The Team House - War Reporter on Op Red Wings and Extortion 17 | Ed Darack | Ep. 210

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

Writer / Photographer Ed Darack has covered the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment since their pre-Afghan mountain warfare training in the spring of 2005 and has stayed with them through their subsequent deployment to Afghanistan and tour in Iraq’s Anbar province. He is the author of numerous articles on military issues for such publications as Smithsonian Air and Space, the Marine Corps Gazette, and Proceedings of the Naval Institute Press, among others. Darack continues to write articles on a broad spectrum of subjects and is the author of three previous books. His photography has been used by National Geographic, Outside Magazine, The Sunday London Times, the BBC, Time, ABC, NBC, IBM, Volkswagen, and Bank of America, among many other editorial and corporate clients. check out Ed here: ⬇️ http://darack.com/ Today's Sponsors: Hello Fresh ⬇️ https://www.HELLOFRESH.com/teamhouse16 Get 16 free meals plus free shipping by hitting the link! https://www.HELLOFRESH.com/teamhouse16 To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #operationredwings #extortion17Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, covert odds, espionage, the team house, with your hopes, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey folks, welcome to episode 210 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave. We got Dee back there in the shadows producing. And our guest on the show is Ed Derek.

He is a journalist who has worked on some pretty big stories, some pretty big book projects on Operation Red Wings, on the Extortion 17 Crash, and more recently a book about the Marines in Anbar Province. So, Ed, thank you so much for joining us on the show tonight. Thank you guys so much for having me. I appreciate it. It's been a few years since we've spoken. And it's, I haven't, actually, I haven't done this in a while. So it's nice to, you know, I'm a little dusty, a little rusty, I guess. But, you know, it's nice to be here. And it's always good to speak about some of the more interesting facets of recent military history, recent American military history. Real quick, we want to thank our sponsor, HelloFresh, for supporting the show.

Go to hellofresh.com slash T-Mouth16 and use code T-Mouse16 for 16 free meals. So, Ed, could you start off telling us a little bit about your background and sort of your entry into journalism and doing all this embedded reporting? Okay, I'm not really a journalist. I've never been classically trained as one. I tell people, you know, technically I'm a writer and an independent writer and a photographer. I do a lot of things. I have a lot of interest, but, you know, journalism is one of the areas that I focused on. And it's pretty simple to me.

You know, you find a topic and you learn about it comprehensively. And, you know, you report on it. You make, you know, you create a media product. For me, it's been magazine articles, books, and a lot of things. times, you know, photographs to go along with it because I really, you know, I never worked for any media organization. I was always independent. So when I was in Afghanistan or Iraq, it was, the organization was Ed Derrick Photography. You know, that was the, that was the organization. And then out of that came magazine articles, books, photographs, all sorts of stuff, you know,

that was distributed through Getty images and Corbus. And not on their editorial side. on the creative side. So it was an interesting, I did it, had a very interesting, unique angle on everything. And then I would focus on, because I was my own business, my own deal, I was able to focus specifically on stories much longer than I could have had I worked for someone else. So I was unconstrained. So then I, of course, forged, had alliances for the book about Operation Red Wings and Operation Whalers, that book was published by Penguin, big publisher. For Extortion 1-7, that was, that book was done through Smithsonian books. I had a previous relationship with Smithsonian as a photographer for the magazine,

and then a contributing editor, writer, and photographer for Aaron Space. And then for the Anbar book, that was with Heshet Books and other one of the big publishers. So I am a journalist. I do journalism. I tell people I do journalism, although I'm not, you know, I'm not a classically trained journalist. I just think it's simple. You know, you just go for, you learn about the topic as, as comprehensively as possible. You know, like you may not want to talk about, you may not need to talk about the Magtaf, a Marine Air Ground Task Force, but you should know about it if you're writing about Marines. So it's stuff like that. So, Ed, growing up, did you want to be a photographer or a writer? What led you into this career path to begin with? Yeah, I mean, I was fascinated with both writing and photography growing up in geography, really. I'm a classically trained geographer.

I was my degree from UC Davis. And I got into photography in, high school really and that was to document climbing climbing trips that I took and then you know I followed in the footsteps of some outdoor photographers like Galen Rao specifically and that just you know I have a lot of interest in many different topics so as a photographer who was everything from combat to nature to flowers to energy to nuclear power fat plants and then in terms of that Same with, you know, photography was for military. It was just specific to infantry or Marine Corps.

It was aviation and a lot of, you know, different, you know, their operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. And, you know, the aviation piece, of course, led me to a lot of different topics to include even aviation-based collections of intelligence. And that actually worked in well with, worked in critically with the experience. distortion 17 projects. So it's just a lot of different topics that I've been interested in. And it's a blessing and a curse because you know you want to pursue all of them, right? Like I've written articles about, let's see, about photographing a space shuttle launch. And then an article, you know, articles about unmanned aircraft systems. And then an article about the, the Cacho del Diablo amount.

in the geography articles. So it's all over the place. And it's just, it's just a vast area of interest. And, you know, so I've sort of, I guess, attacked all these different specific ones. And you just do it. When you do it on your own, you can really commit a lot of time and resources to it. And I did that specific with Red Wings, with the extortion 117, and then with the book on Ambar province, because, you know, I went there and I was with the Marines on the ground. So I think that's a very long way around the barn, as a friend of mine would say, a very long-winded explanation. It's, I have a lot of it.

I like to explain things and I like to learn about things and explain things in text primarily, but also with photographs to complement the text and also maps too. I mean, part of my thing is making maps, although that's not something I talk about a whole lot. It works. So was the photography angle? what got you interested in the embedded reporting overseas? That, it's a really interesting story because I, you know, I come from a mountaineering background and that was, you know, I would take a camera along to photograph mountains as I was climbing

and, you know, up, like a mountain McKinley in Alaska and Mount Logan and Canada, some of the Sierra peaks. And then I'd always been interested in Afghanistan and always been interested in, in the military. And I got this opportunity to go to the Mount Lawfare Training Center outside of Bridgeport. They say Bridgeport. It's really closer to Colville and Walker, California, but it's really because they call it Bridgeport, California. And I did that in 2005, and I met up with a Marine battalion there in March of 2005,

second Italian, third Marines. And I went there. I was actually just, you know, my media outlet for that was Ginnett, newspapers. They were interested in that and I said, okay, I'll go. And I spent two weeks there, which is a long time. And I really liked it a lot. And they said, why don't you come with this to Afghanistan? And at this time, they were planning Operation Red Wings. And I thought, okay. And so I owned a house. You know, I had a girlfriend who wanted to get married and I had a dog. And I sold the house and got rid of the car. And she got my girlfriend and got the dog. And I went back to MWTC and

the summer and I was there following the mountain leader course and I learned about what it's like to be due war, you know, to undertake combat operations in the mountains and the training environment. And then I went to Afghanistan. And that's how it started with that. And it just kept going because it worked well. I worked, I integrated well with marine combat units. And from there, it went to Iraq. It also went to aviation.

You know, I embedded, did an amazing embed in Iraq in 2007 with the Second Marine Air Force. going forward where we actually integrated media ops with combat operations, which had never really been done before. We were dropping the ramp on a C-130 during combat operations when the jets would come to refuel and photographing them. And we were actually augmenting the operation to accommodate that, which was totally insane, but they did it, and I did it, and it worked. You know, so, but that's, that's, that's, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the contrary point. You know, it's sort of almost stream of consciousness, but a little bit more thoughtful. You know, it's a little bit more as, as you're doing this sort of stuff, I mean, as with your background as a writer and everything, I mean, do you have a sense that like you're capturing history

in the making or is it more like I'm in the moment doing my job and maybe in hindsight, it really comes into a fuller picture. Like, wow, that was a big thing. That happened. And both, I applied concepts and now and techniques that I had honed as a, you know, in the world of photography, you know, I'm technically a rights managed stock photographer and a magazine photographer. And rights managers, there's rights management and royalty. This is getting into the sticks a little bit. But, you know, really I wanted to create not just really beautiful, great images, but ones that were relevant and used. usable. So they weren't really photojournalistic in terms of capturing the moment. They were, it captured the moment, but I wanted to do it in a way that was just really beautiful. And that's

odd to think about in terms of combat or one of my topics that I really pursued was energy. Like, I thought, wow, like an oil well pump jack at dawn is a really beautiful thing. If you capture it just right, And those photographs ended up on covers of magazines and the New York Times and the covers of books. And the photographs I took a war instead of just being tossing the dustbin, like, oh, yeah, these are really great photojournalistic things, you know, works. They were on lots of book covers, you know, New York Times best sellers of the book cover about Pat Tillman by John Crackar. And that was my photo on the cover. And there was, you know, just a lot of books, a lot of magazine covers. others, a Hallmark card even.

So a lot of people don't understand just for the folks out there, Ed, that like, there are people like you who take these pictures and go into like big photo libraries that you can subscribe to, like AP has one, Reuters has one, and then journalists, authors, whoever, you know, if they pay for it, they can take that image off for the library and use it in their own journalistic or academic works or whatever it is. I take it your work ended up in some of those libraries. Yeah, but they weren't like the editorial ones. They were on the creative side.

So that's the, that's the thing. So I ended up getting, you know, instead of just having images, and this isn't just for military images, this is for a lot of different types of imagery. They ended up in ad campaigns and, you know, posters, a bunch of different things. because, you know, it's just, I don't want to say they're better than the, you know, the photojournalistic, the editorial stuff. But the creative side is just a little bit, you know, I would never submit an image unless it was beautiful and balanced with light, you know, and, you know, a really well-balanced image.

And I remember thinking, okay, here I am, we're about to get shot at, and I'm like setting up a photograph, like not just recording it, I'm like moving myself around to get the guy's feet just right. There's a picture I have. It's Afghan fighter at dawn, and it was a silhouette, and his feet are right on top of Satal's saw right exactly where that ambush happened. But I also, you know, if my head was up about three more inches, he would have been visually chopped off, which would have been a fine picture. But this way you see the whole person.

He's holding the AK over his shoulder and the lights just reflecting just right off the, you know, off the, off the rock. And then Brett Baylor's like, all right, we got to blow the cave now. And I'm like, hold on. Because this is where the, it's where Al-Qaeda had attacked the base I was at before I got there with mortars. And they found the mortar plate and tube. And they're going to, they just had a bunch of the C-4 and they're going to blow it up. Like, hold on. Let me get this photograph.

Let me get the photograph. So that's, so it's interesting that you're, you ask that because it's almost like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Like I'm supposed to be there and not interfering with something. But I am interfering because I'm setting up these shots. I'm like, I'm never going to have this opportunity again. So let's do it. You know, just hold on. We can blow up the cave 30 seconds later. Right. Come on. You know, so they blew the cave up. And, and, and, but, you know, that also was the case. I mentioned the photo shoot in Iraq, we called the Marine Air Wing. It was Air War in Iraq was the title for Smithsonian.

And, you know, a lot of times you'll see really cool air-to-air pictures where the ramp, you know, you have an aircraft where you're not shooting through window. You're shooting out in space. Like you're right there. You know, the ramp is down. But to get a really authentic image, a lot of people don't realize this. But if you look at the bombs on a jet, they have bombs, and they've got two yellow stripes, that means they're live. And so all these photographs that I have, I mean, and we were doing the same thing.

I mean, there's combat going on on the ground. These guys have to refuel. We're augmenting the operations of the tanker. They actually gave me temporary secret clearance to, like, work. And it was really wild what we did. And nothing happened. Nothing was compromised on the ground. Thank God.

but we would, these jets would, they would tank, and then we had like 30 seconds and I would be yelling at the crew chief. He'd be yelling at the pilots. They would be talking to the jets, getting everything just right. It was the same type of thing. So it was photojournalism. I was documenting it, but I was also directing it a little bit, you know. So, I mean, I wasn't directing the combat, but just how the jets were. I was like, okay, we need you guys to break outside, like right now, go.

And so, and it was, so they're, again, kind of patting myself on the back. I don't want to come off as that, but they're beautiful images. They're in war zones. During war, it's real. You know, we're not over the Mojave Desert to say, okay, let's do this again. But, you know, that's, again, a long way around the barn to answer the question. How are... I was documenting it, but it's, they're timeless, you know, because they're good images.

How are the military or how is the military, you know, the personnel when you're trying to line up those shots? Are they generally patient with you? Are they like, fuck off? Like, we're doing this thing. Yeah, well, it's the Marine Corps, man. And I love the Marine Corps. I have no qualms saying that, you know. This is me not being a journalist, you know?

Like, you're supposed to be objective. I love the Marine Corps. I've had some amazing times with the Marines. And, you know, a general, the Air Wing General for that shoot, they, it was my idea. I came, I was six weeks on the ground with an infantry unit, and that was rough up on Heditha. And I got back and I was, you know, like, you know, met up with the PAO guys, awesome group, awesome couple of guys. And I said, okay, can I go up in a C-130 and, you know, get some shots?

And so I did. And then I thought, God, this would be great. you know, to do an embed with an airman, because the embeds always go over the ground. And they're like, well, why don't we talk to the MAG CEO and the general, the Mags of Marine Air Group? So the next thing you know, we had this thing lined up, this project lined up, Smithsonian located. And a couple of weeks later, I was back in Iraq. I was like, I'm never coming back to Iraq.

I'm out of here. And then I'm coming back. And this time, instead of being on the ground. And it was interesting because I got the photograph. I asked the pilots, hey, can we go to this one bridge and this one area? I get the photograph from the air. There was some personal reasons of one of the Marines I was friends with had been killed by an IED. And so I was able to get, you know, I don't want to get too into it.

But for the family, I thought it would be, they would want to see, you know, where this was and photographed that spot from the ground and from the air. But, you know, we did it. And for the most part, the pilots were into it. it. They liked it. And for the most part on the ground, in combat, I knew my limits. You know, you're in combat so you can get killed, right? So you can't do stupid things. But I did some stupid things like, all right, I'm going to go out in front of you guys. Like you guys are patrolling. And this is like the lead patrol and I'm going to go in front of you. All right.

Okay. Fine. Don't get killed. You know, don't get shot. You know, so it's, Don't step on an ID. But that's, it just, you know, it just sort of, it's, it's the moment. You have to be hyper aware, I think, to make sure that there's so many things going on. It's so dynamic. And I love that. I thrive on. I think you guys get that because I was never, you know, shoot, move and communicate.

I was photographed move and communicate, you know, it was, it was, and not get in the way of the shooters, movers and communicators. and not problematic. And, you know, and the other thing, too, is, I mean, you're with Americans at war. So if they had, if they needed some mortar rounds to be carried or I think we're far enough away from when all this happened, I'm not, no one's going to do. You've got to do you, you've got to do you, I mean, I carried that stuff, you know. I was, I'm not going to say I was part of the unit, but, you know, I was embedded with them. And, you know, and then at night when there's stuff, you know, people are on post or sleeping in them, like, we got. got a bunch of steaks here that are going bad. Let's cook them and eat them. No one's doing it

because they're all exhausted. So I did it. Yeah. Stuff like that. That helps, you know, not to say, I'm going to do this to help myself, but you just do it, right? Yeah. You know, it's just, you're kind of there like, oh, everybody's maxed out on their combat loads. I'm not. Okay, I don't have a combat load. Well, you do now. Here, take the ball. Here's the base plate. Yeah. Well, I never carried a base plate or two, but. I carried the rounds, you know, so. Yeah. So, sorry, go ahead.

No, no, I just want to make sure I answer your question. I can, I go off on all these angles. Yeah, yeah. No, that's great. We just need to take a second to give a shout out to our sponsor, HelloFresh. Flavor is in full bloom at HelloFresh. Enjoy the taste of spring with chef crafted recipes featuring ripe seasonal ingredients delivered right to your door. When the spring sunshine is calling your name, don't call for takeout because takeout is expensive and fattening.

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So, Ed, back to you. why don't we start or get into a little bit here about your sort of entryway into Operation Red Wings? When did that come up on your radar? When did it become a story for you that you started covering? Well, like I said, I was at Mount Warfare Training Center in March of 2005. And that was right around the time, you know, when I was with the Marine Battalion, they were getting ready to go over there, do what they call the Rip Toa, really. in place transfer of authority. They're ad von, advanced echelon, which is, you know,

now we're going to get into the fun stuff like the initialisms, the portmanteaus, and the acronyms of the DOD, you know, advanced echelon, you know, all this stuff. But yeah, the, it was, I hadn't happened yet. At that point, it was still called Operation Stars, 3-3, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, the sister battalion 2-3, the ones that I met in the MWTC and then embedded with in September and October of 2005 after it happened. They had been planning it, but they were feeding all the information back to the battalion,

and so they were getting ready to jump in and just take off running as they wanted to keep the operational tempo as they had established it, as 3-3 had established it, which was one battalion-level operation per month. You know, it wasn't really that kinetic. It was mostly focused on a lot of coin, a lot of counterinsurgency. And, you know, they had, they knew about this guy, Ahmad Shah. He had popped up on their radar. And I do have some very interesting information about him, too, that I discovered that I haven't published. I'll mention that later.

But so then I, you know, I spent the summer up in the mountains with the Marines. I don't want to say I was training with them, but I was covering them training what's called the mountain leader course. Very, very difficult course, six-week course. So I followed along with them and then in the, you know, sold my house, all that kind of stuff. And sit went over to Afghanistan and met up with the Marines. And I went out to a base called Camp Blessing, which was really way out there. And it was, you know, some people say, well, you're not lucky to. go out there, but I was very fortunate because that was only seven miles from where all this

had happened. And the Marines who were there were, they were experts in that terrain. The platoon that was there was Echo One, Second and Italian, Third Marines, Echo Company, First Platoon. I'm saying that out of order, but, you know, that's, that's, that's Echo One. And it was Pat Kinzer, who's now a really good friend of mine. He was the platoon commander. And so I was embedded with his platoon. And, you know, I learned all, you know, at the time, you know, I was like, well, I'm going to write, you know, photographing you guys, photographing the situation. And I'm, you know, I want to write a book about your experiences. And I eventually did that.

And, you know, the focus was Red Wings and Whalers. The book that I wrote, Victory Point, you know, I laid everything out about Red Wings. You know, all the basic, you know, there's some stuff that I learned after. after the fact that would have supplemented that and get into some of that here. But, you know, the step book was not specific to Red Wings. It was included in Red Wings, and the big victory was Whalers, and they were going after the same guys, and they, you know, they ran them out of town, so to speak, and they were never able to reestablish what they, you know,

any type of disruption of coalition forces or government of Afghanistan, and initiatives. Like they got the elections in September. So that's how that went. But that's what got me, you know, that's what I just going out there and being on the ground. There's nothing like with the Marine Corps and I've embedded with other units,

you know, some really wonderful units throughout the entire Department of Defense. It just doesn't, you can't do it by phone, you know, you can't just call these people up and say, oh, I want to write a book about Red Wings And being there on the ground with them, the people who were up and down those valleys during that period of time, during Red Wings, during Operation Whalers, getting shot at, shooting back, doing call for fires, calls for fire, doing all that stuff, Medevac. And then seeing it myself, like, you know, seeing an actual nine line being delivered by a joint term, actually a fact, joint terminal attack controller. the Marine Corps, who's a pilot, they just call FAC, Port Air Controller.

But, you know, and it was that I, like I was talking about earlier, you may not need to know, like what I just said, the difference between a J-TAC and a FACC. Most people couldn't tell you that. But I know about it because I was there and I learned about it, and it's important to learn about all these, what some people might say is minutia, but what I think of as granules into a very strong foundation. because then you don't do things like say, oh, the soldiers from the second battalion of the third Marine regiment, you know, like their Marines are not soldiers. And similarly, you know, you don't say a pilot is a grunt, you know, it's just not, that's, there's certain, there's just certain things.

And just that knowledge and just the demonstration of having taken the time to learn about the history, about the operations. Like if I went up to, I guess, joint-based Lewis McCord, that's where 75th is based. Is that correct? The second Ranger Battalion is based out there. Okay. If I went up there, I would just say, I know nothing I'm going to learn about because I don't know anything about the Rangers. You know, and that's what I do. The first thing, if I go into a situation, you know, I'm not going to be Mr. Ego guy and say, oh, I've written these books.

It's like, okay, I know nothing. And I want to learn. and I want to learn it from the people who do it, the practitioners. And then you learn and then you, boy, do you get a lot of information and the doors open and you end up being able to create a really good, solid work. And again, I'm pat myself on the back right now, but to this day, and a lot of people have tried, let me tell you, I should show you some of the emails, people that did not like, you know, by far, the vast majority of people love the book,

but there's people who didn't like me explaining that there were not 400 Taliban, you know, it was seven or eight guys, you know, where does that come from? It comes from, you know, being there, looking very closely at all the information that I was given. And to this day, no one's poked a hole in that book. I can point out some errors that I made, you know, But in terms of the overall big picture of Red Wings and certainly of Whalers, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's stood the test of time. And I've seen a lot of other authors come in. And it seems like, you know, it's a cottage industry. Red Wings, writing about Red Wings is a cottage industry. It's almost like a ride of passage. It's just like, oh, yeah, I've written an article in Operation Red Wings or these, there's people out there, and this is funny. They actually would go to a website that I made.

to promote the book that was very comprehensive. And then maybe they would enter, they would call me up or email me. And then they would write an article about my article. And then they would publish that. And then somebody would, somebody else would cite that. And so now they don't have to cite me. Oh, yeah, I wrote this article.

And so they're an expert. I mean, this has happened a lot. I'm sure it's happened to you. You know, it's really funny. And it's happened, not specific to Red Wings, but I wrote an article. It's called Welcome to Yodaville. So back in the early, the late 80s, a guy named Floyd Usory, call sign Yoda, a whiskey

cobra pilot based out of N-Case Yuma, conceptualized having an urban target complex out in the desert. And now they have, it's called Range 2301R UTC, Urban Target Complex. And they dragged a bunch of Connix boxes, and they stacked them four high. and they did this earlier on, like in maybe 2000. I said it wasn't the late 80s, late 90s, he thought about that, but it's called Yodaville, right? And so I wrote an article about it. And a couple of years after that, some blog picked up on it.

And then the Daily Mail wrote an article about my article. They didn't even like go and do it themselves. They just wrote the article. And of course they didn't get fed. They said, oh, it's the Air Force. No, it's the Marine Corps. Soldiers. Well, yeah, there's no.

soldiers in the Air Force. Yeah, the daily, the daily mail's done that to be a few times. And like, everything and it's wrong. Like I say the pictures are wrong, everything's messed up. Yeah. But I guess to get to, this is sort of demonstrating like if you take the time and, you know, you do actual real research, which is dangerous when you're writing about war, it's like dangerous to do real research because you have to be shot at and risk getting blown up, right? And so, you know, you can't do it by phone. And you have to go there and do it. And not only can you go out there and be a sort of battlefield tourist and be like, yeah, I'm out here with the Marines, it's awesome.

You know, you have to do the background work, which is academic type stuff. Like you have to understand that, for instance, you know, on a PEC-16 or, you know, there's a million different ones, that's not a laser designator. That's a laser pointer. That's a sparkle. The Jets have a, you know, a targeting pot as a designator. How does that work? How does that work to build situational awareness? What is that?

What's the kill chain? How does that function from a guy on the ground with a PEC-16 pointing at something, doing a talk on with the J-TAT? You know, it goes on and on. You have to learn all that. And a lot of this stuff that I just, you know, sort of touched on now, it doesn't, you know, you're not going to maybe put that in a book, but the fact that you know it and you've been in that, and you've had that foundation, that granularized foundation that I talked about.

That's that's real journalism to me, right? That's, I'm not, and nobody taught that to me. Yeah. They actually, journalist classes have actually had me come in and they'll ask me, like, tell us, and I'll tell them that. And it, it's not a very realistic way to go about things because it's so expensive. Right. I will fund it. Like, I funded it. Okay, I'll do it. I'll fund it. Not a problem. And in the long run, from a business standpoint, we're not here to talk about business.

It paid off, but it's still, you really have to believe in what you're doing, and you really have to. And of course, down the line, you can take those lessons and apply to other things, and I do that to this day. I mean, some of the other work that I'm doing, you really want to found everything. You really want to have a solid foundation. And with the military, it's not just guys crushing plates, as you know, and going out and like killing bad guys and stacking bodies. It is an immensely complex world that the Department of Defense has, I mean, it keeps getting better. It keeps getting more refined. But wow, is it an amazing?

It is, you know, from the C5, now they call it C5 I-Star. They've added cyber to that mix. The strategic backbone, the C-5 I-Star backbone, that all the way down to the, you know, to the operational level and then down to the tactical level. and how all that functions and how it fluidly works together to learn about that stuff. It does not take, it takes years, you know. Yeah. It takes years. So tell us about Operation Red Wings and what your findings were.

What really happened that day based on your research? Well, so when I wrote the book, I, you know, I had some after action reports. The book came out in April 9th or 10th, 2009, and then the soft cover came out a year later. And, you know, I mean, I interviewed a lot of people. I tried to get in touch with Naval Special Warfare. And this was before lone survivor came out. And, you know, I just got stoned oil and I thought, okay, that's fine. You know, the focus is really, you know, it isn't just Red Wings.

It's just this progression. This, you know, it started with Serbets. Dying 3rd Marines and Operation Mavericks and Operation Celtics and those guys were up there in the Corrigal Valley in the wintertime getting inserted doing ramp down inserts like there's some great pictures that I don't know if they're still around this is almost 20 years ago now these Marines running out the back ramp of a of a CH 47 and it's just basically a hovering there and these guys are getting out and they're staying up there you know I want to give 3-3 they're due and they were up there for not months, but weeks on in caves and like in February. I mean, so I take it from that and I move it through to the pre-deployment training. And then, you know, then we go to, you know, Red Wings and then Operation Whalers, which is, you know, the ultimate victory. But the, you know, the information came from the Marine Corps and then from after actions

that some, you know, Naval Special Warfare, AR, summary of actions, you know, let's just call it material that I was able to source. And it was straightforward. You know, they got ambushed. And, you know, when you're in the mountains and you get, you get, you know, you get interlocking fires from a superior position with P.K. I mean, I've been, I've actually experienced that. I can say, you know, I've been shot at. And one valley over during Operation Pill when I was at the Marines. And I tell you what, it's an effective way to ambush people, you know. And they used me as an aiming point because this is I'll admit this big dummy no body armor uh Nikon f6 with a flash to do fill flash out there doing fill flash and then the next thing you know like

you know you know explain to people it's like over six inches it's whizzing under six inches it's snapping and then you start hearing that and then the muzzle and I was like oh boy and so you know But I got to experience what that was like getting shot at with a PKM and not getting mortared and not RPGs coming down. And that's what these guys had. I mean, it doesn't take 400 guys, as you know, it just takes a few guys on superior terrain, just, you know, a general endpoint. And it, it, they, you know, the specifics of who made the phone call and this and that and who was in this part. didn't really matter to me when I was writing book. It was they got inserted.

They got tracked. You know, it was fine fixed. F2. Find fixed. Track target and gauge assessed. The enemy ran through the kill chain, right? Fine. They found them.

They fixed them. Track them. Targeted them. F2T2E3, right? Find fixed finish. Yeah. Well, okay. That's an abbreviated version.

One that I know is find, fix, track, target, engage, assess, F2T2EA. Yeah, so that's what they did. They, they ran through it. And Nicholas Moore's book does a great job and amazing job. I love that book. He's great. And he, you know, he summarized it very well. I mean, they found the fast row, right? They had to jettison it. You know, if you interview who I was explaining, talking about before, you can get into that. I have great detail, you know, about why. why they did that. I mean, they, their imagery wasn't that, they misinterpreted the imagery, and they didn't bring a long enough fast-ups. They had to drop in below the treetops, and it got snagged,

and then they had to jettison it, and they got out of there. So then that's, you know, but it wasn't just that, that gave them, you know, that tipped them off, that allowed them to find and fix on them. But that, that was one, you know, the footprints and everything. Of course, to helicopters. That Chinook is kind of loud. But anyway, so I covered that and I think I did a very good job of it. And, you know, to this point, to this, I didn't get into the specifics of the Navy SEAL planning. And I learned about that later and I can explain some of that. That's never been published before. Yeah, yeah, I'd love to hear about it. So, well, we want to do it right now. Sure. I mean, I can. Whichever. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, I, there's a lot of stuff I'm not going to talk about.

I'll just say that the parents of one of the Navy SEALs, they got in touch with me, wonderful people. They felt that the Navy side of the story, they felt that I'm not saying this is how it is. They felt that this person, this seal who had been killed, did not have been, his actions weren't portrayed accurately in the book, loan survivor or the movie loan survivor. And so that opened up a lot of interesting possibility, you know, a lot of interesting interviews. I worked on a project with a wonderful journalist, a real journalist, somebody who's been classically trained in who is great, Ross Schneiderman. We ended up not publishing this. It was for a very large publication and we ended up not publishing it. But for, you know, we were contracted, paid, but they didn't

publish it because the portion of the publication shut down. And that's fine. But anyway, I got to interview, now I got to interview a lot of the seals who are involved in this, who weren't killed. And probably the biggest thing that I learned was, I'll tell this in a second, one of the big questions was, why did they send in basically a fire team? Like in the Marine Corps, you know, it's like a fire team is three Marines plus the fire team leader four guys you know four of those plus the squad leaders of squad you would never go into a situation like that you would have to be really a really good squad to go in as a 13 man group oops and and and they went in as a as a fire team and a lot of people were always wondering, like, why did they do that and what was the point? And why did they make

that planning decision? Well, as it turns out, they had planned to send in essentially a squad. They had, they wanted three groups of four guys dispersed through the mountain. And had they had that, that we wouldn't be talking right now. It would have been just another unknown combat operation. You know, that decision was made. And it was a approved by the SOTF. Well, that specific decision I don't believe would have been approved by the SOTA, but the KONOP, right? And I don't have direct experience with concepts of operations and approval processes with hire you do, I assume, and how that works. But, you know, when you're applying, you know, when you're applying like the 160th and all these other different capabilities and assets,

you it needs to be signed off by, you know, C.J. Sotom Alpha at the time. Fulberg, Colonel, I think, or maybe a one-star. I can't remember. But so that was the big, you know, I mean, you want to talk about that? Yeah, I mean, why, why, why, why end up going with four instead of the, instead of three separate teams? Well, that's a great, that's a $64,000 question, Jack, you know, I mean, I mean, it's just like, I, I think this is my, opinion and my just guessing they either didn't have the manpower or the other soft units didn't want to work with them and provide that. Those are those two options.

Or the third option is they really thought that that was a viable option and that going as a bigger operational footprint because as you know, in those mountains or the hills have eyes there, right? It's very, you know, every person that you add on to a unit that's moving in that terrain, it really, you know, it's not an exponential increase of signature, you know, like, okay, you're, say you're like the sniper team that would go through there. A sniper team, I think, was typically, I think it was four guys. I don't know the table of organization of a Marine sniper scout sniper team. I probably should know that. I think it's around four guys.

Shooter, spotter, Corman, saw gunner. Does that sound right? I mean, a sniper spotter team for sure, but it makes sense that as the war went on, they augmented that and went in a little heavier than normal. Yeah, when they now, when this team, the sniper team, who was going to do this originally, they had planned it with six guys. So shooter, spotter, Corman, sawgunner, 60-millimeter mortarman. And I think I don't, I want to, you know, this is me making this up probably a 240 gunner.

I kind of don't think so. That's too heavy of a gun. But I think it was definitely six guys, you know, and those are, those are extraordinarily knowledgeable, skilled. They were there. They have been operating in that terrain for months. They knew it very well. They weren't just like, hey, we just got over here from, you know, damn neck Virginia, you know, or Coronado.

You know, they had been there for months. And so that, you know, and they also weren't going to get, I'm kind of jumbling this up a little bit. The original plan that Marines had, they were going to have the six-man team for the R&S portion for phase zero shaping, walk in from waterport. Yeah. So it's not, not jump in in a very noisy helicopter, you know,

And the 160, those guys are great, you know, like all Army aviation are wonderful. They're very professional and, you know, they're amazing pilots. You can be as amazing as you can be, you're not going to like fly in a certain way that masks the sound. I mean, you can fly tactically and you can sort of mask that sound a little bit, but, you know, you're not being tactical at all by by opening an operation with a Chinook when you're within a mile of. population that has been known to be alive with the enemy. I mean, that's just not. So, you know, I'm not going to get, I don't know, I don't have visibility on had they thought about walking in.

I don't know about that. But had they put, you know, basically a squad and not a fire team on the ground, yeah, we wouldn't be having this conversation because they would have had, you know, fire support, you know, even if it was like just, you know, direct fire support with 556 or, you know, I don't know what seals carry with them. I don't know. I don't think they, I don't know if they carry back then. They carry moors or whatever. But I mean, like one 60 millimeter mortar, that will wake someone up and be like,

all right, we're done. No more ambush. You know, 60 millimeter more is like, you know, a firecracker compared to a 120 or a 105 artillery. But still, it's like, okay, these guys are shooting back at us. We're done. We're out of here. They would have broke contact and tick over.

Right. But that's, that was probably one of the. that was probably like the biggest thing for me because I was mostly a lot of people are interested in like, you know, who made the phone call, you know, who the medal of honor and all this kind of stuff. And I don't care about any of that. I mean, it's just, you know, I don't, it's not, you know, I'm much more almost clinical about it. Like I was interested in how did the ambush take place? What set the stage for it? You know, what was the, what was the table of our organization for the specific operating? how did it evolve? What was the intel? Who were the people involved with this? You know, what were the fire support plans? Those are other things that were,

that were, I can tell you for sure, we're overlooked fire support. Like, you know, that's, you can't, you can't go outside the wire without a fire support plan. And you, in your research, that part was overlooked? Oh, absolutely. The Opso operations officer for second battalion, I actually just talked to him a couple of nights ago.

His name's in the book, so I'll use his name, Tom, Tom Wood, Major Wood. And he briefed Eric Christensen. He said, we have 12 grids for you. I don't know if there are specifically target reference points, TRPs, but they had, they had registered grids on that mountain, and they were like, do a call. for fire and and during whalers there was an ambush that was essentially identical to that ambush of the snipers i was talking about the corpsman got shot in the knee pigman Jamie pigman and uh what ended the what ended it was the call for fire of the doghouse i think i think that's probably

a standard army um call sign for for artillery doghouse but It was in Asadabad, and they had, they had one, they had one, they had one oh five's with rocket assisted projectiles. So it barely ranged to that grid, but they did it. And it broke, they broke contact, you know, and that was it. And that fight. It doesn't need a 105. I mean, it had been, you know, I mean, it could have been, you know, 81 millimeter more

or something. But that's the thing. I mean, that, that, that might, integrating that into this conversation. comes from spending so much time with Marines who are just, you know, combined arms, multi-domain, tactical and operational combined arms campaign frameworks are just, they just wake up in the middle of the night talking about it, you know, that's what they do. Do you feel. Sorry about that.

I was going to ask you, do you feel as though the SEAL's lack of combined arms experience and lack of, you know, the SEALs are more of a raid force than on the ground. sort of, you know, movement to contact sort of out there. Do you feel like it was those two factors, one terrain familiarity or area familiarity and then not being used to working in a combined arms environment? Not that those two factors heavily influenced it? Yeah, I don't know enough about the Navy SEALs. I know that they do a lot of different things and there's some, you know,

I have some friends who are in that world. you know, I know some of the family members. I mean, they're wonderful great Americans. They're wonderful people. And I know some specifics about operations in which they were involved. But I don't even really want to discuss. Like, I could probably talk about the 70s Rangers, but I've never been on the ground with Rangers.

Uh-huh. You know, so I can't, I won't even talk about, you know, their fundamental fighting ethos, ethos, ephosy. or whatever the is, I just don't know. Sure. I do know about the Marine Corps. You know, I'm not an expert. Only Marines are experts in that.

I'm not, I'm, you know, I'm knowledgeable about it. And I tell you what, it's just, it is beat into them. Like you have a fire support plan period. Like you don't go outside the wire without, not just a fire support plan, but contingent fire support plan. It's like what happens if it's cloudy and we can't get bore on station? Okay.

What happens if Slasher has to go back, you know, for whatever reason, you know. And, you know, it's just, it's constant red selling with those guys. It kind of almost makes you go insane. But that's how they fight, you know. And so you've got you've got two, three, second time, third Marines, and their operations guy who I will tell you, he's a friend of mine. He is a Marine's Marine. He's retired now. Tires, Fullberg.

but he is a really good marine magtap planner that guy knows his stuff and this is 20 years when he knew it then and

he delivered everything to them and you know they didn't use it there was no there were no call for fires at all so as far as actions on the ground and in the air and back at the talk I mean

when when the word goes up that this ambush has taken place that we have troops in contact out there. Can you kind of like, again, walk us through, you know, your research of what you uncovered as far as like how this thing progressed? Well, that's, yeah, I've learned a lot about it since I wrote the book, some very specific details. I haven't looked at that in a while.

I want to be careful about what I say. The summary is that there was. confusion, as there often is. And, you know, it's like, you know, sometimes people, they'll say, hey, how come they say alpha and not A? I say, well, because communication, even when you say, like, you know, spell my name, Ed, it's not ED, it's, you know, echo delta. Even when you say that, people, they mess it up, you know, there was that going on.

There was just, there was, there was confusion because there were multiple tactical operation centers. There was one at Bogram, and then there was one at Jalalabad. And those guys were on, I assume most of the viewers here know what Merck is. It's a military internet relay chat. We'll call it Merck chat, which is sort of redundant. It's just Merck. And there was chat, there was a lot of traffic on that. And, you know, there was communication over a PRC 148 multi-band inter-intra tactical imbiter. Yeah, tactical radio, five-watt radio. And then there was some phone, there was some phone calls.

But they were, the communication just fell out. I mean, when you look at military, when things go bad with military operations, it's so often, little details like that, you know, communication. Like it's even on a day-to-day thing, like I was, you know, my name gets misspelled. And it's like, okay, well, we're not getting shot. I'm not getting shot out right now. That's fine. You can't spell my name.

But, you know, you miss something. You're like one number on a grid, you know, if it's like the third grid on a 10-digit grid, that's like you're not even going to hear it. I mean, it's like, you know, 1,000 meters away, right? I mean, it's off. So the answer your question in general, the communication, this whole thing really comes down to a breakdown in C3, command control, and communication. You know, the third C is often set off on its own. Usually you hear communication in C2, but it's it was the C3.

It was that was another thing. So I think what are the, you know, the Marines have their, you know, I'm talking about Marines because that's, that's what I know the most, you know, before they go outside the wire, they got their comp plan, you get the fire support plan, they get their their, their Medivac plan. Help me. What else do you have when you go outside the wire, you know. Coordinations with adjacent units. Yeah, battle space deconfliction. Yeah. So that's, and it's just like, you know, when you're, you know, when you're, you know, And I talk about, like, in a really well-run system, be it military or not, we'll talk about military, like, or pilots. Like, when you hear these pilots, like, they'll run through things. Like, okay, you know, this is turned on, that's turned on. And you really, they have to take a good pilot.

We'll not just go, okay, A, B, C, D, and A, check, check, check, check. We'll really look. Okay, is A turned on? B, yes, yes. even if it's mundane and silly, not silly, even if it seems like it's just mundane and run of the mill, it's not, you know, because something's going to go wrong.

And if that, oh, didn't you check B? Oh, well, I thought I did. I just flipped it. Okay, you didn't check it, right? So that's the thing before going outside the wire, before doing any of the stuff. And that's sort of a general, kind of, I guess almost like a slot.

I don't want to say, I don't want to call these guys sloppy, But, you know, you have to, you know, my observations of military operations, you know, from small squad level to battalion level, it's just really extreme detail oriented. You have to be. You have to be, right? Yeah. Every little thing. No, no, that's spot on. But as far as the way events transpired the rest of that day, turbine 3-3 gets spun up. Right. Okay, we'll get into that. So there was a long delay. Again, I've been really busy with some other projects. And I told myself about this time yesterday, go back and read through these books because you're going to get asked questions. Did I do that? No. So, but we'll see how good my memory is. There was like an, it was a long delay because of the, there were, people just didn't know what was going on. And this is actually, again, I can't get into specifics. But this delay, uh, this delay, uh,

it's been recorded. You know, the, it's, you know, people just, there's confusion. They're like, well, who's this? Okay, oh, wait, is that Bogram or is that Jalalabad? You know, who's, you know, Mako, who's that? Okay. And there was just, and then there's people, again, like talking about little tiny things. Like, this happened.

Like, I had to go to the bathroom, right? So, and then someone had to, like, watch over, but he didn't know maybe some of the specifics. And then that guy came back. and crazy little things like that that aren't crazy at all. They're just details that need to always be hawkishly looked at and watched over. And so I think it was about four hours before they spun those aircraft up. And then at that time, we're going to get into some weather. If you look at the, I guess it's the Asian monsoon, that moisture that gets

pushed up into that area. That is on the northwestern periphery of the influence of that. They do get thunderstorms in that area. Not a lot. It's not crazy, but they get them there at that time of year. And that is a huge factor in, you know, whether, you know, I call it ESA environmental situational awareness. I don't know if the military calls it that. That's my turn. Maybe I made it up. maybe not, maybe somebody made it up before I did. But that, that, they went in and they, you know, at first it was, you know, there was clouds coming up and there was some obscuration and there were some issues with that. And then the aircraft got shot down and then they went back in and looked for it, but that

monsoon had been there. They had to, that's something for the pilot. I know about this a bit. I'll tell you a little bit, but there almost was another disaster. a mid-air disaster because there were five ships in the air going through P-Suit. And they said, we can't do this. And they had their, they had their plan of basically their egress plan, which was everybody go, this, I'm going to go this way, I'm going to go that way, we can't see anything, we'll just do it. So that averted, I mean, can you imagine had,

you know, they even like 10 more seconds heading inbound and there could have been another disaster, but they had to break off because of the environment. It was too late, it was thunderstorms, we're closing in, raining, everything. So, yeah, you had the insert on the night of the 27th movement, some of the movement, the sound alerted the guys, Ahmad Shah's guys, so in the morning, maybe even at night, they were picking up the trail. You know, they got identified, they got ambushed.

There was just a long period of confusion. there was just, there wasn't very good, you know, communication to begin with. Once people knew, okay, something's wrong, we have to send in a, you know, a QRF or IRF, immediate reaction force, depending on what branch of the military you're talking to, is, you know, predicates that, that terminology, but they're the same thing, send in people that save them. And so then they finally got that spun up, they got shot down, and then they tried to go back, they couldn't, and then they moved in forces,

on the ground and that's when the big search began so uh and then of course the trail got saved by mohamma gulab and shana and um they're you know they recovered the the bodies up when satea so is it did i answer your question adequately i think you you walked through some of the main key events there but i am really interested to hear what your findings were What were the big takeaways that came out of this experience, you know, research that you did for the book or subsequently afterwards that maybe are important or that people haven't heard before? Okay. Well, this is going to get a little technical. Yeah, go for it.

You go back to really the modern military, you know, it started with the Goldwater's Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act in 1986. And, you know, prior to that, you had service chiefs who were commanding on the ground, right? So now we have COCOMs, combat commanders. So, you know, each branch of the military is, they're tasked with organizing, training, and equipping. They're not leading on the ground. So the common other Marine Corps, you know, he organizes trains and equips the Marines under him. And maybe another four-star will be at Centcom or Southcom or EUCOM or whatever. But, you know, the actual duty of the service is to organize train and equip.

So you started to get this, that really came from the Holloway Commission, the Hallow Report, which was in, that came after the 1980 Operation April. Oh, 80, yeah. Yeah, 1980. Yeah, did I say? No, no, you're right. You're right. Yeah, so 1980 in April of 1980. So they wanted to, this is a really good story.

I mean, it's a horrible story, but it's a very enlightening. It's a very enlightening store. It's put that way. So they needed to get a joint operation on the ground in Tehran to rescue the hostages. They had what we would call a forward arming and refueling point at the Dosti Kavir Desert that was designated in Desert 1, about 340 miles south-southeast of Tehran, if I'm remembering correctly, in the Great Salt Desert. So they had RH-53 deltas that were sitting. on the USS Nimitz that hadn't been flown in a year that were going to fly in.

They were going to have a C-141 that was going to land somewhere outside of Tehran. They had C-130s, MC-130s that were Air Force. You had Navy, RH 53 deltas flown by Marine Corps pilots with Gen 1 night vision. They didn't properly do, they didn't have, there was weather report. that were created that were not that were not passed over to the pilots. So I guess what I should get to is that you had all these components of an extremely complicated mission, but there was no good integration with them. So what happened, they converged on Desert One.

One of the aircraft, the rotor blade, they fill these rotor blades. The system has like some inert gas in it. and you can get, there was some fault with it. So they had to turn around. And then another, they flew through what's called a Haboob, which is a dust storm, a type of dust storm that had been predicted, but the prediction did not get to the people who were operating because of security clearance issues.

So that didn't happen. And so they got on the ground. None of these people had trained together either. So it was Charles Beckwith, who was the first special operator. basically combat application group today. Yeah, yeah. Delta, whatever. So he was there.

And so he was, he was the ground forces commander. And they made the decision at that point because they were down to, they had to have like five helicopters and then two of them, two, I think it was seven to begin with, something like that. Basically,

their manpower was shrank. And they had to call it off. And then they had to refuel. and one of the helicopters browned out, ran into the fuel bladder of a C-130, and it was just a disaster. And so the key takeaway of all this, you know, not this, you know, the Grangler stuff is very interesting, but the key takeaway was there was unity of effort, there really was no unity of command, the C2 structure was not there, the training wasn't there, there was just not a good, solid oversight to the whole thing. I mean, you had these old helicopters, you know, they didn't train together.

It was just, you know, forget about the kind of wildly hairbrained operation that was going to take place after that. So they, you know, so this disaster, which was a horrible public relations disaster, you know, that came to Halloway Commission sprung up. They, you know, Admiral Holloway put together commission. And their key findings came out a year or two later. And out of that a few years, you know, in 86 came this organization where they created combat commands, geographic combat commands, unified combat commands, subunified combat commands. So like a unified combat command is United States Special Operations Command. Subunified combat command is one drop of one below that.

That's joint special operations command. So that was, so they created that in 86. And so they had, they said, okay, we're going to compartmentalize differently. We're going to have different individual units that are, you know, specific to a geographic area. And we're going to pull all the talents and all the specific units together and train together. And then we're going to conduct operations. And it's going to be much more fluid. A year later, none Cohen amendment to that act.

And I think it was 17 April, 1987, established United States Special Operations Command. And so now you've got, at this point in time, going forward, you've got the main branches of the military much more integrated. So you've got much better fluid integration and operations. And this is where it gets a little esoteric, I guess. But you don't have the, at this point now, we've got two different types of forces. You've got conventional general purpose forces, Marines, sailors, airmen, soldiers. have special operations personnel who are under a completely different unified combatant command, and they're not working together. So you get Operation Anaconda and you get Operation Red Wings.

And there was no doctrine, as there was doctrine for the general purpose, conventional forces to work together that was engendered from this disaster at Desert One. There was nothing that was brought up to integrate the Special Operations Forces with the conventional forces. Am I adequately describing this? Yeah, I think so. So what you have is in anaconda, you have a similar type of, it's similar in that it's not integrated.

It might the specifics are different. You know, there was communication problems in anaconda, some ISR issues. Whereas with Eagle Claw, which engendered the whole reorganization of the military, at least at the conventional level, you know, that was integration issues as well. You know, it was just training and organizing. That wasn't well done. And so, and so then, you know, of course, you want to get to a point. Any Marine will tell you, and I'm sure in the Army, you want to integrate, not deconstlict. You never want to be deconflicting anything, right? So you want to have it all worked out smoothly and adequately. And so that's what you get that poor integration. There was no integration with the soft.

and there was very little, you know, between NAFSOF and 2-3 and TAS4S-CoA, you know, Tess Force Coa, is the Second and Lieutenant Third Marines. There was, they were just sort of insular. It was, it was not, they didn't train together. They offered them the fire support plan, fires package. They didn't, they didn't integrate that. They didn't, they tried to stay insular when they had all this, this other stuff. They had, most importantly, they had the knowledge base to say, you shouldn't be, dropping it in an helicopter, and I have this in the book, and you shouldn't be using four guys. You know, you should walk in with, you know, more people like we plan to do like six or eight, and that's how you should do phase zero shaping in your R&S.

But because that integration wasn't baked in to people's, how they, you know, Marines try to get them to do it, they didn't want to do it. That's, you know, I'm sure people out there are going to say, oh, you're a cheerleader for the Marines or whatever, fine. you know, but that's, I know for a fact that they presented them with that. The Marines try to get these guys to act like Marines, and they're like, nope, Navy SEALs do things differently. And so this is what's going to happen. So from a fundamental conceptual standpoint, the integration was poor. They did not, they did not, you know, they did not integrate in this greater joint task force

that had been established all the way back by that reorganization act. Since then, they've gotten, they've gotten much better. And we'll talk a little. I'll say that like with extortion 1-7, even though that was a disaster. One of the interesting things about that was it illuminated just how well special operations forces and conventional forces are working together because they weren't on a 160th aircraft and they got shot down. They were on a mix of active guard and reserve Army aviation. And they did this all the time.

They were supporter constantly. And that's because they were integrated, not between Army, and Air Force and Navy, but between conventional forces and special operations forces. Does that make sense? You're talking about specific branches integrating, and now you're talking about integrating force types. And that's where that's really the fundamental breakdown. And there was a great article written and published in the November 2006 issue of the Marine Corps is that entitled Operation Red Wings, a joint failure and a joint failure in unit.

of command, page 62, by major at the time major, Robert R. Scott and Andrew McManus, the executive officer and the battalion commander of second time third Marines for this operation. And they spell out pretty much what I just said, you know, not with all the Department of Defense for organization act and that kind of stuff. But, you know, you have to have unity of command, which is integration. You have to one guy, one individual. Sorry, there's men and women who are commanders. But one individual, and it runs right down the line.

So you guys are practitioners. I'm sure you agree with that. And it's happened over and over again. So you've got that with conventional units working together now these days, as exemplified, you know, we'll talk about Red Wings. It just wasn't there. The integration piece was in there. Given, you know, like we have the ground situation, but it also sounds, you know, you mentioned that there were two talks.

You know, there was the Tactical Operations Command in Jalalabad and the Tactical Operations Command in Bogram. And I mean, split C2 right there. Split C2. So did they do a disservice to the seals on the ground by like these like two chefs in the kitchen basically? Yep. Yeah, that goes back to the poor integration, the poor unity of command, splitting the command and control. You split the command and control like that. And the whole operation, it was sort of a battle handoff after, I think, phase two, there was phase zero shaping,

phase one, insert and direct action, and then phase three, I think, cordon. And so between two and three, they were going to do the handshake. okay this is your operational Marines right now right now to open it up we are the supported entity you are supporting us and then at this point we're going to egress and the operation supports you so that's how that that's how that flow and and I mean have you ever because I'm a I'm a bit jaded about sort of the military command structure at times and to me like my initial thought is that everybody wants credit for this op that's going on. So you don't have the continuity in command. You

don't have a continuity in the post-tasical and strategic picture. And then people, like, it takes four hours to get things spun up when one of your teams, you know, is out there or flapping. Yeah, that's, that's what happened. And that goes back to, you know, like we were talking about, you know, when you talk about a good thing to bring up is close air support, and I know it from being with the Marines and learning about it, there's a term that they use over and over and over again. Detailed integration. So close air support is a detailed integration of air power with other fires and maneuver elements. That's it. Detail

integration and you can take that idea and that means like you know on a conceptual level like making sure your shoes are tied like you have to make sure everything has to be integrated every individual warfighter has to make sure that everything they've got is functioning their m16 service rifle their m9 sidearm everything is functioning and their calm gear is working and they know the plan they know all that they know everything and that that just broke down you know and you know they make this whole thing about how, oh, one guy was walking around at Boggerman flip flops. Oh, that's so cool. And I used to kind of think that was kind of cool to have, you know, guys, you know,

in board shorts and flip flops. No, that's any more. If I hear about that, I'm like, well, you know, I can't do anything about them. I'm a civilian. It should just be relieved right then, right then and there. Send them home. If they're going to be that lucy goosey and lack of days ago, you know, you're over there, there's people being shot at, people getting killed.

You know, you have to take it seriously. And every little, every tiny detail. And that was because when I, again, doing the photo shoots in the air and also, of course, on the ground, I mean, Marines would tell me, they said, Ed, so you put your shoes on and make sure they're tied right because it could get us killed if your shoes aren't gone. And if something happens, you know, or, you know, up in the air, tie your shoes right. I always use that because it's such a mundane thing. But it's part of the greater integration, the detailed integration. Every single little detail has to be gone over. So, and I know Jack's been, you know, I'm sure you've been outside the wire a bunch on combat patrols.

And, you know, you have to, you have to take, there's no such thing as being overprepared and over-readed. And they, they, that's, I think that's really what happened. That really, at the, you know, at the bottom line, that's, you know, a number of people just, they didn't plan it well enough. and the execution, the integration, the command and control structure, all these things were broke down, exactly which one broke down and caused this, you know, precipitated this, you know, I think really it's just the planning of it. That planning was just, it was too loosey-usy, you know. When you have people saying, we've been operating here, you got to put a squad,

at least a squad in, you got to have a fires plan, got to have it, got to have it, you know. And the other thing was calm. Again, not been, you know, over a decade since I published the book, type of radio that they brought with them. When the Marines went outside the wire, they brought a PRC-117, 20-watt radio, which is heavy and the batteries are heavy, and it drops the fill, the crypto-fill,

when it's really hot, but you carry extra batteries, you know how to use it. The Embiter can do taxat, or SATTAC. I always get that term mixed up. Tactical satellite communication. But it's just, so it's only a five-watt radio. So, and I've had people say, oh, you don't need five.

You don't need 20 watts. Nah, no, no, no. But you do, you know, they, they need to, you do, obviously. You need that rate, you need that com plan nailed down. They didn't do it. So that's, that's another one. And, and, I mean, it's easy. I think that the tactical element has,

that there's been criticism leveraged at them, but a lot of people haven't taken the time to like look at the command elements and say, why, why did this plan go down the way it went down? Well, that's the guy who's, Eric Christensen's dead, you know, so, and he was in charge of signing off on that.

So that's, you know, that's where the buck stops, right? He was in charge of it. Seals deployed as a SEALs deployed as a SEAL task unit, and he was the commander of it. So, you know, that's, I'm trying to be as objective here. I'm not trying to, like, you know, denigrate a person who's dead. It's just, I'm just trying to be clinical. When someone goes into a combat situation, you know, you have a command. structure, there are expectations, there are rules. It's the way things are run. It's not,

you know, you can't hit the undo button. There's no undo button anymore. We can write a book. Let's write a magazine article. There's no undo button and more. You know, you can't hit the undo button, you know, it's just, it, once that, once that poor plan is executed, that's been approved and that poor plan has been exploited, the circumstances. stance that has been engendered by the poor planning has been exploited by the enemy. You can't undo it. Right. And then after that, you're just like running around, you're three steps behind.

Instead of thinking two steps ahead of the enemy, you're running three, four, five steps behind the enemy because your communications are shot, you know, there's no fire support. No one knows what's going on. You have split C2. You've got two tactical operations centers. Right. The Marines go by, they're like, okay, what's going on? you know and that's that's really and that comes down to just you know at a very fundamental level

integration operational tactical integration and a and a more specific level is is is just the you know the specific planning don't take four guys take 12 break them apart the three different separate entities because, you know, once these guys start attacking you, take cover, B and C, they can engage, you know, everybody's in good communication. But even if he were like, you know, the, and I don't know, so I'm asking you, but if he were like the seal element commander or maybe the ground force commander, whatever, he's still not the ultimate approving authority, right? There's still like the theater commander, because we're not talking about a covert action that nobody's getting read onto.

Like, wasn't everybody aware up to the chief brass, whoever it was in Afghanistan at that time? I don't know if Camilla, Major General Camilla, two star, who was in charge of Combined Joint Task Force 76, Jason Camia. I don't know if he looked at the thing. I mean, the generals look at anything. They have some colonel look at it or some lieutenant colonel, and they have a major look at it.

it but you know you sir it's good but I mean it's it's at least the SOTF in fact definitely the SOTO in the full the full bird the full bird at the SOTO level the combined joint CJ's combined joint Special Operations Task Force Alpha Afghanistan they yeah he looked at it and you know again I he looked at it they signed off on it they just signed off on it so But yeah, I mean, that's, again, I, you know, I'm not going to, it, at this point, you know, we have to be as object. I mean, we'll always be objective. Right.

But maybe a little bit more upfront and say, you know, yeah, I mean, when you're the commander, when you have a commander, even though he's dead now, you know, you know, you still have to identify what. what mistakes were made by this person. And you know, I'm not going to pile on individuals who are no longer with this, but, you know, speaking, you know, academically, just outside of these specifics of Red Wings, when you have a commander on the ground of a, you know, of a combat operation, and, you know, you're the one that's been briefed by all these different individuals and, you know, the case has been made for four guys or 12 guys or eight guys or whatever. And you can say, well, we want to do 12 guys, but we don't have the manpower. What do you do? Right. You don't do the operation.

That's what you do. Right. You don't say, all right, let's just, you know, F that. We're going in, man. Let's do it. Yeah. That's where, that's, again, now we're. we're getting into psychology and you kind of touched on this before a little bit of ego stuff and

I don't know if that's what happened. I'm not saying I'm saying in sort of general speculation about, you know, what may happen, what may not happen. So, you know, it's just, yeah, that's, you can't for once let your guard down when you're doing this stuff at the planning level, the operational planning level, the tactical planning level, at the execution level. And a lot of times, you know, things would be fine. Like, okay, well, you know, this is a bad plan. We should have sent more guys up, but we all came home. We're back inside the wire, you know, end state achieved, objective, you know, achieved.

But it's still not good. It's still, that's why, you know, we've got the rules. And that's why. And I've seen it a couple times where, you know, again, talking about the Marines, where even if things go right and even if they do every single thing right and the planning was good, they still get on each other. It's wild. They say, well, how could you have done that better? You know, that's, you know, hey, lieutenant, how could you have made that better? And I'm thinking like, okay, well, they plan it right, they executed it right, achieved the objective.

and you're still getting on this guy, you know? So that's, is it that way in the Army? It's that way in the Rangers? Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, that's what an AAR is for, right? That's tear it apart. Yeah. Yeah, they just, even if it goes well, you just tear it, they just tear it, you know.

Was this mission, was this mission torn apart afterwards, Ed? I did. Not by you, by the military. Did the military tear it apart? That's a good question. And that's one that the answer is no. And it's great that you brought that up because I even think about that. I'm sitting here babbling on about this stuff.

And then I didn't even deserve very insightful of you to bring that up. Thank you. Because that was a question that was brought up. And they just basically, it was embarrassing. And individuals brought it up and individuals, you know, within that world, within that naval special warfare world did. And, you know, that's a very infreesome. fractious world, there's another thing that I found out, like seal delivery vehicle, vehicle

teams, don't get along all that well, or at least it back then, didn't get all that well with the East Coast, West Coast units, you know, the, I can't remember what the terms are for them. I just don't know enough about it, but I, but I was surprised that they, you know, like in the Marine Corps, that you get people, you get prologelism and the Army, you get it, the Air Force, you're sure, of it. I was surprised by the level of animosity, you know, speaking to some of these people after the fact. And maybe it's because of the, you know, there was so much death and destruction that happened, that engendered that. But I think I just, that was never formally done. And if it was done, it is classified at a level and compartmented at a level that nobody will ever see. I think that's probably what happened.

I think it's something of a, I think it's something of a common theme. And I mean, with some of these things that go sideways. Yeah. I saw an interview, someone talking about Operation Gothic Serpent and Mangadishu and how there was never a full-blown AAR across, you know, the spectrum of all the units involved. The Chapman bombing, some people would contend that, you know, exactly how that happened. and the findings of afterwards the findings on it were not allowed to be questioned. I think this is a common theme in our nation's national security apparatus that we kind of want to sweep it under the rug and move on.

I feel as though like when it's when it is the guy on the ground, when it's the tactical elements fault, oh, it'll get like, it'll get questioned to the end degree when it's when it's, when it's something that involves a higher level leadership, it's like, ah, shit happens. Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, Jack, for bringing that question up because that is, that is one thing that, because,

you know, again, going back to my interest, it's, you know, what was the planning? What was the execution? How did it happen?

Okay. Now next. I never really was that interested in, you know, pointing fingers. looking at, well, who, you know, who approved and who did this and who did that. It just wasn't my thing. You know, my thing was telling the story of Operation Red Wings as it happened and then Operation

Wheels. That was it. Not the after action. But, you know, it's, that is exactly what happened, which was the, now that I think about, there was, there was, there was like one, there was like one AAR, I believe, that was sort of higher level. And it was, it was, it's been, you know, it was, I believe it was classified at TS and it was, it was very compartmented.

It was very much like, no one's going to be able to FOIA this. It's not, we're not going to let it get foyered. It's not going to let it, we're not going to let anybody see it. A few people saw it and that was that. That's my recollection. I'm human. My, you know, where this came from, I can't remember specifically. But I believe, I believe that's, that was the situation.

That there was one, maybe two, higher level. It wasn't really like a summary of action. It wasn't really an AAR. It was more of a help me out here, like a lesson. learn type thing. And I always tell people it's it's not lessons learned, it's rules reinforced because these are these are mistakes that have been made over and over again. And they're just rules that are established that people know about and they're just being reinforced. Don't say lessons learned. Right. It's like the first time that this has ever happened, that's a cop-out.

Right. You know, lessons learned my ass. You should have learned these lessons in, you know, whatever their version of expeditionary warfare school is. I'm curious also, you know, what was if in the years after you wrote this book, I mean, I know you put a ton of research into it, but afterwards you said you've learned a lot more about what happened out there during this operation. I was wondering if you would have any interest in sharing some of that with us. Like what new information has come to light in your research? The biggest thing was that they had a plan for three teams of four. That to me was huge because I went in studying mountain warfare.

I mean, from the start, my introduction to the military was in the mountains, was mountain warfare, going to Afghanistan, and just that right there. There was also some stuff. Let me see. That was the big one. That was the biggest one. And I don't know if that's so groundbreaking to you. It's earth shattering to you.

It is to me. It's important. Because none of this would have happened if that's, if they had followed through with that. And I think some of the other stuff that I learned was stuff that had to do with recognition after the fact, which I don't really want to get into. You know, there's some pretty big things that I found out about afterwards that it just, it's not, it's not important to me. I know it's important to some people. they want to know they want to know about who did this and who made that and you know it doesn't matter we don't necessarily have to get into like naming names or anything but like their recognition that

like something should have been done differently or could have been done yeah or awards awards yeah people should have gotten a higher level award oh really yeah and why do you think they weren't Well, I'm not saying that. I'm saying the conjectures that some people should because of actions. Like, you know, talk about like Danny Deeds, you know. I mean, there's never been any definitive, anything, anything definitive saying that, you know, he did not make a phone call on a satellite phone. In fact, there is a person I talked to who said, I, I received a phone call and it was from him. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. It was from him. Now, there's other people that, that, you know, say, well, no, that's not the case. And I mean, but the thing is, like, it doesn't really matter, does it? I mean, it's, it's, you know, it. Right. It doesn't matter from my, from the perspective of looking at this from, you know, tactics unfurling. It makes a difference for people giving credit based on awards that were, that, that happened posthumously. So, um, I personally think that he, Danny Deetz made at least one phone call. He was the communication specialist.

I think he made at least one phone call. And Danny Deetz, by the way, was extremely proficient and very, he had a lot of experience, very experienced warfighter. And I did, we talked, I'll just go ahead and talk about this a little bit. And I did watch a lone survivor and I did see how he was portrayed. And from the people that I spoke with about him who were not his family members, but people who knew him professionally, that was a very, it was not an accurate portrayal of this individual of him and how he functioned.

He was very skilled and, you know, he sort of made the look like kind of a, you know, someone who was a neophyte, unfortunately. I mean, I'm not the first person to say this at all. There's been a book written about it. But it's just some of the stuff that, again, going back to my focus is, you know, on the actual undertaking of the operation, not who gets what award after the fact. But, you know, there is some over, you know, there's reasons for these things, you know, for awards and the reasons of it.

But yeah, I do believe that he, you know, if they're going to give a medal of honor to somebody for making a phone call, and he deserves one too. There are times that the military has used awards to help them craft a narrative. Right. Do you feel that's one of the reasons why he wasn't given an award or do you feel that there was another reason

behind it? I don't know. I don't know at all. It's so it's such a, you know, I see stuff portrayed, you know, having been there on the ground, not during the operation, but afterwards, in those mountains, and I see how stuff was portrayed, I can say, it's really obvious to me why things are wrong or why the narrative that I see being portrayed about certain types of warfare, how things happen. It's just obvious to me because I've been done it. I've not done it as a military practitioner, but as an observer. I just don't know enough about the Navy SEAL world. I just don't know.

What I do know is that there's some parochialism, vicious parochialism, or there had been. and you know that's that's that's kind of and that's just and you know again too I because I don't know because I've never embedded with them I mean that I did work with them to a certain extent on the operation or on the extortion 17 book and I had a wonderful experience you know I've worked with some others you know about this subsequent to my book being published about Red Wing and they're great people, wonderful. You know, it doesn't seem, but I do understand that there's a very, almost a level of animosity among some of the units,

like certain SEAL teams and certain, you know, other support capabilities in the Navy SEAL world. But I'm not really the one to, have you had anybody on, seals who could get into this? No, not who were, seals who were involved in the operation, no. mostly Rangers of 160th guys. Yeah. We've had any SEALs on to talk about just the sort of internal culture and culture

clashes. A bit, a bit. A little bit. Like, we have a reputation of being SEAL haters, which were not. We've had a few SEALs on. We like to joke around about. Programming note, this Tuesday, we have a former SEAL team 6 member on the show.

Who's that? His name is Nelson Miller. Okay. I don't know. he's never been on any other podcasts yeah i mean that'd be cool here from him because these guys usually worked their way up through the plain vanilla before they go to damn neck right yeah yeah i mean i mean we're all about one team one fight like everybody's out there hook and jabbing and doing what they can seals are fun it's fun it's fun to poke at them sure but but but they're

they're they're tremendously good guys that come out of the seal teams yeah i don't want to overlook that yeah but like you said i mean my main interest is kind of just like drilling down into what, like what did happen, what didn't happen. Yeah, you don't see this happen again. Right. Because now we're generation removed. Yeah. And there's people there's people who are in the military now, they have no idea.

Operation Red what? Yeah. I mean, it's on that note, Ed, could you talk to us about Operation Whalers? Because I feel like that's not spoken about as much. I mean, could you like set the stage for what that operation was? Well, as the executive. officer of the battalion and the operations officer of the battalion said to me right off the bat when I asked him that question they said there were no seals involved yeah no seals involved and so

that's what I was told right off the bat so operation whalers that kicked off an early August of 2005 and basically it was going to be forced movement to contact they were going to have an element in the Horn Gau Valley push in. They're going to have an element in the Shurriak Valley push in toward the summit of Sotalasar. Those are coming from the north. They're going to have an element mounted and then I think maybe dismounted unit part of what they call a map mobile assault tune come in from the Noree Valley. And then they were going to have another element come in from the Chalkai Valley, which is also called the Duagal Valley. and D-I-W-E-G-A-L-D-A-L-D-A-L-D-A-G-A-L-D-A-Gal Valley, and they were going to, they figured that they were going to take contact in the Corengal Valley and try to egress, you know, Ahmad Shah's force was going to try to maybe egress out to Narang Valley

or out the Shuriyak Valley. So what happened was, it was a joint operation that was the focus was on Marine Infantry, and there were all companies, all line companies and the weapons company. So real quick, the table of organization for Marine, infantry battalion is you have three line companies and headquarters and services company under which falls snipers. And then you've got a weapons company. So in terms of sort of operational forces, you've got four of them. Typically, the weapons company is broken up and divvied out. Their assets are to, you know, like having like a machine gunner, tow missile, that kind of thing.

at that point, they were still working on a mentality from like, you know, Cold War type stuff. They were getting out of it. But they turn the weapons company into a mobile, into mobile assault platoon. So you have Echo Company, Echo Fox and Golf, EF&G, and then weapons company that was retasked as a mobile assault platoon group. They called them whiskey. Of course, they call them whiskey, right?

They're Marines. So you had, let me see, Echo. in the Cornygol Valley and some of the Shariak Valley, golf and Norei, and then the Rang Valley, and then you had Fox Company go up to the Chauke Valley. And boy, it was a movement. It was a tough movement. But these guys took contact. They ended up taking contact in the Chalkay Valley, so it was Fox Company.

And it was two or three days of sustained contact. And they killed a lot of... Ahma Chaw's guys and he fled. He did escape at night. He got out of there, which is, you know, you look at the terrain, look at some of the topographical maps and, you know, it was a tip tip, it was a, you know, he was able to escape. But the operation itself was conducted, you know,

squeezing this guy out from these different valleys. So you've got it in from the north and from the south and then a little bit from the east. And he, you know, he squirted it out and got into Assadabad and left, but it destroyed the contact, the movement to contact, the contact that resulted, destroyed his little army and he never was able to regain any type of influence in the region. So that's, that's the, that's, and it was a great example of joint operations of specifically with the integration of fires. where you've had multiple troops in contact in this whole area simultaneously. So you had the integration of artillery, 81 millimeter mortars. You had close air support with Apaches.

Now, a real quick side note on Apaches because the Army considers them a maneuver element and not an indirect fire asset. That produces some issues. We just talked about this with Don Bentley. They were able to work through. They do it, yeah, so they were able to work through that with what's called type three control with parameters. Shock troop was there, which the individual you were talking about before, I believe he was a shock troop pilot. So they were, they conducted exceptional close air support, or as they would say, close combat attack.

And then there was 810s or their call sign was bore. So you had Air Force A-10s Army, Apaches, Army, artillery, marine mortars, and marine heavy guns. Even some tow missiles were used, which is part of the whiskey company, the weapons company, retest as a mobile assault platoon group. I say, you know, the company, and of course there's just for anybody out there doesn't know, like the maps, the mobile assault platoons, there's three of those per the weapons company. So as I say it's a group of them. Yeah, the group is the company. The individual elements are the platoons, the mobile assaultions. So that's how that went.

And it was, I believe there was one Marine who was killed during the egress, Philip George, egressing in the Cornwall Valley. There was a small tick, and then they got A10s in there to clean up the guys who did that. But yeah, that was, and then they got out of there and then they, yeah, that was a, they egress and that was a, it was an amazing, now we're getting a little technical, a little raw, raw Marine Corps. Basically in the Marines, they, they, I would call it nowadays a multi-domain task force because they're so, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're all the talk that they're doing is like, you know, integration with the. Navy and all this stuff, but they call it, which they have to do because the focus now is on U.S. Indo-PACOM and South China Sea. But they're war-fighting DNA called the Magtaf, the Marine Air Ground Task Force. Again, it's a multi-domain task force because it's a combined arms construct

to include now cyber swarms of UAS if they're doing that. I don't know. You know, all these different capabilities all put together. And normally, you know, you've got a thing called a Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is based around a battalion of Marines, the Victor Battalion. And then you've got, you know, artillery, logistics, the ace, the air combat element, all these things put together in the ship, and they go over.

And you've got a MF Marine Expeditionary Force. You know, it's a division level. I hope I'm not screwing this up. This is like really Marine Corps basic Marine Corps 101. A friend's going to see this and be like, Hey, dummy. There's a MEP Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which is a regimental level, and then a MET which is a division level. But what these guys did was they have a term called SP Magtas, special purpose magtap. They essentially did an ad hoc special purpose magtaf. They integrated

it into the assets that they were given or allocated by Task Force Devil, which was the 504th parachute infantry regiment, was Colonel Donahue. I believe. Is it the 504th or based out of Salerno? Is that right? In Italy? I think that it. 173rd is based out of Italy. Okay. There was there. There was there. They were, there was CJ. TF 76. Below that was, you know, you know, there's C.J. Sotom alpha. And then of course, and then there was, task force devil, T.F. Devil. And that was a, that was an 06 level, Fullberg colonel, Donahue.

and below that was Task Force COA. Coa is the two, three, they got, they're no longer an active infantry battalion, the new commandant. They reorganized the Marine Corps. So they're on hold for now. We'll call it. We won't say they're over. They'll just say they're on hold for another day. But so two or three, task force COA, 05, Lieutenant Colonel Command. They fell under Donahue, the task force, Devil. And so Devil was able to push assets to them, assault support assets like helicopters, and they had the artillery. So normally, you know, when a Marine battalion goes into, you know, at their endemic war fighting capability, it's the MAGTAF, Marine Air Ground Task Force. So they have all that stuff on their own. Talk about integration. Talk about really, really effective

integration, you know, again, Marine Corps, cheerleader here, I guess, but those guys who are doing nine lines on the ground, like they know all the pilots. They're friends with them. They know them. They know them. You know, so and so, and, you know, bring in this guy, and they know it really well. So throw them into a combined task force, a joint task force, like, as they were. They pulled it off. They did it. You know, there was some frustration. You know, like, why can't you get this helicopters here and whatever, you know, Marines, they're going to complain about it because it's not they don't own it but they did it they figured it out and they was a very successful military operation i'm very fortunate to have been able to be the guy who wrote the book about it so

that to me really was the gist of that book that i wrote victory point that was the culmination of it that those troops and contact uh episodes in the chow kay valley with fox company you know and then you know there was also some other you know the the task for um team run which was part of headquarters and services company, you know, they're the scout sniper team. They got in a tick that was, you know, we were talking earlier about using getting a call for fire and cleaning up the enemy with 105s. But there was, there was stuff going all around, but, you know, was there, it's a really, you know, if you read that everybody, I'll just, you know, plug the book, Everybody buy the book.

And not because to enrich me, but to, you know, so people can know about what happened. Oh, but we want to enrich you also. So everybody buy the book. Well, and we haven't even spoken about extortion 17 yet. So I would love to shift gears over to that for a moment. Perfect. Yeah. No, we can.

So what do you want to know? You want to how I get involved in it, the story, all that stuff? I mean, tell, yeah, tell us. Tell us about the story about what your research uncovered about, you know, what that, first off, for the people who don't know what extortion 17 was and, you know, the findings of your work on it. So extortion 17 was the call sign of a helicopter, a CH47D, Chinook helicopter, operated by an Army Aviation Task Force, GSAB. I know the Marine Corps pretty well, not the Army so well. G-S-G-Sab General Support Aviation Brigade.

Yeah, G-Sab. I think it's it would be a brigade, not a battalion, right, Jack? Aviation, not my thing either. Yeah, I think it's a G-Sab is a general support aviation brigade. And so they, you know, they had, they had Chinooks and they had, they had, they had UH-60s, and I believe they had dust-offs there, which were UH-60s. and they were they were based at fobs shank and they were in their ISO you know you know they're in a joint task force and so this is an example of how far we've come from anaconda and red wings because they were regularly supporting primarily not just plain vanilla soft they're supporting TF East task force East which was naval special warfare development group tactical development an evaluation squadron.

Is it three gold? Takedevron three. Is that who that is, Jack? Oh, geez. I can't remember how the numbers correlate with the colors. It was gold squad and the line. Yes. Yes.

And so, and it was, there were, they were, they were co-located at Shank. There was the J-Soc headquarters with, and down the, you know, down the road, there was, there was extortion company. and so there was Task Force Darby or TF Red, which you guys are intimately familiar with. That is the, you know, the Ranger component. And was it 275 or three, I can't remember who was there. It was 275. I mean, Nick Moore was 275, wasn't it?

Yeah, I think so. I think it was 275 and it was Gold Squadron. And so they would swap. You know, they had, they were getting a lot of really great intel because they, you know, they were, you know, they were, you know, they had a task, you know, they had access to, to really good intelligence collections and processing. And so there was a lot of activity coming from Pakistan into Afghanistan. It was the people say it was the, it was the, it was the Haqani network. That's primarily who their target was, not the Taliban. Of course, there was,

there's like 20 these groups, they're all mixed in together, and it's easy to say, oh, like, they call them a Pepsi a Coke, you know, it's like, oh, the Taliban, but they were the Haikani network, and they had their, their HVTs, and they were going in there, and they would, so extortion, they supported them, because I don't, I know the Marines called assault support. I believe the Army calls it that as well. Basically, you're lifting, you're carrying units in, they would, they would get an objective. They would get, you know, the imagery intel and a lot of the other intel, you know, the pattern of movement, pattern of life. And they would, you know, all these cats and dogs were constantly being monitored. And, you know, they finally, you know, all these are intel triggered ops.

So there's a trigger and they say, okay, and the trigger may be a SIG-int hit, a mass-int hit, a measurement and signature intelligence hit or something. Usually it's actually any more, even back then. that was in 2011, a fusion, you know, a fusion of all this stuff. And they would say, okay, objective Lefty Grove is going to be at this grid at this time because we got him on, you know, a combination of human intelligence or whatever. And so they would go in and, you know, one night it would be T.F. Darby would be the main element going in and doing the hit.

And then TF. Blue, again, I'm starting to like use terms that they're interchangeable. So we'll just call them TF Blue. That's the Navy, the seals, the Debt group guys. Task Force blue, task force red is the Army Rangers. One night, the red guys, the Army, 75th would be the main element, and the immediate reaction force standing by would be blue. And then the other night, the next night, because there was a huge, there was crazy off-tempo.

Sometimes they would do three raids a night, you know? And so, you know, extortion would they were responsible for both, for the insert and then egress, you know, getting them out of the ex-fill, the infill, the infill, and they were also there standing by for IRF, immediate reaction force. And so the, some of the different types of inserts that they would do, they sometimes they would just land, you know, like quarter mile away, half a mile away, and these guys would, you know, movement to contact, or they would insert them. Sometimes they would land very close to the target building. And sometimes they do this thing, it's amazingly cool to me. It's called Math, Mobile Assault Force, where these, I should have a video

on YouTube. I got a hold of it and put it on YouTube. What can I tell you? So these guys would have quads and dirt bikes and they would land them outside of the oral range, the hearing range of the enemy. And these guys would ride their dirt bikes and quads, stash them, and then, you know, foot mobile op, do their operation, and then get back in. And it's really pretty cool seeing some of this stuff. Like I've got some Tad's PINVIS, some infrared thermal imagery of, you know, like the helicopters on the ground. And then, you know, you see these guys come in and, and you're just like, wow, that's cool. And then you see them land and get out and they take off again. It's really amazing. But so they did, they supported these guys and every night. And the,

bottom line is when the helicopter extortion 1-7 that was shot down in the tangy valley on 6th August 2011 it was just a lucky shot the guy heard it he had you know an auditory reference he aimed an RPG him and another guy they aimed an RPG at it and they shot in a general direction and it hit a rear rotor blade took off 122 inches of it now he snook and other helicopters can fly and they have flown and I've seen video of them flying with chunks of their rotor blades missing, but not 122 inches. That's like over 10 feet, right? Yeah.

So there was a catastrophic, basically breakup of the aircraft and through the extreme gyroscopic forces, everybody on board was killed more or less instantly. And they went down, and then they, you know, and they went to recover. and it was a terrible day. It was 30 Americans. And in addition to that, there were eight Afghans, and there was a dog, an American dog. Some people say 31 Americans because they count the dog, and other people get very offended by that because the people whose, you know, their loved ones who died, who are humans, they say, well, you know, you're not a dog. Okay, you know, the dog behind.

I love dogs. So I'm just laying it all out there like in journalism you're supposed to do. So there was 30 Americans, eight Afghans and an American dog. But then I'm putting you to sleep. No, no. You said that the contrast between this and Red Wings is that there's really good interoperability. You mentioned how T.F. Red and T.F. Blue were working really well together. Yes.

And the aftermath of that crash, I mean, Nick. Moore told us his, you know, kind of boots on the ground account, which is terrible, terrible to. Yeah, he was one of the guys that would, they approached it. They were on the, on the road and they were going across the field. And yeah, yeah, I've seen that from the air from from the Tats Pinvis. That's actually out there more or less, so not open source, but it's out there. But yeah, I do remember reading that. He had that in his book, correct? Yeah, I believe so. And, and I also read your book. on extortion 17, which is like goes into the minute details of these helicopters and how they work and what happened.

I mean, it was really a tremendous work. It really is. And I highly recommend the book to anyone who wants to know about extortion 1-7, that's just obvious. But anyone who wants to know about how military aviation, rotary wing aviation works, I think would be really well served by reading your book. Army aviation. Army aviation is amazing.

I love Army aviation. They're great. They're amazing. And so what, you know, I'll ask you the same question that I did about Red Wings. I mean, what were some of the big findings in the aftermath of that that came out in your research? Well, in terms of after extortion 117? You tell me. Yeah, in terms of the crash and how that transpired. Well, it was just a lucky shot. And a lot of people asked me like, well, how could they, again, and we're going to go into some technical things. First, I want to cover real quickly. Stop me if I started. going too much on a tangent. But I do want to emphasize that in the years from the Red Wings

disaster to extortion 1-7, you had asked about, you know, what types of after-actions and all this kind of stuff? Well, that I know about it was, you know, there was just that one or maybe two. But clearly, the military did learn something from that and anacondent because, you know, it was dumb luck by the enemy. know, shooting down extortion 1-7. And I will give a quick vignette. In 2012, a cobra, an H-1 whiskey, an H-1W cobra in 2012, was shot down, ingressing on an attack run.

He was 500 feet up in the air, and a guy shot the tail off, which is like this wide. You know, it's like not even a foot wide, with an RPG, a ballistic system. So he got lucky, killed both those guys. But anyway, So fast going from Red Wings up to Extortion 1-7, again, the Extortion 1-7 shootdown was just dumb luck by those guys. They were just the right place at the wrong time.

And they shot a volley and they got them. But when you look at the day-to-day function of the Task Force Red and Task Force Blue working together, like they worked very well together, great together, and then being supportive. by conventional Apaches, you know, those aren't special operations aircraft, you know, conventional assault support. In fact, 90%, I think more than 90% of all the special operations, joint special operations command activities on the ground during that deployment were supported by conventional aviation, 90%. So I should mention, too, that in the aftermath of the operation that's where the 160th came from. That was one of the, you know, the phoenixes to rise from the ashes.

So in it, but even more enduring is the idea of interoperability so that you have a situation many years later where special operations units are being supported every night, every POD, every period of darkness by conventional aviation. And that's how it works now. And it's a good thing. Okay, so what's the net, I think, and then, okay, so the other takeaway is this when I explain this to people. So, lethality really comes down at a conceptual level. When you, when things, when you talk about, we're in an age of precision weapons. A Marine is a precision weapon because a Marine will shoot an M-16 service rifle. They cannot go outside the wire.

They cannot deploy unless they, there's standards. I don't know what it is. It's like, what are they going to shoot at 550 yards or 350? I can't remember. I'm sure the Army has the same standards. They are a precision system. You know, it's not just a joint defect, a defense attack munition or an LGBT, a laser got a bomb. That's a precision system.

So when you're in this situation where we're not just swinging clubs and throwing rocks and in warfare, lethality really comes down, or I don't like to say lethal. I like to say combat efficacy, which subsumes lethality. Sometimes you don't want to blow the building up or kill the people. You want to be combat effective in that regard, or you have the capability, but you don't do it to kill and blow stuff up. It comes down to two factors, which is situational awareness and signature. So let's say we're on patrol and we're going down and all sudden you get a tick starts and boom, pop, pop, puck. And, you know, dust is flying up.

So our essay, like where are they shooting from is like zero. And but our signature is high because we've given the enemy a capability of hitting us. So immediately what do we do? We go to ground. So our signature is optimized for us. Now we have to optimize our situational awareness, right? Are you tracking? I mean, so then, I mean, this is like, this is like, this is like, you know, infantry tactics,

like basic, basic, basic, but I'm putting into these more fancy terms that will make sense. So now we need to build our essay. Higher, we need to optimize it. You know, we can use these days unmanned systems. You know, we can look, you know, whatever. You know, I'm not talking, I'm talking about organic to our element. We need to get up and look. So we get up and look.

And so now our signatures is not optimized. We can get hit, but we're building essay. Okay, so good. We got it. I think, and this is the world according to me, you know, essay and signature, essay is slightly more important than signature. because you have to, you can't just go through a combat operation like an ostrich with your head in a sand. You have to be always building your essay at a little bit of expensive

signature. So, so there you go. That's the, that's the basis of combat efficacy and lethality because now we've got eyes on where the point of origin of the fire is coming from, and now we can engage and kill and continue on with the operation. What happened with extortion one seven coming in was just sort of an outlier. They get, they, they, their signature was not optimized because it was loud. But the SA of the enemy was not optimized either. They didn't have a target to shoot it. They didn't have a man pads.

They didn't have like an SA7, like a heat-seeking missile. They were just like it was just they left their situational awareness up to luck. And they got lucky. That's it. Bottom line, now going forward, people say, oh, how can we keep this from a current? Well, you could drop a W88 thermonuclear weapon on the valley, 1475 kilotons and just completely obliterate it.

Well, then you don't even need anybody on the ground. But in the future, we have the ability to build situational awareness so well that we can know where every weapon is and what weapon might be employed against us and could we potentially augment our ingress. not now doesn't exist. Technologically doesn't exist. Theoretically, conceptually, it might exist

at some point in the future. So when they say, could this be prevented in the future, when you take what I explained about the situational awareness and the signature is you're dealing with SSA and signature on both levels, on both sides, on our side and the enemy side.

We always want to optimize ours. That's the basis of an F-35. by the way. You know, you talk to an F-35 pilot and they'll still laugh at you. You say, well, can it do Mach-10 or Mach-3 or can it do loops? How maneuverable is it doesn't matter because that thing is optimized for signature and it's optimized. I will tell you, for situational awareness at the operational level and to feed that down at the tactical level. And through both passive mechanisms, through scans and through active mechanisms, which is like putting out, you know, Sparkle, putting out, you know, okay, well, where's this guy at? Okay, he's right over.

there, okay, let me download this digital line, you know, this digital whatever they've got. But that's, that's, that's the takeaway in the future is that if you can extrapolate what we're doing now with, you know, with just being able to see what's going on in an area and, and take, just filter out all the noise and all the BS and figure out, because there's going to be all sorts of guns, like which gun is going to get used, which RPG is going to get used. You know, that's another thing. There's we only have so much space. We only have so much bandwidth, you know, that you can't, you just simply, it's physically

impossible. The golden baby is. Yeah, the golden baby or big, plain little sky. Right. You just, so theoretically, conceptually, can we stop this in the future? Yeah, we don't have the technology for it. It would take all the computing power we have and all the scanners we have, you know, to try to figure that out.

It's just, you know, that's part of war, you know. there's risk, you know, there's no such thing as going to war and having a guarantee. I will tell you that having embedded six times, I eminently aware of that, you know, it's it kind of rings true. But, Ed, I just, I just want to, because there was something we skipped in your origin story and in who you are, that in addition to being a journalist and a photographer and, you know, having your degree in geography geography right this isn't all theoretics to you in a way in the sense that you also have patents right you also have patents for aircraft and which is so bizarre in the

sense that you don't have a green engineering you don't have a career in like that that that That hasn't been your, you've been out there on the front lines and on nice and mountain tops taking pictures. So like how much of this for you is because you do have also this oddly weird aberrant path of these, you know, aerospace patents. Right. How much of this is sort of the futurist of you like. kind of figuring this stuff out. So great question. Okay, so I'm not going to talk about this, but I do, I have done work in systems development and integration for unmanned systems, for tactical employment, for the optimization of situational awareness and signature,

at the employment at the tactical level, for the optimization of essay and signature, about the tactical and the operational levels. And so where that comes from, initially is from observation, right? And observation of being there and seeing it and talking to practitioners and hearing how things could be done better because you want to design things for tactical effects and operational end states.

So operational end states are the aggregate of tactical effects. So just sort of break that down a little bit. Say it, the objective of the operation is to seize an airfield. So how are we going to do that? that. Well, you're going to say we have to destroy the radar system. We have to disable the aircraft, and we have to destroy the C2 architecture. So however we do that, whether we kill people or blow stuff up, the individual acts against these things are tactical effects. And then altogether, the operational instated is that we have a seized airfield because we're able to maneuver

people onto the ground on that airfield, right? So to be able to develop systems, when you want to develop systems that optimize warfighter of efficacy in these regards to, you really want to bring everybody home. I've had friends who Memorial Days coming up and someone said, well, they brought that out. Say, hey, you know, every day's Memorial Day to me.

It really is, I'm sure to you guys. Every day you know people who didn't come back. And so that's kind of a driving force. You want to make sure everybody comes back. And nobody really wants to kill people and blow stuff up, right? And so we develop a force where we, not me, we America, United States, not me. But, you know, the military develops, you know, the capabilities so that, you know, whether it's unmanned systems or whether it's, you know, manned systems or whatever, based on sort of, you know, they're basking on their afteractions on their observations

and they're, you observe, you discuss what types of operational in-states you want and what type of tactical effects that you're going to need to engender those operational in-states, and you conceptualize mechanisms to achieve that. And then you develop systems and you test them. So, do we have questions? I talk to you. Is this getting too esoteric? No, it's not. It's just that for me. personally it's observation and discussion and there's personal stuff to it too you know how do we how do we get this do it how do we make sure everybody comes back and to even more so how do we get it so that american forces show up and everybody just says we give up right you know what at the strategic level

we're there right the operational and tactical level or not at the strategic level we have the Ohio class submarines soon to be replaced by the Columbia class and there is no touching that, no touching that at all. Nobody will mess with this at the strategic level. Ed, I just want to, because I want to pull this kind together, like we're talking about, you know, your experience with the military and this and that. When did you file your first patent? Oh, boy, that was like 20 years ago. So, so, so a minute before like Red Wings and so, so how many music, do you play musical instruments? No.

No, okay. I'm just trying to figure out the level of your savantness right now. Because again, my parents tried to get me to be a pianist and I resisted and I continue. I couldn't even, I think there's 88 keys on a piano. That's all I know. Which is more than Jack or I know. Yes. And probably your rendition of Chopin

like matches our rendition as like Mareau we go along. But how did you do that? How did you? I just did it. You know what? The bottom line, it's America. And it's what we do. You know, it's like you can do whatever.

Yeah. Yeah, I guess, Jack, how many patents do you have? None. Dee, how many patents do you have five with the patent office? I actually have four. Do you really? No, no, no. And Dee invented the sham.

Wow, not a lot of people know that about it. No, no, no. Well, he invented a super absorbent cloth that was advertised on, like, not TV. But, yeah, it's just, it's amazing to me because you're talking about these things in sort of a disassociated this is what we could do but you're also like this super genius who was filing patents as early as like 2003. The patents that those things were for have nothing to do with the systems that I've worked with since then.

You know, and the systems that I've worked with since then are really nothing special. They're just, you know, they basically, basically enable, and it was all very experimental and it's really not going on anymore. It's all been tested. And it's like, okay, you know, we've proven this concept. I wrote an article for the Marine Corps Gazette in 2014 and it was about a small unmanned system, aircraft system that was to be employed by a small, at the tactical level for optimization of situational awareness and signature at the tactical and operational levels that include,

both passive and active mechanism. So that's, you know, so you can do like remote sparkle, remote illumination. That's a big thing because, or remote marking. So you can maintain optimized signature, cover, defilated position and still mark a target, see it and, you know, do a talk on with that. So it's, it's very, it's actually very low tech. So it's just something that. Do we have questions for Ed? Yeah. Let me get to those. I just, I just wanted to pay tribute to you. in the sense that, like, you don't, you don't, like,

talk about all your achievements, so I'm going to talk about them for you. It's just to me, because, again, like, we can sit here, like, Jack and I can talk about, oh, what would be great for the warfighter,

but we've never filed a patent. And a patent isn't just that, hey, here's a good idea. It's like a detailed summary. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's like writing a book, like, or you're telling the story of the Marine Corps.

It's, and, you know, it's like, hey, are you going to do this or not? Right. That's a good comparison. Are you going to do it or not? Like, okay. Right. Hey, you can't support the troops or I want to, like, write a book about the military or something. And, you know, I'm like, I'm going to do it.

So I'm selling my house and I'm going to go to Afghanistan in war with the Marines. And that's, you know. I mean, I don't know. I'm not pat myself from the back on that. That's just what I did. Yeah, get out there and do it. And the same thing with systems. The same thing with systems development integration.

It's like, hey, you know, got an idea. Here's the idea. Published it. And okay, well, let's build it. So I built it. I built a bunch of it actually and tested it. That's amazing. We only have one question, actually.

and it's from Louis Vasquette. Oh, actually, did your patent experience help you become a better journalist? Good question. Yeah, all of it does. You know, everything in life is integrated, right? I mean, here we are. How many times do I say integrated tonight? Like, you know, but it's in writing and thinking when to be able to, I will, I think we want to cut this off.

It's been two hours, two hours and 20 minutes. I can talk all night, but, you know, when you write a book or anything about writing, conveying something, one of my Ed Derrickisms is there's no, there's no, there's no writer's block, there's subject comprehension block. Like, we can write a story, you know, about like, okay, going to the refrigerator and getting a drink of water. Like that's easy because we comprehend that. But when you get into concepts and other things, it's like you really sort of stumble along, you're like, wow, you know, like, you know, so how am I going to talk about like hope and achievement and all these other things? How am I going to describe that?

I don't, I cannot lucidly comprehend these bizarre concepts. So not so esoteric is, say, we'll talk about like, you know, designing a certain, um, device. And in patent, in the world of patents, you have to, they're called claims. There's independent, there's independent claims, independent claims. And so for a utility patent, you have to describe it. And the trick is to describe it as broadly as possible to not get patent lawyers, if someone's listening, they're going to say, oh, he just, not quite right. But you have to, you have to pass what's called the unobviousness concept. So you can't patent like a, a way. wheel, you know, like, okay, it's obvious dummy.

You know, one patent, it's very interesting that's used a lot is aspirin to fatten up pigs. Somebody patented that because it was, you know, acetyosyacylic acid, which is what aspirin is, was already invented as an analgesic for, you know, the cure pain or to alleviate pain, but somebody figured out when they fed pigs, aspirin, it made them get fat. So they patented that, you know, so the trick in patents is you have to adequately describe your invention and you have to do it in a way that it's not so hyper-specific that it's easy for other people to patent around it or to invent around it. Now, to sort of summarize, to get, because we didn't, we didn't do this talk about patents or intellectual property. I can

talk about that all night too, but you, um, you, you have to really, really comprehend the subject. Your invention is your subject and you have to understand it so well. So like writing a book about the Marine Corps, It's the same thing. You can't, you can't just like, oh, I'm going to call up 29 palms and, you know, see what these guys are doing and combined arms or whatever. What are these soldiers doing down there with close air support? You know, you have to go there. Right.

You can't reach somebody else's. By the way, I just said soldier. As I said that intentionally to me. That's a line you don't cross. That's a line you don't cross. I was doing it. I was going to slip up. It was my own.

I was intentionally saying that to come across as a dummy. But the thing is you have to go and do it. You've just, you got to do it. You want to write about the Marines. You want to write about, you know, anything. You want to write about extortion 117. I was not able to go there in that specific Tangi Valley. But I've flown a lot on CH47Ds and, you know, you talk to different pilots and crew members and you study it and you observe and you formulate the story.

You grasp, you understand the story. There's no story comprehension block. got it same thing with a bat so does that answer the question yeah so we have one more question that just came in thank you uh and um fantastic guest guys ed's a legit warrior poet mad scientist i agree um um being being like a sort of savant dilatant but successful in many areas give us like two lines the secret of success oh my god Oh, my gosh, that's it. I don't consider myself successful.

It's just very fortunate. I've got to meet some very wonderful people. But the one thing that I do, I would tell people when I get invited to go to talk at classes is just it's a small world and always be on your best behavior. You know, I'll tell you a quick story about Afghanistan. I was in Pakistan in 1999 to photograph mountains. And I show it, this is before 9-11, August. in 1999, we can all do math. But the first thing I read at getting off the plane was Osama calls for the death of every

American male. And when I was in the cities, you know, I actually smoked cigarettes back then. And I would go outside and smoke. And the one proprietor of this one hotel said, hey, you're an American. Don't stand in front of my hotel. You can stay here, but you're making me look bad. I mean, it was like thick, you know. It was, and I went to Nanga Parbat.

and photographed Nangapar Bhaps, the ninth highest mountain in the world. And then I wanted to go to K2. But as my backup plan, I wanted to go to the Wakon quarter. Going to K2 is really a big undertaking. I didn't climb it. But I eventually did go there and photograph it. It was great. Photographs have ended up on a lot of book covers and stuff,

magazines and stuff like that. But I went in 1999 as a backup to the Afghan consulate in Rawl Pindi, and it was operated by the 10th. Taliban and I met the Taliban and they told me, we'll give you a visa, but then we're going to kill you when you come. They said that. I was like, I'm not going to the Wakon Corridor. And so I left that, you know, I went back and I met up with some other people. We made it to K2 and I came back. And then six years later, I was with the Marines in Waterpour and Waterpour Village. And, you know, I'm getting on my way out to Camp Blessing. And, you know, I'm getting on my way out to Camp Blessing. And

I'm sitting there with the Marines and they had just met me and this guy, this Pakistani guy comes in, this, I don't know, Pakistani Afghan guy, comes in to this courtyard. The Marines were meeting with the local police chief and this one guy is pointing at me and he's like excitedly talking and the interpreter comes up and said, six years ago in Rawal Pindi, he was a bus driver and you got on his bus. Wow. And I was like, okay. It is a small world. Behave yourself. Yeah. You know?

Yeah. And it was, and that is, and the, and I had long hair and a beard then. And the, and I looked like, I, who's the guy that, he was, the Johnny Walker, Lynn. I looked like Johnny Walker Lynn. The Marines were looking at me like, well, who is this guy, you know? So when I got the camp blessing, I'd shave and got a haircut. But that is a small world story. So I just think that, you know, I've been very fortunate.

I get to work with wonderful, amazing people to include you guys. Right now, we're working together, right? We're communicating to the world stuff. And, you know, A, that just, you know, behave, you know, don't throw a fit because the Taliban says they're going to kill you on the bus afterwards, you know. Taliban. Who are these guys, man? They were the real deal, too, man.

And they had like the mask hair and all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It was, I wish, oh my God, I wish I had a photograph. There's going up the Caracorum Highway, we would stop. And, you know, the bus would stop. And every other store was like a gun store. And these guys went around this, you know, it's not that far from Peshire where I was,

which is like the fake gun, you know, the, you know, they copy infield rifles and everything. Right. And a counterfeit gun cap over the world. That's the word I don't think of counterfeit. But this one store had all these little placards. And it was a picture of Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden with an AK-47 and a PKK crossed. And it said, Osama and Omar, we salute you. And I was like, and then I thought, well, you know, maybe I'll take a picture of this. And they didn't let me take it. And I really, I asked him if I could get one of those posters. I knew who these guys. I didn't know Moa-O-O-O-Maw-M. more was, but I'd heard of Osama and Laden. That would have been interesting to have, if I had gotten that or a picture of it. That was, anyway, that was, to answer your question, you know, I always just try to be a nice guy, like I said, going up to 70th Rangers, you know, I would never say, oh, I know all about this military stuff because I don't say, hey, teach me, you know?

Yeah. Probably best thing is just be open to learning. Yeah. Ed, do you have any future projects that you want to, uh, books coming out that you want to tease out there? let us know about. I had tons of stuff I'm working on, but I'm not going to say anything. Come on. Yeah, I can't come on. Yeah, I can't say. I just got it. I got it. Yeah. If people want to check out your photography, is there a, uh, us, like I checked out your website, but you don't have like it listed there. Yeah. Um, is there a place on LinkedIn. If you go to LinkedIn, like I have a, if you just do

Ed Derek and LinkedIn, like, I'm the only at Derek there is. There's not too many people with it. last name Derek anyway, but I actually, I was at a point where I had finished up a bunch of projects and a friend of mine, and I said, God, it's the first time in like 10 years. I don't have any major things on a to-do list. And my friend's like, well, you know, go to LinkedIn and fix up your LinkedIn. I go, okay, I'll do that. So I went nuts. I actually made some interesting document, And it's not just for my ego. I think people would learn from it of photography credits. And like there's everything from a stamp.

A photograph of mine is using a Canadian poster stamp to like, you know, those accessories, those posters that say, those inspirational ones. Hang in there. Yeah, no, it's teamwork. Teamwork jets. Yeah. And there's a bunch of stuff. So I, you know, and I have that.

So I put that. I made a document on there. You can go see it. I mean, look at my LinkedIn. That's, I always just his joke that. LinkedIn is Facebook for people over 30. Well, I'm definitely over 30. And so there you go.

I'm on LinkedIn. Fantastic. Yeah, I really encourage people to go and check out your books about Red Wings, Extortion 17, Marines in Anbar Province. We didn't even really get to. Victory Point about Operation Whaling. Yeah, I mean, I highly recommend the stuff I've read was just amazing. And I hope people will go and check it out.

Thank you. Well, let's do this. again at some point. We could talk about the Marines and Amber at some point. I would love to. Yeah. I was like, that's what I'm going to talk about tonight and we didn't even talk about it at all. I'd be happy to have you back again and talk about that.

So yeah, on, what is it, Tuesday, D? Nelson Miller, former SEAL Team 6 operator. We'll have him on the show Tuesday. And that's kind of where we're at right now. We got a good lineup for the next couple months. And victory point. Yep. And then the after.

It's called, so the books are, the books are the Warriors of Ambar. Right. And there's another, I have a photography book called War Moments. And then I've got the final mission of extortion 117 and then victory point. But if you just go to, if you go to like just Google my name and then go to Amazon. Right. It'll come up. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we could say it's your favorite bookstore, but I think everybody gets her books from Amazon now. Yeah, you know, it's, uh, the publishers have a problem when you say that. It's convenient and it's sad. But I do, too. I don't, I don't even, I don't know. I mean, there's some, there's great bookstores out there.

Yeah. Everybody in America, buy them, you know, just go buy books and read them. Yeah. From your local mom and pop bookstore. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, all right.

Well, thank you guys. Thank you, Ed. Thank you so much, Ed. I really appreciate it. We'll do this again sometime soon. And, yeah, everyone out there will see you on Tuesday. So take care. You guys.

You have a great one. You too, Ed. Bye.