeah, they were. So we had a force platoon, we had a reconnaissance platoon. I'm pretty confident we had a seal platoon as well. So I think those three groups, groups were pretty confident that we were going to do something. And we were right. We all did

separate things. But I don't think any of us were privy to any more intelligence than anyone else was privy to. I mean, the world was on CNN. Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty much open source. And then whatever, you know, the captain of the ship was being told and whatever the battalion commander was being told. It was surreal, though. Being forward deployed when 9-11, it happened was surreal. And what did you guys end up doing? What was the Marine Corps' response to it in those weeks and months after? Well, we immediately pulled, we sailed out of port.

It was late when it happened in Darwin. So it was probably 20, I want to say, 2,300. Liberty expired at midnight. They were dragging people back to the boat, half drunk. Nobody would say what was taking place. They're seeing some things in the news. on the bars. From what I gathered, bringing the ship's compliment back was a nightmare. I was already on the boat. The next day we left. We weighed anchor. We basically went, no one knew what

had taken place. Was this the opening shot of a war? Is this some kind of asymmetrical attack that is going to repeat itself? So we left and went into the open waters, 50, 60, 100,000. miles off the coast and just cut squares for a couple of weeks. Then we went into East Timor, did a humanitarian mission, and then it was in very short order apparent that we were going to go into Afghanistan, that they were the ones responsible. So we made an amphibious landing into, well, we hung out in Pakistan for a while at an air base, and then we did an amphibious assault into Afghanistan. And it was amphibious assault into Afghanistan.

Right. The technical amphibious assault was because we departed from ship and we landed in Afghanistan. And that by definition is amphibious. And it's the longest amphibious assault that's ever been made in the history of American. Right, right. So you had to refuel a few times in the air on the way. Yeah. Yeah.

Also one of the scariest flights I've ever had, we landed at Camp Rhino, which was a compound in the middle of the desert. It was a hunting preserve for some very rich individuals. But it had private runway, unimproved runway. It had a big hanger. It had a little mosque. It had all these ancillary buildings. It was surrounded by this wall.

And we're like, that's it. So C-130, I mean, we are packed in. No doubt you've been on a C-130 before. I don't know if you've done a mass attack. Yeah. But it's that kind of cramped. And, I mean, you've got your gear. Your pack is on your legs.

And you can't move. And we flew high threat tactics, which means you're assuming you're going to get a lot of ground fire. There's also going to be surface tear missile threat. So you've got to fly basically nap of the earth. So C-130, we did receive some ground fire. We don't know where, but the plane did get shot a little bit. But that wasn't the problem. You're going from this really high altitude, and then it goes screaming down to like a thousand feet.

And you're just sardined in. You can't move. And then the runway is made of this like moon dust. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about because you've walked that. You sink into it. It's up to your ankles. But here's a C-130, fully loaded, full bag of gas, and it's coming in on this runway, and it's not getting purchased.

And it's just sliding and yawing. And I'm like, oh, this is it. This is how it's going to end. The plane is going to clip the ground. It's going to cartwheel. And I'm wedged in between, you know, 60 other fuckers. I'm done. This is, this is it.

This is my story. It didn't turn out that way. I mean, this is basically kind of what happened to the C-130s in Iran a few months ago. They got stuck in the dust, essentially. Sunk in because of that. Whatever, it's that certain type of soil. It's unique. And then, you know, so fast forward, I had a guest on the show, Alexander Lemons, and he did some research to find that the soil in Iraq is unique from all of the soil in the world.

I know that we're talking about Afghanistan, but there's some property about this particular type of sand where it just recirculates due to the, you know, the dust storms and stuff. It does something to grind it down. But yeah, so I ran, Afghanistan, Iraq. It's all that same type of dirt. Yeah, I thought it was over. It didn't turn out that way. And so you guys kind of spearheaded into Camp Rino. We did.

Yes. There was us. And then it turned into like the who's who of special operations forces. Yeah. Because it became the beachhead for everyone. to flow in. So there was, you know, British SAS. There was Australian. There were French. There was German. Clearly the Marines, Navy Special Forces. There was, I think, for a very brief time, I want to say there was an ODA team, but it all kind of blends in at this point. We're talking

0.1. And we ran operations out of there. The infantry was dug around the perimeter. It was just weird. You know, it was weird because nobody enlists in the military under any illusion that you are not going to potentially go to war. Right. But I enlisted in 95. There was no war taking place. I mean, we had some people that were concerned, but it was like, oh, that's, you know, Nicaragua or that's, you know, Somali or that's. Right. Right. The United States getting attacked on its home turf and then retaliating was unheard of. And then finding yourself in like such a third world country. What's going on here? It was so weird and we didn't have any of the equipment to really do this type of thing. You know, you're still wearing, we had just transitioned.

We didn't have them yet. The Marine Corps had just transitioned to that new digital pattern. Yeah. We still had the old classic tricolor woodland pattern or chocolate chip. Like 91 chocolate shit, desert storm. So that's what we had. And that was our desert uniform. And we didn't have vehicles that were really tailored towards what we were doing, which was some long range desert patrol.

We didn't have the equipment for it. So we made it work. But it was very weird. I remember working with Marines in, this was a little later on. This would have been, well, 2004 Marine infantry. I mean, they had like one pair of nods per squad. They didn't have any sort of organic intelligence attached to their battalion. And there's, again, not trying to throw shade on them.

It's just they didn't have a lot. The infantry operates under very austere conditions. They always have so much so that it's really a point of pride to them at this point. Yeah, I know. Yeah, like we can do everything with nothing. And the Marine reconnaissance community had a lot more. It did. But now when you compare Marine Recon or even the Force platoon to say a Ranger Battalion or an ODA team or, you know, CAG, oh, yeah, like night and day, like don't even get it started.

But we did have more equipment. You know, we had some laser rangefinders, laser designators, everybody had NVGs. We had M4s. We had suppressors. We had a lot more hardware than your run of the mill. and we had reach back. And that was one of the things that reconnaissance is able to do. And the Marine Corps is all of the other services put an officer in charge of their smaller SF units.

Marine Corps doesn't run that way. Now, Marsok does, but there was no Marsok in 01. So this was six enlisted Marines with an E5 in charge. You will go out to 20 kilometers. and get eyes on a target, and then we want you to talk to that aircraft overhead and lays ordinance on it. Can you do that? Yes, I can do that.

The Marine Corps is the only one that does business that way. It's a tremendous responsibility. And one we took seriously. They were sending you out on those kinds of missions? Yeah. What was that like going out there? And now it's for real. Yeah, now it's for real.

And it was fun because you're finally getting to play the game you have practiced for. Right. You know, it is that pro athlete who never gets off the bench and now finally I'm off the bench. Let's see what it's about. But it's also incredibly naive because you hadn't been shot at yet. You didn't understand any of the fog of war. It was very sterile in many cases because the desert was the only opposition that we had. We did drive into a minefield at one point. That was interesting. We did call in

some ordinance on occasion. That was fun. But a lot of it was just spent doing what reconnaissance Marines do, which is quietly getting eyes on and just reporting. But it was fun. It was really a relief to be able to finally do what we had always practiced. And were you guys inserting on Humvees like walking, setting up an observation post and that sort of stuff? Humvee. We had a single Humvee for the six of us and we would drive it out there, leave it, camouflage it. make the rest of the movement on foot, establish an observation post, and then monitor.

And it was a lot of monitoring MSRs. You know, we understood Taliban at that point. We understood who our enemy was. I'm talking strategically. And the infantry battalion had a CIA case officer assigned to them when we went in. So we were getting intelligence, you know, the larger we, from a couple of different sources, military intelligence, as well as the intelligence community at large. And it was early on in 01. So the sky was just filled. I mean, they were dropping 2,000 pounders. You could see the light flashes,

right? So there was a massive air campaign, but overhead you had all kinds of enablers, all kinds. I mean, we would see the planes overhead, and then you could just, you could pick up the radio and talk to the AWACs or talk to the command and control bird. If there was fixed wing aircraft checking in, they would push it to you. That was pretty cool. Yeah, that was pretty cool. Any of those operations that kind of got a little dicey? I don't think so.

There was a firefight with the force platoon. They were out and they got into a bit of a scrape. Should they have is a matter of some disagreement? I know the guys that were there at that time. They did exchange. They did get into a firefight, but nothing, I don't remember anything that was like dicey, other than our own dangerousness. We were, I've told this story before.

We modified the Humvee with a pental mount to hold the belt fit. Mm-hmm. Okay. When I say we modified it, we took a piece of tubular steel. We welded a full. flat plate on the bottom, and then we took the caster off of a refrigerator and welded it to the top. That allowed for a swivel, which the gun sat on with a pin through it. You now have a pintel mount once it's ratchet strapped in the Hyundai.

Any machine gunter knows that you have a device under the barrel or attached to the weapon in such a way called a traverse and elevation. It's a fixed piece of metal that keeps the barrel from free flowing. We didn't have that. so there's a gun in the bed of the Humvee which could pivot to shoot the floor of the Humvee or between the driver and the A driver. And there was a moment where the gun was used and it was like, oh my God, you just riddled the hood of the Humvee. And it was between me and the A driver of the Humvee and I'm like, oh, God, this is so fucking stupid. That was the worst thing, I think, that took place. as far as the enemy contact and anything, no. There were some other very surreal moments

like getting into Kandahar Airport and we did watch one of the Marine Infantry step on a mine and get blown up. There was a couple of other instances as well. Yeah. It was a period of time, I guess a brief period of time, when the Taliban was essentially defeated.

There were maybe some holdouts we were still looking for. And there really wasn't an IED threat yet. it was nice because that changed and it changed relatively quick i mean any any adversary that is going to survive will learn asymmetric warfare against the united states i mean that is the only way that you were going to survive and it's not just unique to the american culture and ukraine's doing it against russia right now and yeah it was a matter of time but in Oh, one, there was no, there was no such animal. That was great.

Yeah. And tell us about rotating back home from that trip. That was great. It was so weird, too, because I compare my retrograde from 01 and my retrograde from, like, the Iraq War in 2003, complete night and day. I mean, when we went into Afghanistan, we went in with a full competition. that load. I mean, freaking you name it. It was like shopping cart. I want one of those.

And I'll take two Claymore's and I'll take that law rocket. I need seven fragmentation grenades. Nope, not enough ammo. More ammo. We never downloaded that stuff. Like, we got out of Afghanistan on a helicopter and then leaped frog back to Pakistan and from Pakistan back to the ship.

And we've just got our pack is filled with stuff. Like, I mean, just stuff, man. And our deuce gear filled with ammo and fragmentation grenades. And I've got two or three rounds. I mean, I just, and it just all gets dumped into a quadcon. And that quad con gets closed up, not locked, not secured, not like sign here. Just, hey, go put your gear in your team quadcon.

And then it gets back to Pendleton and it's like, you know that's all full of ammo, right? And explosives and C4 and Claymore's and rocket launchers. We should probably turn that into the. armory. Yeah, yeah, we'll do that. We were the only platoon to see any kind of combat, any kind, and make no illusions. I'm not saying that we, you know, we're six months constantly getting shot at. It was a very short period of time. And for all intents and purposes, it was pretty innocuous. But we were the first platoon to see combat. Yeah, yeah. So you walk back to a unit who is operating at a very high level and is itching to get some from 9-11 and you're treated like I don't want to say

heroes because that's not what I'm saying but you are definitely like you're the cock of the walk right now right right yeah we want to hear what happened we want to hear your lessons learned we want a PME you're going to talk to everybody what did you do how did you do it what worked what didn't work and in the process of articulating all that I started absorbing all of those lessons because I'm now, you know, it's an oral story. This is what worked. This is what works in the planning process. Yeah, that technique right there, screw that.

That doesn't work. So now I have this great database of things that we fast forward to 03 and I'm like, okay, this is what needs to change. We are going into Iraq. We can't do this, but we are going to keep this. This needs to change. And that made all the difference in the world. When you got back home, were you already hearing stuff about Iraq, a little

But yeah, yep. There was discussions about Iran while we were still in Afghanistan. There was a lot of talk on the high side about possibly remaining and just crossing the border into Iran. We're going to do the rest of the Middle East. Yeah, like, let's just get it taken care of. And I think, my God, how different would the world be today if that had actually come true? The Iranians were scared shitless after 9-11. And not because they were involved, but they were afraid we're going to catch some of the retaliation from this.

Yeah, there was a lot of blowback. And a lot of people were, like you said, running scared because we were not messing around. The United States was on a war footing. And we don't get on war footings very often. And we will get into engagements. But as a country, we were galvanized. Everybody. I mean, especially this city.

Yeah. I mean, it's something about like the American character. And I mean, when you get the entire country pissed off, like, we'll do scary stuff. We'll do stupid stuff too. I mean, and yeah, it's like I have this conversation with people sometimes about Taiwan, that people are like, well, we're not going to go and fight over like some rocks that you can barely see at low tide and the South China Sea. It's like, yeah, no, I get that. You're right.

We wouldn't. But if an American aircraft carrier gets sunk in the South China Sea, this entire country will be. go bat shit. It's 5,000 people. That's more than we lost in 9-11. Yeah. People will lose it. Yes, they will. They absolutely will. And it's a conversation that I've had on my show as well with some policy experts who are, that's their job to talk about that subject. And not to get you off track, but the most likely scenario is China blockades Taiwan and we are forced to somehow try to break that blockade. What does that look like? In a, a Berlin-style airlift.

Right. But their response, their most likely co-it is probably going to be just that. And God help them if they sink one of our aircraft carriers. Yeah. That's, that is a red line that you don't come back from. And I talk more about, you can theorize what the battle is going to look like. That is great and that's academic. I don't care about that.

I want to know what is the world going to look like after? What does this do to the globe? How does it piece out different countries? What is the alignments is going to look like? What is six months, nine months a year after Taiwan do? That's what I think is interesting. Yeah. Well, I mean, the same question for Iran right now.

Yeah. Yeah. Watching that. So talk us through a little bit the ramp up for Iraq. Yeah. We had a period of time after Afghanistan. get back, we, you know, we do all of the post-deployment things, like put all your gear away, you know, go talk to the shrink, take all your welcome back classes, and then you need to take some leave, you know, and you go on leave and you do all the things. And then it's business

as usual. We went back into a training cycle. I went to a couple of schools, but we knew that there was something coming. And it was definitely, on the front of everyone's minds. And we formed, you know, people rotate in, people rotate out. We formed a new platoon with new leadership. And we start preparing for ground operations. We start preparing for Iraq. It was known that we would be, that that was the target.

It wasn't, you matriculated down, like, this is the line of departure and this is where we're going to stay. But it was like, that's the X. that is the target. So we started practicing a lot more vehicle ops. We started modifying the vehicles. I got my vehicle prepared to do what I knew based off Iraq or Afghanistan. It would be needed to do. And we practice. I mean, that's what you do, right? You train vehicle operations and contact drills and downdriver and all of the other things. And then medicine. I mean, lots of medicine. And once we had a date for deployment, that really, I think, solidified everybody's resolve because that's like, okay, it's real. Yeah. This is not some buzzword. It's not something to rally the truth. It's like,

oh, we're going. And this is the date that we're leaving. And I think because it's not just a platoon now, and it's not just a potential, it's real and we're taking everybody. The whole battalion is going, you know, a couple of hundred very well-trained men are going into with the rest of the U.S. military into this little country, and we're going to take it over. And I remember, and I don't know how your experience was, but I just remember the sheer number of body bags they ordered. Oh, shit. Because they expected massive casualties.

I mean massive casualties was expected, anticipated. I mean, I'm not talking about for the Marine Corps or First Reconicative Battalion, I just mean the U.S. military. They were expecting a lot of casualties. There was anticipation of anthrax. Yeah, chemical, right? So we got before 2003 the full anthrax regime, which was an 18-month shot sequence. Yeah, it was like six or seven. Yeah, it was a lot.

And I think we had two people in the unit that refused and they were out. they were gone because it was non-negotiable this isn't covid like you're going to be taking anthrax it's so weird i mean just to go down a rabbit hole how different everybody's attitudes were towards anthrax compared to covid yeah yeah no one gave no one gave second thought no like completely untested untried experimental anthrax uh and you compare it to covid which had rigid anyways it's not important it was i was so forced to that I got the anthrax series, but it wasn't recorded in my records, so I got it like 1.5 times. You know, I probably got like 12 instead of 7. Yeah. You're extra inoculated,

or extra your DNA is screwed up. I don't know. Probably I'm pretty screwed up. You know, it's a good thing. I'm registered with VA. I'm probably going to get something weird down the line. Like, I seem to remember something about you couldn't donate blood for a period of time after the anthrax vaccine. That was also depending on certain parts of the world that they sent us to. If you were, like, probably Afghanistan was one of them. But I remember, I've heard that story also. Yeah.

Oh, you've been hanging out in Central Africa for six months? Like, nah, we're not taking your blood. I had so many inoculations, though, like from all of the different places that I had been to. And that's one of the things that blows my mind because, again, tangential, I worked in my last job with all former military guys, you know, and when the COVID kerfuffle came, everybody starts complaining about it. I'm like,

I know where you guys all served. I know what your shot records look like. You've had like 25 vaccinations for stuff that is one in a billion chance you're ever going to get it. Like Japanese encephalitis and God knows what. It's, I mean, it really is dependent on the person's media diet and what

they're consuming and what they're hearing. Because, yeah, when we went through basic training or boot camp, we lined up and they had the gun and they injected us with all kinds of shit. I don't know what the hell it was. No idea. Yeah. Yeah.

You remember the shot that they put in your ass cheek where it's like they inject like, it feels like there's a golf ball. Peanut butter. It feels like like somebody is injecting peanut butter into it. Yeah. I don't remember what that shot is for. We got smallpox too, which Americans don't get except for military. Yep.

I remember my smallpox vaccination. Still have the scar from it. I'm sure we all do. And so like all of that stuff, right? It was all part of the workup to that O3 invasion. because we expected the royal week, so many casualties from KEM, a lot of people didn't know any better. I don't want to say didn't know any better because they were ignorant. But I think the assumption is, is like, this is not Afghanistan 01.

This is not 2001 or sorry, 1991 First Gulf War. Like we are going to get in the fight. And we were prepared for that. And we weren't reticent. we weren't afraid. It was just this very pragmatic resolve. Some of you guys aren't going to come home. Right.

And that's not the way it worked out, at least not in 03. That is not the military's experience during the duration of the conflict over there. But for my battalion, we lost no one with only one, you know, one real casualty. when you deployed to, I'm assuming, Kuwait first, what was sort of like your concept of what your unit's mission was? It was really weird. We were supposed to drive through and find a route through a very specific, I'm trying to think how to describe it.

There was sort of like this dam network of levees. My job was I was going to be the lead platoon, lead team, lead platoon for the entire battalion that would then lead the division through. So I had to, and I was looking at U2 photographs, you know, with a magnifying glass and just like, and I'm charting it and rehearsing, and that was supposed to be what my team's job was. You're going to go through the line of departure, engineers are going to blow the berm, and then you are going to navigate this route,

proof it, and then everyone's coming in behind you. None of that fucking happened. No. No. And that was what we were supposed to do. We worked at the time, General Mattis was the division commanding general for first Marine division, of which first recon fell

under. Brilliant strategist. I still think he's one of the brightest minds of our generation as far as a warrior goes. And it ended up That's not how things played out, but that's what we were supposed to have been trained to do. We must have been to Kuwait. I mean, it was over a month, I'm sure.

It goes by very quick. I can't remember. And so what did they have your team doing in actuality? In actuality, the battalion still spearheaded movements, but we did not have a lot of infantry or in many cases any infantry behind us. We acted as shock troops. We did more of what a Ranger battalion would do in many ways. That is not what we were trained to do. Not to suggest that we weren't capable, but I think that's a lot of what the friction was for the unit and really for the lower ranking, the rank and file, men like myself who were an E5 at the time. Because I'm like,

this is not what recon Marines are supposed to be doing. You know, our job is recon pole. We're going to go over here. We're going to locate the target and then you do whatever you want to do if that's infantry, if that's rockets, if that's an airstrike. You were using us as shock troops. We're flowing in mass. We're making contact with the enemy. We are destroying the enemy and we are continuing to move. And if that's what the general wanted to use us for, that's great. Like, In retrospect, who the F was I to sit there and be like, I'm sorry, I don't do windows. You don't say that. But you complain about it.

And we did. And that did not go over well at the end of events. But was the idea that they wanted you to sort of be like a blocking force, like go out there, see what's going on and kind of like guard the flank of the movement? In many ways. Yeah. We were. And we were way out front. I mean, way out front. In many cases, and it's not just us. I mean, the military to a whole, but the Marine Corps specifically moved so fast. There were several times where they just had to say, you guys have to stop. You've outstripped your supply lines. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know where you were. I wasn't within the invasion. I joined the Army in 2002. Got it. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. I was actually in Ranger's selection when the invasion happened.

God. Yeah. Well, when the guys came home with like a bunch of broken ankles and stuff from that jump, they're like, maybe. Yes. I never jumped a combat jump. And I'm really kind of glad. You know, I have a lot of parachute jumps to my name.

We'll get one of those guys in here. I mean, they told me the static line was at waist height because they were so weighed. down. Yeah. No, thanks. Yeah. I'm good.

Kind of, kind of my thought about it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, even jumping a square with combat load is not a fun ride. I don't know how it was for you. We jump front-mounted rucks. We don't typically jump back-mounted rucks.

We, in free fall, we did front-mounted. Okay, front. Yeah, and it's like that beach ball until that is lowered and it's just such a pain in the ass. We trained for it. I'm just really glad that I never. did it. I'd much rather just walk. I'd do a free fall jump, but like a static line jump into combat. I mean, sounds pretty cool, you know, band of brothers and all that, but in reality,

that's scary as hell. You've got, I did a JRTC at Fort Polk years ago. And I say years ago because the C-141 was still flying. So you know it's years ago. And they did a mass tack with like 16 or 17 C-141s over Fort Polk, you could walk across the sky from one canopy to the next door. So many Joes

in the sky. And they assume a 10% combat injury rate. And that was legit. And this was a training jump. I mean, broken ankles. They had a couple of casualties and I'm not celebrating that. Combat now? So let's take that template. And now you've got guys

on the ground potentially shooting at you. No, thanks. I'm good. Tell us about, you know, the D-Day, the day of the invasion pushing across the berm. So cool. I mean, it was, they did all of these preparatory fires, surface fires and aircraft. They did tomahawks. I mean, all kinds of soft and they did, you know, some diversions and try to draw the Iraqis

to confuse them where we were going. And the engineers blew the burn. very shortly before we crossed the LD and it was at night so everyone's on nods we did so much driver's training on nods and it still sucks because these are the old single tubes seven bravos pvs tvs sevens zero depth perception because there's one tube and that takes a lot of practice in order to get good at but it was surreal it's just like you're with your friends and you have trained with these guys for a long time. You trust them.

You know how they're going to react, but it's still not been proven. So there was a lot of that anxiety, like, what's going to happen? Not fog of war because you don't know what the enemy is going to do, but there's this little, like, Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder like, don't fuck up. Hope you go really well. Hope you don't die.

Good luck. You just don't know how you're going to react. So I think there's a lot of not at the forefront of your mind, but there's that little voice like, what if I screw up? What if I panic? What if I freeze? What if I'm not as competent as I hope I am? But it was just weird.

You know, bombs are going off. There's explosions way off in the distance. You can hear gunfire. Is it ours? Is it theirs? Is it a firefight? Is it misdirection? Like, what is all that?

and you don't know and you're just you're just driving and that's what we did i mean we left at oh dark 30 and we drove and we did not stop driving for a couple of days but like all through the night we just drove and it was very um like staccato you know you drive for like 20 minutes and then for some reason you had to stop sometimes our vehicles were in front sometimes we were in the back of the convoy. Sometimes we spread out. Sometimes you'd have to come together, but it was clunky for all night.

And it's got to... It would be an accordion effect. Yeah. And then it's just anticlimatic and you're like... There's nothing going on. There's nothing to see. It's all just like just desert, right? And it was that way for until the next day.

And then suddenly it's daytime and the nods are off. And you're, you know, wiping the crust ed. your eyes and you're like, oh, this is Iraq, huh? Well, this is cool. Oh, look, there's a goat herder. And then there's more people. And then you come to this little mud hut town and village and people were just kind of looking at you. And like, there's a war on. Do you could? It's, it was just, weird. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Unexpected. I've never invaded a country. That was my first time. So it was a lot of firsts. Yeah. And you guys had an embedded journalist, right? We did. Yes.

What was that like? Was he specifically with you? He was specifically with my... Well, he was assigned to First Reconnocence Battalion. And just through this weird twist of fate, well, I consider it to be a twist of fate. I have talked to some other people that say, actually, no, you were specifically chosen because they wanted him to be with your team or you specifically because they felt you would be a good fit. that you could handle it and all this stuff.

But I felt, and I am still, that is my position, it was just dumb luck. I had an empty seat. We had four Humvees. We had three teams. So that means one team of six is going to have to be split into two groups. Humvee has four seats. So if you take six people and you have eight seats,

you're going to end up with an empty seat somewhere. I had an empty seat in my Humvee. Reporter, you're riding with him. again there is another side to that story but that is my version of events um i wouldn't say that i wasn't crazy about having him but i was not super enthused he grew on me because he's very personable and he's very likable but i'm like i'm not going to be responsible for this guy you can't give me a civilian and like if we get into a firefight, I'm not dealing with this person.

You know that, right? And all of that was explained. Like, nope, you do you. He'll look after himself. If he gets hurt, that's on him. But then, of course, you have this implied responsibility. Yeah, yeah. Like, I'm not just going to leave you helpless.

So, all right, let's talk about it. Where's your gas mask? Where's your mop suit? Let's talk about 2.m chloride and atropine. Let's talk about speed drills. Where's your weapon? He had no weapon, but we would give him access to one from time to time if we felt like, hey, I think we're probably going to be in a firefight.

If one of us gets shot, you need to pick up his M4. Let's just make sure you understand how to use it. And he was keen across the board on all of this. He came with his own mop suit. He had his own body armor. He had his own gas mask. I have no idea where he got any of this stuff. The corpsman hooked him up with some of the stuff that he basically needs.

turnicets. In those days, they were all homemade turnicants. It was a crevasque and popsicle sticks to make the winless. And they gave him the atropine and the 2 psal chloride for chemitaxin and just like all the stuff. And he did well. And he was a big dude. I don't mean like he was a little, but not a lot. He was just tall.

It's like 6'4. So he was not small. it's interesting that at the time he probably didn't even think about this but like someone had once told me that Magellan was not the first person to circumvent the world but he was the first person to do it with a historian on the ship yeah that wrote about it yeah and that's why everyone remembers Magellan in you know your your team your platoon had a historian along for the ride we did yeah and another interesting footnote about about this is that he was the only print journalist in the entire Marine Division.

No shit. He was, I want to say he was only one of two in the entire theater. Everyone else was news or TV or, you know, film. They were all film. He was the only person that was there as part of a printed publication, which meant that he wasn't in and out and that changed things too. It would have been very different if it was like an embed, from CNN or BBC or Al Jazeera or, you know, whatever.

Because he was going to be there for the duration. He was. He was there for three months and just hundreds, hundreds of notebooks. And he got to know all the guys. Yeah. Intimately. Yeah, yeah. He heard the stories was witness to everything.

And we didn't censor ourselves, which bit a lot of people in the ass later, right? a lot. But, you know, early on, and I've said this before in some other interviews, but I made its decision very, very early on. I could take one or two approaches. I could bring the platoon or the team together and I say, all, listen, guys, we've got a reporter with us. Everyone's just going to have to shut your mouth and not say anything.

Or I could just say, don't change a thing and just be yourself. Let history be the judge. Let history be the judge because what I didn't want to have. happen was I knew what we were getting into, right? I didn't know if somebody was going to die or if we were going to get shot. I didn't know if we were going to get blown up or witness whatever. But the last thing that I wanted to do was to tell them not to process it. And a lot of people, when they are nervous or when they are scared or when they are whatever, you know, they're going to verbalize. That's just how we process. And there are probably some things that they could

talk to a reporter about that maybe they wouldn't say to like a teammate, you know, like you wouldn't tell your teammate like, man, I was scared shitless, you know. So I just felt that the easier thing to do between those two linear choices would just be like, just treat them like one of the guys. Whatever's going to happen is going to happen. And I stand by it. Yeah. And so in those subsequent days, what was the story that he was capturing?

What was it that you guys went out and did? I think everything that, you know, the Generation Kill the book and Generation Kill the series talks about is, you know, it's out there, it's the story, it's pretty self-evident. But it was all of the, you know, the day to day. It was driving from one position to the next. It was interacting with people. It was helping sometimes. It was treating wounded. It was collecting POWs.

It was uncovering weapons caches. It was sometimes getting in firefights, sometimes being ambushed or calling. in helicopter strikes. It was war. It was all of it. It was the good, the bad, the ugly. And he was there for its entirety. And I think it was really great

to have somebody narrate that history, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Somebody's got to capture those stories and capture that history. Yeah.

You know, we've had so much published on Vietnam. There were so many journalists. It was a long campaign, and it was a bloody campaign, and it was... Somebody said to me the other day that one of the generals made a comment recently that the United States has been in combat for the last 20 years, but we have not been in war for decades. Sure.

And I said, that's brilliant, because he's right. We haven't been in war. And I mean, I would argue Southeast Asia. I would say Vietnam was our last American war. where you had an entire generation baptized in combat. We've had hundreds of thousands of men and women over the last 20 years be in combat, but it's different. It's different.

And so you had all of these stories come out about Vietnam on the air side or the Navy side or the ground side from every walk of life, from men and women, old and young. You didn't have that in a lot of life. OIF and OEF, not to the same level. You certainly didn't have anyone writing the type of story that Evan Wright did at that time and place. Yeah, there's, my opinion is that there's very little coverage of that like Lance Corporal perspective, boots on the ground. And it sounds like he did that very well. He did it. And that is one of the reasons why I think so many people identify with the story,

because it is the every man's story. It doesn't matter if you are an army, 11 Bravo, if you are a coasty, you know, National Guard Reserves, it doesn't matter. If you were an E5 and below in Iraq in 2003, that's your story. Yeah, it resonates. Yeah, we all get it.

The same food, the same conditions, the same fog of war, the ambiguity that can, like, all of it, yeah, it's like everybody gets it. If you want to know what it's like to be, to be in the military, that's a pretty good way to do it. So it sounds like they kept you incredibly busy. Like you were kind of like doing it all.

We were doing it all. I wouldn't say that I was bored. But combat for anyone who's been in it is long periods of boredom interrupted by intense periods of violence. That's combat. And that was 2003. There were long stretches of just like,

fuck. It's very flat out here. Yeah, it's very flat or like, this is boring. We have to wait. And you know, you don't know where the goalpost is. It's just like, well, what are we going to do today? Well, today we're going to drive five miles or five kilometers or whatever the case may be. We're going to go check out this thing over here.

And then we're just going to wait around. And there's just a lot of it, right? And it's just day after day of that kind of unknown goalpost, unknown objective. and but it's busy. And you guys ran into some like Iraqi military holdouts? We ran into a lot of different people. The Iraq war was kind of this bellwether to anyone who wanted to fight Americans. Sure.

It was we got into some, a firefight in particular. And then when we did the post-firefight analysis and we find passports from like Syria and other countries. trees, fighters who had crossed the border. I didn't know that was happening already. I thought that came a few years down the line. No. That was right then and there. Right in the beginning.

Right in the beginning. We got into a pretty good ambush, trying to cross a bridge one time. And then that's where I fired a 203 that didn't blow up because it was too short of an army distance and just went right through the chastel cavity. Yeah. It was like, well, I didn't know it could do that. But then again, well, why didn't I know it could do that? And why haven't I done that before?

But yeah, they had Syrian passports and a couple of other foreign fighter passports. And it was all over. That was Iraq. Anybody who wanted to come in and get their jihad on. Right. That was a place to do it at that time and place. But we did. We came into contact with a few Iraqi regulars, but most of it were militia fighters.

That's so weird. Yeah. Yeah. It was. and, you know, tactically now, or I should say not now, but like 04, 05, 06, that would have, we would have stopped and we would have been like, okay, let's prosecute that whole. Right. Back then, it's like, not our problem.

Just keep moving. Yeah, yeah. Shoot as many as you can. Mitigate the threat. If it's not a threat or it's a mitigated threat, or I should say reduced, we're just going to keep pushing. Yeah. Yeah.

It was weird. So when was it that you did find that goal post? I mean, that your unit must have stopped you at some point. We stopped at Bakuba. Bakuba? I'm probably saying it wrong. I cannot pronounce a lot of these words the right way. I think Bakuba is.

Yeah. That's as far north as we made it. It's on the other side of Baghdad. And then we kind of declared it was game over. Like not First Reconnocence Battalion, but mission accomplishment. I think that's when America said, Okay, the Saddam regime is toppled. They are unseeded. Saddam was in hiding. We'd captured the palaces. We'd captured some of the family members. They have no functioning system of government. They can provide no real

opposition. And truly, when you're fighting war, that's the measure of success is when opposition ceases to happen. And at least at that time and place, it was declared, oh, that's it. That was the goalpost. So then it was just a matter of, well, fuck, I guess we got to drive all the way back south. We didn't drive all the way back to Kuwait. We drove basically back to Baghdad. We kind of made an assembly area there and later slowly retrograded back to Kuwait and then back to America. Should that have been the goalpost?

Oh, wow, this is a great conversation. The way that we fought that entire war, I think, was probably myopic. Yeah. Many people would agree. Back then in 2003, we probably did the best that we could. But, yeah, I think no one would disagree if we were to do it again, we would do it differently. Well, I would hope. It seems sometimes like we're the United States of amnesia and we just do these things over and over again.

American suffers. I mean, that's just our culture. We are short-sighted. Yeah, to say the least, yeah. Yeah. And tell us about the reception back home this time. You said it was different than... Very different. It was an amazing... So America still had a lot of jingoism. You come back and there's parades and America, you know, you could not be more patriotic. We had vindicated, you know, supposedly 9-11. The Dixie Chicks. Fuck them. Yes. But Camp Pendleton is right outside of Oceanside, California, and you've never seen a more patriotic little town than that.

And I'm sure it was the case whether it was Fayetteville or anywhere. America was grateful. We could not get a better reception. But then the magazine article came out. Evan Wright's home. He was a freelance reporter for Rolling Stone. He was originally commissioned to do one article in one issue of Rolling Stones. They end up loving it so much, they make it a three-part series into three articles.

So the first issue comes out, and then it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, they don't like that. The Marine Corps doesn't like it. General Mattis doesn't like it. First reconnaissance battalion leadership doesn't like it. because it openly criticized a lot of the decisions that the officers made. It openly criticizes the decisions that the Marine Corps as a whole was making, whoever wanted to be the face of the Marine Corps. It was critical because, again, you are talking about a E5 and below's version of events.

And look, if you don't know anything about the military, let me tell you one thing. members of the military, especially at that rank, do nothing all day long other than complain. That's what people do. You will sit around and you will find something to complain about. It does not matter if you have lobster and steak and caviar and all the free booze you want. And that's what we did. And now you're not just doing it in peacetime garrison. You're doing it in combat.

And that's, you know, where everyone is hypervigilant. And you are stressed. you are scared in some cases you are hungry you are a whole host of emotions yeah you're going to complain and there's a guy documenting everything oh this person said that

lieutenant so-and-so is a the marine court didn't like that it has since been re-looked at but at that time you know you're talking what winter of 2003 they didn't want to hear that shit

well yeah and what it is too is, I mean, they're worried about their own career progression, and this makes, you know, our command look bad and this and that. This command is, what is this going to do to the Marine Corps's public relations? And is potentially any of this actionable? Did you violate anything in the UCMJ? Yeah, yeah, I was going to ask, like, what? Did they try to retaliate against any of you?

So I had, while in Iraq, I was nominated for a meritorious promotion, a combat meritorious promotion to staff sergeant to E6. For the entire division, so it wasn't in the battalion, they had one meritorious combat slot for E6, one for E7, one for E8. I competed against, I don't know how many people for E6, and I won. I was the first meritorious combat promotion since Vietnam. Wow. So my warrant is date of rank on the second of the month instead of the first, and it says,

in combat. Should have said that. It got taken away. General Mattis rescinded the promotion warrant in light of what had taken place in the article. Now, I ended up getting it, but it was gone for about six weeks.

Yeah, and it wasn't just me. There were other people in the platoon as well, and the prevailing attitude of the leadership at the time was, well, you should have kept your mouth shut. You didn't have to say anything. I'm like, okay, hold on a minute. you put this person in our group.

You put a Rolling Stone reporter in the midst of our recon team. Freelands reporter, be that as it may. Former publisher for Penn House letters, New Flint personally. Like, he's got a great street reputation. He was not the liberal Ivy League acts to grind Democrat. No, he was cool as fuck. But come on, man, he was still a reporter. What did you think was going to happen?

That was the first thing that I had sort of stood on as, and the secondly, I'm like, what was really so bad? Right. I mean, really. I had known and had conversations with General Mattis prior. I spoke to him many times in Afghanistan when I was reporting directly to him in Kandahar. I had a couple of other conversations on other, other times, through a weird set of circumstances, it's not important. He knew me. General Mattis

has a great memory, by the way. He will meet somebody one time and he will always remember you, which is incredible because I was a nobody. He knew me. I had a very, very unpleasant, one-sided conversation with the general, and this was the conversation that was going to determine whether or not I was allowed to be promoted to that next rank under the circumstances that I was, it worked out, but it was painful. He was pissed. He was furious. He was fucking furious.

And again, it was a one-sided conversation. He didn't give a shit what I had to say. He was not asking for my version of events. And honestly, it was interesting because the general didn't care what the officers looked like. He didn't care that they were questioning. or slandered or ridicule. He's like, I don't want it affecting the enlisted men. I don't want your, I don't remember the exact words that he said, but you know, I'm paraphrasing.

I don't want your cancer affecting the enlisted ranks. And it worked out well, but really the only reason it worked out well is because he had a sergeant major and his sergeant major liked me. And his sergeant major listened to me and he heard my story and he listened to me and he listened to my argument. But he was one of several. I had to go in front of every single sergeant major in the entire meth.

Okay, that's a lot. Because remember, a division is below a meth. First week I'm Italian, is below the division. So there's a lot of sergeant majors. There's like eight of these dudes, the artillery, the infantry, like they're all in a room, and there's Sergeant Colbert.

And I'm having to explain myself to senior enlisted people who don't like recon Marines anyways because we're all a bunch of cowboys. And now here's an uppity little sergeant who thinks that he can just say whatever he wants about, yeah, it was rough. But I won the day.

I won the day. And I got to keep my rank. I got to pick up my next rank and my next one. And, you know, the story has aged well. I think people will realize that, like, one, there were a lot worse things to come. For sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like in the grand scheme of our adventure in Iraq, Sergeant Colbert's mouth is not the thing that we are going to blemish. Yeah. So yeah. And does this have anything to do with your stint with the Royal Marines that they're kind of like, we need to get this guy out of here for a little while? No.

In fact, quite the opposite. That is a coveted bill. I would think, yeah. Highly sought after. You are completely alone. You have no higher headquarters. You are isolated. Like, when I say you're embedded, it's like, that's it.

It's you. I have no American chain of command in the country, not Marine. The only Marine in the country are the embassy folks up in London's embassy, and they have no association with me. My reach back was a officer, a major in Quantico. And so it was highly sought after and I was selected and screened and found to be, yep, it was good. It was not universal. The angst over the Generation Kill magazine articles was not universal. There were a lot of people that were like, yeah, dude, I get it.

What could you do? Right. You were in a tough spot. I don't think you did anything that was that egregious. It was really just the upper, upper echelons. You know what I mean? And it all rolls downhill. And it all rolls downhill.

So to be selected for the British exchange program, I mean, it was great. Phenomenal opportunity. Really, personally and professionally. It was great. Did you have to go through their training course? I had the option to go through their training course. I started to go through their training course. There were some circumstances that prevented me from finishing the all-arms commando course.

One of the unique things about the British commandos is the individual role Marine goes through their eight, I think it's eight months. They're enough positive things about their fighting spirit, their morale. Their attitudes are, you just, you cannot demoralize this group of people. It is, I've never seen anything like it. They can't be miserable enough. They're just really good dudes. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that their training pipeline is incredibly long.

Yeah. Eight months is a long time to be in basic. And they go through some very arduous physical courses. They go through a lot of schooling. And there's not that many. You know, 3,500, 4,000 at any given time, that's small. And I mean, I found them to just be an incredible group of guys. And I've said this before.

I think they could do so much better if they would unass more funding for them. If they had access to more money to pay for some really top. to your equipment and get access to some really good training and their training's good i don't mean to insinuate that it's not but i compare it to u.s right right like my platoon of 24 recon marines would typically have a range day where the ammo allotment was nine 10 000 rounds that's pretty average really i mean flat range maybe a shoot house you know maybe you do some live fire maneuver some immediate action drills 10 000 rounds of 556 and then some other associated belt fed and smoke. That's nothing. That's a lot of ammo for those guys. That's a lot.

So that's the kind of stuff that I'm talking about. Not that they're not doing anything wrong, but like, bro, if you had the latest cutting edge communications equipment, an absolute top tier, like, amazing. What did you think are the similarities and the differences between them and the American Marine Corps? Well, they're still very much embedded into the Navy. One of the really weird things about the British military on a whole is that their pay system is not the same across the board. Like in the American military, if you are an Army E1 or a Marine Corps, E1, or an Air Force, E1, you are getting the same amount of money. That's not the case over there.

It's different. Their Navy pay is different than their Army pay, then it's different than their Marine Corps pay. So that's the first thing that's weird. They also don't have an up or out policy like we do. Right. So you could potentially, so they sign up for, and I could be getting this wrong because my memory is a little fuzzy these days, but you basically sign up for a 22 year enlistment and you can leave after a certain period. But that's it. And you don't have to be promoted to stay in like you do in the American military system. So you could be a corporal of 20 years. You just don't want the responsibility of leading and you're quite happy to be at that rank. That's a big difference. And I think that is very impactful on their leadership. Because just because you're upwardly mobile doesn't mean that you were necessarily ready for that next.

Right. So I don't think that you're promoting the right way when you do it like that. I'm sure there's reasons beyond what I can see on the surface level. But those are some pretty big glaring differences between our military or at least our Marine Corps and theirs. We want everybody to have the mantle of leadership and you are going to do it. You're probably going to suck at it, but somebody will teach you. They're still in the Department of the Navy in almost all ways. Their Navy controls their budget and their manpower and a lot of their other things.

Whereas in the U.S. Marine Corps, yeah, we say Department of the Navy, but that's really just something that's still on the figurehead and the walls. And it's not the case. I would love to see the British commanders or, you know, the Royal Marines sort of separate themselves in more ways from their parent service. Did you end up the point with them? No, I was at a training command. Oh, okay.

So the way that the exchange program works is it's one of theirs and one of ours and we swap. So my counterpart went to a unit that was deployable and he did get a chance to deploy. Oh, interesting. I would have loved to have gone over to Iraq with those folks. But now it was a training and education command. So I spent a decent amount of time teaching asymmetric warfare amphibious operations, boat driving, VBSS, that kind of stuff. That's pretty cool.

Yeah. Yeah. In three years, almost in the UK. Yeah. That must have been fun. Yeah, it was. I had a great place to live. I had a two-bedroom flat right on the water.

Like you could jump off of my balcony into the ocean if you wanted to. I don't recommend it. It's cold as fuck, but you could do it. And then it was right next to work. So I got up in the morning and I walked next door to the training compound. and it was great. I had two of my motorcycles went with me. I TMOed them over there.

So I would regularly put a motorcycle on the ferry and go over to France, you know, and drive through the coast of Normandy, or I would go over to Ireland, you know, and ride the motorcycle through the countryside of Ireland or go up to Scotland and tour the distilleries. So a lot of personal takeaways. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was great. I had a good time. Learned a lot. And after that, uh, wrapped up and you got sent back to the mother, yeah, Marine Corps. Yeah. Uh, what was the next assignment for you? Well, so I, that's when I went to first force.

I was there for, you know, about six months. Um, and there was, unfortunately a cabal of people who were like, yeah. That whole generation kill thing. you're not going to be a good fit. I'm like, you know, I went to school with a lot of you guys. Like, we all went through the same pipeline. We all treaded the same ground. Again, don't be a dick.

But, okay, if that's your attitude, then that's fine. Yeah, so, I mean, I just came back to the mothership. I reintegrated myself, tried to do whatever was asked, whatever was needed. and then in short order found myself back at First Reconnocence Battalion, getting ready to go back to Iraq again. How'd that go? It was a little rough. Yeah, it was a little rough. I mean, when I went to Iraq in 2003, it was the Wild West.

I mean, we were in combat. Now it's like we have forward operating bases and there's gate cards. What is this, by the way? 07. Okay, I'm got true. So I'm in Fallujah. in 07. And, you know, this is 07.

So none of the really horrible fighting that was taking place in 4, 05. 06 was there. It was, well, we did combat operations and we got into some scrapes. But for the most part, it was like, it's kind of what I call peacetime combat, garrison combat.

It's bureaucratic. It's administrative. It's, your hands are tied. You know, you can't do this. You can't do that. And we still went. out and we did a lot of really what I think is to be, you know, good work, a lot of cordon clearing, a lot of IED stuff, swacked a lot of dudes putting in roadside bombs and, you know,

found weapons caches and all the stuff that we all did, but it was also horribly bureaucratic. It was, you can't do this, you can't do that, and we got to ask permission to this. and this is where we had a zero injury mentality. We started loading these vehicles up that were never designed for all of this armor. With all this stuff and like, oh, you can't go out. You need full PPE. Like, I can't run with this, by the way, okay? You put 80 pounds of armor on me.

If I get into a firefight, how am I supposed to maneuver or grab my friend who is shot? and I have to maneuver him. This is stupid. But somewhere along the line, we as a country decided we will not allow casualties. We're not having it. You can't. It was looking pretty bad in the press, yeah. Yeah.

Can't fight a war that way. Did anyone not read a soldier's load and the mobility of a nation? Because I did, and you haven't clearly. I have that manual here somewhere, actually. It's a good book. Yeah. Yeah. So the 2007 deployment was very different for me.

I was also not a team leader. I was now a platoon sergeant, so senior enlisted for 24 individuals. And I had a pretty shitty platoon commander. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty shitty. He was a last minute substitution. The original one rotated back to United States because his significant another had cancer.

And he's like, I'm out. Okay. thanks and they substituted somebody else in and this guy was a douche a total douche. Did he come out of the recon community? No, no. He was there, but he had no reconnaissance. And the officers typically don't. Usually they're ground intelligence or aviation intelligence officers. Oh, I can see that being an issue. Which for the most part is not a big deal because they understand the significant.

of the mission and the reconnaissance, and they are mature enough for the most part to be like, this is your area of expertise. I'll just sort of help mold you and point you in the direction. You know, this guy was straight from the infantry, and he had some very didactic and rigid ideas about, you know, the way things should be done. I'm like, okay, okay. So how did that relationship end up working out? Not good. Not good. Not good. I also got into it with our first sergeant at the time a lot. Like I said, it's not that I forgot I was in the Marine Corps.

It was just that the reconnaissance community had always been a little to the right of center. You have the Marine Corps rank and file, rigid, like this is a Marine. and then over here you have recon who I'm not saying shouldn't adhere to the norm, but by virtue of its mission set doesn't. They have to adapt that little bit. A little bit. And I had a couple of individuals in the chain of command that were like, nope, this is the way we do business. That's not how we do it.

I'll do it that way because all of you outrank me, but fuck you, this is not how we do it. So, yeah, there was some contention. We did not get along. We made it through. I made it through the deployment, clearly. But it wasn't fun. It wasn't enjoyable. Yeah.

Felt hamstrung, it sounds like. Yeah, I was. I was hamstrung. I was really just ready for it to be over. Yeah. Yep. How long was that deployment? Seven, eight months?

Yeah, it's a long time. It is. Yeah, it is. And again, it's camp flu. and everything had just been, like, all of the fun of war was stripped away. Because, you know, you're living in a pod and there's a dining facility and there's all these rules about, well, this has to be done. How you can use the shower, what you have to have with you when you go to the chow hall

and all this weird stuff. I'm like, this is not what I remember of 03. And for me to go from that period and really be away from the Marine Corps in England And while all of this other stuff was going on and now reintegrated with it, I have got a platoon commander that I can't stand. And I've got some other people in the chain of command that are difficult and prickly to work with. It was just not a good experience. Yeah, I recall that, kind of being difficult because you're like,

maybe it's a sense of entitlement, but also it's just culture shock that you're doing these, like, combat operations. And then you come back to the fob and there's like a whole one-page printout of the rules of how you're allowed to use the coffee maker. It's like, this feels weird, you know? It does. And I think somewhere along the way, we just industrialized the whole process of fighting. Yeah. The Marine Corps does not do peacekeeping very well. The Army doesn't either. In fact, I'll go so far as to say America. No, we don't. We just don't. And that's what we were trying to do. You know, you're fighting this asymmetric warfare at the same time we're trying to help the transitional government of iraq and

it was just yeah when when the MPs are handing out speeding tickets on the fobs yeah it's kind of like what are we doing here guys what are we doing oh the road guard vests i don't even want to talk about yeah yeah fucking road guard vests that was like a huge preoccupation what so yeah i mean that's i i know exactly what you're talking about uh and So where did you land after that Iraq deployment? Back at first recon, I took over as the headquarters and service company Gunney. So I was the company Gunny for H&S. I did that for a little while and then got another platoon.

And this time we were going to go on ship. So I was a platoon sergeant for a mule, which coincidentally would be my last, would be my last. pretty cool. I mean, that's pretty rare to get multiple platoons. Yeah, it is at least multiple deploying platoons. So I've had, I think, total five muse, five Marine Expeditionary Unit deployments, which are all, you know, on ship. And I, during that five held every position that you could have. So I bookended it very, very nicely. Yeah. Oh, you guys were back in the Pacific? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It was, that was a great deployment. And I did some things on that. that deployment that I'd never been able to do before, didn't even know we could. We went to

um, went to Malaysia. I spent like a week in the jungle with their Malaysian recon just, just living on the land and, um, eating monkey and squatting over rice and it was, it was fucking cool. Yeah. That was really cool. Um, Kuwait and did a bunch of other stuff. Um, yeah, it was fun. We had a lot of fun. Yeah. And eventually they sent you to airborne school? Yes. Fort Benning.

So, okay. That decision was made while I was on the way home from ship on that meal. At that time, Fort Benning was where you sent the, like, your shipbirds. The people. I was not that nowhere else to go. For like four years, man. As a Marine,

especially as a recon, you're like, oh, wow. So I called up the monitor. The monitor is the person in the Marine Corps who sends people to their jobs.

Like, they have the big chest board and they're like, this person's up for reassignment. Where do I need this person? And I'm an E7. So I'm not cannon fodder. I'm going to pick up E8.

So the monitor had a good relationship with the individual. And I see the orders come across the computer. I'm on ship. And I'm like, oh, no. So the first chance I got, I picked up the phone and I call him. And it was a very short conversation, but I basically said right off the bat, like, I know that I have ruffled feathers, but I had no idea I was this much of a shipbird. And he said, slow down.

I am not sending you to Fort Benning because you have. have done anything wrong because you have not had a good career because you are not an a fit I need the opposite he said we have been sending the worst of our worst to fort benning we cannot do it anymore because it's given the core it's giving the core a bad name and we have not had good mentorship and leadership at fort benning so if you don't know the marine corps has had a presence on fort benning since world war two it is an agreement we made with the army way back in World War II, which basically says, we will allow the Marine Corps to go through our parachute school. But in return, we want one or two of your Marines to help teach.

So the reconnaissance community is really the only people that are airborne. That are airborne qualified. So it inevitably stands to reason that the instructors would be from that community. One of my RIs on Benning was a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps. And it's not, you know, just the airborne school. So we have infantry mortar leaders course there. We have Pathfinder. We have Jumpmaster. We have Ranger's school. There are air assault schools there.

Fort Benning has a lot of schools. Each one of those schools has a Marine on the staff. All of those individuals have to be shepherded by somebody. That's what he was asking me to do. And I'm like, okay, I hate you, but I will go do

this. And I did. Fort Benning, was an interesting tour. You know from having worked there. I was part of the Marine Detachment. I was the infantry operations chief for the Marine Detachment. And it was very small. There was only 12 of us. It grew later. There was a time where the tank school that used to be at Knox was bracked, closed. They put all of that structure at Fort Benning. Fort Benning, changes from the maneuver center of our infantry center of excellence to the maneuver center of excellence doesn't matter so now marine corps tanks are there and we went from a 12 12 individual mom

and pop detachment to oh we have 90 people here now and that was interesting yeah and how was it providing that coaching teaching and mentoring to young Marines young recon Marines coming through airborne school so i i spent a year as a static line jump master instructor that was the first thing I did. Okay, that's cool. Yeah. After that, I went into the office and was just, you know, permanently in the office as the operations chief, essentially. So part of the duties and responsibilities would be to talk to the Marines when they showed up for the basic airborne school or Marines that were showing up for Ranger school or it didn't matter what. Like, I would be the guy that come by. Right. I was a master sergeant. I picked up master sergeant, so E8 halfway through that tour.

And I would just be, you know, let's talk a little bit there, young sergeant. So welcome to the Army. You were going to be called Sergeant, whether you're an E5 or an E8. They all get called Gunny. Yep. Yeah, yeah. You're gunny or sorry. I'd make one correction a day.

That was my quota. As an E8 or an E7 at that time, a lot of the soldiers would refer to me as sergeant. I'm like, I'm not a fucking sergeant. I'm a gunnery sergeant or a mass sergeant, but one correction a day. After that, I reached my quota. And I would just help manage expectations. There were a lot of Marines that would come through the schools. And as Marines, for example, we don't wear PT gear in the mess hall.

We just don't. It's horribly forbidden. Nobody would ever think to do that. But in the Army, after whatever, you're going to go eat in PT gear. And so sometimes you'd have an overzealous staff sergeant. You'd be like, everyone's going back to change. You know, I'd have to be, listen, dude, they can't. you have that. There's a schedule. They don't have time for that. Just leave the little guys alone.

Things like that. Or, you know, there was, I don't even know if I should say this, there was a senior enlisted Marine who failed the physical fitness test for the basic airborne course. Yikes. Yeah. It was good. He then lied to his parent unit and said that he didn't fail, that there was an administrative error that he was being recycled to the next class. So I had the unpleasant conversation with his unit to say, yeah, that's not what happened. He didn't come back, Alina. I always found the Marines going through those schools to be pretty squared away. I think it might have been the seals that needed adult supervision. They did. And they stopped going through that school. Yeah, I know, back in the day. Do you remember, I don't know if this was still going on, and it sounds so bizarre to say this out loud.

people watching this are probably like, what the hell? When we went through airborne school, they would like check to make sure that you weren't wearing underwear under your PTs because they're like, we have to monitor how hot or overheat exhaustion or something like that. Possibly. And so they would do these like random underwear spot checks on guys. And one of the seals decided to wear lingerie underneath his PTs one day. So they check it.

He's wearing like a thong from Victoria's Secret or something. I went through the Basic Airborne course as a student. I want to say in 2002, it was one of the first things I did after Afghanistan. And then free fall school the next year. And we went through and there were still seals there. And it was like I look back now and I think to myself, what a freaking joke it must have been for those guys. Yeah, it was, absolutely. To finish buzz, you'd be like, really?

Yeah, yeah. This. And they've proven clearly, because their parachute schools one week now, it doesn't take three weeks. Yeah. To jump out of the plane. Yeah, that really feels like a relic of like the World War II. It so does.

And there were complaints, too, is I remember as we were getting out of the army, they were trying to change things. Because you remember to do a jump, a training jump, that's an all-day event. Yeah. To come in and do your sustained airborne training. drop parachutes JMPIs Go down to the hangar, rig up

Yeah, it's like a full day event It's like does it really need to be? It's a lot of work And I got to say I still think Tactically Well strategically does an airborne unit Have worth

Yes, but less and less I mean if you think about What the need for the 80 second airborne is And I say that with all due respect to those individuals. But can you envision a battlefield where we would need to parachute and hold ground and hold and seize an airfield for follow-on forces in 2006 with what we know about taking place in Ukraine and the drone threat that has permeated warfare? I don't know. Maybe.

Yeah. Well, I mean, this is sacrilegious, but you also have to ask, like, do we really need all of these guys? who are free fall in dive qualified. Like, you know, the amount of people that we qualify on it versus how many combat jumps we've done during the war. How many combat dives have we done during the war? I mean... And I spent the bulk of my time and recon on the dive team.

You know, so I went to dive school in 97 and I spent the next, God knows how many years, diving with all manner of equipment. And, like, the same thing that you trained me to do, there's now an autonomous system that can do better without any risk. So you're right. I don't know if it's really required anymore. I think the Marine Corps sees it because they're drastically changing what their units are going to look like. Yeah. And somewhere around this time frame, when is the generation kill was turned into like an HBO series?

2008. Yeah. So it's around this time frame. Did you get kind of hit a second time? by the... I did. I did. This time, it is not as pejorative as it was in 03. Because he wrote those three articles and then it was turned into a book. That book was optioned by HBO. Now HBO is producing it.

So I'm in Fallujah in 2007 and the series is in production and then comes out in 08. So I come back from that 07 deployment almost to the first episode being released, almost. I helped a little bit in post-production. did some technical advising on the show, you know, made some trips to Hollywood and Burbank, actually, and did some work. Met David Simon, met who at that time was very well, or sorry, was unknown, Alexander, right? Like hung out with him for a while, did some press stuff. But I didn't really get hit with the negative side.

That's cool. I did get hit with a lot of just the other side, the love the show or love the book. or, you know, did this happen? Did that happen? Did he really say this? What did you think of Captain America? And a lot of these guys at that time were still in. They were still around.

And they were like, I'm not going to slander or bad mouth or say one thing or another. He's over there. You can go ask him. I learned my lesson. You know, there was a bulk of time between 03 and 08 for me to be like, yeah, I'm wiser. I'm older. I am going to handle this one differently this time. So, I mean, discretion was definitely the better part of valor.

Was it a little surreal seeing those experiences on the screen? Yes. Yes. I read the scripts early on. The technical advisor on that series was a good friend of mine. He had access to the scripts. Well, the first technical advisor, he bowed out, and another friend of mine ended of taking over. The point is I read the scripts and I saw what they were trying to do.

And I thought it was pretty good, right? But you don't know what it's going to look like. Right. And so I see it and I thought, oh, okay. Well, I look good. The rest of you guys I don't know about, but they got this one. They nailed me, clearly. It was very, very surreal. one of the things those like even before generation kill was even a thought I don't know how it was for your experiences but there were times where when you're just bored and sitting around as a platoon or a team or just a couple you would sort of what if like if this was a movie who would play you and never in a million years did I actually think that that would come to light and it did and so you know there I am I'm actually at Evan Wright's house in California I'm there My girlfriend at the time is there and Alexander Scarsguard is there. And we're watching it in Evans Living Room. We're watching a pre-released DVD of the first episode. You know, and it's still got the editing code scrolling through.

And it was like, yeah, all right, this is not bad. This is not bad. I think this will play well. I think it'll do it justice. And I think it did. What do you think has been like the kind of legacy of the series? Because people talk about it to this day. I mean, I think it resonated with a lot of folks.

You know, I think we kind of hit on it earlier. There is not been a chronology or capturing an oral history or written history about what was it like for the American soldier. And I'm using that term universally. to go to war. We just didn't have anything because we hadn't had a war. You could argue 91, but if anyone says jarhead, I'm just going to punch him in the face. That book sucks. I'm sorry, the book sucks.

The movie was horrible. Three Kings was good. Three Kings was actually pretty good. Three Kings was pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that movie.

But there wasn't anything. We just, and this was it. Now, there has been numerous things since then. but maybe I'm a little biased. I don't think anything captures just the raw grit. The absolute truth of what is it like for a young man to go to war in this generation or in that generation. Nothing else captures it. And I think it's still to this day fairly representative of what it is like for that generation.

Yeah, and it's important to communicate that to the public. Yes. who largely don't serve in the military. That is another interesting demographic, less than point, I want to say, point one, point zero one percent of our population wears the uniform at any time, the lowest it's been in the history of the United States. And even less of that is actually in theater exchanging gunfire. Right.

So I do feel like your point is valid. This is transparency. This is empathy. This is understanding. I have never been one of these people to say, you know, the veteran needs a handout. No, but just understand what it's like. Put yourself in the shoes of somebody who is 18, 19 years old, 20 years old, away from home, maybe for the first time, and in a foreign land.

And they are picking up arms against an unknown aggressor and seen. So I think it's interesting. Yeah. And for you, what came after your glorious stint at Fort Benning, Georgia? I got another call from the monitor this time. The last call that I would get from him. Now, we talked all the time. I mean, I just talked to him a couple of months ago, and he's long since retired. He basically said, what do you want to do? Do you want to stay in the Marine Corps or do you want to get out? And now, I had never intended to serve longer than 20 years. That was always my goal. 20 years to the day, and I'm done. Nothing against the Marine Corps.

I just wanted to do something else. Yeah. But you got to do your 20. Once you're past 14, you're committed. That's sort of that fork in the road. And he says, do you want to stay yet? And I said, no. He says, okay, I need you to do one more thing then.

Then I would like you to go to Quantico. I want you to work at Rays and Recon. And if you're not going to get promoted, that's where you're going to go. I said, okay, I'll do that. And I did. And also very interesting career ender. Never expected to end up there. Raids and Recon is the group that is in charge of acquisitions for the reconnaissance community.

And in some cases, the Marine Corps as a whole. So if you don't know. the army has a version, the Navy has a version, the Air Force has aversion. There is a group of people, and it is a mix of civilian and active duty whose job it is to buy you things. That uniform that you're wearing, that pack that you're carrying, that rifle you're shooting, all of those things had to go through some kind of a purchase process where there is a need identified. We need a new gun, okay? Tell me about this new gun. What are the capabilities? Describe it. What do you want it to do? maybe there's a, there's a training gap.

There's, who knows? Well, you've got to have a group of smart people, you know, engineers, logisticians, subject matter experts who say, oh, well, they need a new gun and it has to fit this criteria. Well, then that means it must be, you get the idea. So that's what I did. I was a project officer for raids and recon. I had a portfolio I was in charge of, which were boats and engines, breaching equipment and Hearst equipment.

Hurst helicopter rope suspension training. So all of the Army's air assault equipment. Gotcha, gotcha. Right? The Marine Corps we call it Hearst. So if you're doing fast roping, if you're doing repelling, if you're doing anything like that, that suite of equipment we would label as Hearst, I was in charge of it breaching.

So if you're doing explosive, mechanical, thermal, or ballistic breaching, all of the tools, techniques, tactics, and procedures, I would be in charge of. So, for example, it's all about battery powered these days. The quickie saw, I'm sure you're familiar with it. It was gas powered. Those are great, but when you're using it in confined spaces like on a ship, that engine, that'll fill up a space pretty quick. What about an electric saw?

Ooh, interesting. How do we recharge it? What is the battery life? Does it have enough horsepower to get through a bulkhead of a ship? Right. All that stuff. But predominantly it was boats. the Marine Corps uses an inflatable craft called a zodiac.

You guys do too. Everybody uses it. It's kind of old technology. There's new stuff out there, so I worked on trying to bring that to market. And then a lot of parachute testing. Go out to Yuma and get new data for new glide data, release data for the parachutes,

or a lot of underwater propulsion testing, a lot of diving, stuff like that. And then just going out to industry and talking to people, and going to trade shows and finding new things. That must have been actually a pretty good gig to help you transition into the civilian world. I don't know what you did in retirement, but...

I worked after the Marine Corps. Do you want to jump ahead? Yeah, yeah. I mean, unless there's something in between the two that... Not really. I got out of the Marine Corps on a Friday and on a Saturday I was flying to my new job. Yeah.

So I spent the last about 10 years. years in the intelligence community after the Marine Corps. A good friend of mine was already doing the job and it's kind of one of those jobs where it's word of mouth. There's no website you can go to. There's no resume you can send. There's no application process. It's just like, hey, you're interested in doing some work? Yeah, sure. What's the job? Can't tell you. Okay. Would I like it? Yeah. Well, can you tell me anything about it? No. You want to do it? Okay. Let's try it. And it was like that. My name was dropped. Phone call was made. Interview was done. And then assessment and selection, which is no joke. There's been two schools in my life where I thought, I am not going to graduate.

Dive school was one of them. I never unpacked my bag from dive school. I went from Okinawa, Japan in 97 to Panama City, Florida to the Naval Dive and Salving and Trading Unit for Marine Combat and Dive. I loved that school, and I could swim like a fish, but I could not run to save my life. And they had extremely rigid PT standards. And I'm like, I am not going to pass this course. So I never unpacked my bag. And I graduated and I loved it. And it was great.

But the other thing that I thought there's no effing way I was going to pass was the assessment and selection for my last job. How come? The shooting standards are incredible. I mean, there were guys from. pick a unit doesn't matter all the letters that you could think of they had guys there from all of those you have a 78% attrition rate it's hard and i'm not a shooter not like i can shoot the long gun but my pistol skills are just average and they couldn't be average and so i was really worried about it and i had about three months to prepare and i spent a lot of time doing a lot of shooting and a lot of

things wrong. And the organization sent me to a school in, it doesn't matter. Like a Mid-South or something like that. You said it, not me. That changed my entire pistol approach. That's cool. If not for Mid-South, probably wouldn't have passed because I learned a way of shooting that I wasn't aware of, and it completely changed. What was that thing that? changed? I have a tendency to muzzle. I always have because I learned how to shoot with very, very large caliber guns. It was, I never really had a proper pistol education. The long guns are different. So I learned at a shoot on some guns that were just, like, nobody learns how to shoot with a 454 casool. I'm quoting a movie that was Harley Davidson and the Marlborough man, but big guns.

And so I have a tendency to muzzle a little bit. They taught me a way to press that support hand palm into the grip swell. And it helped so much so that I suddenly started bringing my groups in nice. And I just, I naturally offset a little bit. I know I shoot low and left. So I offset a little bit right. And I was consistently making A-boxes. It's all Ipsic target for scoring.

So suddenly I'm getting A-Box. A's were before I was getting B's. And yeah, it worked out. It was. Yeah, it was great. And then the speeds, like you draw from the holster and you're talking about two rounds and less than two seconds from the draw and they have to be in the A bar. I mean, that's fast.

And I just didn't do anything like that before. It wasn't that I couldn't. And obviously I did because I passed. But there was a learning curve there. Needless to say, it was incredibly, it was incredibly hard. And I watched a lot. of people wash out. Dudes that come from communities that we would, we always would emulate. Like, wow, you're, you know, you're from that group. I thought for sure, you, nope.

Was there any, like, additional training you had to go through after that? There wasn't anything that I had to go through, but I was afforded the opportunity to, and some of the best training. I mean, amazing. And the people that you work with are really fantastic. Fantastic individuals. And you talked about transition. And while Quantico, that last bookended tour in the Marine Corps, was fantastic for helping me transition into the private sector. I promise you what really did it is I found myself in an organization of all prior military and in a semi-military environment. So no, there wasn't a rank structure, but it's like, oh, you served here and you served there.

And I remember that part. And you remember this. And, you know, all of the services from all, you mean, pick an SF unit. And that's who you're all now with. But you're wearing plain clothes and there's no rank and you're all doing the same job and it's fun. So there's a little bit of measuring still, but not much. And that's what really made the transition so seamless. And you said you did that for 10 years.

How did you like the job? Oh, it was fantastic. Not only were the travel opportunities incredible, but you're working with some people who are absolutely at the tip of the speech. and you're helping accomplish a mission that is really important to national security. You're helping support real-world operations. And so there's relevancy. A lot of the things that we do in the Marine Corps or the Navy or the Air Force, it doesn't matter,

you're not going to see the effects of for years to come. I have no idea in my heart of hearts if Iraq is a better country today because of 2003. I'd like to think that it is, but I can't prove it. It's hard to prove a negative. Right. But I can emphatically say that I have helped, helped, been a part of, I'm not taking ownership of it, but I have helped support operations that I know had immediate impact to national security. And that's very, very gratifying.

Was it, speaking of transitions, was it difficult for you to transition from being a, recon marine to I'm guessing in this case more of like a clandestine woe visibility sort of a framework it was very easy because it was a lot of the stuff that I did wearing a uniform or sometimes plain clothes but in the military under title 10 and now it's a different title but it's a lot of the same MO more so in many respects you one of the things that I think it really solidified for me is just how much more vulnerable or less safe you are, the more that you try to make yourself safe. Right. Right. The more armor you're sticking on the side of the vehicles. Yeah. All of it. The convoy operations, the, you know, the SOPs. Raising your profile. You're just

raising your profile. And while it wasn't a foreign concept to me, I don't think I saw it illustrated as much when I left the Marine Corps and worked in the government sector and went, Oh, wow, the State Department's rolling around in five level sevens all in a convoy with toe straps hanging out. Yeah, you guys are fucking targets. That kind of highlighted it for me. And so there were a lot of takeaways. A lot of things that I think the reconnaissance training and all of those years in uniform

helped me along the way in that next walk of life. Yeah. And honestly, it was really, really. easy to go from being a master sergeant in E8 in the Marine Corps with all of the courtes and customs. Now I'm just, I'm a private again. Like, no problem. I'll clean that for you.

I will absolutely get you another cup of coffee. Dry cleaning need picked up. I'm on it. It was like, it was kind of cool again to have nothing to worry about in just individual efforts. And you did that for 10 years. So what kind of convinced you to move on to the next thing? Nothing convinced me.

Somebody took that away from me. So I had been working on the training side of the house and I loved it and it was incredible. Probably the best job I have ever had. And that is not hyperbole. I worked in a very small group with some amazing dudes. and we had some great freedoms and we designed some fantastic training. I just happened to have the misfortune of telling the emperor he had no clothes. There was an individual at my last job.

Let's see, I want to protect the name. So we will call this person Skyler. Skyler is a piece of shit. There was, yeah, so I had a personality conflict and it wasn't egregious, but when the, individual transitioned from the position in which I met him to a position of authority, he decided like your services are no longer required. I said, okay. No problem. I get it. And in hindsight, it's probably good because it afforded me the opportunity to do this, to do the carry-on podcast, to have conversations with individuals such as yourself about my story, about what comes

next and then all of the projects and things that carry on allow for because I couldn't do it in my last job. Yeah, right. They didn't want you being like public. No. No, you would have had to have asked permission for each and every, you know, podcast ahead of time for each and every, all of it. But that's actually interesting because I, I also got to see how to phrase this. There's a guy that once worked for me and wrote for me and I think he did the same job you did. but the client did not give a shit as long as he wasn't writing about the client. If you're writing about the Marine Corps, they're cool, no problem. Yeah.

I think it's part and parcel due to my systems access. There's rules for individuals that have access to the system and those that don't. So if you have a TSS SCI and you have the ability to log into these classified systems, you're under much greater restrictions than if you don't. And I think that's... That could make sense. That's why. Just by virtue of doing the job, you are still restricted,

but not to the degree that somebody who is doing the job, oh, and you can log into the system. Yeah, they want to make sure that you're not talking about things that you shouldn't, sharing locations that you shouldn't. I get it. I get it, man. There's a lot of people that currently hold TSSCIs that shouldn't. I think 1.2 million.

Yeah, it's crazy. We've seen through the news. Yeah, some of you guys don't need it. Yeah, the military especially hands them out like candy. They do. And it's funny because when I left the Marine Corps, I had a T.S. And then I went to the new job and they're like, have you ever held a TS before? I said, yes.

Like, who have you had it with? I said, you know, the Marine Corps, it's like, oh, that's so cute. Yeah, we don't fucking care. We don't recognize that. Like, they don't care at all. like we're starting from scratch and then I guess I kind of realized like oh there's different degrees of like wow okay I get it now yeah they don't put military guys through a lifestyle poly is one of the big differences yeah huge so yeah when you go through that it you're

definitely like put through the ringer yeah I don't know how most military guys can even pass that yeah um I yeah absolutely I don't I don't I don't I pass mine. So it can be done. But yeah. Interesting. So since you've left that position behind or were helped out of that position, what's been consuming your time since then?

Well, I have some side businesses. I have a distillery. Cool. Yep. Yep. A single malt and a bourbon. I do have a small gun business manufacturing. And I can do modifications.

and then from whole metal AR-15s, A-Ks. So I do that. And I always, I've had this for a while. Like fabrication. Yep. Oh, wow. Yep. And then I'm back in school for my master's degree,

and that's taking up a lot of my time. I do have children. They take up a lot of my time. And then the podcast and the story and the conversation. I'm very motivated and passionate to shepherd that and grow and continue. and continue to yeah, see where it goes. Have conversations with folks.

Tell us where people can go to find the distillery and the gun business. They both have websites. The distillery is called Raider Distilling. It is an homage to the Marine Raiders of World War II. I was not creating that title because of Marsok, but I certainly don't mean any disrespect to the Marsoc. Folks, the bottle, the website, the history of the distillery, if you will, it all goes back to World War II and those Marine Raiders. So that's why I named it what I named it.

The gun business, very innocuous. It's Bravo 2-1 Tactical, and it's named so because of my platoon in Iraq and 03. It was, you know, Bravo Company, second platoon, Team One. So Bravo 2-1 Tactical is the website. So folks can go if they want. Yeah. And we spoke about it a little bit early on in the podcast, but the carry-on podcast. Yes.

Tell people again where they can go to find that. They can go to Bradcolbert.us. Okay. Really easy to remember. Bradcobert.us is the splash page for the website. And then from there, it talks about all of the different styles of interviews or videos that we do. And there's a variety of things that people may identify with. But our bread and butter is our weekly sit rep, we call it. So we talk about some current events, about an hour, hour and a

half of discussion with news and stories that are relevant to the day. You got anything coming up that you're particularly excited about that you tease a little bit? Well, we're working our way through the Generation Kill Patoon. We've had several individuals come on. We are going to have Rudy Reyes next month. People seem to be very excited about Rudy. He is a individual that was portrayed in the book. He actually portrays himself in the show. He is on television now.

He does one of those Special Forces shows. Cool. So he seems to be very popular. We're going to have him on next month in July. I think people will probably be excited about that. And we're just going to continue to work. Nate Fick is going to come on the show. He was the platoon commander for that time.

And we have a few others, all of which are forthcoming. And we also have authors, too, regularly have authors. We've had a couple. And they're coming up soon. Jody Fletcher has a book out. Andy Pretty has a book out, all of which are available in future episodes coming up. Super cool. And we'll have links down the description for people who are watching this on YouTube or podcast or whatever.

We'll have links to all these places. Before we get going today, Brad, is there anything that you wish I had asked, anything I failed to cover here that you'd like to put out there? I liked the opportunity to come on the show and talk about some of the history that I have been witnessed to and some of the stories that have brought me where that I am. But honestly, the one thing that I feel I've always tried to let people know is I'm standing on the shoulder. and giants. I love the fact that people identify with the Generation Kill story. They may have been inspired by myself or others that are depicted in that story, but I still look back to the men from, you know, Vietnam or World War II, and there's not that many left, less and less every day. And the things that they did, I've been to Normandy. I've seen the sand. I've touched

those pillboxes that the American Rangers had to cliff assault to get to. I didn't do anything. The shores of Tripoli, Marine Corps has been around for a while. Yeah. I've been to what was the Beirut Barracks in Lebanon. It's now an airport, but like I've seen that soil. I've been to the beaches at Tripoli. I have touched that sand.

All of these places, I stand on the shoulders of giants. I am so humbled to have been a part of the Marine Corps story, but also just the story of all of us who have sacrificed. my hats off to them. Yeah. That was great. Well, best of luck with the podcast, the businesses. It sounds like you're doing good stuff. I appreciate it, my friend. Thank you for having me on your show.

Yeah, thanks for making the trip out here to New York. It's my pleasure. Yeah, really. So thank you, everyone who joined us today, and we'll see you guys next time. Hey, guys, I want to take a moment to tell you about the Team House podcast newsletter. If you go and subscribe, it's totally free. and what it will do is aggregate all of our data, all of our content that we put out,

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We don't want to spam you guys. It's just a kind of roll up of all of our content on a weekly basis. You can find our newsletter at teamhousepodcast.kitt.com slash join. Again, the website for that is teamhousepodcast. Dot kit.com slash join. So we hope to see you there. The link will be down in the description.