The Team House - The Rise of the Navy SEALs | Ben Milligan | Ep. 142

Episode Date: April 23, 2022

Benjamin H. Milligan became a US Navy SEAL in 2001. He is a recipient of the Bronze Star and other awards. A native of Indianapolis, he currently lives in the Chicago area and has three sons. How did the US Navy—the branch of the US military tasked with patrolling the oceans—ever manage to produce a unit of raiders trained to operate on land? And how, against all odds, did that unit become one of the world’s most elite commando forces, routinely striking thousands of miles from the water on the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, even Central Africa? Behind the SEALs’ improbable rise lies the most remarkable underdog story in American military history—and in these pages, former Navy SEAL Benjamin H. Milligan captures it as never before. Find Ben here: Ben's book: https://tinyurl.com/yhnh9bf9 Ben's socials: https://www.instagram.com/bmilligan3/?hl=en https://twitter.com/benhmilligan Today's sponsors:👇 Chill Boys Undies https://www.CHILLBOYS.com/ Save 15% on your first order by using our discount code "TEAM15" And keep the boys cool! https://www.CHILLBOYS.com/ ORCA Coolers https://ORCACOOLERS.com/ Use the promo code "TEAMHOUSE20" for 20% off your order!! Keep the good times flowing with ORCA. Make it Last. https://ORCACOOLERS.com/ Thank you for supporting the companies that support the show! For all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon!👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Hey folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Team House know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever.

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Hey, guys, welcome to the team house, guys. We're here tonight with our guest, Ben Milligan. He's the author of By Water Beneath the Walls. It's a history of America's Maritime Commandos, essentially, Maritime Commando capability from World War II to, we say the end of Vietnam and then kind of talking in a little bit into- I cut it off and write right about 72. The epilogue takes us up to 76, but yeah. So yeah, I still got like 50 pages to go on this book, but I've really enjoyed it. And I, you know, thank you for coming tonight. Thank you, Ben, for joining us in studio, man.

It's awesome to have you here. Thanks having me. Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to start, you know, with the first half of the interview talking a little bit about yourself and your career because you are a former seal yourself. What was your life like growing up and what was sort of that pathway that took you into the Navy? Do we have enough whiskey? Yes, we do.

Hey, I'll start here. Gosh. I think like probably both of you, I'd always wanted to do it. I mean, not always wanted to do it. But, you know, you hit that, you know, 10, 11, 12. you know age and you start looking around and I had a very close relationship with my mom's dad my grandfather he had been a Marine World War II and you know at a young age I always kind of knew that I wanted to be a Marine until I found out about Navy

Seals and then that's all I could think about it went I had a you know great family my dad was a ear nose and throat surgeon I had two brothers and a sister, but nobody in my family, short of my two grandfathers in World War II, had ever been in the military. So I think the first time I or anybody in my family had talked about the military outside of my grandparents' context was, you know, I was sitting at the dinner table, like 12 years old, and I announced that I was going to be a Navy SEAL. I don't think anybody had ever heard Navy SEAL in my house before, and so they just kind of looked at me. And I was like, but, you know, through junior high and starting into early high school, you know, I had, you know, made it pretty clear that I wasn't going to go to college,

which is, you know, for a doctor's kid, that's, that's not okay. So it led to some, you know, pretty, you know, energetic arguments. And then I just stopped talking about it. I didn't talk about it for a couple years at least. And it didn't really come up again until my senior year of high school. I was supposed to be coming home from a practice. I think it was a soccer practice or a track practice.

And I didn't show up. And I think my mom just had some sense. and she drove to the recruiters office. And there I was, and I was getting ready to, you know, sign in. I mean, I just turned 18. She must have known. And the recruiter, to his credit, like, right before I signed, he was like, do you, you know that woman?

She had, you know, both hands on the glass, sobbing. And so I went, we went out to the parking lot. We had an adult conversation. She said, if I would do one year of college, and I didn't like it, then I would have their blessing to, you know, join the military. I think, you know, my parents knew who I was. They knew me, you know, always knew that I was kind of a bookish kid. And they knew that, you know, college would grab me, you know, and it did. Once I got there and I, you know, I discovered that you could go to classes all.

about World War II. I was hooked. I was hooked at least for four years. Four years came around. I was a history major in college, and what are you going to do with a history degree? Be a teacher. Yeah, I wanted to be a...

So that's what I did. So you did your four years? You graduated? Did you go enlisted, or you try to go officer? Yeah, I tried to go officer. I was... I went through the OCS recruitment process and you know I did all the they were the the recruiter knew that you were going to have to

you know have pretty high scores to compete with Naval Academy guys and ROTC guys so I my PT scores were pretty pretty great I mean I went you know a whole year you know doing three-a-day workouts and never took one hot shower in that entire year and I put a what I thought it was a really good officer package together. I had, but I didn't know. I'd never met anybody in the Navy. I didn't have anybody counseling me on how, you know, competitive it was to get in.

So my letter of recommendation for leadership was written by my high school soccer coach. You need like an admiral or like a senator or something like that. I was pathetic. I mean, it wasn't pathetic. It was a really nice letter, and I still, you know, I appreciate it to this day, it my yeah I was I was out of my depth so the application went in you know

predictably rejected sorry and so I then I had another serious conversation with my folks and my dad at that point was like I think this is something you have to do and I went over to the enlisted recruiter's office and that's what happened did now did you have did you have a contract when did it at the time it was called the challenge contract and they were I think I'm gonna have one of these yeah please and what year was this by the way 2000 okay yeah yeah so had the the seal challenge contract and then it was pretty easy after that I mean I you know I'd gone through months and months with the OCS recruiter and then you know I assumed I was gonna

have to start all over you know with the enlisted recruiter and you know take you know months and months more I think it was five days yeah and I was on a bus going to Great Lakes yeah so yeah the great mistakes which you've been to I have not I actually went to San Diego oh nice for both I'm not not sure that's marine so yeah it was a no I didn't have to deal with any of that weather Cheers by the way cheers thanks for joining us excuse me did your uh you you mentioned that your your mom's was sort of very influential, but both of your parents' dads had been in World War II. Did they counsel you to or to not join?

Did they have feelings about it? I mean, my mom's dad, who I had the particularly close relationship with, he was, I think he knew that I was going to do that, and he was supportive of it. my other grandfather he'd been in the 12th Armored division he and I had I don't I recall him him and I talking about it I think he was you know supportive I I think most people were just confused you know my my two grandfathers were I mean my army grandfather was more confused about what the seals were

I mean he's not confused anymore I mean he's you know he went to my graduation and everything but yeah they were just that's fantastic though that did both them make a degree they did yeah they both did wow yeah I was 22 years old my so the one that the grandfather was

very close with he he passed away just in 2016 he was 102 yeah and he swam every day until he's 98 and so so the interesting thing about that grandfather so he had And not only he had been a Marine, he'd been a Marine artilleryman, fought in Guadalca, or not Guadalcanal.

He trained on Guadalcanal and fought on Okinawa. But after Okinawa, after fighting on Okinawa secured, they were looking for anybody that could swim to join the underwater demolition teams. And at that point, I didn't know this at the time, you know, when I was learning this family lore. but I knew that, you know, they needed lots and lots of swimmers to, you know, lead the way, you know, for the invasion of Japan. So they needed everybody that could swim, Army, Marine, whatever. So he was a Marine volunteer for the UDT. Oh, really? So he did three weeks of, you know, underwater demolition training.

Yeah. You know, when you said that, it just reminded me on Monday, I interviewed a World War II veteran, this guy, John Luckadoo, who flew B-17s. over France and Nazi Germany. And he has actually, his book came out this week. If you guys want to check it out, and I'm trying to recall the name the title of the book. I'll look it up for you guys later. But anyway, you reminded me of that

because this gentleman, I don't know how old he is at this point. It must be in his 90s. Has to be. Totally articulate, sharp right there. I was like, I hope I'm like that at this guy's age. I hope I'm like your grandfather. And you're doing episode 5,000 of the team house. Yeah, he was great. I mean, it was great to go to his 100th birthday.

After his 100th birthday, things started to take. It was, yeah, it was rough to see him. But he and I were, I mean, so not only did I get, you know, the, sort of the motivation or early interest in the military from that relationship, but he was a really disciplined reader. and really his main focus was always American history. And when I was in, and I, you know, I don't know how that relationship, you know, happened or how, you know, I think he just saw, you know, the same sort of interest in me. So when I was in junior high, so right about that same time, I was, you know, deciding that I was going to be a, you know, grow up and be a Navy SEAL, he started taking me every fall break to a different Civil War battlefield. field. So I, you know, right, right at that point, you know, it's a really critical point,

I think, at 12, 13, 14, and you really start thinking about what you want to do when you get older. So I knew one that I was, you know, I really wanted to be a, you know, a frog man, but I also was really interested in history. And I wanted to write and I wanted to read and I wanted to. So. Yeah. Now, he never at any point in time gave you shit about going Navy? No. No, he was, uh, I, I don't know when he found out what the SEAL teams were, but he was, yeah, he thought it was the coolest thing. That's great. He also liked my ponytail, though.

He was encouraging of that, so maybe he was just a really encouraging grandfather. What was it about the SEALs versus, like, Force Recon, you know, at, you know, Special Forces or whatever else? Like, what was it? What was the allure for you? I think it were two things, and I think there was this reputation that won the SEAL teams. or this, Buds was the hardest thing that you could do. And that was always something I was a bit self-conscious about. I mean, I didn't really know if it was the hardest curriculum out there.

But two, I think it had this reputation because of the, you know, even going back to the acronym of its name, C, air, and land, that seals go everywhere. Which I just assumed it was true. And then, you know, I think that was reconnoissem. confirmed during Desert Storm when you see I had a newsweek of you know special forces type guys right when Desert Storm is happening and there were seals in dune buggies with grenade launchers and machine guns I was like yeah that's what I went to that's awesome driving around in desert with your best you know you do two best buddies and your yeah that's yeah so you know, before we've, when we've had people on the show and we talk about the various selections

and what the mindset is going to selection, you know, one of the things that comes up is, is the people who are inevitably successful are people who really, like, they never even considered a possibility to quit. Like, it's just like, it's just what they have to do to get to where they want. I thought about it. Did you? I mean, it crossed my, the first time I hit that water and there was a moment, you know, in Indoc, where I was, boy, I couldn't, it was, it was January when our, when our bud started, and phase one hadn't even started yet. Yeah. And I hit that water and I was like, you've got to be kidding me.

Yeah. And we were in there for 30 minutes doing like an acclamation, you know, surf torture type thing. and then I knew we were going to have to get out of there and go right to the pool and do two hours in the pool. Like, well, this seems ridiculous. That was probably, I think that was the only time I thought about quitting. But, I mean, if you can get through that one time, maybe. Yeah.

I don't know. Yeah. And it, I mean, and how many guys, I mean, I don't know how if you brought guys on here in the past who have quit something and then come back for a second, chance like I know several guys several several seals that have gone through hasn't worked out then they've gone back for a second time you know I went through buds and I was you know first time every time I didn't fail anything you know

and you know my career was relatively short-lived I did seven years you know active duty and but some of those guys that had trouble you know I noticed that came back for a second time you know some of them are you know incredible they they really know how valuable it was. I mean, they really meant something to them. Yeah. You know, they have that taste of failure in their mouth. They never want it again.

Yeah, yeah. Well, also, I think that they go to the fleet and they realize that they don't want to be there. So it's like, get me out of here. Right. But I think they're, you know, the guys that, for those guys listening that, you know, maybe something doesn't work out right away,

and we can talk about this later. But, you know, the characters in the book that I discovered, like, I would say, 90% of the characters that I found, they all started on their path expecting to do something, and then the rug gets pulled out from under them, or a new opportunity presented itself, and they find themselves doing something that they never expected to do, for what it's worth. Yeah. No, I mean, that type of flexibility, though, is, you know, or seizing opportunity when it comes up, you know, in lieu of this is the plan, well, this didn't happen, and, you know, let's,

readjust now. I mean, that kind of is a hallmark of like special operations. Absolutely. You know, forces and the people who start them really, I think. I definitely have known a few people who failed out of special forces selection or the Q course and ended up in like some sort of like special access program that special forces guys wish they were a part of. You know, it's weird the way that works sometimes. Well, I think there's also, I mean, I don't want to make a huge generalization, but there's also, I mean, a lot of times in a selection course it is the luck to draw are your shin's going to hold up are your knees going to hold up like like getting getting injured or not passing an event um sometimes that's just not in our control within our control you know um and you know do you let that moment crush you or you do you find you know do you make a new way absolutely you know um so you went into the Navy in 2000

so you were like you were kind of bright eyed bushy tail like young frog man when 9-11 kicked off. I was in I just graduated buds I think I was I think oh yeah

I was either I just finished airborne school so you graduate at the time you know the pipeline's different now but it's it was at the time it was graduate buds go right to for bedding you do army airborne so we yeah we all expected

boy we're going to war didn't quite work out that way it was a bit more jagged timeline for me but yeah I mean we showed up I mean I packed 9-11 morning I packed my bags was ready for a recall

and then I found myself getting no call reporting for you know SQT or SEAL qualification training you know right as scheduled but yeah it definitely took on a much more you know serious more yeah so what was that path like after you know you got your trident you get to a platoon um what was the next step for you next up was seal team four uh and went to a platoon that was going nowhere near the We were assigned to an ARG platoon or a MARG. And we were in the Mediterranean, mostly in the Mediterranean. It was based out of Rota, but we would bounce from ship to ship doing various missions.

We ended up, the most exciting thing that we did was support the, whatever the mission was in Liberia. The second Civil War with Liberia came up. Oh, there's an embassy evacuation, right? There wasn't, yeah, there was a embassy evacuation. We did a series of, like, hydrographic reconnaissance missions there. It was pretty cool. At the time, like, I mean, if there hadn't been this other stuff going on.

Right, right. You know, in Afghanistan and Iraq, it would have been, you know. Liberia would have been the thing. Right, right. But, and not only that, but that platoon, I mean, if that platoon had come later in my career, you know, and I'd seen, it would have been incredible, you know, getting to see these cathedrals and museums and everything that we got to see. Spain and everywhere else that were.

It would have been. But you guys were probably concerned like everybody else that wasn't, they didn't get the initial appointment. They were going to be over. Yeah, we're going to miss it. It's going to be over in three weeks and that'll be it. Yeah. We missed, I mean, at the time, we missed Afghanistan.

Nothing was going on in Afghanistan after that. Things were going on in Iraq and we were, you know, finding out, you know, about that and just, you know, getting sour grapes the whole time. Well, lay on us what that hydrographical survey was like, because that'll dovetail with what's in your book, too. too um you finning towards shore in the night I mean was this was the real frogman mission that it was everything you wanted it to be it was cool and yet and it absolutely did come back to help writing it I mean we so much of Buds is

you know doing you know it's almost buds is almost a metaphor for the the evolution of Naval Special Warfare you You start with that conditioning phase, it's that, you know, Hell Week and, you know, all the guys that were inducted into Naval Special Warfare, even from those early, early times, they're doing all of that conditioning and all the misery of Hell Week and everything like that. And then you go into this water phase with, you know, the dive phase and everything, which is, you know, sort of the direction that Naval Special Warfare went to after World War II. you know the the expectation for planners is that you know the future of the underwater demolition teams is not going to be on land it's going to be in the water so we need to get really good at going deeper farther you know putting bombs on ships and doing you know disabling mines and all the rest and then you know that metaphor you know you go go ashore and you go on land and that's that's kind of how

you know, my career went. It was, you know, the training phase and then, you know, the, you know, the Liberia phase, and Liberia was, uh, it was, it was, it was interesting. I mean, I, I, you know, doing all the academic stuff that we had done in Buds and, you know, actually prepping a hydrographic chart, just like the guys, not just like the guys had done, uh, you know, if you're plotting a, you know, a beach approach to Saipan, but not too dissimilar. I mean, it was, uh, we were doing, at one point we did an online hydrographic survey you know of a beach right outside the embassy there in monrovia and what does that look like are you are you uh for a good swimmer or a bad swimmer i was a bad swimmer but for anybody for yeah for both good ambassadors there was a guy in

my class who phil samberg he's uh he's now out of the um the teams he was a kid from uh um Minnesota, he was, you know, we had, you know, Olympic, close to Olympic caliber swimmers in my Bud's class, as almost every Bud's class. This kid was, he'd come from the fleet. Before that, he'd been, I think he'd been on his high school swim team. But you look at him, he's, you know, he's not, you know, a particularly, you know, muscular guy. I mean, he's a little roomy, but, like, when he got in the water, he was, he was incredible.

And our Bud's class, he had, they had that, the surfboard on the wall. in the second phase classroom. And on that surfboard, at the time, there were like 10 swim pair names on it. Everybody, every swim pair that had finished the seven-mile swim in under three hours. He had, I mean, he'd crushed the swim. He and his swim buddy got on the swim board,

or on the surfboard. But he was there with me on that hydrogram. survey in Liberia. So being an incredible swimmer, he had gotten, you know, the hardest position, you know, on that, you know, swimmer line, which is the furthest one out to sea, away from the beach. I had barely made, I'd almost gotten dropped from buds because of swimming. I had to, I had to train every weekend. So buds, you know, a lot of people don't know this, but you get the weekends off in buds. So when everybody was recovering, I was at the pool, trying to get faster and faster because I was comfortable in the water.

I just didn't know how to swim fast. Right. So when I got into that first platoon, I was, you know, I was, I had the position of the, the closest to the beach. I was, you know, supposed to be swimming, you know, through the surf, which, you know, wasn't supposed to be bad, but there was a really intense shore break on that particular beach. And the most humiliating slash, you know, awesome frogman.

story that I have was, you know, I got tangled up in my lead line and there was nothing I could do and there was nothing to, you know, really measure with my lead line anyway. So I find myself, you know, I couldn't swim because I was wrapped up in this thing. I had to pull my, you know, my dive knife out and I'm cutting myself out of my own, you know, swimmer line. And I find, you know, this wave is about to crash on me. I don't know what to do. If I put my knife back in the sheath, I'm going to stab myself in the leg. So what do I do? Put it right in the mouth. dive through the wave. So, and there were CNN, you know, photographers on the beach. So if you did, it was the coolest thing I've ever done. Yeah. So have you seen a picture of yourself? We made the cover of USA today. My mom swears that I'm on the cover. I'm not, but yeah, there's, yeah, we're on the cover of USA today. That platoon anyway. It was pretty cool. So what was the next jumping off point for you from that mission in the Mediterranean and obviously West Africa. I got out for a brief period and then I came back and found myself in a platoon with SEAL Team 5 and Al-Ambar. And it was kind of everything, you know, I had

expected and it was sort of, I mean it was the time, it was the quintessential SEAL deployment. A lot of sniper overwatch missions, a lot of direct action assaults. culminated with a pretty good ambush of the platoon. And it was, it was good. It was intense. It was a good... It was everything you sort of wanted to get from it. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that wanted is...

I mean, it was everything you know, you kind of, you would, you would expect it to get. You know what I mean? I'm sure you guys probably felt something similar. It was a great. It was a great place. It was, I mean, but yeah, I mean, at the time it wasn't probably too, it wasn't, it wasn't at all dissimilar from what other seal platoons were experiencing. But it was sort of the first time that I started to think about, you know, what were we doing here, you know?

And, you know, I should, I should step back. So there was a period where I got out. I left the Navy. I did some contracting, you know, security contracting in Iraq. And got to work with lots of different special operations types. Worked with a lot of Rangers, a lot of Marines, Green Berets. And it was sort of there that I started to realize that, you know, there were other units out there.

And they all looked at us weird. Or they all looked at us like, what the hell are you guys doing here? You know what I mean? Like, I know you guys have thought it at some point. And it was probably there. Not once. I think to be fair, I mean, yeah, I think what you're alluding to is like, you guys are a maritime commando unit. Why the hell are you?

One foot in the water. Yeah. Why are you in this sort of landline? Yeah. Why are you both feet on a mountain top? But to be fair, I mean, after 9-11, every special operations unit had to exceed their mandate and ended up doing things that they weren't necessarily training to do beforehand, right? And that's what I assumed. Yeah.

I assume that was the reason that our mission had expanded. That was the reason that my, you know, my experience in Liberia had, you know, shifted to this experience in Iraq. I would have continued to think that if I had not, you know, done that. All right. We'll get it. But we'll get into that. But, yeah. But, I mean, it was, and it was a completely, it was an experience completely divorced from, you know, the water from the, what are we doing?

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for today's show is Orca Coolers, and I got some merch here. I won't insult our guest giving him the U.S. Army mugs. These are Orca Coolers. I got this one. This is more agnostic thermos for you. Hey, all right. What is it? Is flowers? Butterflies? They're fly fishing. Oh, that's a nice firm. Yeah, orca coolers, guys, orcacoolers.com. If you go there and check them out today, you use the promo code Teamhouse 20 to get 20% off your order.

I mean, they make obviously thermosons like this. We also got this huge US Army cooler here. Oh, that's nice. You take to the beach, load it up with some bruskees. It's got wheels. It's got a pole handle. Oh, does it have wheels? No.

Okay, but it's got the handle to carry it. that's nice do i do you have chill boys for i i don't have any undies for you i have i have a pair you want to lend you want to lend you want to lend yours i man look let's swap i was i was a corman in the navy so nothing's nothing's out of my lane we we have established with previous guests that it's not gay if you're underway right we've talked about right we've talked about it extensively maybe more than we should being a parent can be really challenging child and family resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help

with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support service. to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging.

Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Have you ever been underway? No, I'm sorry. It's a hoot. I'm sorry, I'm sure it was.

I feel like I missed something. My favorite, my favorite underway story is I was, you guys haven't experienced it, but they'll do like a sweepers call like every hour. Like on the carrier deck? No, no. Sweepers, sweepers, man your brooms. Yes, sweepers. Oh, okay.

So throughout the chef. Four and aft, I don't know. I can't remember what it is. Yeah. So I was walking, I mean, if you're a seal on board a Navy ship, you don't have any job. You don't sweep anything. you just, you know, stand around, work out. Anyway, I was walking through a passageway,

and I saw a young sailor who was sitting, you know, legs crossed underneath a ladder well. He had a fox tail in his hand. He was fully asleep, fully 100% asleep. He heard footsteps, and he just woke up and he just started sweeping, so he wouldn't get in trouble. So take this thing 360 back on the rails. Yeah, back on the rails.

L. M. Barr. Well, yeah, and talking about sort of the one foot in the water verse, like, I think, because we saw in the war on drugs, too, is that when there's money going into something. Everyone gravitates to it. And you get mission creep. Because everybody says we can do that. I don't think it had as much to do with money, or at least I don't think NSW's motivation was money. I think NSW's motivation is there's a war going on. Right.

And we're not going to miss this. Right, right, which makes sense. I mean. Which is always, you know, I don't want to keep edging back toward the book. I do. But that's always the, that's always the bias or the, uh, it's a bias towards action. I mean, you have a lead commandos. Of course they want to get into war.

Right. Yeah. But there's also, there's something else that I didn't anticipate. And that's this, you know, it's the, it's the, uh, it's the, uh, it's the, uh, impulse from the branch of service that the seal teams are attached to, which is the U.S. Navy, they also want to get into the war. And they use the SEAL teams as this sort of harpoon that they launch out and then they grab that rope and they pull themselves in. Yeah.

That makes sense. I mean, between the SEALs and the fighter pilots, like, those are the big recruiting tools also, you know? I mean, like the Navy. Tom Cruise and Charlie Sheen, man. Yeah. I've never met a Tom Cruise in the Navy, but I've met lots of Charlie Sheen's. Yeah. Tiger blood and all that.

Yeah. Yes. So, yeah, walk us through a little bit more of, I'd like to hear about some of the operations that you were doing in Ambar and, you know, what that was like. You're still a relatively young sailor. This is your first experiencing real combat. If you walk us through sort of like what the mission was,

jocking up for those missions and starting to go outside the wire so we so that that deployment we were following the seal team three the sort of the task unit bruiser era so we were we were coming right on the heels of that right at the sort of the beginning of the surge so it was a it was a mix of you know counterinsurgency type fid and then you know I straight, direct action, you know, Vietnam-type seal stuff,

taking boats up the Euphrates, inserting, offsetting, patrolling to someplace and either doing a hit or laying up someplace and waiting to see if anybody was going to come out. So on one of the last missions, we did a really great job of getting in to this town. It was sort of like a suburb of Ramadi. It was along the Euphrates,

but it was, you know, this little town of Abu Bali, and it was, we'd inserted, we'd taken two separate houses on either sides of a little lake. And we were, you know, positioned to sort of cover the flank of a Marine patrol that was going to be coming up. And at one point, right a little bit after sunset, the Marines got contacted. One of the Marines almost got shot. He took a bullet through the crotch of his pants, and they weren't going to get up after that.

So they asked for our support. So one of our units, on the southern side of the lake, I was in the northern spot. gathered a little team together to go hunt a sniper in broad daylight which isn't particularly comfortable but right before they they left the house there was a you know the this little you know Iraqi or insurgent sniper team comes b-bopping out of an alleyway and tracksuits and masks and RPGs and everything like that and they took care of the problem pretty quickly but as that was

happening I don't know what happened but there was a you know another element that saw our position on the north and contacted us pretty good and pinned us down like there was not a lot that we could do. One of our guys, Seale Mark Robbins, he was on the top floor of this little structure that we were in. He popped up. I think he engaged one fighter, killed him, and then was about to engage this machine gunner who was pinning us down. And right before he engaged him, he saw this guy with an RPG, so he shifted his attention. Machine gunner.

I killed the guy with the RPG, but the other guy shot him through the eye. Oh, man. It went through the head, went through the right eye, out the back of the head. And so we spent the rest of that engagement just trying to save him. And then it was touching go there for a second. The other team from the south side of the lake, they, you know, risked everything. They came around that lake. They fought through house after house getting to our position.

Took up, you know, a little flanking position on that unit. But there was this other guy, this Marine, who was, he was the talk commander. I mean, he was the commander of the fob down there. But his Marines were out, but he was at the talk. So he gathered together this little group of Marines, you know, took two Humveys up this road that we had never known to not be IED. Right. Braved this, you know, kind of mad dash to get to our position, put his humbys between the insurgents and a, you know, a field so we could call in a medevac for, you know, Mark. Which was incredible.

It was incredible, you know, to see, you know, another. you know, he wasn't a seal or anything like that. You see this guy, like, you know, risk everything for some, some, you know, junior seal that he'd never met. Throw a posse together and just roll right out. Yeah. And the posse that he gathered together, I mean, the funniest story that I have from that was that this guy, he, at one point, he was trying to, you know, I was trying to get a smoke out there myself, but he was, he was trying to get a smoke out to, you know, signal the Medevac helicopter. So he's yelling up to his gunner. He's like, I need to smoke, I need to smoke.

And this, you know, 18-year-old kid, he was like hands him a pack of cigarettes. God damn it. You know, I feel like every squad's got one. Yeah, yeah. It was probably me back in the dust. It was probably me, too. But Mark, he lived and he managed to, you know, despite having his, you know, eye, not missing an eye, and having a Gatorade cap-sized hole in the back of his head,

he walked to the helicopter. He knew that he was going to be taking another gun out of the fight if he let them carry him, so he literally muscled his way to the helicopter. That's insane. That's amazing. The guy took a machine gun round through. PKM round right through the...

Wow. The 762 by 54 round through the eyeball. That's incredible. Yeah, he's a tough kid. He's not a kid anymore, but he's an incredible person. Did you, because... Can you hear me okay? I'm on this thing?

Okay. Because this is something new for SEALs in terms of... I mean, it was new for everybody. But in terms of tactics, you know, this wasn't like a small unit operation, like in Vietnam, where you could silently kind of, you know, get in and get out of places. like in in in a lot of these built up areas you needed to have a blocking force you needed to have security you needed to have a quick reaction force did did you guys did you see your tactics changing over time yeah I mean we did we definitely like you know in an environment like that we were trying to be as you know as helpful as we could I mean you know it was different the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the capture kill cycle that, you know, seals are always trying to get to, you know, you go, you grab a guy, you ransack him for information, and then you go to grab the next guy, you know,

that's, that was available to us to some degree, and we had a pretty robust intel infrastructure to do that. But at the same time, you want to, like, just like that Marine major, who cobbled together that little force of, you know, guys to come get us, you want to be helpful to other Americans that are, you know, risking everything every day. And in that instance, you know, if Marines are going to be out there patrolling, you know, through what we knew was a, you know, a really sporty area. Right. We're going to help.

Right. And that's where you guys were at at that point in time. I think that's where everybody was at. Like, I mean, I know tasking a bruiser was doing, you know, the same thing. I know that the Havinae task unit that preceded us was doing the same thing. And I think it took a second for, you know, everybody's sort of fighting the last war. Everybody does it. And, you know, the last war for the SEAL teams was really Vietnam. Right. So we're always, you know, you're always expecting, you know, the same thing to repeat itself.

And it just wasn't doing it at that point. So it took a second for, you know, NSW to get sort of on step. And once it did, like, you know, you find, if you're, if, it seemed like NSW by making those changes tactically, all these other new opportunities were, you know, appearing for us too. Well, I feel, I feel, because you mentioned fighting the last war, or fighting, fighting the way we think, you know, because CQB became, you know, sort of the de facto way of waging war for special operations in, you know, that's the culmination, right. Yeah.

You're always expecting to get to there, right, the big mission. And then I think that after a while, people realized that, There was no reason to do CQBA. Like there was no hostage. There was no reason to go into these buildings where the insurgents knew the tactics. They had, you know, they had barricaded or set up or whatever rigged it. And so then, you know, there was a slow shift to callouts and things like that. So when you say that we all, you know, everybody fights the last war, not only did we fight the last war,

but we also like fight like to the, I don't want to say. to what is sexy. But CQB was like, it was the cool thing, yeah. It was the thing, right? But really this was back to like World War II style, house to house. Did you find that the army was doing, so your career precedes 9-11,

did you find that the army was doing, or Rangers, Green Berets, or are they doing all that CQB? Yeah, so when I was in the Ranger Battalion, they were transitioning from sort of the preeminent light infantry force and airfield seizures and, you know, patrol bases and all that. They were still doing all that. But then they were also doing CQB and implementing CQB. And all that was, of course, coming down from the higher tier.

And then they kind of switched over and that became how everybody, even I think conventional infantryists, that became how people conducted war until they realized there's no hostage in this building. We don't need to rush in. We don't need to dominate four corners. We can pie these windows off. We can pie these doorways off and we can throw in a grenade if we don't like what we see. By the time I got there in like 2002, I felt like we were transitioning from lessons learned in Mungadishu to this new form of warfare. And the J-Soc guys definitely helped modernize what Ranger battalion was doing. Yeah.

As far as like CQB is concerned. But another thing on that too, that I wanted to ask you, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Navy SEALs start changing the way they were deployed? Like wasn't it at first? They came to double up the platoon strength on deployments? They did. And that happened on that first deployment that I was on. Oh, okay.

So we went from, you know, platoon-sized deployments. And a suit platoon is how many dudes? Well, at the time it was about 16. Okay. I think we're, I think now it's, it's more. It's more, more toward 20, a little bit north of 20. But, yeah, the time was about 16. So more than, more than an A team.

And that was because they were previously task organized for maritime. Well, the expectation is that they're, just like Vietnam, they're going to, you know, each platoon is going to split into squads. and that each squad needs to be, you know, sort of self-sufficient, you know, to a degree. But, yeah, I mean, the problems that, you know, changed. Right. But they were changing NSW. I mean, they were, you know, we went from a sort of a deploy for geographic specialty to a deploy for what we're going to take everything.

You know, each team is going to cover it's part of the globe. I'm not sure if that helped or hindered NSW. I don't know, and I'm not sure where we are right now and how that's... But yeah, they were messing with the mixture, you know, right... Experiment. Right before, you know, 9-11 kicked off. That, whatever they were trying to do, everything got sort of firmed up. Any other, like, particularly hairy operations you call from...

an bar on that deployment. That was the hairiest. Yeah, it sounds like it. Yeah. I'm trying to think of it very funny ones. We did get contacted once on a, when we were inserting, we were intending to insert on an assault.

I was always a radio, or RTO, so I always had a man-pack radio. This is the first time that I wasn't going to have a, you know, a man-pack. It was going to be the lightest I'd ever been. and I was pretty excited about it. I didn't have a 203. I had my short barrel on.

I was right before we got off the boat, somebody handed me a thousand-yard reel a debt cord in a trash bag. In a trash bag? Yeah, they whispered to me. He's like, carry this for me. It was like, mother. Why a thousand yards? I don't remember the details of the mission.

I know that they didn't have to do it because we got contacted, we got ambushed on the river. There were four insurgents that, popped up over a berm with AK-47s when we were on those sock-Rs. I think we dumped 10,000 rounds in 45 seconds at those guys. We killed one, one dropped dead from a heart attack. I mean, 10,000 rounds coming over a berm at you, you dropped dead from a heart attack. Or shoes and hand grenades.

Yeah. Yeah. That was pretty, it was funny. And after that, rotating back home, what was the next step for you in your naval career? Next stuff for me was I went to grad school and then I helped refine some of our J-TAC equipment doctrine and I got out. So the Navy gave you time off in the middle of a war to go to grad school? Well, they didn't give me time off, but I was taking it catch as catch can. There were a couple classes that I would cancel.

I'd have to do it was kind of a mess with GI Bill and everything like that okay yeah I mean that's pretty uh pretty ballsy of you quite frankly to go to grad school while also being full-time you know I yeah I look back on it and I'm I don't know why I did that I don't know why I did this but uh there was something that got sort of unlocked like on that first deployment to to Europe I mean I was I'd always been a reader but I'd never been as a disciplined reader and hadn't really wanted to know, you know, wanted to know everything. And then once I got back from that deployment, I really kind of set out on this, you know, plan.

I was, I always had a book. I always was. What was your plan at that point? I didn't know. I mean, I considered a, you know, being an academic, I had applied to a couple of programs. And when you apply to Ph.D. programs for, you know, anything, you've got to, you've got to, have some sense of where what direction you're gonna go yeah and I had been reading and I'd been somewhat interested in like Napoleonic War type stuff you know kind of the Napoleon like that

1815 or the the 1800 to you know 1918 period in Europe so I was kind of looking at that I didn't know you know where where I could find a either Napoleonic Wars First World War I liked that you know but I was I was kind of angling toward a you know a career in academia I had shit grades though from college and you know a diploma from from buds will get you so far and it's not going to get you into a PhD program at any reputable university though so was that tough for you to get out after achieving like your you know literally your childhood dream to be a seal it was and you and you regret it every day but I you know I had a son at that point and I you guys have kids I want you see that guy. That's um that's like to me a very courageous move because one of the things we've talked about on the show before is how when you're doing this you when you're doing this job when you're doing what you dreamed of doing how it can become a very selfish endeavor and the people in

your life suffer for it and it's very it's very courageous I think and very like um Yeah, I mean, I go back and forth on it. It's a decision I've second-guessed, I'll probably second-guess it until the day I die. Yeah. I mean, I love the SEAL teams. I mean, I wrote this, you know, as, you know, I, this is my love letter to the SEAL teams. Yeah. But I love those guys more.

Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, when all of a sudden done, when you're 50 and 60 and broken down, the SEAL team's only going to love you back so much. Yeah. You know, but, you know, family, you know, hopefully is, you know, hopefully you get a long. Feeding you apples. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. Pushing around your wheelchair. Because the VA hasn't taken care of you. Tell you guys. Tell you you the Americans about the war in Iraq. What do you know? So when did the idea, when did you start thinking about this book? After that deployment, I got back, that's true to a, you know, to a degree.

I'd always known, like I said before, that I was going to at some point write a history book. I didn't know if that was going to be as an academic. I didn't know how. But I didn't start thinking about this book until I got back from that deployment. I got back from that deployment. And I went to see my grandparents, the grandfather I was really close to, my grandma. We had very close. She, I was over there to eat.

And at one point she asked me, you know, what the hell were you doing in Iraq? you're a sailor. I was like I was, you know, probably three weeks away from, you know, that firefight that I've been in, two weeks away from going to the hospital and being the liaison at Bethesda with Mark's family. And for some reason, I kind of answered that question a little bit rudely. Like I said, you know, I wasn't, I'm not a sailor, grandma, I'm a Navy SEAL. For some reason, I don't know if it was because I answered that way.

to someone who clearly loved me and was just curious about what I was doing there or if it was just a really good question but I know she had no she had context she was not a completely uneducated person she lived through World War II

she was the oldest of eight and she had seven brothers all seven of them had served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and she knew that sailors they fought on ships they were at sea they did not go ashore and

you know here I was returning from a war that she had seen on the news that would look like a desert or you know towns in a desert and she didn't understand it and I didn't understand it either and

the question just kind of stuck in my head it stuck there for like three years four years until I really I got out in 2010 and I it was a year later

you know one SEAL teams you know killed Osama bin Laden three months, four days after that the extortion one seven tragedy happens and it seemed like a remarkable you know occurrence

both of the you know the you know, there's both of these things happening this close together, both of these things happening, one in Pakistan and one in Afghanistan, both events occurring more than, you know, 600 miles away from the closest salt water. It's like, I, like, I need to know the, I need to know the answer to this. Why are we there? Why do the, you know, how has the Navy justified this or how is, you know, a naval unit justified this? This book was partially you trying to process your own experiences. Absolutely it is. You know, and when I, um, when I, um, when I, when I, um, when I, I started, you know, thinking about history and started thinking, like, you know, about writing

books. I was always sort of critical of people that were, like, uh, that wrote history just about, you know, uh, things that had affected them. Like, I was, I was critical or I wasn't critical. I wasn't, that's not the right word, but I would always like, you know, uh, black historians that were only interested in slavery or Jewish historians that were only interested in the Holocaust. Um, but we all come to history that way. Like, we all want to know about ourselves. And this is me trying to understand, you know, this monumentally important experience for me. Just like, you know, them writing those books, you know, about those, you know, things, that are monumentally important for them.

They're, you know, they're trying to understand, you know, family history. And we, you know, I came to history first, and we all come to history first by, you know, stories that our grandparents and our parents tell us, you know, the times that they lived in, you know, the major events that they've experienced. anyway that was but jack can you hold the book up real quick yeah

um i've posted it before i'll post it again the link to the book and uh for amazon wherever you buy your books i'm just just uh convenient link it's in the description also and it's also in the description um available on Kindle is it out on an audiobook it is yes

yeah audio kindle um it's not paperback but uh hardcover right now hardcover the publishers decided to push it a year before they paperback it, which is great. It's a third printing right now. Oh, that's fantastic. It's really good by water beneath the walls.

I got like 50 pages left in the book, full disclosure, but it's really good, really well written. And unexpectedly controversial in a few places. Some choice words for William Darby. Wild Bill Donovan takes a tongue lashing from you in this book. Even the first seal, who's at Roy Baum? You'd tear his book up. Yeah.

There's even a racial tirade against the Irish in here that we're all criminals and cops. I couldn't. Wait, you're all what? Criminals are police officers. Yeah. That sounds about right. The twin forks of East Coast Irish Destiny. That sounds about right.

And I know you're not a police officer, Jack. I'm the guy who, you know, we're in Brooklyn. And so I'm the guy when I show up at the party, everyone looks at me like, that's the Fed right there. But no, I mean, I appreciate that it is a kind of a critical look at U.S. military history. It's not just about the naval commando or maritime commando. It's not. No. There's a lot in here about the Rangers, about special forces, about CIA to some extent.

force recon gets a little bit of attention Charlie Beckwith gets a little bit of attention in Project Delta so I mean why don't you tell us Ben because this is not an attempt to be an all-encompassing U.S. Special Operations History Nope

what is it that you were trying to accomplish with this book so one I didn't want to write a comprehensive history of Naval Special Warfare that seemed boring to me partly because I think other people had tried it and I didn't I didn't see anybody that had succeeded or Kelly had tried Kevin Dockery had tried very Dwyer had tried Bill Doyle tried I think some of the reason that these books weren't interesting or they weren't successful or they weren't compelling captivating whatever you want to say is because they you start you're you're taking on 80 years of history and you're trying to tell this in 300 pages. How are you going to decide what's important in that 80 years, except what's interesting to you?

I knew that this book would need something to pull you through it. I knew, and I never wanted to write a book with sort of a thesis or like an argument that, you know, try to make, but I needed something that was going to take a reader from the beginning and just drag you through to the end. So I needed a question that needed to be solved. And that question that I settled on was, how did the U.S. Navy, the least likely,

excuse me, the least likely branch of service, come to create the country's first permanent land-focused commando unit? It's a completely unlikely history. So it's not really, like I said, it's not a comprehensive history. It's more like a, I almost like to call it a biography of NSW, at least an early biography of NSW, It's like a, you've read Hamilton or, you know, even Montefiore's book on Jerusalem.

It's not, it's a, you take that central character and you use that central character as a vehicle to introduce you to all these other little stories that, you know, are sort of surrounding that, that thing. So it's not, it's a, that's what it is. It's a book that it never tries to describe everything that happened to the SEAL teams. It really is just trying to describe why the Navy created this unit, this commando unit, first. So if you're going to tell that story, you have to tell why all these other institutions, the Army, the Marine Corps, the OSS, the CIA, why they didn't do it first.

That's why each chapter kind of alternates. The book's about 50-50, Navy, Army, Marine Corps, CIA. So I alternate. So, you know, my, this is probably the only book that's ever going to be written about the SEAL teams that starts with a chapter on the Marine Corps. And then NSW, then Army, then NSW again, then it just kind of bounces back and forth. Did, when you started the book with that question in your mind from your grandmother, did, was that your intent? Or did sort of your idea for the book change over time as you were writing? It did.

But it changed, it went from being, so that, you know, the question that my grandmother asked was just, you know, what the hell is a sailor doing in the middle of Iraq. It went from that to how did the U.S. Navy come to create the countries first. So it did. It modified over time, and part of it modified, you know, for selfish reasons. Like I didn't want to tell that history. I didn't want to tell just the SEAL team history. I wanted to find all these other stories about, I selfishly wanted to know them. You know, I wanted to know about the Rangers.

wanted to know about the Green Berets, I wanted to know about Marine Force Recon and the OSS, I was looking for some sort of vehicle that would let me do that. This question seemed to let me do that. So it sort of, it kind of shifted as I was, you know, you're a writer, you've confronted, you know, this, you know, the cursor on the page, and it's miserable.

It's a, you know, and it just, I was able to find it eventually, but yeah, it took a lot of hard. work, you know, writing that first chapter to kind of massage this question or this thesis into something that would allow me to do all these other things. In the book you make reference to, like, naval infantrymen and Navy SEAL Rangers, I'm like, ugh. It hurts. I mean, I know it hurts.

What's happening? But doesn't it hurt you when you read about your institution, the U.S. Army, constantly ripping the rug out from under, you know. Yeah, yeah. And there's a, there's a truth to what you're writing, though, that the Navy is continuously trying to get in on the action. But there's also a capability that's a legitimate that needs to be built. Whether you're talking about the explosives demolition guys in World War II, a D-Day, or even the guys who start, you know, spend quite a bit of time talking about how. how the Navy starts venturing further and further inland. Why don't we take it from the top then?

I mean, you really start the book talking about World War II. Right. Where does this book start off? What's your jumping off point? My jumping off points, the Marine Corps Raiders and the raid on Macon Island. And the reason I start there is because that is both chronologically, it's the first, you know, modern commando experiment that the U.S. military, you know,

undertakes. Two, it's a commando experiment that the Marine Corps had no interest in, and they only did it because their parent service, the U.S. Navy, wanted them to. So it's got dual relevancy, you know, it's, you know, it's first. It sets a standard or an example. it's the first one that the American people know about.

Within a year or within 14 months, I think, of the raid, there's a movie about it. So every American knows that, you know, there are American commandos. And two, it telegraphs this, you know, the Navy's interest in creating something like this. So it seems relevant to me that, you know, for the institution that ultimately created the first permanent commando unit in the U.S. military, it seems interesting that, you know, 20 years before that they were already, you know, telegraphing that they wanted to do this. And it makes a lot of sense, I guess, in my mind, and probably in a lot of people's minds, that this is the capability that would be the purview of the Marine Corps, right? Right. That the Marines go out with the Navy,

they're on the ships, and they provide that capability of making, I mean, it's the... Forest projection. Well, and their term amphibious, right? They're going from the sea to the land, right? Why did the Navy seize on this capability? As you were going through your research and writing this book, why is the Navy so hard on this particular subject? Well, the Navy has always had, the Navy, every Navy, not every Navy, but every expeditionary Navy, the Royal Navy, the American Navy, and they have always developed a Marine Corps, a semi-maritime force, or a semi-maritime army to project, you know, force from the sea. but at the beginning of World War II, and you have to sort of go back to World War I.

So in World War I, and this is one of the things that gets cut, you know, the editor really, he cut it out of the book, and it was incredibly painful to pull it out, but I wrote this section of the book about, you know, how the Marines had done incredible work in World War I in the trenches of World War I, and then they fought out of the trenches and they had they'd done this because the army at least in the beginning hadn't done very well the Marine Corps at the beginning of the First World War is the most competent land warfare force that the US military has they demonstrate an ability to be much more than just the Navy's sort of utility force so after World War

or after World War I that's what the Marine Corps starts to to see itself as. They don't see themselves any longer as this, you know, stepchild of the U.S. Navy. They start to see themselves, why can't we be just like the Army? Why can't we be a maritime version of them? And all of their leaders, you know, want the same thing, or at least they have this ambition to, you know, modify the force, to grow the force, and that's what they do. And when this opportunity to create commandos comes along, that's the old Marine Corps. We want the new Marine Corps. We want the Marine Corps that can sees an entire island.

Not just raid an island. We want a Marine Corps that can conquer an island. So it's all about, you know, I don't, I never talk about anybody. I don't want to convey that any of these leaders are failures, but they just have different priorities. You know, the, you know, Holcomb is not a failure because he doesn't see the opportunity of Marine Corps raiders.

he sees an opportunity for a Marine Corps that is the Marine Corps we know today. But there are consequences to having those preoccupations. Right. And we've seen this with the Marine Corps all the way up until like recent history where the Marine Corps was an elite force. So the Marine Corps was not going to have elite forces within the Marine Corps. and, you know, like they missed out on the J-Sock budget. You know, they missed out because they were still, they still maintained that, right? That sort of mentality.

The whole Marine Corps is in lead force. We don't need a specialized unit within ourselves. That's this undercurrent. And at some point, that undercurrent or that bias or whatever we'll call it, that is consequential. That comes into play that helps to disband the Raiders. It helps to disband the Rangers later, helps to disband the Rangers again. But yeah, this idea that, you know, we don't need an elite force. We're all elite already.

Right. And they have a point. You know, I mean, you've, particularly as wars, as these wars or conflicts continue, and the Marine Corps raiders, they were the best that the Marine Corps had, you know, in August of 1942. They weren't the best that the Marine Corps had after Tarawa, you know. a year later. The best of the Marine Corps had were those guys that survived that and they really knew what combat was or the guys that, you know, went through the Guadalcanal campaign. Like, they had a point.

Yeah, your book talks a lot to a lot of things I didn't know about the politics and it gets into quite a bit about the personalities and in some sense, I think you can see why the U.S. militaries as good as it is because of inter-service rivalry. People are competing and I want to be the best at this mission. I want to be better than you, which creates a better force in the long term. But in other times, the competition becomes quite petty and we start duplicating capabilities and all sorts of stupid stuff starts happening. Yeah, if you had a, if we wiped the slate clear and decided that we were going

to build a military from scratch on this board right here, we would not build the military that we have. Right, right. We would probably not have fighter jets spread across three different services. No, we have two separate navies. We have two separate armies. We have three separate air forces. I mean, and now we have, I mean, we, special ops is like its own thing. Special ops is its own thing. We have one, you know, we'd have, but, but you're right. There is an advantage, I think, and it's a hidden advantage, and it's not, you know, it's not immediately obvious, but they're the military or the it's a bit like a market in that way and these egotistical personalities that are trying to carve out their little empire yeah and they're these

entrepreneurs i mean there's not entrepreneurs aren't just you know you know confined to you know the world of business there's you know half the guys that not half the guys almost all the guys that i write about are entrepreneurs they're just entrepreneurs within a you know a military context right well and i mean they're big personalities right back with uh Marchenko, like, they're big personalities to sort of carve out that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, arguably, yeah, those capabilities wouldn't be created if not for a guy who's a quote-unquote hard head or hothead or whatever.

Yeah, whatever you want to provide a majority of term you want to applaud. An entrepreneur. I mean, Buck Halpern, he's one of the guys that I write about initially. he's the he's the Jewish Notre Dame quarterback he's an NFL quarterback

and then he he fights through all of World War II he goes from being a scout boat driver or a landing craft driver all the way to being a ground force commander of Navy-led Chinese guerrillas in China

like he his career He's rear spans this whole thing. And then after the war, he goes back to Chicago. He runs his father's light company, and he starts business after business. He started L.L.B. Oh, really? Yeah.

Like he, I mean, some of these guys are, they, you know, and Phil Bucklew, who I write about. He, you know, on the day that the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, he was recruiting guys for a new football team, an NFL football team that he was starting in Columbus. These guys were go-getters. Yeah, they're go-getters, but they've got this, you know, they see gang gaps. It's like every entrepreneur does. They see a gap and they're trying to fill that gap. I don't know if you ever contracted, when I, when I contracted, the one thing that I noticed about all the guys that I worked with was they all had schemes on the side. I'm sure you've

like they had like some sort of like multi-marketing, multi-level marketing scheme. Something like that. They have the Western Union receipts that they're sent into their Filipino life. Or a training company. They're starting, you know, a kit company gear. They're, you know. Something. They're all working on something.

Bob Wagner, who I write about later in the book, he comes up with the PRUs, the Prues, the Pruz, you know, the CIA. Provincial reconnaissance units. The provincial reconnaissance units that sort of teach that cycle of capture-kill operations to the rest of the military. He develops this thing, you know, doesn't, best as I could tell, I don't think the guy ever slept. But he's developing this thing while running two separate bars in Vietnam that he bought, ran, and, yeah, I mean, some of these guys were just insatiable entrepreneurs. I'd like to hear you talk about the Navy demolition teams that hit Omaha Beach and other places, other areas on D-Day. I thought that was just an incredible holy shit story in your book. It is, yeah.

That chapter was a real challenge in the sense that I had, you could have written a chapter on each of the gap assault teams. Yeah, yeah. Three gap assault teams are, so for the listeners or the viewers, there are 21 separate gap assault teams that were assigned to a different section of Omaha Beach. their their mission was to blow 16 gaps on Omaha Beach that tanks could land on and then push into the hinterland. The Army, this would normally have been an Army mission. It would have been an Army engineering mission except for the fact that the Navy had somehow managed to convince the Army that the Navy was in charge of every invasion. until the army was firmly established ashore and it ended up being both right because they needed everybody they could get it did so it became the gap assault

teams become a joint unit and that was one of the interesting things I found in the book is the naval special warfare doesn't necessarily you know they're not always pushing themselves ashore it's just they kind of like hitched themselves to the next wagon that's going you know that's going that direction so the scouts and raiders they you know they attached to the army they They attach themselves to the Army engineers with the Gap assault teams. They later attached themselves to the Marine Corps when they're doing railroad raids in Korea.

Were there even a couple stories where they did their naval demolition mission and then just like kind of jumped into the stack with the Marines or lobbing hand grenades and stuff? They did. The sailors, they jump in, the UDTs 1 and 2. invasion of Quagelaine and Roy Nemor, they follow the Marine Corps inland and they fought inland combat before. Anyway, but to get back to the combat demolition units, it absolutely was a joint unit. Army, Navy, blow these obstacles, blow these gaps so the Army can push ashore. And they suffer some of the most devastating casualty number.

on D-Day. So devastating that the naval combat demolition units at Omaha Beach hour are awarded one of just three presidential unit citations that are given out to Navy units for that action. But I think 31 are killed, I think another some 60 or wounded. It's a 51 or 52 percent casualty rates. I mean, five times higher than the charge of the Light Brigade. It sounded just so horrific. And I mean, jump in whenever I'm saying something that's historically inaccurate. But these guys jump in, they get in there, and there are all these maritime obstacles, you know, metal obstacles and so on and mind obstacles that are out in the surf there. And these guys have to go out there under MG-42 fire and start planting explosives on them to destroy those obstacles so the landing craft can get into the beach.

And meanwhile, they're just getting shoot up. They are. And what I didn't realize is how, you know, kind of nonlinear the invasion happened on Omaha. Yeah. Some, the intention was that the tanks land first, the gap assault teams land second, the waves of infantrymen land third. That's not really how it happens. some sections, Fox Green, Dog Green, Easy, different things are happening at different sections of the beach.

So on one section, the section that Bill Freeman lands, he lands, he's the first landing craft to touch down on Omaha Beach. To his right, he can see Point to Hawk, where the Rangers are 45 minutes late. He knows that he's supposed to see Rangers up there. There are no Rangers. He lands, there's no machine gun fire, he doesn't know what to do, so he just runs ashore and starts planting bombs on obstacles. It's not, that doesn't happen everywhere else. Like I said, three landing craft, three gap assault teams are completely destroyed before they get out of their landing craft.

Two by mortars, one by, just completely by machine gunfire. Yeah, it's a, I mean, it's still the most significant contribution that naval special warfare has given to the country. Yeah. It's the most important day, the most important mission, the highest number of casualties. Yeah. And what's interesting, though, about that, about that, about the, the NCDUs that fought there, they had all gone through Hellweek

Oh really? The first group that has gone through Hellweek. Hellweek was invented by sort of invented by Draper Kaufman who was this

Draper Kaufman if you I don't know how to describe him quickly. He's the weirdest guy that I write about in the book. He's just, he's a weird guy.

Like he's Like what are what are, what's, what are, What is a weird fact about him, or one or two weird facts? He got kicked out of the Naval Academy. He got dropped from the Naval Academy because he has bad eyesight.

His eyesight is so bad that even when the war starts, they don't want to let it back in. But he has this weird biography where he, World War II starting, he volunteers for the French Army, he serves as an ambulance driver, he fights through the German invasion of France, then he becomes a POW, he gets released, you know, the condition that will never take our arms against the Third Reich again. He immediately volunteers for the British Navy.

He fights through the Blitz as a bomb disposal guy. And he gets repatriated to the United States Navy. He gets put in charge of this bomb, not before he dismantles a bomb at Pearl Harbor and wins the Navy Cross, but then he gets put in charge of this bomb disposal unit to come up with a way to defeat these obstacles on Hitler's Atlantic Wall. And he, you know, being the one person in the U.S. military at that point, who's seen the most of World War II, he knows how horrible combat is. So he comes up with this training curriculum that is equally horrible.

And he goes to the Scout and Raider program. They have this eight-week-long conditioning course that they've developed, all developed by former NFL athletes that's supposed to be pretty, you know, tough. It's eight weeks long. It's eight weeks long. He knows that he only has a very short time, you know, to train his guy. train his guy so he's like can you take this eight week long course and compress it into five days i guess so they do and that's how hell week comes how we how we how week is just this scouts and raiders you know eight week long curriculum smashed into five you know sleepless days and then not only

does he create that but he puts himself self through the course so even though he was kind of like an older guy and like not in particular old shape at that bad shape he you know can't see he can't even qualify for the 2020 vision standard that he sets for the rest of his guys. Yeah, he's a weirdo. And then after that, he fights through, you know, he volunteers for the UDTs in the Pacific, and he leads, you know, the UDTs through, you know, some of the most, you know, consequential battles of the war. Yeah, I mean, do you want to talk a little bit about the stuff that they did in the

Pacific also? Because some of those stories were just like bat-shit crazy when they're coming up on the surf and they're kind of like taking depth measurements. while they're getting shot at and stuff. Yeah, that was the one that I, so that was my chapter. That was my fifth chapter. I started researching that chapter before I started researching any other chapter.

And I was still researching that chapter 10 years later when I finished the book. I was one of those chapters that I was like, it's a hard chapter to compress because Kelsey Kaufman, Draper Kaufman's daughter, I can't even remember how I found her, but she could not have been kinder, could not have been nicer. She invited me to her home. She gave me complete access to, you know, her dad's, you know, a file cabinet full of papers.

He kept everything. So this book has information in it that has never been published before. No, never. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's, I mean. Like primary source material. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it's, yeah. I'm going to take a break to cry, but yeah. Yeah, it took a lot. It's amazing. Yeah, and like I was saying, like, I like, I'm somewhat well read. Like, there was stuff in this book I never knew. Even the stuff about, like, Bill Donovan,

and things I just never read about before anywhere. It was really amazing. So I'm sorry. Continue, please. No, so, yeah, so it was probably the first chapter I started researching. It was, there were two chapters that I was, you know, kind of neck and neck at the end that I was. I was still working on finishing writing, but chapter five, the UDT chapter was one of them.

And it was, the problem with that was, there was just so much information. The reason that the UDTs are important to the history of the SEAL team is, one, they were pulled from the UDT, the SEAL teams were pulled from the UDTs. But two, the underwater demolition teams, the UDTs are the only special operations unit that survive World War II. They're the only unit that does not get disbanded. The Raiders are disbanded. The VAC Recon is disbanded.

The Devils Brigaders are disbanded. The Rangers are disbanded. OSS is disbanded. Everything. They're all gone. So the Navy, you know, takes all of the, you know, that institutional knowledge that they've managed to accrue during that, you know, four years of terror.

And they compress it into these two under- demolition teams that you know survive the war and so even though that the even though the underwater demolition teams don't do any command to operations during the war they're the only guy standing at the end of it so they start to think hey maybe we're commandos but yeah so they the operations that they go on are they're they're absolutely I mean so we're talking off offline I there there are certain characters in the book that have stuck with readers but there's certain units that have also stuck with readers and the one that I get the most questions about are the UDTs which I thought was just sort of common knowledge it's not like I the fact that there were these guys that in nothing more than dive masks swim trunks and dive fins and a K bar and a K bar and a slate to mark you know you know depths on they they swam you know

completely naked almost up to these beaches to record findings I think for whatever reason it's stuck with people and for good reason

I mean the the risks that those guys ran I mean there's stuff I mean there's so much in this book some of it like you only like almost allude to with a couple sentences is probably stuff that you had to omit for

for length like dudes coming across to the shore and derailing a 16 car Japanese train and I'm like what the fuck I never heard about this shit before like this happened yeah uh yeah for brevity like I yeah you you're you're you find yourself like I mean for the UDT chapter I probably left 30 pages in the cutting room floor yeah like one where there's like a UDT below like a Japanese pill box and the machine just coming out and the guy's like lobbing a hand grenade up there and like what the hell I Out of curiosity, because, you know, like the CDs were really active, you know, like, you know, from World War II and on.

Right. Were the UDTs originally, were they sort of part of that construction battalion? And then how did they, how did they create their own personality? Sort of. So the unit that my grandfather was in, he was, he had a picture of his, the unit that he volunteered for. So when he volunteered for the underwater demolition teams, they called them the 11th special CBs. But there was a connection between the CBs and the underwater demolition teams. So about 40% of recruits for the UDTs.

Initially, the UDTs are a joint unit, Army, Marine Corps UDTs. After the first two UDTs, they get rid of the Army and the Marine Corps volunteers and they make it an all-Navy outfit. And part they make it an all-Navy outfit because the Named. Navy or the commander in the Pacific, he doesn't want anybody to have any sort of authority over this unit. He wants this to be a completely Navy unit. He's tired of dealing with the Marines. He doesn't want them to be able to take anything away from him, so he makes it an all-Navy unit. But who's the question again?

About the CB's? Oh, yeah, so the CB's... How do the UDTs manage to peel off? So the Navy at that point, you know, with no other... you know, service branches to contribute, you know, to this unit, they need every swimmer in the fleet that they can get. And the CBs, they have a pretty robust training camp at Camp Perry. So about 40% of the recruits to the UDTs come from the CBs. Another 40% come from the Fort Pierce NCDUs, and the remainder just come from wherever they can get them in the Pacific Fleet, anybody that can swim.

they put them through a you know a little pressure cooker of training in Maui but the UDTs were never like part because I I thought a lot I thought that the like the UDTs originally started out as part of a construct as part of the CBSs as part of the construction no they're they're the the UDTs are created out of whole cloth okay but they do recruit a significant number okay of their of their swimmers from the CPs from the CPs all right that's fascinating and why were all these other Units You know, the Raiders, the OSS, everybody that you talked about, why are they all disbanded after War II and the UDTs remain?

That's a great question. And there's different reasons for all of them. I probably could have, I mean, I don't know that my editor thinks this, and I'm not sure that the readers think this, but the book could have been twice as long. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it could have gone into the devil's brigators. I mean, there were, when I initially wrote chapter three, which is my chapter about Darby's Rangers,

I didn't want to write about Darby's Rangers. I knew a little bit about Darby. I knew a little bit about Sustern. I was like, I don't want to touch it. I was more interested selfishly in the Merrill's Marauders in Burma. I really wanted to, you know, write a chapter about Machina, the Battle of the Burma Airfield. Yeah, that seemed really attractive to me. I did a ton of research.

I found a lot of stuff. And the more I read, the more I realized, this is not relevant to the story. I needed to cover, I needed to find after World War II. And the only, and the story that explained that was this raid on Cisterna. It was the most, it was the operation that convinced this entire generation of army planners, the ranger operations, or rather commanding. operations were, well, one, they were risky, but they could be performed by anybody. We didn't have to separate, you know, entire group of people away from the rest of the Army,

called them elite and, you know, say that they could do special missions. But each unit is disbanded for various reasons. The raiders are disbanded because the Marine Corps doesn't, you know, they don't want. Right. Raiders. The Rangers are disbanded primarily because of Sisterna, because of this, you know, this aftertaste that, you know, this whole horrible debacle, the 700. The Senate and Light Infantry up against like a Panzer Battalion or whatever is probably not the best decision. It's a terrible decision. I mean, the whole, I mean, you, and I, the,

you know, researching that chapter, writing that chapter, I had to, uh, when I was doing my research at, uh, all the, all the archives that I was doing it at, I, I'm, I'm, I was very disciplined to not look at what I was grabbing. I was really just, I would pull entire boxes out. I would pull folders out. I was like, okay, yeah, I need this. And I would take picture, picture, picture, picture. And then I would move on.

I would not read the documents that I was read. I would do that later. I would, once I got home, I would print all these documents off. I would go through them and I'd highlight it, make notes, and all the rest. That's when I did the actual reading, the processing of the, of the material. I wasn't, I did not do that at the archive. If you did that at the archive,

you were wasting time. The only time I violated my own rule at the archive was when I was at the National Archive in College Station, Maryland, or College Park, Maryland, and I was going through the transcript of Darby talking to the, how, how, how much, how much, how First Battalion Radioman at Sisterna. And all of those, all those transmissions are recorded. And I found myself no different than the reader is in the book, you know, turning page after page. And I found myself getting emotional.

I had to stop and take a break. Because that history is right there in front of you. And those guys are literally, they're dying in front of you. And you know what's going to happen. Yeah. And you write about it in your book quite a bit about, what was going on in the talk, what were they were in like a barn

at the time, and the commander is like having breakdowns. Like everyone's having breakdowns at various points as like these battalions are just wiped out. Wiped out. Wiped out. And there's like Rangers like charging tanks

like throwing hand grenades at them and like crazy shit like that. The amount of carnage that happened in that war is like I just find it impossible to even conceptualize in my brain. Yeah, the combat that I've seen is not combat if that's combat. You know what I mean?

Like that World War II, that World War II generation, like, yeah. It's a different level. It's a different thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Very different. I mean, even, you know, Omaha Beach, the way you describe it. You know, like, there's nothing like that. It's a tornado.

I mean, there's nothing like. Yeah. Could you tell us the story about Mary Miles? I found that chapter very interesting in the book. It's about a real. rearguard action that happened in China to sort of draw resources away from the Japanese military. I had never heard about this before. So I was learning about it for the first time reading about it in your book, and I just thought this was like incredibly fascinating.

Yeah, so a little backstory, this is a chapter that I did not want to write. I was, I knew that this, I knew that this experience that happened. I knew that the Navy had, you know, you know, raised a guerrilla army in China, and they had, you know, led raids in China to sort of tie the Japanese down. At the time, I'd spent, you know, three years working on World War II, and I was really anxious to get into Korea. And my thought was I was going to write about sort of the Navy's, you know, guerrilla warfare experiences, and I was going to talk about, you know, China in a sort of prologue or an introductory section to it and I I wrote up a couple paragraphs and it's like well that's an interesting fact I'm gonna put that in there I found

myself as a page a little long for an introduction I was like I write two pages like when it got to 10 pages mother I knew I had to write I had to double back on World War II that chapter took a year to write but it was so that the experience you're talking about is the Navy creates a guerrilla army in China. So American planners at the beginning of World War II, they see China as this, you know, huge opportunity to tie Japanese forces down. Japan's been in there since 1936, 37.

Something like that, like in Nanking. Yeah, so they've... Man Sharia. Yeah. they there's a huge number of like something like 600,000 Japanese soldiers in mainland Japan. Mainland China. Mainland China. And they would like to raise the guerrilla army to see if they can tie them down and keep them from going to the Pacific.

The Bill Donovan wants to do this. Bill Donovan sees China as sort of the main theater of OSS operations. He sees this is an area where he can sort of be the ruler of this kingdom. The Navy sort of gets there first. They send this sort of unassuming destroyer skipper to China to set up weather stations. And this unassuming destroyer skipper just happens to have a personality that is really well suited for the Chinese culture and he ingratiates himself with the Chinese high command and manages to you know exceed you know OSS expectations or OSS hopes and that's Mary Miles he's a Mary Miles is a

he's our Lawrence of Arabia for World War II but he's there's nothing flashy about him he's a he's a dad like he's a dad that goes to China and raises a hundred thousand man army and he's just he's totally like unassuming and he gets ingratiates himself with what like the intelligence head yeah die lee which is another like weird story about di lee's a character yeah yeah yeah i think uh there's a movie there i mean you could definitely make a movie about the navy in china or american if it wasn't for you know Chinese domination of the film industry I think you would there's a there's definitely a movie because they were they were uh who's it yet son who's the

chinese the chinese democrats well yeah son yetson he proceeds all of them but but uh chankai she's he's the he's the nationalist head is general isimo and he tylee is his uh is almost his number two he's his um he's his j Edgar hoover slash uh Donovan rolled into one. And Miles learns Chinese and... So Miles has done a... Miles did a tour in China before and Miles just... As an observer, right?

Sort of as an observer, sort of like that, you know, sand pebbles type Navy tour. And he's an interested guy. Like he's a... He never develops like sort of the supremacy that most Westerners develop when they go to a... you know, an Asian country, or at that time, you know, particularly, you know, hostile, you know, personality. He's, he, I don't know how else to describe him. He's just got this, he loves the

Chinese in a way that, you know, other Americans don't. Like, he doesn't look down on them. He sees them as equals and he, um, and I think that's why he manages to, you know, develop this relationship with, you know, Tai Li. And Tai Li, and Tai Li, you know, in return, he gives him not carte blanche authority, but he makes him a, he makes a Navy commander, a general

in the Chinese army. And you write about how this caused like major butt hurt between Miles who is a Navy officer in the OSS. You know, like, Bill Donovan's like, we should control this. We should be running this whole operation here. Like, why are you

why are you here? This doesn't make sense. It doesn't. And I'm, um, yeah, and try, try to say no to somebody like Donovan. Yeah, yeah. Like my, my initial, when I had sort of structured the book, I, I desperately wanted to write about Donovan. I wanted to write it, I wanted to write a chapter about the Jedbergs or the operational groups. I thought, you know, I mean, Donovan's such a rich character, you know, to, you know, write about, to learn about. I just couldn't find, I couldn't, I couldn't find a way to him except in this chapter.

And then when I found myself, you know, writing about him, I found myself like, he's not a, he's not a bad guy, he's a great guy. He's an, you know, he's an, he's an incredible American, but he's a, he's a, he's a schemer. You fought a petty turf war in this. Yeah, he did. I mean, and, you know, and anybody that's ever written about Donovan knows that. I mean, Donovan's the one that, you know, started telling people that Hoover was the one that was dressing in women's clothes. Oh, really? Yeah.

Well, Hoover was the one that was telling everybody that Donovan was sleeping with his daughter-in-law. I mean, they had this, you know, ridiculous, you know, I'm not sure that, you know, there's not any truth either. I mean, there might be some truth to both of them, but they were the ones that were pumping these rumors out. Yeah. Donovan's absolutely a schemer, and he was doing everything. he could to, you know, get rid of this, you know, this obstacle, you know, to him controlling China. And that's Mary Miles. Mary Miles.

I mean, you'd see him at a restaurant. You wouldn't give him a second thought. If he was your mailman, you wouldn't think about him. And what did, how did things end up turning out in China with Miles? Again, these like little vignettes that you write about in the book where it's like a couple of his Navy dudes, like tie limpid mines to their backs and. swim out into the bay and like blow up some Japanese ship and all like again it's like I never really realized this stuff happened before yeah and they I mean they led yes they they lead

they lead they leave I mean they blow up bridges they uh they rescue missionaries they um they they they they they they they they've done are uh these are uh a combination of Navy and Marine Corps um advisors that the Navy um advisors that the Navy sort of cobbles together into this unit called Sacco. And Sacco is the Sino-American cooperative organization. It's sort of meant to lead Chinese guerrillas. But they, it becomes so much more. It becomes like a testing ground for special operations.

And they do ship attacks like you're talking about. They swim limpid mines up to ships. And when that one goes, they order 70 more limpid mines. They lead, you know, cavalry charges. Buck Halperin, who I talked about the Jewish Notre Dame quarterback, he ends up leading like a cavalry campaign against the Japanese in the last three weeks of the war, like just harassing them at every possible tank, ambushing him, you know, it's incredible.

That's fascinating. It's a totally unknown, you know, corner of the war. And because they're off in like the western part of China, I guess. Like, you write about, like, just resupplying these guys and getting them whatever they needed was, like, incredibly difficult to fly that stuff in. And they ended up getting carried on, like, pack mules at a certain point. Some camps, so they created, oh, gosh, I think it's 16 separate camps throughout China. And some of the camps you couldn't even get mailbags to until one of the one river,

and then you have to you know slide it down this river in a oh I can't remember the I can't believe I'm stumping myself damn you like a sled or something wasn't yes it was a sled but I can't remember what what kind of skin that they used in the in the mail bags it doesn't matter but yes I mean they everything out there was you know months removed from support these guys were completely on their own they did everything by themselves and they managed to, you know, tie down 600,000 Japanese soldiers. 600,000 Japanese soldiers

that could have been fighting on Henry Jensen. Right, right. Were the Flying Tigers supporting them in the whole show? That was before. That was before? Okay. That's fascinating. Let's, uh,

I'd let to jump forward and talk about Watson, which another character in your story, that this guy is like absolutely larger than life. Yeah. And when people, yes, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Well, I was just going to, I mean, we'll talk about it in a second, but I think there's lessons to be learned between that and some of the things we did or the CIA did early on in Vietnam about when we try to repeat the Jedberg process in Asian countries. Doesn't always turn out so well.

But tell us about the chapter you wrote about him. Yeah, Martin Watson. He is, you're right. He's a superhero. Yeah, a comic book character. He's a comic book character. He joins the, I mean, he grows up in Connecticut. He, he, he, uh, almost grows up in an orphanage.

Uh, he's, uh, um, he's sort of raised by a grandmother and the arch, or the, the Catholic diocese, but he grows up. He's sort of a local tough. He gets, you know, beaten up by bullies, but he's in a part of the town that's, you know part german part irish so he learns to speak german and irish or french irish and or german and french and um so when he he joins the army um in world war two he's a you know very valuable you know guy he joins the rangers and he fights um from north africa all the way to sisterna where he gets captured with the rest of derby's rangers uh he gets released

he comes home to connecticut um and in between that period between World War II and Korea, he gets arrested some 76 times by the local police for various things, fighting, drunken fighting, resisting arrest. The judge ultimately gives him a, you know, I mean most of his incarceration is just done in jail, but the judge ultimately gives him a choice, you know, you go back to the Army or you're going to prison. It goes back into the Army. joins the Rangers and the sort of the second iteration. And he leads in a sort of weird roundabout way he gets put in charge of this sort of hybrid

ranger, hybrid partisan sort of Jedberg-type mission to go blow up a railroad tunnel. Lots of different factors come into play. And ultimately the mission is a total failure. Watson manages to get three of his American Rangers extracted, but he ends up leading his surviving Korean comrades on a three-week-long no-food mission just to escape to friendly lines. He gets captured. And his POW story is nothing Lex than, I mean, it's remarkable. like his survival during the period like it's

I mean that the entire story about them like basically like trying to E&E across Korea it's insane it's snowing and they're sending helicopters at one point after they finally get a combo check and birds are going down and like what in the hell it's a yeah it was a I had a hard time finding I mean just writing that chapter because I couldn't find you know the the corroborative material to, you know, write the chapter on. It was one of those sort of weird things. Like, I did a FOIA request for a POW record at the National Archives, and I just sort of hoping that there'd be a, you know, a little couple-page summary of his captivity. I'd seen these POW reports before, and they were always just a couple of pages. the response was, yes, we have a POW report with Martin Watson's information in it.

It hasn't been declassified. We'd be willing to declassify it, but you'd have to come here to get it. And I was like, well, I had just left the National Archives. I was living in Illinois at the time. It was kind of a big effort for me to get back to, you know, Maryland. I was like, well, we can't, you know, we can't send it to you. at 750 pages. Oh, shit.

Well, I mean, I was like, well, it's in a, I assumed it was in a, I assumed it was in a 750 page, you know, folder or something like that. So I was like, all right, well, I'll look at it the next time I'm there. So the next time I was there, which is months, months later, and I'm still having trouble with this chapter, I requested the, you know, the box, and they brought it out, and I was expecting to pull his two pages out of it. And it was, no kidding. 750 pages all about him.

That's amazing. Where they're trying to propagandize the GIs and he was calling them Kami's sons of bitches? That's where it all came from that. He was. I mean, and those, everything from that chapter was taken from another POW. So they were interviewing P.O.W.

After P.O.W. about Martin Watson later. Tell us about him. like and if there's anybody if there's anybody that I write about in the book that is deserving of the Medal of Honor it's it's Watson and this dude after the war it sounded like

he went with the quiet life working odd jobs and his epitaph is a bit more problematic than that I kind of I didn't I didn't put it in there for sort of a reason he had a rough go he ended up dying of cancer he didn't he had a

a few kids, his son was helpful, very helpful in the writing of the book. He ultimately realized, I think he realized that he was not able to live the sort of family life. And he sort of removed himself from this situation, went to Alaska to work on pipelines. When he got cancer, he came home and he was able to kind of somewhat reconnect with the kids. his one son I think he saw him two dozen times or something like that but every time his son would come

to the hospital to visit his dad his dad made him knock out a password and the password every time was courage it sounds like a guy who was quite frankly just damaged by the war by two wars yeah he was absolutely damaged being a POW

I mean the stuff that you described in the book is horrific I mean anybody would Yeah, and it's not just the war that damage. I mean, his whole childhood was damaging. I mean, he had a, you know, a horrific, horrific upbringing. I mean, that's why he survived two wars because he was a hardcore dude. You won't, yeah.

Yeah, refused to die. Yeah, there's parallels, I think, between him and Bob Gallagher, who I write about later in the book. They have similar, like, orphan stories and, you know, similarly. Bob Gallagher didn't have, like, the legal trouble that Martin Watson. and had Bob Gallagher's, you know, every bit is, you know, complicated and, you know, just... The trick, you know, I think when you're, you know, you want these guys in special operations, and you want these guys in the military. The trick is, how do you get a guy like that into the military?

Right. And then maintain... Channel it. Yeah. So they don't, like... Like Charles Shunstrom, who writes the report... Charles Shunstrom was one of the Rangers at Sesterna. And he's captured, managed to escape three weeks later, and writes a report about the Rangers' captivity or the Rangers' capture at Sesterna.

We wouldn't have a lot of the details that we have without his report, or at least the contemporaneous. He has a very troubled, you know, he goes to Hollywood, tries to become an actor, I think, but fails. he ends up robbing, robbing liquor stores and banks and things, and ultimately, I can remember how he dies, but, you know, probably not well. No, not well. Yeah. What's, as I, I, we, let's talk a little bit about getting into. We don't have to end. I'm just going to have to need a facility break.

Yeah, yeah, we, you can take a facility break. Yeah, we can plug our, we can plug our, our patron and everything, because, I mean, I know we're at two hours, but if you're, you're here and if you're here and if you're, if you're You're willing to keep talking. We're willing to keep asking. Okay, cool. Yeah, because this stuff is super interesting to me. Anytime you want to take a break, just let us know. I would like to talk a little bit about how that transition then post-Korea, I mean, the birth of the seals, right?

You didn't set out to write a book. But, I mean, the byline is the rise of the Navy SEALs. When did that happen at the transition where, I mean, the UDTs or guys are taken from the UDTs and created SEAL teams? How does that come about? It's a period that happens after, so after Korea, after the UDT experience, it's sort of bigger than the UDT experience. It's the Navy's experience, you know, post-World War II. So after World War II, you know, there's sort of a scrambling for resources,

which always happens after, you know, a war, it's happening right now. but the creation of the Air Force and the like the sort of the Army the Air Force are convincing planners that there's not much need for a Navy anymore the Navy can sort of just you know sort of devolve into like a merchant Marine almost all the offensive capabilities are contained in the Air Force and the US Army, we probably don't need the Marine Corps anymore because the US Army can do everything the Marine Corps can do. That's the idea. The Navy sort of goes through this period

where it's very, very self-consciously justifying its existence. You know, not only, you know, are we not going to let the, you know, Marine Corps sort of devolve into this junior partner? We're going to take a, you know, a more aggressive, you know, the Marine Corps gets, you know, I don't know if it's inappropriate aggressiveness, but they definitely are trying to get involved in any way that they can. So when probably the most aggressive chief of naval operations takes command, which is Arlie Burke, he takes command in, let's see, it's under Eisenhower, I believe it's 1956 that he takes over, Arlie Burke pushes the Navy, drives the Navy, into creating a Navy that is every bit as connected to combat as all the other service branches in all sorts of ways. He doesn't really come upon the seal concept until very, very late in his term as CNO. But there's nobody like Arly Burke that I came across.

Nobody, there's nobody that has his stamina, there's nobody that has his sort of hang-ups or his preoccupations or his, his commitment to keeping the Navy at the forefront of offensive combat. And ultimately, you know, when he sees what's happening in the world, Lebanon's going off, Vietnam's going off, all these hotspots around the world. he's like we need a force that can fight in sort of a guerrilla fashion so he pushes his advisors to come up with creative ways to do this and those advisors start to pull all those various experiences

that have happened over the last 20 years into this single entity and he pulls in a really kind of diverse cast of characters to do this One of the guys that he pulls in and got cut from the book is Arnold Def Shade. He gets put in charge of the unconventional activities working group. And Arnold Def Shade is... Do you guys ever see the movie U-571?

Yeah. Yeah. You remember the scene where Bill Paxton, he's the commanding officer, he orders Matthew McConaughey, who's the executive officer. Bill Paxton's in the water. He's gotten wounded. He knows that the submarine's in danger. He orders the submarine to submerge beneath his body. He knows he's going to die, and he orders his men to submerge them.

That really happened. That was the USS Growler. It happened in the Pacific. The commanding officer gets wounded on the deck of the submarine, and he's not going to be able to be pulled in. He's still on the deck of the submarine. He orders the men to submerge beneath him. He dies, and the executive officer that ordered that was Arnold F. Shade.

And Arnold F. Shade is the person who's put in charge, like, Burke puts in charge of this committee. you know to develop the you know where's the navy going next and arnold f shade and the rest of the guys they come up with this you know it honestly though if you look at it i think from his perspective like the navy has a projection that nobody else has right you have you have air force stations somewhere you have army stations somewhere but the navy right they're projecting all the time Right. And then if they have these internal units that can conduct these small actors, they have the Marines, but it makes sense when you're, I think when you're looking at it, especially when he's fighting turf wars.

Right. You're right. And when you do, when you, absolutely, when you step back and you think about it, it's only, it's only inexplicable on the surface. Right. But yeah, when you step back and get a little perspective. Yeah. No, I mean, you could say, well, why, you know, they could take Marines on board, they could do this, but when he's fighting a turf war and he wants to be a one-stop shop or he wants to, you know, you know, I mean, every aspect of government is always trying to get more power, right? Every aspect. And especially when different branches of the military, because if the Army is saying we don't need the Navy, because during World War II, the Army had more boats than the Navy, I think.

right I mean larger not now but then you know you when you're nobody wants to lose what they have no but in the one I mean the only way maybe not the only way but in the one way that my book is somewhat controversial is that it goes sort of against this idea that the CLE team sort of created themselves like there the myth that I grew up with like when when I was a young frogman is that You know, it was this, it was sort of enterprising UDT guys that had come up with this idea for this unit in Korea. And all these conventional Navy brass or Navy officers are like, no, we're not going to do that. We're a blue water force. And we're, you know, and then JFK comes along and supports these UDT guys and they create the SEAL teams.

It's all bullshit. The Navy created this force. The Navy created this force for a reason. In some instances, the UDT guys were against it. Really? The Navy created this because the Navy wanted to project its power. Right. Because the Navy had gone through this, you know, 10-year period of, you know, being the last dog at the bowl.

Right. And they wanted to get, you know, more involved. They wanted to be relevant. And there's some really good chapters in this book. There's one about the Bay of Pigs. Talks about the unique relationship between the UDTs and the CIA and paramilitary operations. that I really think is worth people's time. There's a whole chapter about U.S. Special Forces, Colonel Yard Morrow,

JFK coming down a bit. Again, a lot of stuff I didn't know about before that was really illuminating. I think to start to like wrap up this interview, though, I would like to kind of take us forward to the latter part of your book and talk about the SEAL teams in Vietnam when they really started to come into their own and show what they're capable of. Yeah, they do.

So, I mean, I mean, I just talked about how, you know, the, the seal teams didn't create themselves. They didn't. They absolutely didn't. The Navy created the SEAL teams. But the SEAL teams weren't the SEAL teams until Vietnam. The SEAL teams become the SEAL teams because, I mean, the first attachment that gets sent to Vietnam, they get there and they really don't know what they're doing. Right. They've prepared for, they've prepared for all the missions that they have anticipated, you know, the, the,

dismantling trains, destroying command posts, landing from the shore, sneaking inland, doing some sort of commando operation, and then, you know, sneaking away. It's not until Vietnam, they get to Vietnam and they realize there are no missions like that. Right.

There are no command posts. Right. There are no railroad depots or anything like that. So they get there, the first detachments. the first commander, he says, this isn't what we've trained for. He essentially confines the guys to base. He goes in, well, anyway, he confines the guys to base, the Navy planners, they don't, they're, they're really upset, they're ready to kick the seals out of Vietnam, and it's not until Phil Bucklew

intervenes that, he says, well, we'll replace the detachment, we'll replace the leadership, and we'll get a new detachment in there, and that new detachment comes in, and the same, thing. They realize that this is not the war they've trained for, but they also say, well, this is the only war in town. We're not going anywhere. We're going to figure out how to do this. And they stay. They go out night after night, and it's just trial and error. And by that trial and error, they figure out this works, this doesn't work, this is good, we'll keep doing that. And they sort of manage to figure out that, you know, this jungle warfare is miserable, but there are ways to get it, you know, to make it easier for us.

Where did I mean how did they develop that and that's a huge like sort of failure point, right? That's a big consequence for not getting it right. It's not a training exercise. I mean, is anybody there helping them out? Nobody's helping them out. They're they're completely alone and they're in their own battle space. They don't have any, they have no support and they have no, they have no framework. They've got no historical framework to go from. Right. They've got no, they've got nothing. They get them. there it's it's I mean at least you know when you know my unit got to Iraq we had some sort of idea right you know what guys had done before they get there and they're like I guess they just started doing patrol and ambush was really you know as simple as the the the the words patrol and ambush are you know we know that it's not you can't

just give a farmer a gun and be okay now you're a soldier right like There's a steep learning curve there. I mean, how do they, were there a lot of casualties up top? Like, how did they learn? There were some initial, there were initial casualties. It was, they knew that there was no replacements. They knew that they had to find some sort of method of operation that would, one, you know, make them incredibly lethal, but also, you know, not, you know, undue.

risk the force. Sure. You know, when Billy Macon gets killed, and Billy Macon is the first seal killed in Vietnam, he's, you know, his loss is, is almost a 2% loss for the entire team. Like, you can't take 10 Billy Macons and not, you know, completely dismantle the team. I mean, it's decimated at that point. So they needed, you know, they needed some.

some way to, you know, be really lethal against the enemy while preserving the force. And they, you know, they ultimately settled on this intel-driven capture-kill raid. Like, gather as much intel as you can. And don't go out into the jungle to, you know, kill Viet Cong. Go out into the town, get as much intel as you can, and go and find that Viet Cong, that guy with a name. and then you bring him back, you ransack him for intelligence, and then you go back for the five other guys that he knew.

And it wasn't until the 7th platoon got there, and it was sort of this combination of Bob Gallagher and Pete Peterson and just being relentless in the battle space, but using all the lessons learned from the guys before. And I think probably the most important thing that makes the SEALs special in this entire period it is that you know they deployed as a group you know nobody else was deploying to vietnam as a group green berets uh lirps everybody they were individual augman or individually uh deploying to vietnam

they didn't they hadn't they hadn't trained uh together they hadn't uh um they didn't know what each other looked like they didn't know each other what other you know they didn't have the same tactics when they would get to vietnam they'd go out on a mission with guys they'd never been with before. I mean, and we know all these lessons now. We know how, you know, how damaging that that is to a small unit. But at the time, they didn't know it. And, you know, the Navy, you know, by virtue of, you know, the Navy, they deployed as a unit.

They deployed as a ship as a, you know, there were no individual augmentations that were going on in the Navy. It was you deploy with your unit. And I think that alone is probably the structural reason that the seals were so successful. Yeah. I mean, it's really impressive to think that, you know, you're not, they're not coming from an infantry background. They're not coming from a background steeped with this, you know, sort of, you know, a knowledge base of land warfare. And then they went out there and, I mean, they really just kicked ass. They learned it.

And part of the reason that they learned it is from all of the, you know, they got so much of this from Ranger School. I mean, I write in the book, one of the weird twists of fate is that, you know, all the Rangers, all the lessons learned that the Rangers get from World War II in Korea, they dump into Ranger School. But they don't create a Ranger regiment. Right. Not until 1974. Right. So all those lessons are getting passed to various guys in the U.S. Army who are going back to their individual, you know, infantry units, airborne units, artillery units. The greatest concentration of Ranger School graduates ultimately becomes the SEAL teams.

Really? Which is so bizarre and such a weird like, anyway. So they were going into, I didn't know if they were going to like the Ranger School. Absolutely. Prior to. Yeah. I mean, it was, you know, I was going through schools lists in the documents that I found for SEAL Team 2, CLE Team 1. This guy's been to this school.

this guy, you know, how many guys are going to Ranger School every year? And there was like, oh, man, you'd see like a high number of guys going to Ranger School or high number of guys going to the Army Jungle Warfare School. Yeah. Like in all those lessons, I mean, from, you know, Derby to Watson to, you know, Army? No. Back to somebody in the Navy. Yeah.

This is weird. That's fascinating. Well, and now Ranger School is considered punishment in the teams, right? Yeah, absolutely. Right. Right. Right. But, I mean, Ranger School is kind of punishment to everybody.

Yes. I need to take a break. Yeah, yeah, please. Go ahead. So, guys, thank you for joining us tonight. Really appreciate it. And if you want to support the stream, we have some links down in the description. You jump onto the Patreon. We do bonus episodes.

We do amazing bonus episodes where Jack and D. and I sit around and shoot the shit about nothing. We also have other guests on the show. Alex Hollings. The guests are definitely worth, yeah. Yeah, some other good dudes. And there's also some links down there. for like the merch and other stuff. But yeah, I mean, please like and subscribe to the channel.

If you haven't already, drop us a review on iTunes or wherever else you listen to these podcasts. Again, we really appreciate it. And that kind of stuff really helps the show grow. Thanks for 40,000 subscribers. Oh, yeah, 40,000. Woo, who. Yeah. For those of you who weren't around way back when we hit 10,000,

I'm pretty sure we said that if 50,000 Jack would dress up in Sailor, Say the no we did not say that. If you go back to the 10,000 I'm pretty sure we did. Somebody can fact check me. But yeah, thanks everybody. We really, we deeply appreciate it. And next week, we're going to have the first Special Forces soldier who's in Afghanistan. Justin. Should be in studio. I'll confirm with him. And then the week after that, we're going to have a former CIA paramilitary officer. the show who wrote a book about another paramilitary officer who's kind of legendary in special activities and then the week after that we have a german special operations dude coming on the show and then a marine uh a marsock raider and then we have doug wise who was another uh senior cia officer so that's what's coming up in may uh in the in the end of uh april so i hope you

guys will join us for that look if you guys enjoy the show and enjoy the content I haven't read this book, but I'm going to because everything we've talked about tonight sounds absolutely fascinating to me. No, I honestly, honest to God, like Navy SEAL history aside. No, I'm just kidding. No, this is a really good book, and it's a really well-written book. I've read a lot of histories and different history books about the special operations world. And maybe this is the best written one. A lot of them are very like kind of meandering.

This one's very compelling. And like I said before, it includes a lot of history I didn't know about. And from what we've been talking to with Ben here, that's because a lot of this has never been published before. I mean, there's stuff in here that you will read that. I mean, he did foias for some of the stuff. So it's never even been. Talk to relatives and found, like, documents and their addicts and that kind of stuff. So by water beneath the walls, the rise of the Navy Seals by Benjamin Milligan.

And it's on Amazon or wherever else you guys. go to find books so I really hope you'll check it out it is really worth your time and it's one of those books like I've said about like relentless strike and some of the other books like if you watch this podcast and you're interested in this stuff like this is really kind of like a no-brainer so kind of book you should probably have on your shelf and you should probably give it a read me you have the chance the link is in the description um as soon as Dave what are you drinking over there on your side of the table my old standby a little LaFroy

I got the Hakasu Single malt Japanese whiskey Is Santori It's Santori time And Ben is over here Drinking some Goose Island IPA Yeah

He said he's actually been to Goos Island a few times Really? I didn't know it was an actual place I just thought it was like a cool name of a beer Guys when Ben gets back in a minute We'll have him answer your questions okay. I know there's a couple in there. Yeah, I was going to pull those up. Yeah, you know, I scheduled Dale Comstock. I do need to confirm, like, get a secondary confirmation on it,

but for the end of Jim, he's writing a book about his freelancer days. Oh, is he? Yeah. That's awesome. Dale's a good man or genera. We also got Fred Galvin, who's a Marsock officer, another dude who served in Rangers, Special Forces and Mercy, and a former head. And, of CIA counterintelligence that's coming on in June. So that's going to be pretty cool. And then I'm still working on July and August. But we do have Jim Morris coming on in July, who was, he was a team leader in Vietnam, wrote for Soldier of Fortune magazine for many years.

And he has a book coming out about his experiences post-war. The book is about his time in Vietnam, but it's also about his time post-war. experimenting with LSD. Yeah. Which is funny that, you know, back then it was experimenting now is treatment for post-traumatic stress. I told him that and he was kind of like, what the hell? Like I had to do it illegally. Right, right.

And now it's like an actual thing. But so, yeah, it is very interesting. So we'll be talking to him about that this summer. So we're going to get us some questions real quick. Alejandro, thank you very much. if I remember right tasking for missions and Siege of Sotaph in Iraq

because of mandate or if they missed the water any mission near a body of water deeper than a shower stall went to the Navy Boys he said ha ha ha kidding was that a question I don't

That may have been a smart ass comment Yeah I appreciate it regardless Alejandro is a range or so Expect some heat KGM thank you very much look forward to reading your opus considering the

show that is current SMO wars around the world oh the show that is current okay any reflections in the book on lessons the war machine needs to learn or unlearn that has current relevance

relevance yeah I mean I I struggle with this one I'm not all the nice things about writing history is that you can kind of take cover in it

I don't have to, but if historians aren't going to, or I wouldn't even say I'm a historian, but I would say that, um, yeah, I think we're entering a new, a new epoch, but, you know, like every epoch, it's going to have, you know, traces of, uh, of what came before. And I, I know that we're going to make, you know, incredible mistakes in us. I mean, we're, we're entering a, you know, a new, a new era of proxy war. with you know I think a sort of a heightened risk of nuclear war I mean I don't and I don't know if that is because we You know we we haven't We don't have anybody in living memory that has experienced it you know seen you know the fire bombing of Tokyo or the you know the trauma that you know we inflicted on Vietnam and I mean we're This is real war. I mean yeah And this is war, you know, prosecuted by a country that doesn't have, clearly doesn't have, you know, the same values that, you know, the West has.

And they're, I mean, and they're, you know, he, you know, Putin has clearly telegraphed that, you know, he's willing to do things that we're not. So finding our way in that, that environment is going to be tricky. It's going to be tricky, not just for, you know, special operations and the SEAL teams and everybody else, but it's going to be tricky. for policymakers and everybody. Ben, I got a question on that. I mean, what do you think of some of these, some might even call them legacy capabilities, underwater demolitions, subsurface,

you know, rebreather systems or whatever it is, scuba systems, come and ashore, airborne, static line, airborne insertions, or even MFF, you know, free fall insertions. We've done very, very little of this in 20 years of war. and it could bring up the question, are these capabilities even relevant in modern warfare? Do we need to maintain these capabilities? Do they matter anymore?

Will they matter in a future war in the Pacific? Yes. I think they matter more now than ever. But I don't know how. I mean, I know that, hmm. The expectation that Army Special Operations developed after World War II is that we were always going to have a partner force, or not Army Special Operations, but Army, you know, the OSS operational groups and the Jetburgs, they always, they assume that we're going to have this partner. Partner force in any sort of country that we're going to invade, and we're going to have this, you know, ready population of. partisans to work with.

And they, you know, the Army Special Forces, they worked for 10 years until, you know, Vietnam came along. And they get to Vietnam and there's no, there's no partner force. There's no, and parts because, you know, the world had changed. You know, communism, you know, was a much more persistent, or had a much more persistent police state than, you know, Nazis did over occupied France. There's nobody that you're going to be able to mobilize. But in that period, they didn't necessarily, the skills that they had perfected, they didn't go

to waste or anything. They ended up just serving another mission. They ended up being valuable in another way. Now, I think, you know, naval special warfare is saying, that it's going to it's transitioning back to the water now you know we're going to get away from this counterterrorism you know mission we're going to transition back to the water it's a sort of self-serving I mean it makes sense to do it but it's a sort of self-serving um why we're still relevant yeah but I mean we're about to be we're we're our adversaries now all have you know huge naval presences or huge coastlines that you know I mean we and and huge you know

shipping footprints and everything else. Like I, I mean, I think the ability to, you know, drop people, you know, from a, you know, far away place to, you know, drop into the water and go someplace. It's more relevant now than it certainly was when I was, you know, working. Right. Now that we're dealing with near peers that actually can project naval power, have the ability to counter that in such a specialized way.

counter it but it'll be interesting to see what happens it'll be interesting to write the history of this period yeah

it's 25 years do you think there's a sequel to this book in the works from 1976 through the 80s 90s

and war on terror I have to go no I don't know I mean I am no there's not a sequel to that I think this book

hopefully this book stands alone. There's other books. I don't know what the other books are. I'm in a, you know, sort of a miserable time right now trying to figure out what the next book is. Like I, I think the worst thing that you can ever do is write a book. The only thing worse than that is to not write a book. Like I feel like now I'm sort of in a very, very anxious state at all times, because I don't have this, you know, this millstone around my neck. I got used to the millstone. I liked the millstone, and now I don't have it.

And I don't know that I'll, I don't know that I'll ever return to NSW as a topic, but I also said that I'd never write a book about NSW. Like I was always, like I said before, my, my passion, my interest was always that, you know, that block of European history from, you know, 1798 to 18. or 1918. But, you know, the way to ensure that I'll write another book about NSW is to say that I'll never do it. Right. Is there anybody in this book that you would want to write about that you feel that there's a story that needs to be told?

You know, lots of folks have asked me that. There are. There's probably fiction opportunities that I haven't thought of. And I've never written fiction. I'm not sure that I have the confidence to do it But I tried to leave everything on the field and even the stuff that I cut out like the you know there are sections there's 20 pages here 20 pages there that I would cut out and they were Brutal to cut out like losing a relative or not in a not but they were they were just they sucked He did so much work, you know

But I even in those parts that I ripped out, I tried to like just compress, compress, compress, like push all of that into, like, you know, if there were 20 pages of material, I tried to find the two sentences, you know, that were representative of those 20 pages, you know. Well, if not fiction, I mean,

would you ever, like, consider like a screenplay about one of these events that hasn't been told them? I'd be interested. I would talk to, person who did screenplays i'm not sure that i have the i don't have the chop i don't i i you know any dialogue in the in that book oh gosh hey if you're there's definitely yeah there's definitely there's definitely uh chapters in this book that could be movies no it sounds i mean there there there the udt chapters definitely it sounds like there's so many and and i i look

forward to reading the book and and um and there are so many fascinating stories in it it is sounds like there are a number of movies. We're sort of just scraping the surface, too, in this interview. There's a lot more in the book, and that's why people should go and pick it up. Yeah. You were gone when Jack said, but he said it's one of the best history books he's ever read. You know, and Jack reads a lot of history. Yeah, and there's, like I said, there's a lot in this book that I didn't know about before.

So, and as Ben pointed out, there's a lot of this is from primary sources that has not been published before. So it's worth picking up. So let's get to the other questions. I think that's it. Oh, really? Okay. Just thank you for your donation. Say great.

Oh, Alhanda dropped one. Yeah. What direction do you see the teams going, what their mission set will evolve into or go back to to include integration of cyber warfare capabilities at a platoon level? You can answer it a little bit of that. But is there anything you'd like to expand on? Oh, gosh. You know, I don't know what's, I don't know what's still. I don't know what's classified.

I don't know what. So the one opportunity that the book has given me has been to be able to go back and connect with the teams. And I've gotten to, you know, just such a great chance to go back and talk with guys and reconnect. And I want to be careful about not to say anything. Sure, sure, sure.

But I do, I mean, I, the question that he asked is the question that they're all asking. Right. And the one fascinating or the one thing that I learned about this institution is that it's very adaptable. Do you find that from the outside looking in, it seems as though the SEALs is the only special operations organization that consistently has the support of the parent force as opposed to being at odds with it because they're like they're the only unit that does anything like that right and I think that that has helped the SEAL teams time and time again like and I yeah what price tag can you put on that right it's never at the expense of the pay parent force. It's never at the expense of an infantry battalion or anything like that. It's

SEAL team stand alone and they have full support from their parent service. It's slightly different with the creation of SOCOM. You know, SOCOM has made, you know, the Navy sort of just like an administrative head of the SEAL teams as opposed to a, you know, like an actual parent parent command. But I think the interesting thing that's happening right now is that, you know, with this radical U-turn that Naval Special Warfare is undergoing under its current leadership, and I don't think it's a bad U-turn at all, I think it's just a, you know, it's a sign of the adversaries that we're facing.

Like, it is a, it's going to be a re, what happens? happens when two divorced people, you know, get remarried. It's going to be a remarriage of the Navy and the Navy SEALs. I mean, they're getting back together, you know, getting the band back. Getting back together again. Like, I mean, it's, I mean, there's a lot of opportunities for the fleet and the, and the SEAL team to be working together right now. And I think they will.

And I mean, I, I, I recently went to a lunch and, um, where i heard the commander of uh submarine forces speak and like the language that the uh that you know the they're they're using right now i mean the they're fully i mean the they're fully anticipating that they're going to be the the front line of you know any conflict yeah like the navy is not anticipating being a subordinate force yeah in any future conflict it's I mean, it makes sense why they think that. I mean, especially with technology developed the way it is. And you've got, and your two major adversaries have, you know,

the Chinese have a, you know, a fleet that dwarfs ours now, and the Russians have a submarine fleet that is, you know. It doesn't really dwarf us, though. Like, we have, like, what, how many aircraft carriers? They have one. We have, like, eight. That's an expeditionary capability. You're right, absolutely.

They can't project power the same way that we can. But as far as numbers of ships, they are... Yeah. And it's sort of like we talked about. Like, the seals are in a, you know, very... They're in a great position where there is, you know, nobody else... Where in the army you'll have S.F. Delta, you know, Rangers, and the conventional military. You know, all competing for the battle space.

the seal and the funding and the budget and the tech and everything else and the seals don't have that that kind of competition right now but i mean other branch or other special operations unit have had all the all those same advantages um at other times and our history and they've squandered it right so we'll see what you know nsw does so with your original with your grandmother's question and and sort of what drove you to write this book. In the research and the writing process, do you feel as though you've answered your question? Did you found it answered your question of what were the seals doing in inland Afghanistan? You can't ask that question. Four beers in. Fair enough. With the emotional connection, you want me to cry on camera? Yes, I think I've...

If you cry, I'll cry, will I cry? No, I... Yes, I'm incredibly proud of the book. I'm incredibly proud of the, you know, and I'm, I'm, I'm incredibly proud to have brought all of these stories, you know, back to, you know, I didn't know them. I know that, you know, my readers didn't know them. I mean, I got a, somebody sent me a direct message on my Twitter account today. yesterday about their uncle, whose name was Seymour Owens, and he was the commander of the USS Norman Scott. Why that's relevant is the invasion of Tinian, the UDT-7 was conducting a diversionary reconnaissance to draw Japanese attention away from the actual landing beaches.

And UD-T-7's role was incredibly important. They had to swim ashore. They had to blow up obstacles. They had to make it seem like the U.S., the Marines, were going to be coming ashore at this beach. The only defense, well, not the only defense, but one of the defensive tools that the UDT-7 had was the USS Colorado, which was a battleship,

and it's firing its guns into the Japanese shore guns. right into the Japanese shore defenses. And in the process of that, Japanese guns managed to hit the Colorado right amid ships killing something like 47 of her sailors, sinking. The Colorado has to, you know, get away from the battle. They've got to get out of the,

you know, the range of the enemy's guns. There was a destroyer skipper there, Seymour Owens, Commander Seymour Owens. He saw what was happening to the U.S. is Colorado. He was the, uh, brother-in-law of Draper Kaufman, who is the commander of UDT-5, he knows that the UDTs are now exposed, they're ready to take all of this fire in the water. He also knows that the USS Colorado is sinking and has to get out of there.

So what he does is he sails his ship, the Norman Scott, in between the Japanese guns and the USS Colorado, puts his ship in between them. And in the process, both defends UDT-7 and saves the enemy, and saves the gun. the Colorado and Jap, he's killed. He's killed in the process, so we're something like 40 of his sailors. And being able

to, and this guy, he texted me on this app, and he's like, that was my uncle. I never knew why he, I knew that he died at Tinian. I didn't know why he died. And just the fact that I was able to find that story and put that in this book.

and then give some closure to. Yeah, you never know how these stores are going to affect people. It's incredible. But it's, I don't know. I mean, I don't want to get the terminology wrong, but it seems to transcend the bounds of, like, a historian and, like, you're, like, an archaeologist, like, you're digging up the, like, you're, it's a living history.

Yeah, you're presenting these things that may have been lost to history. had nobody ever written this book or looked for those things. And it seems like there are so many of those types of stories in this book. And the, I don't know, the honor that you've given these people that maybe, you know, deserve to be acknowledged and have not been up into this point is just amazing. I do. They've been, yeah. But yeah, it's a huge honor.

And I'm proud to do it. was I miss doing it and hopefully someday we get to do it again. Yeah, and this book is a real credit to not just the SEALs, not just the Navy, but I think the U.S. military as a whole. And again, I mean, I think I've recommended it like 10 times on this interview so far. But again, hope you guys will check it out. Here it is by Water Beneath the Walls. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you, Ben, for joining us in studio. Absolutely. We're not getting paid to plug them tonight. but Jack's eating some boikis right now. People tell me it's unprofessional to eat on the podcast. Do you like Bill Tong? I don't know what that is. Do you like beef turkey?

I do. You will love Bill Tongue. We have the chili and the traditional. The chili's hot. It'll light you up. But you will love this. It's so much better than beef jerky. Thank you guys for having me on.

This is fantastic. Thank you. Thank you for coming in. Thank you, everybody. We really appreciate it.