Kitbag Conversations - Kitbag Conversations Episode 10: Chief

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

CW4 Schwalm, 33 year army veteran with 24 years in 5th special forces group. Chief Schwalm has been in the gulf War, Horn of Africa, Invasion of Afghanistan, Invasion of Iraq, and the War on ISIS.

I'm supposed to mow the grass today I'm supposed to fix the fence But when the sun's beating down on me It's hard to make it make sense Half of me wants a cold bed Yeah that's the cold hard truth And when the refrigerator stops full of them Tell me what's they gonna do I ain't even trying to find it's already been decided The sky and the mountains are blue Half of me wants a cold bed And the other half does too Yeah I kinda need to wash my truck Welcome to the KitBed Conversations Episode 10

So I'm gonna speed through this introduction because So 33 years in the army We said 24, 24 years in self And then 5 conflicts First Gulf War Invasion of Iraq Invasion of Afghanistan Return of the Empire ISIS And then the Horn of Africa 19 Delta and Gulf War got your combat action badge You did 18 Zula 180 Alpha time so you have your CIB

And then you've also done 18 Delta and you did the combat medic So basically you have every combat badge under the sun You've been in part of every conflict in the last 30 years And for those who don't know this is my dad So we were talking but we're gonna start from the Let's start with the first job which was the admin specialist And you gotta start at the recruiters office Because that's actually the funniest fucking thing

Sure no problem So admin specialist So to start with how I even got to the recruiters office It goes back to how you know I was 18, 19 Absolute shit head kid was not doing I had gone to college but my mom and dad had paid for me to go to college I screwed off you know I was an absolute shit bag of a kid at that point You know I wasn't getting in trouble

I wasn't like getting in law but I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing My grades were trash And I had failed pretty much I had failed out of my first college which was a four year state college in New York But you know in an odd thing I had gone to take my ASFAB while I was there at that college And scored a 128 on my GT at that point Which I knew nothing about or what the relevance of that was Is it on max like 130 or something like that?

132 So I didn't even know Yeah you got a 128 and the recruiters like I didn't do whatever I wanted with this Yeah they were constantly on me I didn't know why But I wind up going back to Rochester I started going to Monroe Community College That's where I met your mom We started living together

And one of the things I was working at Night Crew at a grocery store full time And I decided I wanted to do something more with it so I was going to go into the reserves I had a friend who was also going to the college too He said why don't you come out and be a combat engineer He sold me the idea of being a combat engineer I had to go take another ASFAB At that point I scored a 129 I get back and the recruiters are really excited

It's like yeah we're going to send you over to the map station You're going to be a combat engineer You're going to go to the unit Go through the deal, go to the map station And of all the things that I was just Physically everything's fine except for one small little thing According to them I was color blind at the time You're not color blind

At that point I somehow managed to suddenly become color blind I couldn't tell the difference between red and green Horribly so the numbers that I saw when I actually got to look at my own physical And I understood what I was looking at I was like you've got to be kidding me I think so You just looked at 50 bucks like I need an admin specialist The difference between the recruiter and the map station

It's like what is the map station trying to fit in that day And here's this kid For looking at him he's got like a 129 GT This kid, let's do something So they sold me on this bill of goods that I could be an admin specialist Which is a 71 Lima at that time Packler essentially Go down to four checks

The selling point to me As soon as they told me I couldn't be an engineer I was almost in tears I couldn't be the cool guy I wanted to be But they're like you can get six college credits off I'm like okay, I get six college credits Maybe I can rebuild my college career And make my mom and dad happy

Get that college degree that they wanted me to get Love, love, love And I go down and I became a pack clerk And I will say one of the things that has been A huge part of my life in the Army Because when I went through Fort Jackson and became a pack clerk One of the things that they drove home while I was there Was appearance, basic soldiering

And walk right, talk right, look right And you can say what you want about it When you become the combat arm soldier And everything like that You almost totally detest people who look like this But when you're an NCO And you've got that one soldier Who is never a problem on appearance

Or anything you like His records are right His appearance is right His uniform is right His hair is right When you get those basics out of the way And this was always a big thing when I became a warrant officer And in senior NCOs like look guys

Do the basics Because when I go and talk to leadership I don't want to talk to them about how my soldiers look Or how they act or something like that I want to go talk to them about Give me money so I can go buy equipment Give me the best operations And the jobs that you guys got out there

From my team, from my units I don't want to talk to them about that other crap That's wasted time If I've got only 15 minutes with my commander Or my sergeant major I don't want to talk to them about how one of my soldiers looks And I was that one guy that took that burden off Every commander, every soldier, every sergeant I ever had

Has never had me as that problem child That they had to go talk to the sergeant major about Or anything like that And now since I've taken that off the table All the other military things that make you a better soldier That super soldier was available to me And it's just like here, now go do this stuff And one of the things that we always said in Special Forces

That a Special Forces soldier is not like this real super soldier He's just mastered the basics And if you can master the basics Everything else is gravy You know what's funny about that though Is that without even mentioning it We do that to each other For those who don't know

It was weird being me for a minute there Because I was a second lieutenant With aerosol, airborne, and then my pathfinder torch But I didn't have a ranger tab So automatically heads started going What the fuck is that thing? Because we check each other Because we wear everything

I know your Special Forces are a ranger I know if you've seen combat based on a combat patch You can read somebody Immediately once they walk it And we don't like to admit it We don't really care how we look We like to be war fighters But really we do it to every single guy

And not so much women We may start soon But men size each other up And uniform the minute they see each other You got a combat patch Oh shit you got one You got a ranger tab? Well though you don't

I got a ranger tab You're a pussy Oh yeah yeah yeah It's a measuring contest Yeah But then you could be a fat ranger Or you could be a fat SF guy And then it's like

You look like shit Well that brings things into question That brings into question You know it's like yeah You can be overweight But now we got a question Are you overweight and out of shape Or are you overweight

And you're just one of those guys That miraculously can pull this stuff up As opposed to looking at somebody go Oh no he definitely can go do what he needs What we want him to do Yeah I think it was buff S1 clerk I've never fucking seen

Right right right right Yeah Yeah and so that would That the one thing I would By having all that S1 background I mean I could do anything in an S1 shop You want a lead form I'll do a lead form

You want your records to look good SGLI DD214 You know all that stuff You know we'll do it I'll do it all I can do it all So I know what Wright looks like

And that made me a danger You know that You know when I walk into an S1 shop And when I was in Special Forces Or any unit really And somebody You know tries to song a dance act Why they're

You know I'm telling them They're screwed up And they're like Oh well you're just an SF guy You don't really know what we do And I go Let me show you something real quick You know Stud

I used to be you I know what you're supposed to be doing I know what you're capable I know what you were trained to do And this ain't it And then they Oh shit Yeah which also on the other side

Of the coin too is like You know S1 is in finance clerks And we're my best friends too Because I spoke their language And we've talked about this You know when you're in the S shops There's like There's an S shop language too

And you understand emotions And things that It's different up there at that level And so I was After being one of them Besides the fact that I could correct them Was also the fact that I understood them You know it's like

I know what you guys do I know what you guys are also going through And I can I can either be your worst enemy Or your best friend So how are we going to do this Yeah it's the It's a difference maker

You said it before right Like there's a lady at fifth group Who's been at fifth group for her entire life She's the receptionist for the group commander And everybody likes to kind of like Oh she's being She's not giving me the calendar Of the commander or this or that

And it's like No no no You hand Ms. Joyce flowers Ms. Joyce You hand Ms. Joyce flowers You hand Ms. Joyce Valentine's Day That's mom Yeah that's mom

Same with like your staff shop Like everybody wants to come in And shit down the throat of the admin people But then the one guy who does come in It's like hey guys what's up They're like They move heaven and earth for you All of a sudden

Oh your computer's fixed today Oh the Yes Your paperwork is done over lunch And it's beautiful And it's like because you're the only person That went in there Yeah

With a smile on your face It's odd that we even bring that up right now Because I just I think it was yesterday Or the day before I got this friend request on On Facebook From a female

Last name Sullivan I'm like Sullivan And I look Originally when I saw the picture It was her and a guy who was a pilot And I think her first name is Jordan Sullivan I think But I'm like

Who is she And why am I getting a friend request From her and her pilot And I started scrolling through Before I agreed to accept the friend request I started scrolling through And I'm like And I realized it wasn't him

It was her that had sent me the friend request And I looked at her And all of a sudden I saw her in a uniform And I go That's Lieutenant Sullivan Lieutenant Sullivan Was actually working at the group S1 shop Yeah

And you should remember her Right Because She actually filled in So when the group S1 Actual went overseas She stepped in And filled his role

She filled a major slot Yeah She's a Lieutenant Filling a major Like an O2 Filling a freaking O4 O4 spot And she's killing it

And so Lieutenant Sullivan And I always talked Because I'm always in the group command And talking to people And it was because I understood I understood S1 I spoke S1

And then was also You know one of the things where She was one of the The major players in getting you Out of the Hunter and First And over to Fist Special Forces group Yeah And so and I realized it was her

And I remember her talking about her Her Warren Officer Which was also I know another connection that we had Was that her husband was a Warren Officer Flyboy Okay Flyboy

Warren Officer We won't go down that road just yet But you know she I remember her being pregnant Up there Up that group And boy she was pregnant pregnant Like you know we're talking

Third trimester And we're still doing her Killing it up there At group I mean they had to drag her out With a A freaking tow truck To go have her baby

She was awesome She Yeah she was When I dropped my packet To come over there She was like Yeah you're the only intel officer With a combat deployment

Who applied And I was like Yeah That's really strange And she's like You got time to talk I was like Actually no

And she's like why And I'm like Because I'm literally about to get Out of helicopter And go to a mission And she's like Oh you're still over there I'm like

Yeah I'm still here I was like I'm about to come back And not be an Hunter And first But She was really nice Yeah she was fantastic

Yep Yeah so that You did the S1 thing For like Whatever year it is And then No about a year and a half About a year and a half

And then So As a reservist I was still Working in the In the civilian sector Going to my reserves And

I got with your mom And we talked We had a baby Your sister Erika And we The discussion was Like look We need a better opportunity

Let's Go in the military There's better opportunities For the medical There's better opportunities For our life Let's You know

I'm going to go Act of duty And the decision was made Go Go act of duty And went back to You know Maps again

Just You know They're like They keep looking at my GT scores And they're like What do you You just want to be a cat You know

Somebody hard charged And like yeah You know They were offering me everything It's like You want to be on a nuclear weapon Or you know I just want

I want to go Run through the trees And everything else And if I'm not color blind This time I would really like to go do that You know You know

One of the things I was You know Well here's Here's the sidebar on that As well as at that The 817th hospital EVAC Which was the reserve unit That I was assigned to

You know And Just amazing NCOs At that unit That Just further You know Magnified everything

That I had learned As a 71 Lima But You know I go into I go to The next MEPs day I check with

The medical section there And I was not color blind And then I go And did the Went to MEPs And this time Lo and behold You know

They sell me on this I'm not color blind And they sell me On this cab scout You know I'm wanting to be Infantry I want to go

Ranger I want to go They're like Oh Cab scout Closest thing to Ranger Without actually being a ranger Plus

Beautiful And if you If you ever get a chance To see the old 1980s Cab scout Selling video It's

Man You're just like Wow I'm going to be Like SF on Roids Here Yeah But no

No I got to find it Because if I can That's a Later is that Like 35 years later You'd look at that

With a beer in your hand And go Motherfucker No You guys I didn't ruin my life at all But talk about Cherry picking

Visual concepts Yeah I mean This was like A 30 second inspirational video It's like You're a den You get done watching that

You're just like Waving a flag I'm America Yeah And I got to say Becoming a 19 delta Was amazing

So A couple different stories There So number one Is I go to Fort Knox And while I'm there I go to Fort Knox

My They got this new thing Coming through Called the Bradley Finding Vehicle That tells you how old I am That the Bradley

Fighting Vehicle Was new at that time You know I don't even know What vehicle iteration Run now For everything that's Out there

But The Bradley Fighting Vehicle They had two versions They had the Infantry Fighting Vehicle And the

CSB Or the Cavalry Fighting Vehicles And This added An extra three Or four weeks

Of extra training On my Cav time And so I'm Climbing all over This new guy Meanwhile Everybody else

Who didn't get Assigned The new Delta 3 training They're out there Running around In the old 113s

Or the Flat tops Vietnam level Shit So I go through that And then I graduate Go down

To my contract Go to Airborne school And when you get done With Airborne school I was Airborne unassigned 19 Delta Airborne unassigned

And I'm thinking Alright There's only two Unison out there That have Airborne scouts 82nd Airborne Over and for

Breck And Italy They had scouts Over there too And the 82nd had The best

Cavalry Like Airborne They dropped You know I mean By God I'm a I'm a

19 Delta Airborne Cav Scout I am going to For Breck I find this Very funny Because I didn't know You went to

Airborne school Before Like Before selection And I remember Very, very A life changing Discussion

Slash Debate You and I had Was like You wanted me To become An intel officer And I wanted to be

An Airborne school Why can't I go be A Cav Scout Like you Like go be a Cav Scout For the 82nd Or the 173rd And you

This is the first time I've ever heard this By the way Because Really? Yeah No I thought you

Went to Airborne school After SFAS And For the Listeners out there When I was a cadet We had this discussion Because he's like

The only people that Leave the wire Are aviation Intelligence people And special forces I wanted to be A pathfinder I wanted to be

A long range Reconnaissance Paratrooper And stuff like that Yup You motherfucker You motherfucker I wanted it so bad

And you were like Put MI And so I put intel As my number one choice And then Number two I was like Fucking Cav Scout I swear to God

If I get there first Like Anyway I didn't know Yeah Yeah But you know Now you even know

The difference there too So Now I look at my orders And it says 29th Tree division And then it said

Fort Benning Unassigned I'm like What? Or not It wasn't even 29th It was Fort Benning Unassigned

And I'm like Alright This is weird I'm actually staying Here in Fort Benning And one Of my buddies Had a car there

And we actually Went in and drove All around Fort Benning There was only One unit in Fort Benning Bradley's And that was the

29th infantry division Again Not knowing anything About the units At Fort Benning There were two units there Or three units You had the

Rangers You had 29th Infantry division And then you had 197th Infantry Brigade 197th Infantry Brigade Had flat tops Everywhere

29th Infantry Had Bradley fighting vehicles And then You had the Ranger battalion Over there And so it's like

Alright So this makes sense We're Delta 3 Bradley qualified KF Scouts Going to the 29th Infantry Division Finally get

I'm in processing Fort Benning No, no 197th Infantry Brigade Like What? Yeah Are they getting Bradley?

You know Am I missing something here? So I've got All this additional training I'm Airborne Qualified Delta 3 Qualified And here I am The unit

And I'm in a flat top Central You know There's nothing about 113s And what The other thing That they had

It's at the hammer The old hammer heads Where it fired Twin toes on top of it That came up like a hammer head And it would fire On top of that That's

The Scalpatoon I get assigned to Has three flat top 113s Vietnam A2s Which are just One level above What they had in Vietnam And we had The ITVs

See, you know The hammer heads Yeah This Like, wow Talk about You know And this is where I learned

That the military will do that They will train you And then throw you To this level And then throw you And something down here And you're like But I'm one of the few

That's actually trained To do that Okay Then they'll take some idiot Who has no training In any of that Send him to that unit And they'll bring him up to there

It's like But I'm already there Send him Well, the 29th Infantry Division Their job there On forebending Was the assistant training Unit

For They were the ones That did all the training For the infantry units That were there They were Some were instructors Some were just support assets to it

And the 197th Infantry Brigade Is like Who the hell is the 197th They were They were nobody They were like They were It was actually the

197th Infantry Brigade Separate They were They were not assigned Any additional division They were just The 197th We were

I mean If there was a shit job On forebending We got it Like, if they needed Additional people Not Not the instructors

Not the people Who were designed to support The schools On forebending They were like We got taskers All the time to go out And help

The training Because nobody Knew what the hell to do With us We were just this Random brigade And middle of nowhere But

The Scalpatoon So I was in a Scalpatoon In an infantry battalion The NCOs That we had In that unit

We're like The Ambassador children Of the entire battalion In a 19 series In an 11 series Battalion And there's only one platoon Of us

But the NCOs That I had there Were amazing Like we're talking You know They were NCOs Who had gone to Korea And been on the border

In Korea They were from 11th ACR Over in Germany 3rd ACR Over in Germany And this is We're talking

Before 1990 In the fall The wall And everything like that And so You know When you're talking Cavalry

Like these are the guys That went overseas And that was the other part Of the rotation Out of Fort Benning Like if you went to 197 You were going to go to Korea Or you were going to go to Germany

And these were Very real missions Over there In Germany And in Korea It's like The bad guy is just Right there

And Got nuclear weapons And the Russian Horde And everything was Very, very real back then And so You know It came to

You know Teaching us Our 19 Delta Series tasks And ingraining us You know What we were supposed to do And like

We knew Like the 197 Did have a mission And was to go over And be a support In Germany And We're going to die

You know We are We You know What's the word? Dip Die in place Was our scout mission

You knew As a scout Like if we were going To go over And fold a gap Or somewhere over there One of the gaps That the Russian Horde

Was going to come through And we're going to Be on the sides of these hills We're going to get put in place And essentially All we were was a trip wire You know When the Russian Horde

Came south And they started going In Germany And going through Europe And all that other stuff They were going to go through These specific locations And as they went through

There was going to be 19 Delta's on the hill Saying Okay You know This is the Or this is the The way they're arranged

As far as their To a front One in the back And that's it And then the artillery That the Russian We all knew that the Russians Were going to do

Is the flanks Were going to get Chemicaled, artillery Everything Everything on the side Of where the Russian Horde Was going to go through Was going to be flat earth

Okay And we were going to be You know And we We lived You know For the whole time That the spirit of our thought

Process was We are going to die There was no In our No No In addition The best we possibly could

Success for us Was sitting there Getting off that Radio call Right before we died And saying This is the way that The Russians are arranged

And we might just be Able to stop them Because we're saying They're one Forward, two Back or two Forward, one Back

And that's it That was That was That was Success You know Your flags Everywhere

You know Taps And everything The possible task In the 19 series And the As a 19 series scout You know

We got so much crap From all the 11 series The infantry guys But then one day We just You know I had a great NCO And he goes

Hold up They used to have The task books By MOS There were These books They had all your Tasks for an MOS

They said I tell you what Go get all your 11 series tasks And so there's like You know Level three books Level one, level two

Level three books And they were about that high Stacked They go Alright cool Go get the engineers Level one, two And three tasks

So they went over and got to The 12 series tasks And they stacked them On top of it That's cool Now Go get The

Go get some Armor guys At task books Go get some Artillery guys Or the call for fire And all those other The

The forward observers books And they stack them all up And they're about this high Everybody else's are this high And they're right about even And they're like It's like This is what you get

When you get a calf scout You know He's He's prepared to put in a Mindfield He's prepared to do a route Reconnaissance He's prepared to do infantry

Tasks He's prepared to You know To clear trenches He's He's also a forward Observer And

Yeah There are 19 deltas It absolutely sucked To being four observers But again When you got guys They're like You know

From Germany and Korea Where their lives depend on Being able to call Decent for fire missions You know Like if we weren't doing Anything We'd go up there to the TV

Room and our NCOs Would have us All right Lay in a Mindfield You know All this other stuff Just you know

Call for fire Here's a tank Bring Scunning down on it From You know heaven From artillery From a mortar

And Just that And then You know Of course All the NTCs And getting beat down And rushing forward

And all that other stuff Along comes Desert Shield Desert Storm This is where things got Interesting for our unit So Everybody said

Saddam comes south Goes into Kuwait Starts taking stuff over Everybody's getting ready To go over Oh by the way Yeah Everybody's getting ready

To go overseas We're watching 80 seconds First ones to roll out They're over there Crying because They knew it They were just a speed bump

That Right So it's like Right Right So they're out there It's like 80 seconds Like they get them over there

Because they were the first ones To get in there They're a speed bump They're like All right They're screaming We need armor And so the first armor

The first division That they sent over there You know Because Germany still had Germany going on Korea still had Korea going on They call out

The one division That's Mechanized They go rolling over there Now they had a The 48th National Guard Was their round out brigade So they had two

Active duty brigades And one Round out brigade Which was a National Guard unit And they had to be validated Prior to going over there So they took their Quick cut

Kicked everybody else Out of NTC Took the 48th National Guard Ran them over to NTC And said All right guys Let's see what you guys Can do

And they They were And they immediately Oh god We have a problem It's like We need a brigade now To go with the 24th ID

And so they Just so happened Right there in Fort Benning Was a separate brigade The 197th Infantry Brigade And so we became They reflagged us As the third brigade

24th ID We went through a Reflagging ceremony And like the next week Boom We're gone I had been I had been in Georgia

Let me see Probably About two and a half years At Fort Benning You know Going through all of our training Everything Prior to going over to

The Gulf War And Again That same mentality The dynamic place Mentality The speed bump And again

As early as we first Got over there Into Saudi Arabia It's like We were the Additional speed bump We were the We were the

Our portion Now here we are Fort Benning 24th ID Which has M1s M1A1s And Bradley's

And here we are You know We're the little brother Coming up in 1, 1, 3 Hi Hey man What's up We're with you guys

The fuck is that Like Who brought in the Vietnam team here Yeah We're like Please God This has got to

Work out some Awesome way It's funny The quality of soldier Is different Because there's just There's no technology Right

Like you're saying Like the Cav Scouts Got to be able to do All these fucking things And it's because There's no drones There's no cyber There's no intel

There's nothing And I mean We We got our GPSs Over there We were in We were in Saudi Arabia I think

Around November We got the The green They looked like a sandwich They were the green Trimble GPSs

Which were Analog as analog gets I mean There was like A digital screen face When I say digital It looked like the old Scout calculators

With the It took like six dots To make a number Four or something like that You know On the face They had a toggle switch On there

It was just this little thing You would click on the outside Those who Those who know who Remember the old Trimble packs And again It's worth looking up

If you want to see it It was a GPS Which had to have The wire to A separate Anten amount Which had to have Clear observation

To this guy The antenna The antenna ray On this thing Was like a box About this big And it had to have We had to create a special

Thing Arm on the 113 For it to sit on And nobody could hit it Otherwise it would Take everything off And the only thing Would tell you

Was your ten digit location It didn't You didn't have a map on it It was just I mean A grid You know We only had

Maybe eight, nine Satellites up there Flying around at the time So your location And it fluctuated Between maybe And possibly So

You know We went from reading maps In the desert In the Saudi desert To finally having A GPS If you Put in a location

If you pumped it You know Click, click, click, click In your ten digit grid Where you want to go to It would give you Like this A knife

You had You had straight up This or the You know There were only like It just kind of Gave you like an arrow Right, right

An arrow was like That way It goes straight And It was awful You know It might be able to get you Within 50 meters

Of your spot Which is In the desert is amazing You know It's like Alright, we're close So that's how That's how

We're doing basics That was basics We got the Mark 19 Over there That was like You know One of the things That they pushed forward

Was the Mark 19 We went through Mark 19 training We got this GPS We We refitted Our 113s Because they took away

We were three ITVs And three 113s They took out the Three ITVs They gave us Three other flat tops So we had six flat tops And we

They re-rigged These things So that we could have Three main guns One 113s Jesus Christ Right So you could have

The situation was You either a Mark 19 With two 50 cals And an M60 Off the back deck But you We just looked

Like this This porcupine Of 113s With guns Like I couldn't We drilled holes In the 113s

To mount The 50 cals And this is There were no chicken plates There were no nothing Out there with a 50 cal And the flat Yeah

You're just laying on top Just laying down Hate No You're sitting You're in the back hatch So Well the other two guns

The ones on the corners Uh They were actually Not on the They were on the corners But facing to the 45 front So you had the

Whoa And the other two Which faced out To what was You know operated By the two guys We had We had to get extra guys

In the back of the 113 So we brought Four infantry guys With us And we put them into The 113s And so they would The

On the back hatch There would be a guy With the M60 facing Backwards With the M60 So 350s Facing forward

One facing back Or one M60 facing back Or mark 19 Is the main gun Which And 250 cals

And then The M60 It was It was Awful It was We were standing With our hands

And cans And ammunition And explosives That's Please That was your Please Yeah

If something Had hit us It would have been Just a vapor Nothing Would have been left Nothing Nothing identifiable

As even a vehicle People are Guns Or anything Just A green Metal Aluminum

Explosion Mist Thankfully it never Happened But that was awful It was I mean The guys in the back

Were standing In the back Waste high Because like On the thing like this You know With their belly From their waist

Up Exposed Because they're standing On top of stuff Jesus Christ Yeah We Oh no

Man Nobody even thought Chicken plate Or anything like that This is how we die Body armor There was no body armor Back then either

Back then too So that was another You know Experience Just wonderful You know But really great You know

And we had already accepted too We were already Like dying place You know And then The order comes Like we're going across the border We were

The When we eventually Went across the border Into Iraq And we did the The actual The Gulf War Invasion

When we went to Desert Storm We were on The far The The swing Which put us Right next to

The Hundred and First And the Hundred and First Was the one that was doing Those bounding movements up But because the Hundred and First Could bound so far forward In one quick leap With their

Their unit The night before Everything really kicked off They said Alright We need Everybody on the left To kick forward

Across the border About 20 miles So before The war Even gets going Before everybody else Knew that

We were going to Invade Iraq We were already 20 miles Into Iraq Okay To make up for the time Different

You've mentioned this before Where it's like At the farther away You are The more you ground You have to cover Because it's like The door swings

So you're Haul and ass If it swings like this If it swings like this This group right here Is only got to go this far This group's got to go Ah

They're screaming Across the desert Trying to make ends meet The outer outer part Is 101st And they're just like Oh, no problem No problem

They're just jumping forward Jump through the helicopters Oh yeah Yep Yep Amazing Just Eye-opening experience

Into You know You go from Not knowing war To knowing war In such a short Or That

That was like You know That's also You know It's one of the One of the major reasons I have to get therapy Is you know

To get away from The border All the way up to the highway Of death And then we came back down The highway of death To come back into Kuwait

And go back to Saudi Arabia And then actually leave So We saw it all You know From the gunfights To the To the death

To the crispy critters To the You know You know Vehicles just on fire You know The surrendering And it's just

Insane You know Just how You can go from Being this kid on the streets And thinking You know what's going on In the world

To suddenly War Yeah And not just like Not like the war I experienced Where it was like Very small Pocketed

This is Because you've talked about Like your first firefight With like Iraqi tanks And I'm like Do you Like

That's something That's a And we've talked about this Where you're like Guys will sit there And they'll come from The regular military They'll come into special forces

And be like I know I know what a firefight is And then they go Hey chief Come here And you walk in And they're like

You're a tank company before Like No No Yeah Yeah No There's no

That's That's open scale warfare And there's no Harrison And You know Thankfully Nobody's had to

I think the only time Anybody even came close To this was over there In Syria When the Well I'm sure during the I'm not going to take anything

Away from anybody else Like during desert During The Gulf Not the Gulf But the Iraq invasion And stuff like that Those guys saw some

Yeah And stuff They got into some stuff They got into some really Crazy, crazy stuff But You know We're talking

That level of ground Scale warfare That we saw during the Gulf War You're talking That hasn't been seen Since like Not in Vietnam

Not in Korea That hasn't been done And they did it And then You know Backward study And everything You look at the generals

And the way they thought And the way they acted And you look at the The battles And you're like Wow That was all Our entire success was based

Off of Our experiences at NTC And the fact that We just got wholesale beat Down at NTC And just shamed By the Russian Hordes at NTC

It's like These guys When we went against the Iraqis It was so Matched That You know

They I mean We're out there Using GPS's And the triple guns And the Mark 19s And everything else Like that

And these guys They were like It must have been Like a Boy Scout Trip going to NTC Because we just Beat And we were like

Angry about it too It's like No Fuck you You know We were The people that We had trained against

At NTC You know These guys We just Routed them You know Wholesale Spanked them

So they were At the time You know They were like The number seventh Ranked military In the world And I think

We knocked them down To number 15 After we left For one Like That's something When you take somebody's Entire military

And you turn You lost So many positions In one fight Dude In less than 100 hours We took Scaled your

Entire military Outlook We changed The geography Of your art Yeah We changed everything It's like

You guys were You know A contender You guys Aren't even That anymore So Yeah

So you Get done You get your You know Your taste Of first Combat And you've got

Right And it's funny Because For those Combat patches Handed out At like One station

Unit training For drill sergeants So like I'll see that patch Like I grew up seeing You with that patch as a kid I remember Being in the army

Going to Airborne school And seeing A drill sergeant With that patch I'm like What the fuck is that And then I remember

And I was like That unit isn't Even a combat unit anymore It's a fighting unit That they Designated I'm like And so like

I've always thought On the wrong side, man Like No, it's not No, it's not Yeah We got done with When we got back

They gave us the option To Where either The 197th Infantry Brigade Patches Or Combat Patch Or the Terraleaf The 24th ID

Patch We could Either or We could Our choice to pick from It all depends How we felt And most of us

Went with the 197th Eventually They made us change it To the 24th ID But for the longest time You sent us to war In flat tops

While you guys Reigned around at Bradley's Fuck you Yep Thank you Yep So you get done

And then The famous My My platoon sergeant Or my squad leader Is a fucking idiot I can do better Than this story

Oh yeah Yeah So We get back You know I made it to Specialists At that point

And This was In 1991 After we Get back from the Gulf War And We had So we get this NCO

And He comes in And he's You know He's an E5 The buck sergeant And he's just Talking smack

To everybody Da-da-da-da-da You know He was over there I think with like The first armored Or something like that And

He's just talking about how It's like On an NCO It's like And he started bragging About having a 62 GT score And I'm like

What? Like we After he started bragging About that We started calling His nickname was GT Absolutely And I was like

This guy And then we would go out And do some platoon training Because we were now A lot more serious Than we used to be And we'd do platoon training Like some of the things

That happened out there In the field We just I looked around I'm like I'm going to die You know I've been to combat

I know what's expected of us I know what's going to happen This guy's going to get me Killed Fair Fair and square And I can't

He outranks me It's like It wasn't a good time It was not a good time To be there And The professionalism Of the guys

The NCOs That had been there Was leaving The professionalism Of the soldiers That we had At the junior level Was amazing

And we got this oddity Then And it just started Perpetuating We started getting more Like that I was like Okay

Something's happening here I went to PLDC Which was The very basic NCO course At the time Got undergrad Leadership award

And this is You know Competing against The rest of Fort Benning To include the Rangers Come back They promote me to corporal And

I got my NCO Shortly I got my E5 Shortly after that And I had been reading I had been reading books On SF All this time

And I said You know what This is 92 And I make the I make the career choice Like I'm going to go to selection You know

And I will tell you I was very Prepared For selection Physical wise The amount of 12-mile Ruck marches We did

The fact We're required to do it In three hours or less Really made a deal The rucks that we carried The PT that we did As a scout platoon Was very

It was ideal You know It set me up just right For to go to selection And I went to To selection In 92 Early in 92

I think it was like March or April of 92 And That was It was very It taught me So much about myself More than

You know And not going to lie It's like there were You know You'd get done with the day And you're sitting there You're thinking yourself And people say this

Like you know I'm going to quit And Gaggins books covers All these things Very in depth But I don't know Whether it was just

Fortitude or just being lazy Like I feel like I think I'm going to quit You know It's like this is really really hard But nobody's ever given me Any bad feedback That's the one thing about

Selection is like You go through all these events And you never get feedback It's like You know You do your runs You know I'm in the top third

On everything that I'm finishing You know For the runs And for the rucks And for the land naves And stuff And You're not getting any feedback

There's no positive There's no negative feedback And you just start Assessing yourself And you're like Man It's like I just

I don't feel like I'm doing And it's like Man I'm really tired I'm hurt I'm You know My ankle's swollen

It's like I don't know what the hell I did to my ankle there Like I had to I had the old jungle boots I had to actually Cut the back strap On my jungle boots

And actually Every morning I would have to Retape my jungle boot Around the swelling In my ankle And at night You know

You go to bed And you're only going to get When they tell you to fall asleep And when they tell you You can go to sleep And you wake up When they tell you to wake up You're only getting four hours

That's it And in between there Everybody in the In the hooch has to pull Fireguard And the more I keep leaving your hooch The more time you get

On your fire guard So you go It's like a 15-minute fire guard I mean Most people If you've ever been through Any sort of a fire guard You're not a special force

It's like one or two hours A fire watch Like you got 15 minutes And all it is You sit around You know You wake up the guy next to you But you're bad

I will tell you If you sit in that bed For that 15 minutes Boy, you will be asleep The biggest thing I would do Is like I'd get up Sit in my 15 minutes Wait for the next guy

Go to the bathroom And then go back to bed But the whole time You're talking to yourself Like man It's like I You know I want to quit

And then the next morning Like nah I'm not going to quit today Because I've already woke up You know I'm here Right And then eventually

It got into my mind It's like no I'm not taking myself out They're going to have to kick me out If I mess up You're going to have to pull me out And you get to the end And you're like

Okay nobody pulled me out And then you get selected And you're like Oh shit Yeah Oh it's done shit Yeah And it becomes

An all heart issue It's not a You could go there And I've realized That you could go there In mediocre shape But if you got the heart And the mentality

To And this was something That was just Driven into me As I was growing up It's like Just keep going Keep going

Just keep going Keep going And then It's just I don't know It's like A level of Jewish religion Of just keep going through the

Desert Man We're just going to keep going Forward Just Just keep moving forward No matter what Just keep going

Keep going And no matter how Even if You only get an inch today Just keep going And that's That's what eventually became Around the end of SF

It's just The selection It's just like No, just keep going You know I'm going to run down this hill And I'm going to Speedwalk up that hill

And I'm like And you start Looking at the people around you And they start Pumping you up And you You could see it And I could

I could tell you About Probably about a A third of the way into Selection I could tell you Looking at somebody That they were going to quit

Because you could You You can try to save them But the Language that they use The way they appear Their shoulders Their eyes

Their everything They're defeated They've Committed to it And I think one of the Best stories I've ever heard Actually came from

One of the guys who Who went back Who got selected To go back And work there At Selection Committee As an NCO there Is he had

A guy Come to him one night And this was Just on a whim that he had And the guy came to him And he was going to quit And he goes I want to quit

And he goes You can't quit Unless you can get You've got to bring a buddy With you to quit The guy Back to his hooch Talked to somebody

Who he knew And he talked him into Quitting And the next thing He noticed He got two guys in front And was like We want to quit

He's What? That definitely worked And if Sure shit Kid came back With another kid And he's like

He knew exactly who He was going to go Back There were There were some nights You'd wake up It was like a total shock You'd wake up in the morning

There'd be like two less people In your In your little area I was like What the hell are so All their shit's gone They left in the middle of the night They did their bit of fire guard

They didn't go to the bathroom And come back and go to bed They did their bit of fire guard Because they were still going to be a buddy They weren't going to screw Anybody over that And I do my fire guard And I quit right after

They grab their shit And go over to the hooch And quit And you're gone the next morning Yeah Hell I've had a couple L.T. buddies Tell me that

Like grab a kid who they know Is about to quit And they'll just like At ranger school And they'll tell them Like hey motherfucker Get to dinner Then quit

And it's like why Because I want your fucking dinner Like fucking Yeah I want your M.R.E. Like Get your M.R.E. And then quit motherfucker

Like There was this celebrity Special forces show You get a chance to watch it It's like a one season deal With ten episodes And they've got these celebrities Football players

Baseball players Models People Bachelorette All those other That go through it And you can watch If you watch the celebrities

You can see And you listen to them talk You're like He's going to quit It's going to happen If not today It's going to come You can hear it in their conversations

Their internal conversations With themselves And then they slightly Leak it out to other people It's like You know I just don't think I'm doing that good You know

I've got I'm really worried about my kids It's day two He's been gone It's like I'm really worried about my kids Well he failed an event The day before

I'm really worried about my kids I think they need me I don't think I need to be doing this It's only ten days dude That was a ten day selection According to the ten episodes Ten days Ours was three weeks

You know And these guys are quitting Day two And it's like Yeah people quit Day two And that's the conversations That you hear

It's You know There's a couple of medical drops And those are They're just as sad on that show As they are in reality In the real world selection Where you've got a guy

Who's a stellar guy And they get A medical something happens To them so bad That they get taken out And they're not They're more than welcome To come back

And you feel bad Because now they got to come back Through selection again Yeah Yeah I was about to say It's For those that

I've never been I made the conscious decision Not to go But it Yeah I understand what you mean By self talk Especially like you find that

On deployments Yes We worked with everybody Over there And so it's like You talk to SF Or soft guys And Air Force guys

Not so much I'll dog them Because they do have that Like little bit of a Negative Nancy in them It's weird But then like You meet like a

Mars sock writer Different mission Different mission They got it But they're just ready to go And they're happy And they're every day And so like

Even as like Even as like a beat up Intel guy Where I'm dealing with Like you know Six PowerPoint presentations a day We're doing hundreds of missions People are dying

Getting blown up And I'm getting yelled at In this meeting Like just a roller coaster Of emotion They didn't care What kind of day I had Or what was going on

Around me They're just like Hey Cody what's going on Let's go get that brief Let's go get the The pre-reef started And it's like I'm sitting there

With my mac and cheese Amaciated by 30 pounds I'm like bro do I look Like I'm having a good day And they're like But we are Yep Get the fuck out of my face

Yep Yep Yeah But I think I taught you kids this I said you know The definition of a good day Is any day you're not getting

Shot at and people aren't Going around you It's a good day You know Everything's got to be Scalable And until you see What level 10 is

You know level If you're sitting there 30 pounds less Eat mac and cheese But nobody's dying And nobody's shooting at you And things aren't blowing up Around you

It's a good day Yeah You get blown up A couple of times And you get shot at The VA The VA Pays for it

For the rest of your life That's how bad The day it was For me It was It was a bad day That was right Nobody was

When you do get shot at And blown up It is a pretty bad Fucking day Yeah It's a bad fucking day As soon as you're looking At a casket

It's a bad day And then So let's move Let's move forward on that So I get done With selection They I'm thinking to myself

Maybe now I put this down As my primary MOS request You get to request Your 18 series And I'm like 18 Charlie

I want to be an engineer I'm finally going to be An engineer The five Five years into Into the army And I'm finally going to get A chance to be an engineer

And that 129 GT Score came in Medic I was like Fuck Shit It's like Medic

Then they sent me down So I get back I'll process Benning Go down to San Antonio Because that's when The med school used to be

For SF We go down to San Antonio And spend About a year before I was down there In San Antonio

Down at the The army med schools Some great instruction Down there too And then we go back To Fort Bragg We go through The actual

18 delta portion of it Outside note To that whole thing Is So I picked up As you're looking at My rank structure As I go through

I went in As a What I've As an E5 Promotable As I actually Go

While So Actually Sorry I went in as an E5 They Ordered me to go through

The Board I got boarded While I was in San Antonio for E6 As a 19 delta Because they still

They still want to keep You progressing In your old MOS In case you Fail out You know What they want you to do

Is spend So long As a Go back And now You're behind All your peers Because

So I got Boarded While I was in San Antonio I get to I go through Med school At Fort Bragg

And the Same day That I got E6 As a You know When you Became a

Green Beret Back then You got your E6 The same day I pinned My E6

Whether or not I had become An SF Green Beret I was an E6 I was not an SF

E6 You know Where you Suddenly get Promoted to E6 For graduation At the time I was

Through 19 Delta E6 At that point In time Too So Go through

That Go through All the Field courses And stuff We're both Yeah Two of them were

Fifth group One of them was First group And because I was so familiar With Desert Shield Desert Storm I was

Really familiar With the desert I wanted to go And Fifth group Was operating In the desert Their mission Was the

Scud Hunt Back then You know Long range Reconnaissance And that was Every 19

Delta's dream Fifth group was Doing I mean That's what They did During desert Shield

Desert storm Like I looked At my instructor Said If you can You know When I

Realized They told me I had passed They said If you can Recommend me For Fifth group And they

Recommend me Fifth group I get the Arabic language Weird I didn't This is Ninety

Five Graduated Egyptian With a One plus One plus Was rocking Just missed

Two two Because I didn't I didn't know All my vegetables In Egyptian Sorry They confused me

When we were talking About the garden And that's when The conversation During the Testing broke Off During my garden

I was like Anyway We go About your Egyptians You need to go Learn modern Standard Arabic

I'm a 00 in modern Standard Arabic And you want me to go Learn Egyptian So Great Lovely

Anywho That's In Fifth group Get there Ninety five Did This is Still

This is Special Forces Pre Nine eleven Yeah Money Uh Fantastic

Level NCOs Um That were there I mean Those guys All of them Just

You know Legends Still in my mind The things that The level of commitment To the job Despite And if you

Have to go back You know We're still thinking Um You know We still had Trimbles The team

Still had the Trimble GPS That was The communication systems Were still Pretty old Um

The Satellite Satellite communication Was just coming up Uh We're doing a lot of HF A lot of VHF

Um We You know But The level of Medical The medicine that Was required

At that time Was really Pushed down low Like The 18 Delta The requirements For us to

Maintain In-depth Be able to Operate completely Separate of everybody Nobody There were no ISR platforms

Or anything That were going on At that time You had to know Your job Scud hunt Was still huge And so

The ability to Live in a Hole You know Covered over by A net Pissed in a trash bag You know

Pissed and shit In a trash bag You know 10 days Was the Minimum training The pressure To be

Excellent Was on us Um So You said money It kind of Skipped out But this is

What's funny Is because I remember As a kid Remember The clay Pink buildings That you guys had

With the cargo Right elevators Playing around In those halls And stuff For those Who Were not

In the army Before 9-11 Like Even looking back As a kid And then Becoming an officer Looking at

I cannot stress enough How little money Was put into Special forces Compared to now Like you go To a Special forces group

Today And it's like Everybody wants to be There Everybody wants to go There Because just The training

The equipment Like each soldier Has like Each green beret Or like Support personnel Like the Soldier

You know Shooting schools All this In the 90s The most None of that existed No we didn't You got the M4

The first And I remember You saying this You're like I got the M4 And I was like Holy shit There's a collapsible stock

Right Right Yeah we went from Having a Locked out Stock to A collapsible stock And I thought

That was the coolest Thing ever We still care Our Green The flap Overcase You had to

Unstrap it The dummy Cord from hell On that thing And we never Drew out our Nine mills either We always kept those

Things separate Those weren't even A consideration To carry around On the regular But We To give you

An idea Of comparison What's going on In the civilian world We didn't Get a Computer Until our captain

Brought One computer To And it had Microsoft Word On it And we were like This is awesome

Yeah That's That's our level of It's like Oh that's F you guys got it all Now we You know

Microsoft Word We can actually type it up You know This stupid printer That you know Was All the paper Is attached to itself

You have to Separate the paper People off the sides And everything else of it In order to turn it And print everything You know Intriplicate

Using Carbon The da31 Your Leave form That was Written Okay

We had to Fight for the Carbon paper To get our Leave form in As fast as we could Because Getting

Carbon paper For the Insert In between Your paper Like If we Got carbon paper

Teams would Horde how bad it was like you can't even think these guys today they can't even fathom and you know it's not about printers out of ink oh dear you know I think level your your your Xerox whatever or not even Xerox or whatever the printer that's you know the size of a fucking ice machine a Zamboni now that they got that they can collate print and print books and stuff like that that every team room has now we had one we had one of the one just horrible we were begging to

brown we hoard ourselves out for any dollars we could and only the best teams got the best missions and if you got the best missions you got extra money for your team like we like you would get a good mission and you get your team would get a thousand bucks to go to go buy team equipment for your team room we're you know one time we got $1500 we were excited beyond compare for 1500 bucks to go buy equipment with oh god you know we buy our own t-shirts by like most of us bought most of our own equipment at one point I remember you saying that when you're in the medical course you guys sold blood plasma just to get like a

team yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah part of part of our like yeah yeah yeah dude you had we were whores man we would we would whore ourselves out for anything for money just for the team fun so we could buy team thing you had more you had more money invested in your spear gear which is the gear that they give you when you become an opera like when you become operational like if you're like support personnel or green beret they give you a spear issue which is like all that high end equipment it's like two for five grand or the shit yeah you had more in that when you left than when you had in the teams like oh god yeah $1000 in a

trash bag yes yeah for 12 guys you know yeah yeah for 12 guys here's you know you guys you guys did really good this year you are the number one team we're gonna give you a trip overseas you're gonna go to Jordan and we're gonna give you thousand dollars to spend on cool on cool gear but it still belong to the team you actually had to be paperwork it down to the team but your team could have a thousand dollars worth of extra gear what are you guys getting oh we got mosquito nets we fucking mosquito nets they were right there at the World War two level mosquito nets were like this huge purchase for us and then

you had to sign for your mosquito net Jesus Christ welcome to the team here's your equipment here's a mosquito net well you're caught oh thank you yep and then again the the one the other things that were going on back then that were different from now is the amount of autonomy that the teams had like yeah they so the team was the team if whatever you saw out front was the God's honest truth you told everybody in the back you know back in the rear what you saw and it was for real nobody questioned that you know if you say

this commander is not working with me that commander is not working with you nobody questioned it if you said the enemy is out front here nobody questioned it if you say the temperature 70 degrees in this spot nobody questioned it and it with the we were given like carte blanche to come up with ideas and we migrated from doing the scud hunt where okay we're going to be in static positions out there in these holes looking looking at these intersections looking for the scuds to becoming to thinking our way through us and and we had this one war officer brady uh we used to call him king brady and he between him and several of the other senior nco's came up with this idea of taking the

taking our vehicles that we assigned to a team and and instead of being static becoming mobile with those vehicles moving them forward in a linear fashion across the desert hiding them you know when we want to but most of the time you know moving forward and what you're doing is if we it became instead of static hiding looking we became area denial which we'd roll through and everything behind us was clear and we'd move forward and and be looking actively hunting the scuts like why should we fear him you know we have the ability to talk to airplanes we have the ability to bring scunning in from above on top of anything out here um and we became good at that too that was another requirement of things that we had to train on was the amount it was

being able to control air and we we we moved forward with that that concept and we became really really good with it we could clear you know space and then we even studied um the whole concepts of scuds somebody it's like this is the target that we're looking for it's like you know Saddam Hussein had I don't know 20 30 scud actual scud launchers but for every so many launchers he had he had like a loader like if you for every for every three launchers you had one loader and a fuel thing and now it's like do we need to take out the launchers or if you take out the loader and the fuel thing you shut down the launchers you shut down four launchers yeah right right so the then it became from all right never mind about just you know finding the

tell the launcher um find the launcher follow it wait for it to go back to the refueling point where it gets the fuel and the loader and take out the loader the fueler and the launchers simultaneously and you shut down not just one launcher but several launchers for that section and that that would play a huge part for me later on in the intel world when we eventually get later on into the the the the long-range uh war on terror uh iraq afghanistan and stuff like that and we just see at the time that the managed to change the mission internally the way we did was huge and that would eventually come into play in 2003 when fifth group came out swooping out of jordan swung across iraq and completely denied the entire west side of iraq where Saddam was going

to push the missiles and launch them into israel and try to bring them into the war so it was it all came from the fruits of the labor of all the all the the sf's guys at that time getting out of those holes and becoming movement oriented and actually denying that type of going changing the mission completely and and show what what we could do and and this is this is something that like i i can't even imagine because when i was there with you we had the group commander and oh six interviewing and talking to the team level like they no company commander coming to brief brief the oh six no battalion commander coming to brief the oh six what his teams were doing the group commander had a vtc talking to teams talking to the team leader what are you doing

what's going on out there right and it not not a group commander micromanaging company commanders but individual odas like yes that's and then 30 years before you guys are out there like hey we're changing the whole god i didn't even know i i'd never i'd yeah i'd never seen our group commander no i i didn't even know my battalion commander that while i knew my company commander pretty decent but i'd have no no we just didn't we didn't interact with them that much they didn't want to talk to us say they had other missions to take care of us at that point that's that's a game changer yeah we didn't you didn't just things that have changed over time and then so um moving forward continue to move the the the ball down the field you get to 9 11 uh you know everything changed um

you know all of our planning for what we're doing in iraq changed and you get to 9 11 and the the towers fall uh we all know what happened there you know you know if you were in a military at all during 9 11 you saw that everybody saw the changes that happened uh money came out everywhere you know at that point you know the and and uh our our kernel at the time um you know in conjunction with the the the major leadership of the united states at that time uh decided to push this special forces group forward and into uh afghanistan and together with the the northern alliance and everybody that was over there um you know we we changed everything it was such a small footprint with small risk to the united states uh we managed to push the town put the Taliban on the run put al-qaeda

on the run game changer game changer um and you know and and it would start there you know like the again you go with the autonomy that we had then you know as a team you were thrown into you were surrounded 360 when they threw us in afghanistan it's like you you went in um you had two contacts a day yeah yeah we didn't have to maintain solid you know communications with anybody you had your two mandatory shots a day uh you know morning and night back um and that it's completely unheard of now you know you can't be a team out there and not have a comm center running 24-7 you know talking back to the rear if is our platforms flying over your head you know if you don't answer the phone now you know everybody loses their mind everything

okay about that end yeah i'm good uh you want to take a quick bathroom break and come back to it yeah let's do that let's do this let's take about five right there this is like so we've talked about like there's like this five-year period before 9-11 right um of just j-sets you guys are going over there training kawaitis you guys are going up we're as as f units we're still doing uh ntc rotations with regular units too as well okay and so like tons like 10 years 10 years of training calf scout like you got calf scout experience 9-11 drops and this is this is kind of the funny thing because everybody knows the horse soldiers nobody knows the toyota hilux soldiers and so you you were one of the first teams in there yep and so this is this is my favorite thing because

i i met some of these afghans when i was over there and it was really really weird to me to meet uh the the lion of pan shear his son we got to hear him talk and he was an american educated guy but you yep explain because like i love the the g chief story 9-11 happens you're tagged one of the first odas to go into country talk me through it because like shane shanes is a different story like shane was one of the teams that went in too but it's like this is this is the this is zero hour like this is d-day right and so how do you explain that uh all right so uh the way you're you're if you look in the data um our the the oda that i was on at that time was uh five three two we were assigned to poli comory um the g chief that we had over there um fantastic guy uh so he was

underneath uh dosa um he had grown up in afghanistan um he was sent to the united states i think he went to the university of pittsburgh there's a great video out there um that i'm trying to think of the name of that there's a the name of the video something like the the lion of the um he's at the pan shear um can't remember the name of it i i've seen i've got to find this yeah because he's yeah you can find the video easy enough he's riding the harley he's right he's a harley rider he went to pittsburgh he he worked he like in for extra money he worked at mcdonald's um like nobody's business um uh he the the warlord could damn or got something like that as well um but he if you in the opening of the video you see him riding that

harley davidson uh the guy spoke perfect english uh fan just absolutely amazing guy to talk to uh he's i think he's been in and out of afghanistan in various uh power positions over there since we left uh but he was our g chief like i said underdosed him um he with uh we were just outside of poli comory and our primary mission at that point in time was to break through the talban lines and get a hold of poli comory uh which is a major uh line of communication uh city on line of communication which uh goes around afghanistan it's especially coming out of the uh the mountains there um very um and i will tell you you know in a amateur sort of mindset of war of warfare at that level and the things that happen post post conflict during conflict and after

conflict was it was very very eye opening for me um so got along really really well um we had zip when we got there we he had a small force which helped protect him inside his his little valley there um we uh in in working with them we managed to develop develop it up to about infantry battalion level strength you know with with supplies and equipment and uniforms and eventually uh we would accompany them uh as they moved uh did their large-scale movement from the location that they were at into poli comory um and like like i said the very very eye opening and i encourage everybody to try to to listen to this part especially if you're you're dealing in the conflicts that you're dealing with nowadays um and that is that everything is even though it

appeared like we're we're so used to okay bad guy good guy um it's we we that's the way we think is that there's a bad guy good guy bad guy goes away good guy takes over it's all over you don't think about okay um levels of good and bad and what their intentions are post conflict and as we moved into poli comory uh we encountered another force that was in there in poli comory and it started an all-day uh fight between forces over there to we were unknowingly did not know that we were engaging another northern alliance force and if you watched the horse soldiers the 12 the 12 strong uh you you saw a kind of a hint of what happened there between dostam and uh i forget who the other general was at that time trying to get into

that one town and seeing who was going to get there first and so we were just at another location where that was also occurring the only difference is we got into a fight and at that same time the leader of the other northern alliance force was actually down in kibble um and they were raising the flag at the us embassy in kibble uh they were right next to each god damn it so we are bringing in planes we are dropping bombs on them they're shooting at us we got tank rounds we've got it's a fight it's a it's a real fight okay right and and we're every there's hell going on all around us it is you know it is tanks armored vehicles you know and aircraft guns like i i had the anti-aircraft gun level at the top of the hill that i was on

you know exploding above us and raining down on top of us our people that we were supporting and this general looks at our colonel and says hey america and afghanistan or he goes yeah no duh he goes no no he goes the new afghan afghanistan and america or it's like your your planes are bombing my people and he's like what a few phone calls later and we're like he's like look we're going to put a stop to this i'm going to get my guys out all right hold the americans out of there we'll get that other force in there because the other team had to get essentially the same team but the other part of that team was actually in poli comory we were on going down in and did not know and then it was explained to us the situation it's like well what do you want us to do you know

we're here with our our g chief he's trying to get there we had told you we were going there you know you know news sudden news flash now here we are you know two green on green is what it was and they got to get us out um and this guy wasn't about to let us go he was like hey i'm you know the other team was ready to fight you know didn't annihilate us and he goes look he goes either you stop shooting at my guys long enough for me to extract my soldiers out of there or i'm going to take all your toys off the board and he they did a ceasefire long enough for us to get hot extracted out and then we essentially bailed on it took the americans left that g chief and left him on his own yeah there's some minor mentions of it in time magazine but you'll never hear too much mentioned

about all of that you know but we you know we had you know in the accompanying we had got high luxes you know as we were building up the forces we had helped them buy high luxes get them weapons you know get them all the equipment we just left all that right there with them this is this is something i will say because i heard this story uh going through college and we talked about this when i finally got tagged for intel and it was a huge this was a huge i would say this has been probably the number one story that kind of helped me become i mean i'm not going to say i was a good analyst but hell every month i was in afghanistan i was i was getting recommended for a combat award but uh right this story is absolutely phenomenal because exactly it's exactly exactly what you

said you said there's level outside of america and like there's people in our discord and our patreon who understand this is that like outside of america like there isn't you know bad guy good guy there is this guy's good but he does this you know this guy's a bad guy but you know he gives his money to this orphanage and he does this and it's like there's this huge spectrum of gray in the real world and i'm gonna say the real i'll say the real world because america's not the real world and like this story is like the best story ever because like if you ever decide to get into intel you need to know that like this is this is what happens there you there you're a pawn um you can upgrade your pawn force to you know a rook or a bishop but ultimately you're

going to answer to state policymakers and there's a lot of room on the chess board to play and you guys were kind of unfortunately caught by a bigger piece and outplayed and it's yeah it's the uh what is it the polycom that you can do polycomry yeah the polycomry it's your design to fail it's a star trek reference like you had to fail it was all you had yeah you weren't set up and then and then this okay so the the partnered force that the americans were with we we left them because of the political sabi point i was like the accordingly that the north owned it at that point it wasn't our team that owned it but the northern alliance owned it and one of the things that that showed me you know and like i said this is you when you dwell on it long enough you said that the lessons

are just poor and and what it is is like look you know we're thinking end of conflict is when the you know the bad guys are done but they're overseas they don't just think the end of the taliban or the end of al-qaeda once i get them out of there now they're they're thinking their political future as well and what that looks like and and there are other elements that they they're with you know their political future all they're before the first bullets are even thrown they're thinking they can continue them beyond the bullets being shot and we're only we were only thinking and it's just so ingrained to us as americans that the fight's over when the fight's over and everything everything suddenly becomes you know roses and it's like no no and

then the other thing is like even though we have like and as we're just the military aspect your government that's in power along with various agencies um they have a political spot they have a thing that they want to see also so just because my force gets in there and wins is it the is it the force that we want is that another agency wants to win or not you know does work in the grand long scheme the 10-year plan the 15-year plan of america and when you work in special operations and you work at that level that's what you're dealing with is the continuum beyond the conflict and everybody and people are trying to run this game sometimes too early sometimes too late or they're not even thinking about it at all or that's all they're

thinking about they're not thinking about the end of the fighting first they're thinking long term it's like you guys need to go back to reality we're still here but you know it's it's always like we always talk about in sf it's like nobody ever talks about it like phase seven you're supposed to talk about phase seven where you you pass off where you pass off control to them starting at phase one you know eventually we when you give a guy a gun you have to sit there and say oh by the way i want that gun back when the fighting is over okay this i wrote a piece on this you're not aware of it but this was a huge piece for me that i wrote on kit bag and i i said i i don't know if you follow the instagram or not but it was i wrote a piece called ukraine and phase seven

and everyone's like what the fuck do you mean by phase seven i'm like eventually we have a 200 billion dollars in equipment that are held by asov battalion a far right extremist group we have anarchists there we have a lgbtq community that is headed by a male to female commander or nco in the ukrainian military there's certain types of generals over there with high mars like let's say and that was something that i wrote i wrote exactly like you said i wrote let's say ukraine wins tomorrow yeah what are you going to do with the nazi battalion the lgbtq battalion yes the yes a plethora a million eastern european orthodox slobs with guns yes and what what what happens and nobody nobody everyone's like eh we'll figure that out later

nobody wants to yep we need to figure that out and that's part of being in soft and like i learned in fourth battalion is like we have to choose the guys we give the guns to very carefully yes if we set if we link up with these forces eventually we like you said now you know come on buddy give the gun back like you yeah and it's okay you have to like before you deal with gchicks now you have to ask that question well okay so let's say the war it was over tomorrow what are you going to do what do you see what's what's the backside now and what's even crazier than that is american i like like we were just saying is american ideals being implemented on afghans and slobs and irakis and stuff like that nobody's gonna be the george washington here's my sword

i'm gonna go back to mount fernan i'm gonna smoke a bunch of pot and don't call me everyone's gonna hold on to that look at con their their congress and their parliament they're gonna go no i'm in charge now so i mean if you if you really i mean there's so many lessons that came out of that it's like all right all right define winning so in american concept we we watch these movies all the time like uh you watch all like even the uh the the avengers all that crap like that what happens in the avengers the bad guy loses all the bad guys are gone good guys are there everybody you know little funeral for tony stark and all this other stuff but everything continues on all happy all the bad guys are gone um uh no no over there uh there's no such thing as all the bad

guys being gone you're not gonna this isn't a movie where all the bad guys you go away you you have that that fulfillment of victory or anything else they're not going to do that this this is somebody pointed out is the difference between a finite game and an infinite game it's like we were thinking finite but they're playing infinite you know they're they're it's not over if there's a guy on there who's still got a gun who still wants to shoot at you it's not over the the resistance is still there and your american movie of all the bad guys being gone is not going to happen i'm sorry you're not going to get rid of that last guy with the gun um and so that that that whole you know i had this finite i had this image in my mind of us

taking this battalion we take over paul poli comrie we unite with all the other sf teams out there and we we all we hooray afghanistan we got rid of all the taliban but wait a minute all the taliban are actually the sons of the people who are the posh too who are own pretty much 95 percent of afghanistan so i can't really kill all the taliban or you know yeah it's not gonna work because you know then you're killing off all the sons and daughters of so of the the the biggest part of the population yeah you've got and i mean go down a yeah he's i actually got told him he's no longer taliban mother fucker oh no we we had he's he's good yeah we we fucking had that we had we put you know it's like we're working with dostem and we're working with all the northern

alliance but who did we put in charge in afghanistan um uh what's the fuck oh god what's his name the guy that uh the the stupid hat yeah uh the first president dude so many people make fun of him yeah um carzai carzai yes carzai yeah he was posh too he had he he only showed up with the one the one oda um that we we lost all the guys on when he was down there with that oda they got blown up up there you know all you know sad to stay because they were just the other side of the mountains and we could have probably been there if we had the ability to um but that was his only that's his that's his biggest fight was that you know it was to carzai but the whole northern alliance had been fighting the whole time carzai shows up they pull him in he shows up you know a little bit and now

he's we decided he's gonna be the president because he's uh linked in with all the posh too who are over there in afghanistan who by the way are also the parents and grandfathers of all the taliban that we're fighting it's like all right so we can't don't don't kill all the taliban just just the really bad ones who is your son a bad one no no my son is not a bad one he's not one of the really bad it's not what he's just a little yeah so that's where you get to the level so if you know what is there's a guy great so much great well i mean that's so we had we had that happen we had an oda go in the helm and and they they didn't get kinetic at all and like all the intel guys were like what the fuck just happened and they like they just walked around the market

all day we're just watching this on isr they come back we're like what just happened and they they're like oh they were good taliban and i'm like yeah say that slower fucking yeah could you could you repeat yourself and what you say yeah and and i mean it's just like you said levels and of gray and black and white and it's it's funny i mean but then you realize like you go back to like the mal and the mal levels of an insurgency right like that's just the auxiliary zone oh we're not taliban we're only taliban when the taliban are here and then we support the taliban we're the militia like and so and then i do have one question for you because this is something that uh so there's a lot of green berets that come out now and the fall of afghanistan has happened

um we lost call it what it is but we we we all know that like the ana and the anp and the afghans never had the will to fight the taliban they didn't care um no but they're buying you've deployed several times to afghanistan you were the first one one of the first ones in there your fucking kid went there which was my that was my favorite was uh i don't want my son fighting here and i'd be like well too fucking late yeah like fucking yeah too fucking late yeah but i was going to say the green berets like to blame the conventional guys they said once once the generals got involved where where do you place the the blame it where from your experience like who lost the war for the united states good really really good question because i have my opinion but

yeah i yeah uh and i'm like i and i will say that everybody's opinion has some validity to it yeah you know sit there and put the blame on the generals you can put the blame on politics you can put the blame on the the ana you can put the blame so many different places but if i was going to put the blame anywhere it it would have to be on the upper i'm gonna i'm gonna put it in two different pockets number one i'm gonna put it into the military industrial complex who was all about finding you know they were making money and money and money off that so the incentive to continue the fight is there from the military industrial complex and all their lobbyists and all the people that they're connected to in the highs but so if you got the people out there who are looking for

the money there was the incentive to keep it going and nobody took away that incentive from them to perpetuate the fight so there's that number two if you were a legitimate person who wanted to achieve something over there you didn't understand what was going on over there that was the other thing is that there was such a lack of unending of you know everybody you know if they're in there with that that that mentality of all that we give it all the bad guys it'll all end no that's not going to happen they're the bad there are going to be bad guys over there and you're going to have to accept that when we walk out of there bad guys are going to be there and then you talk about the tell you know tell banner actually the sons and you know the sons of all the posh too it's like

okay so they're going to be there um you know there's still going to be the poorest border with pakistan there's everything it's like you guys you your definition of winning has to change it's like what you you we we talk about this in the war and officer courses in there it's um always terminate before you culminate or is it a culminate before you terminate one of the other i can't remember right now it's just been too long but in one sense you finished all your objectives in the other sense you can't do anymore and so and in fact you start to lose ground and the idea is you need to identify your military objectives and achieve your military objectives and that's terminate so you do terminate you're you're determining you're determining your termination

criteria it's like when we achieve this we're done okay that's it we should could we have terminated as soon as we took the Taliban out of power and left it up to the afghanis afghanis and let them sort that crap out it's going to be a mess you know that we get somebody decided to keep pushing and staying there and thinking we could do something cool with it like give with the women the right to vote and all that other over there right you know it's like somebody just kept adding termination criteria after termination criteria and eventually we got to the part where we culminated we could there was nowhere else we were going to go there was nothing else we were going to achieve the resistance was too high we had overstayed our cape what we intended to do there you know it's like

one thing that we had in the Gulf War was our termination criteria that was clearly laid out by Colin Powell and Schwartz and Schwartzkopf they said this is how it's you know under these criteria we have achieved our goals and we are getting the out and then let hell you know everything go to hell after that but we achieve what we wanted to achieve the idea that we had we went in we moved the Taliban out we should put al-qaeda on the run perfect kind of easily you know backed off and dealt with it it's like if we have to go back in we go back in but we create new termination criteria we go in now we stay because people had the good idea ferry was just running around ramping over there supported and I want to say supported by the military industrial complex pushing the

good idea ferry it's like yeah go ahead stay women's right to vote all you got to do is continue fighting and keep buying all these arms and and spending all this lucrative amount of money and here's contractors and all this other there's there was too much incentives to stay there and then we got to a point where it was staying continue to stay was ludicrous which was the culmination point yeah you everything was going to shit at that point you know now you're an occupying force and it you you don't even know what you're freaking doing you know you got people are coming up with arbitrary termination criteria women's right to vote was hilarious they can't even read they can't even read right you can't even read you know it's like oh everybody everybody

gets to vote including women oh yeah that sat well with that crowd over there um and then it's say you when you got it when you got a group of people who are populist over there who are looking at you like what do you mean give the women the right to vote they we're trying to implement you know 200 years of american society on them in a couple of matter of years and it's like and if you don't we're going to shame you you know because you don't have the right for women's right to vote that's whatever oh and and you got to let you know you know gays and all that what yeah i mean let's you're not pushing this and yeah it you're taking a country that was literally and and we joke about it in the discord um they they literally build their houses out of mud and

like and and it's impressive i will say that because those those mud brick houses can take a 50 cal it's impressive but it's a mud hunt yeah yeah they're women wear potato sacks yeah yeah and yeah and gay rights yeah yeah and and yeah all that and and meanwhile you're chasing the like the largest heroin dealers ever known to man billions where did that even come from what did that have to do with anything oh my god uh well that was that was that was the thing for me was like when i was introduced to the dea and my five mission over there and i saw how much money the Taliban were moving i'm like why is this not the main priority like why are we not attacking the terrorist funding and they're just like well we're trying to get the americans to bite off on

that they just keep wanting to blow shit up and like you said the military industrial complex like you don't sell a lot of bombs blowing up heroin in fact you sell more by attacking and so that's like i said i've i've got my personal views on that but we you don't if you don't understand the fight don't get into it and we not and we we did not understand the fight and we had people it's like watching a high school fight you got somebody out there who got pushed into a fight with somebody else and that there's a group of people supporting them or not even in the fight they just keep egging it on yeah fight fight money money money money fight fight fight oh right and then you got these other idiots over there right to the vote right to the vote gay rights yeah yeah yeah and

the guy the guy you know we who went in there to you know military people we understand military objectives and what do you mean vote why are we still for yeah that's what the why are we doing here why do you have your camera out he what we're fighting for dirt you know they like what are we trying there isn't a guy in there in this valley there is a person in this valley who is going to number one become a threat to the united states at all yeah nobody in this valley is going they can't they're going to it on a map huts they're fighting over mud huts yeah yeah okay yeah that's Afghanistan then i i i do think though that you're uh the the shining moment for you's always been uh iraq uh o3 uh solder city a15 like yeah o3 to o7 um probably you know with

with that i was with i can't go into specifics on at their mission or anything um a special forces they don't exist anymore they don't exist anymore they don't exist anymore you can explain what a criff is right like you can it's the uh i can give you the what the acronym the overview it's like yeah it's a commander is an extremist force um the words the words are the definition okay if a commander has in a a situation uh you bring in a force that's designed to deal in extreme in extreme circumstances um and they're they're trained specifically a highly trained and skilled and supplied and supported to deal with a crisis situation um so i you're the wikipedia and the uh go for it the wikipedia and google article okay so the criff and the or the sif the continental

reaction force or the the sif was the at every group you had one company um at fifth group it was a15 um they were the group commanders they were his they were the beating stick 60 hand-picked green berets from across the the entire group who roughly yeah yeah six teams yeah yep six teams 60 guys so you got to get into special forces you got to get an incest into a15 or the sif or the for whatever it is that day of the month but basically if somebody if some shitheads acting up you're gonna have 60 of the best dudes knocking on your door and it's only because and the only reason they're there is because delta force was busy with somebody else like if delta forces i don't know who you're trying to know who that other force is yeah they that's another non-existent

entity yeah they talk about yeah but go go to google go to google but if if he's they're too busy begging your mom this is the like they're only jv they're only jv to one person and usually he's out banging someone's mom so you yeah yeah but yes so yes we were we were um we were tasked to work with um uh iraq's uh most elite special operations forces going after um iraq's highest target deck um was this the baseball cards for them we we we helped build them from just a platoon to a company to a battalion to eventually the uh the i was a the iraqi counterterrorism force and the various um uh ranger brigades which are out there uh running around or commando commando brigades which are in iraq um but we still we're still doing the the sf mission of of um build

capacity you know we we the idea was um lead one a company one you know support one type thing and those are the iraqis that we worked with um some some of the finest iraqi warriors i've ever dealt with um you know we lost a lot of friends oh go ahead so this is something that you may have to touch on but there is a big difference between the iraq military and the afghan military oh yes the iraqis oh yeah yeah but go ahead yes so right so again if you go if you look at the iraq military the the way that their own culture speaks for itself because they were the number seven until the gulf war and then we now down to like 12 or something like that um so the the military is very very ingrained in their society um they it's it was an honorable profession within

their their society uh even under sidam if you were a part of the military it was still considered an honorable profession um it but you had to it it all depended on whether you were suni or shia you know when under um saddam was saying uh predominantly most of the officers were suni most of the the the uh the enlisted were shia um the the major officers were all suni because that was what saddam was was suni and the the more the the hardcore elite units of saddam was were suni handpicked guys a lot of the if you if you think like national guard reserves they were they were a lot of shia that were there but the um so when you're when we started creating the ictf and the commandos uh they actually had their own

selection process they we we helped them create their own selection process to create the ictf and the commandos um and very similar to ours a lot of challenges uh we had to show different people were weeded out um but they were elite military fighters they were dedicated they would fight especially the ictf they were um they they got called the dirty brigade uh numerous times by by every bad guy even some of the you know mostly good people at rap were led to believe that they were the dirty brigade but what they were made up of uh they were the the the ictf was everybody it was suni she occurred um even you know various all different ethnicities and they were dedicated to uh at least why we were there the from during the years that i

were there they were very very dedicated to doing the right thing getting bad guys off the street so that iraq could develop our government and become something of trying to regrow and become back into the norm of of the rest of the world or at least get back to the level that they they could or would be so they were they would they they were not running around in sneakers they were running around in boots and uniforms they wore their uniforms right um the ictf were the ictf how amazing these guys were is these guys had their own gym and went to the gym on their own we didn't have to push them into the gym these guys ran platoon formations on their own these they would run um they they wore nods if they put nods on they put the nods down and they

wore them on target um they wore baseball hats they had uh flex magazine pictures of of dudes with you know they were they were trying to be like muscle wise off their wall locker you know like you'd see them in the gym trying to work out they're like i want to be like shon uh which was a shon uh ray uh you know it's like they're they're just they're they're flexing in there and they're just like going down they were they were dedicated they were their ba um so that that's a proud work with that that that's something that i i guess we'll touch on it now but a lot of a lot of it is uh and this this actually kind of comes into the family dynamic that you me cj have but uh you're kind of hinting at it but this iraq team house family dynamic that kind of became our household

it's it's it's the gym it's guns it's video games and see it's men men men men men it's right right right well wait and and you give somebody shit but you love them yeah you know it was it was uh you know like if somebody screwed up you just sit there and everybody looking and lean on it did dumb ass like i didn't care if you were seven years old i'd sit there and say you're a dumb ass you don't know about it you're like yeah i was a dumb ass move i yeah i mean it it is to because like you're you're describing it but like the the muscle and fitness magazines like it doesn't matter if you were a runner or a lifter it didn't matter about any of that like you you worked out you did your job you go home to your family you play video games with the boys

but it's literally like a temple of toxic masculinity it is absolutely a dolly lava like yep with with the one side caveat of love like you know no matter what i've got your back dog i can on the like you and me are the only two that can talk shit to cj and and well and cj can whip our ass for it but i was to talk shit to cj it's like now you've got the three of us coming down on i'm like you know i'll i'll make you cry you know like cj proved it going in the air force is like yeah how many times has cj been up to go see his his officers for making people cry we would be like well that's funny so so this is this is the we'll do the the next the next bit uh the warrant officers ices and then i've got some questions at you for you but then so you go from running and

gunning like literally all the time to yes what what happened with the warrant officer thing uh all right so let me see uh i made it up to e8 um and when i was down there with a with a15 and when i say down there that's all relative to the building we ran it was always upstairs downstairs a15 was always down there on the first floor but uh so i was with a15 i got my e8 i had been thinking about warrant officer for a while and we were getting to a point in the military community and within sf where the level of knowledge of what happened prior to 911 and what was beginning to become apparent as we move towards 2000 2011 eventually where america got kicked out of iraq is we're moving back to more of a peacetime force and that there that there was

no knowledge left of that uh and i you know you're looking at me at that point so when i went in 2007 to become a warrant officer uh i had uh 19 years in the military so i was i was old and and with long and long in the tooth to become a warrant officer and so my selling point was you know number one i'm still in great shape i'm still out there i'm a warrior um uh but the knowledge that i'm bringing to the table is worth it to you here's what i'm bringing to the table is all of this you know everything prior to 911 ever since everything since 911 leadership skills and i'm bringing this to the table and saying i want to stay here and when you become a warrant officer in sf you go you go right back to the teams as like a newbie almost you're a new officer but with

all your the knowledge that and you want your warrant officers on your team your warrant officer is a key player on your team he's probably the longest in the tooth the most educated um the most experienced on the team you know second only or or maybe more so than the the actual team sergeant himself and so having been a team sergeant i had my e8 i did my e8 time um and was moving up to staff at that point uh it wasn't that i didn't want to go to staff i just thought i had more to bring back to the team so i became a warrant officer in 2007 uh funny thing about that is i went back to the very first my my team that i got was the team that i was first assigned to when i was in 18 delta and i got to a special forces group uh got assigned to 51 what i went

from 532 to it was now 5132 due to the renumbering system and you can if you look at the pictures on the wall you actually see pictures of eric as in you know enlisted e6 eric e6 e7 eric and then later on warrant officer 1 eric 2 and 3 eric on this i'm in the same team room you're like okay this guy's been here you know 95 and here is 2013 you know he's been here a while so uh warrant officer uh did my team at the time on the team went back went back to afghanistan went back to iraq as a warrant officer led the team when when they didn't have a captain um got to did my did six years on a team as a warrant officer and then moved out to become a warrant officer instructor i was selected by uh fifth group to to represent fifth group at the at the warrant officer academy

there was at that point we only had one warrant officer from every group at the academy it was considered a prestigious position uh you're you're essentially the representative for your group and when warrant when guys went to become a warrant officer at the academy like all the fifth group guys you know i was their their other advisor so you had their their assigned advisor and then you had your group specific advisor that's still you know liaison with the group back and back so i was teaching at fort bragg i was liaisoning back to the special force of group the warrant officer leadership uh that was back to our fifth group keeping everybody advised to find out how our soldiers were doing and everything like that um came back became a company warrant

officer for this uh charlie company first battalion uh then went up became the what's considered the a bow or the assistant battalion operations warrant uh within first battalion and then migrated up to become the s3x up a group and then the ops warrant the the operations warrant the s3 ops warrant up there at group as well so i i you know the only position that i did not occupy as you as you go the two positions i didn't occupy as i as i migrated up was the actual battalion operations warrant within first battalion or the group operations warrant the two highest one one's the highest end of battalion and one's the highest in group but all the other key major positions within group and now here's a bonus for you so when i got some surgeries for

my shoulder and my neck uh around 17 um first battalion went forward and i was given uh i was the authorized battalion rear d commander for first battalion so i actually signed for first battalion i've here's here's my here's what my my my if you i've still got the the paperwork on it where i had signature authority for uh five three two as the the team leader signature authority for i was the acting company commander for charlie company the acting battalion commander for first battalion uh and this is when you know at one point i had uh four companies underneath me yeah i was the acting battalion commander yeah so there's some literature out there you know it's as far as leadership capability goes that soup that's even far superior than just being the

battalion operations warrants like it i'm i'm answering questions as a battalion commander to the group commander yeah fill it filling in uh as it was really funny because i've for those listening like i got to spend a lot of time as a cadet at the warren officer academy with my dad and like hang out with all the fifth group like fifth group third group all those warrants and my favorite question was when you and another warren officer were briefing these new special forces captains and you were telling them all the capabilities of a special forces warren officer you can lead the team you can take charge of the team you can own the team like all the things a warren officer can do and this guy stands up and he goes chief what the fuck do i do then if

you're in charge of all of this if you if you can do everything i can do what the hell do you need me for yes it it it yeah and so you know and in the army for those listening like we consider warren officers a uh you guys are the subject matter experts and so you guys are basically as a 180 alpha of the subject matter experts on unconventional warfare and how to be green parades and so it's it makes sense that you guys can you know i can take the team back it i can do the yeah yeah you want to watch go go do whatever you want to i got yeah yeah you go do whatever go to a meeting um uh so then like so we've we've talked for a while but you've you've been to iraq twice now iraq's done and then somewhere around 2014 twice or not i mean like for

two conflicts right for two oh yeah yeah okay you've done the the fellowship of the ring you've done return of the tower or the two towers and now yeah we're yeah we did season six yeah yeah and so now yeah now or you know you can make any joke but now isis right what was that like to see it like knew it suck you saw it coming yeah uh 2000 um there was mites so we were uh up north in diala province over in iraq around 2011 um 2010 2011 and both the team before us and our team were collecting data on the targets that were being prosecuted in that area and things had politically changed uh inside iraq um the the shia were primarily in power i think ali was the guy that was uh the the president at the time um i i'm i'm i don't forget who but anyway they all of

any shia target aim almost unprosecutable we could not we could not go after any shia targets without any suny target we could go in on a whim you know they were like oh is he so many like go go go prosecuted and we we crunched the numbers over two rotations up into that area uh 99% of the targets that were prosecuted were suny the other 1% were a shia target that we had to get command influence to go prosecute the go prosecute so when you have that kind of a dynamic um we and you know the the whole thing about uh sf is uh dale press will be there to deliberate the oppress when you see a group of people regardless you know a minority or whatever when you see somebody just beat down beat down beat down and the government is the one that's beating them down

there's only they they're gonna die they're gonna be exterminated or they're gonna fight back that was it and the numbers didn't lie then the and there was as soon as anybody were worth a while that was willing to fight to organize and fight against the shia government didn't matter who they were as long as just so happened to be isis and they were suny affiliated if they were willing to fight against and represent the suny people in iraq against the government everybody was going to support wholesale regardless of whether they were good bad ugly or indifferent and we talk about that gray area and so the rare fact that somebody showed up willing to fight back willing to to get some guns organized and fight back against the shia dominated government of iraq and the

community was going to do it and that's why they managed to push from i mean we'd we'd kind of seen them on the outside over in syria on the borders and there were some actions that were up there but when they swept into iraq and pushed them all the way down to bagdad i was like i saw it saw it coming the only way they got the only reason they got stopped in bagdad is because both iran and shia and everybody else ran in there and stopped them before they took over bagdad because they were coming yeah and they they chased them so fast they were dropping their vehicles they'd left everything behind and you're you were speaking to the people that's what the people actually you know were longing for it's like they were getting beat and i watch that and it's it sits

in my mind you know how you know a you can only push people so far before they they long for the freedom to free to think on their own and not be judged for how for what they do and not to live in fear and i'm why you know i watch that and i you watch what's going on in the united states and there's a there's a group of people that have a lot of money and a lot of influence and a lot of everything right now and they're persecuting people now and it's making it hard to even speak your mind here in america and you're pushing people into corners to where they're gonna start coming out and it only man we are it could go south in a heartbeat if it just something very similar to ices showed up and but i i could have told you ices was coming i could i could

we begged borrowed and eat it with all of the senior leadership we showed those numbers to leadership in iraq saying guys if we don't start going after you know if we don't if we back off of this suni if we don't address this whole shia suni dynamic and we keep pushing this you're gonna have an uprising you're going to and it just came in the form of ices yeah and i mean we've talked about it a lot like a lot of people don't remember like the arab revolution like when they got that the arab world got connection to the internet now like wait a minute like if again hold up and then like we had to say at the ua e we had to go oh we'd like to do by uh and so it it that was a really weird time and it makes sense that if you take the the

arab revolution timeline and then you beat the shit out of the suni like you're saying oh the suni awakening and so yeah yeah it's like oh nobody's so could us all this coming in like um so yeah we got about like 10 10 minutes before we reach like the two okay mark but i'll just yep speed balsam uh first question um one of the books that i recommend everybody is tribe um by session younger talks about how you know sense of belonging whatever um you and i have talked about this where it's like or i've told other people like america isn't a warrior culture but we have warrior families and you'll meet people who they there's the west point lineage family but that's not what i'm talking about i'm talking about like there's a lot of families

that have the dad was enlisted the sun's enlisted when i was at airborne school there were green berets pinning their wings on like there were like five green berets at my airborne school uh graduation along with yourself due to we're going to be 11 bravos rangers myself and and so what i'm what i'm getting at is like you me uncle mail grandpa cj um it doesn't really the weights were used to the weight i would say you know like family members have passed not family members but uh friends have died to suicide to combat uh josh walley dam can't all those guys yep yep how and your words describe it like that whole dynamic the um so one of the things i want to have to go to is actually so all three of us both you me uh cj

we're all getting therapy for some of the things that have happened that we've seen overseas um and i'm going to go to something that one of my my therapist said and that that is um that what you whatever you experience becomes yours whether or not you wanted to experience it it's your experience it's your baggage now for life your whatever you thought was going to be in your bag has changed it because somebody took something and put it into your bag and you can never ever take it out of that bag it's in your bag for the rest of your life now carry it deal with it okay and so one of the things that we have within our family is we've got the uh the experience of carrying that extra stuff in our bag which other families don't you know they

they're like my dad was carrying it in his bag whether or not he talked about it um it was an experience which he carried with them and became you're you're born again like a phoenix once you come out of war your your whole everything you thought you knew has changed and you've got to deal you you are what you what you thought was happening is no longer happening you're now on this other thing and you can become whoever you want but this is in your bag too and so my dad took all of his experiences from war too and it became it's a common conversation within our families like we talk about war like if to to a level that no other i mean families don't talk about this stuff you know we tj is what he does and and and we we talked between you and i any time

we talked is like we don't even have to say too much we know what's going on it's like okay i'm working on this okay i've got all this experience to go on you don't have to explain it to me and it's not odd and when you get that kind of support from your family where you know it's not odd to have that conversation it's like you know i'm having trouble this is what i'm going to go do tomorrow you know we use word like one of the words that that we use is like uh you know yeah i'm ventilating you know we you know for for somebody or and we're like no i don't i don't have to explain no exactly you know um you know you talk about a city and you're for a bomb or you know or the size of a bomb yeah yeah or yeah it's like you know we're going to move around

and we're going to relocate some geography here anything yeah um but it's just it's such a common it's like a when you got that common dialogue that common conversation you become you become any community of people who speak that language and it's almost like a completely separate language and you you gel to the people that you speak the language of so it's it's not a common to sit there and have military families breed more military people just like firemen breed more firemen or police bring breed more policemen it's because the common language and the thought process is so it's so comfortable for us yeah and and then the the the ability to carry around that luggage is also supported by us okay it's like if you know cj's having a hard day as an nco it's like

we're both sitting there going yeah i got you brother yeah you can't share that with anybody else yeah who's he going to share with you know the people of his community which are you know his family and us and everything else it's just it's it's it is it's like you talk about it as a tribe it's like we are we have our own language our own thought process our own reflections our own everything that that other people just don't know and it's such an easy comfortable feeling we're like no this this is as natural as anything this is like breathing to me is to be in the military yeah i mean i it's funny because like my my wife is from portland oregon she'd never seen a military base in her life and like when she went to aerosol school it was like really the

first time she had done a hard obstacle course i've been climbing ropes since i was like eight right right yeah right yeah yeah and if we don't and if anything and i like we talked about it's like it's almost like a far significant other isn't military they don't even have an idea of what to deal yeah how do you you can't even talk to him and so um the other thing and uh i think that's kind of solved by like our the team room thing is like we have guys in here and we talk about this uh most men live lives of quiet desperation and so they end up paying 500 to a thousand dollars for a weekend with some goober and it's it's it's sad because like there are there's tons of guys just like yourself out there who would gladly hang out like go to a bjj gym go to a weightlifting gym

or a gun range but i i guess it's like so those guys who are stuck in the office cubicle i mean i think the what you need in your life is you need that team room time you need the the guys you need to go lift weights and stuff but what do you what do you recommend to the guy in the cubicle oh to the so this is i think this is it's not even it's a calling almost it's a longing for um like one of the things that we've lost as a society is the interaction among people and uh the cubicle farms the isolation of living off your computer um the the fact that guys that you know you're like even that the whole dating services where you don't go out and interact and and go through the the the back and forth of of failing asking when you ask a girl out or any of those

things all those experiences are gone and only you know it's it's you see the same thing within brazilian jujitsu it's just connections you know and the the nice thing about any type of military training is it automatically produces a connection between people and they long for whether we long for the challenge and when only when in goggles talks only when you get challenged do you become your real self does your real self start to show and when you have that shared experiences of challenges with other people and they're experiencing their own humanness alongside you it's an immediate bond it's like hey i want to quit i want to quit too hi let's talk you know one of those things and all of a sudden you're like no we can get through this bra you know you and me it's like

this is cool and it's it's a shared bonding experience brought on by a challenge and people long for it they do um and and you know as you brought up one thing and i wanted to talk about this when i had this chance with you uh because we're seeing this now uh within the military community the post-military community especially among the special ops military community is where the everybody's out to you know we all while we're in the special ops community we talked about being the brotherhood the brotherhood of the special ops community and now when everybody gets out it's like oh you know i'm gonna run this this thing and then and they start talking bad about each other and they start bashing each other on the backside of of this it's like guys

guys guys the brotherhood you know it's it and but it's like i can't believe the amount of backstabbing which would goes on outside the the the military community once we leave or retire or get out especially in the spec ops community like what they're doing at Goggins is absolutely insane um you know they you see it in in some of the other ones too it's like it's like if you guys always like this in special ops were you guys assholes then that you guys just decided to become an asshole even more so now that you're out and it's about me and what i want to do and it's it's like no man it's like we can't do this it's like you know i'm going if you're in the military and you you came out and i don't care what Goggins did overseas what he the the language he's putting

out the the knowledge he's putting out the the experience he's challenging or challenging to people and uh it needs to get out there there's other there's other guys that are out there from the spec ops community and they bring a lot to the humans to the the civilian sector now that needs to be listened to and and challenging them in front of the this you know the civilians it's that helpful not not not in the slightest it doesn't it doesn't hurt help anybody to based on the messages that Goggins put out yeah he's making money off it let's not cut try to cut into him just because we want to make more money let's let the message resonate if you get a different message you know put it out there but let's support each other you know stop bashing

each other i think uh because i'm in i'm in a weird i mean i've got my s identifier technically i'm a special operations intel alpha right but uh i was gonna say i watching that and kind of talking to other veterans it's kind of weird because there are like we have infantry guys and regular dudes in our our patreon and discord who didn't like they did stuff but they didn't do anything special but then on the other end of the spectrum we have the soft community which did a ton of stuff and then there are guys who i'm not gonna name names but there are guys who literally just became soft and never deployed never did anything overseas and they're out there teaching courses and doing gun stuff and making millions of dollars just off the back of soft and i think that um and and this

one more thing i'll mention is like a piece of evidence it's like a ranger up uh for those of you who do not remember it it was a clothing company it was like the only veteran own clothing company but nick paul machano the owners like you can't all these guys come out of the military and they're like i'm gonna start a sf ranger uh clothing line and it's like okay no i'm not listen to me for a second how many actual ranger scrolled rangers and sf tab guys are there in the military and it's like less than one percent and then it's like how much does the military make up of all us personnel less than five less than five percent of the the u.s population so you you've taken it and you've gone down to this little group and i think the thing is is the

like the the conventional army guys are sitting off to the side watching the soft guys eat each other up and they're they're usually and it's funny because like when you talk to other soft guys in the community they're like that guy was kind of a dick anyways or like whatever but the conventional guys are sitting off to the side going jesus christ look at them eat each other the soft guys are eating each other there are guys like you who have just been quiet and you know they want to live their life but they'll come on a talk show and talk but i i think the answer is you need somebody needs to find a way to bring the soft guys who aren't talking and hanging out and they need to take the conventional military and you need to take normal people and you need to

sit down and have a discussion and whoever whoever can bring everybody to the same table without judgment like who cares if at the end of the day who cares if you've got a long tab who cares if you have four tabs who cares if you were a navy seal who cares if you were a medic on a fucking logistics boat in the marine the merchant marine and that's that's where the answer is because that tribe will be too big you can't you can't one navy seal on the outside going you guys are fucking losers to 800 firefighters police officers people who like to do things going i don't care what you think like like i've seen what makes you cheer it your booze be nothing go write a book like it's and yeah it's i i would say the majority of those guys are just squeaky wheels who are toxic and at

the end of the day i think more veterans are going to come out and tell the soft community that the toxic soft guys the toxic navy seals shut up who cares what david did i you know whether or not you know how i how i i look at like i i talk a lot about david godin because what he said resonated with me there may be other you know there's a lot of other books and stuff that everybody his his really resonated it it it hit me in a place that um especially what i like a little bit of shame when he sat there and said you know you get your green bird you get your tab and you that's it and you kind of rest on that laurel and you it's a it's a it's a i fuck i did that you know and i think it it's provocative and i think you know a lot of a lot of seals

probably also feel the same way too it's like yeah i got my seal tab and i seal tab well go go be more seal go be go go the bar you know you don't just because you you could you jumped six feet doesn't everything you did all the training you did to finally jump that six foot can you jump six foot one now can you put do more training and achieve six foot one go try you know you you've already shown the capability and for the rest of your life you should be trying to jump six foot one you know and try to push that raise the bar of your not not just raise the bar green berets but raise your own bar that's that's just achievement unlocked like in the game achievement unlocked but the game doesn't end because you unlock that achievement you keep going on and

try and unlock other achievements and so where Dave went out and it's like he was a seal cool okay try for delta didn't work uh past ranger school cool uh ran up did 50 mile run okay that worked so now he went on did 100 miles and he's gonna do 200 miles or you know if you don't if you don't you're not trying to raise the bar in your life then you know that's you got to do it you've got to got to create those challenges for yourself and it's it's provocative and it irritates people and people want to stop it and and you know jockel wilnick and some of the other great you know there's there's some really great knowledge that's out there and let it provoke you let it let it move you don't don't try to knock it down because we got so many people

who'd knocking down good messages now because they it's like it's a good message you know yeah let's let's let's run with it and then somebody comes on it's like oh it's trash because he's trash it's like let's let's not do that let's let's let's let's push each other on like we do in spec ops you know it's like well i don't we one of the things that we learned in a15 in order to be as good as we were we had to hurt each other's feelings in the team room it's like look you missed that shot you could have taken this current turn faster and that's like all throughout my sf career you know we challenged each other while we were there it's like we can do this better the only reason we got out of those holes a out of the scud hunt holes and actually be started going

linear and chasing scuds across the rack was because we challenged ourselves we challenged the thought process at the time it's like we can do this better we there's a better way to do it we can go higher we can do better and and i think is the one thing the military community does bring into the table is that that thought process of we can do better we can do better we can be better do you know the uh the theodore roosevelt quote the man in the arena it is not the critic account well there's a park before that actually um okay go if you go on youtube type in the man in the arena full speech um theodore roosevelt literally says the poorest way to face life is in the form of a critic who does nothing yeah and he literally tells that like the first part

is hey motherfucker you on the couch sitting there doing nothing and just going hey david gag it's try hard hey jacko sucks it like okay who do you like let me see who your heroes are and it's like eventually you start to see like most of those people don't don't have any they can't point to one thing that they're willing to be like no i back this and it's yes because most of the naysayers yeah they're they're just critics it's so easy to say no it's so easy to say no or to or to sit there and say no he's wrong okay well what's right what is it yeah i don't want to i don't want to take a step they're horrible they're horrible they're horrible so the last one is uh and we we talked about this before but it got cut uh what what what what are you doing now what are you doing now

okay so what do you what do you do now after after all you know all that stuff in your life well first off um so i i i when we talked about this previously i didn't i didn't cut to it but um there there's an actor and they were talking to their kid they're they're i think they were what is it 60 years old they're talking to their kid and they started they started to talk to their kid in a way that sounded like they were preparing for death and the kid goes okay you know he goes the kid told him to think back 20 years so think about everything that if you go back to a point 20 years ago think of all the things that you accomplished over that 20 years and it's like that's a lot it wasn't it it's like all right so you're only 60 let's say you live to 80 you've got

that same 20 year span that you did all this other stuff in front of you and you could go do a whole bunch of stuff and so when i look at i could sit there and come out of the military and go okay you know i did 34 years 34 years in the military and i've done all this stuff and now i'm done you know and no no no no that's the complete let's let's take everything i did over those 34 years flip it to the other side and go okay 34 years from now i've got the opportunity to do that many things over the next 34 years and that's a lot of shit you know that's a ton of shit and we have a you know in our family we have a longevity gene okay we live you know ungodly years like your grandma lived to be 97 live beyond 100 it's like all my brothers and sisters are still alive

you know knock on wood and they're all you know 10 years older than me or above okay i will say this you do have a sister who has had a double hip replacement and she's already getting ready to hike up a mountain yeah like motherfucker and she's in her late 70s like so right right right right ahead of you yeah it's like you got no don't don't don't start talking about dying don't start sitting it's like no i've got everything i've done before just alludes to the fact of all the possibilities which are in front of me all all that many significant events that i could i still got to the front side so what am i doing um you know first off i uh one of the things that we see in the militaries and once you get out of the military that first year is the roughest year i

have post retirement because you have to redefine who you are basically 34 years you had a routine you you knew what was coming you knew what to expect tomorrow you knew what to expect next month it whether it was a shitty day or anything else you knew what to expect but that's gone now what you what to expect is on you now so you know i had to go through that first year of shrugging off the military and luckily i you know as a sf guy and as a warrant officer and my experiences for the last year in the military all gave me the opportunity to kind of throw that stuff off my bag and get it off my backpack and and start to become more civilianized and mental and thinking and everything else and really uh to to do things and so you know

you know what am i looking to do everything you know i'm looking um to everything as you know though it's just so exciting to have the whole world open to me and i'm not i'm not you know i have a a martial arts school in uh tennessee uh which i'm going to maintain for it like i'm it's i actually own it run it uh that's going to be going for about another year and then i'm going to be reopening another mark uh the the bjj judo school here um in georgia um i got a family i'm starting up here um i've got you know as far as work and stuff like that i don't need to work i've got them by military retirement but um and and my uh at the disability and that makes up all that um so you know the world is open to me and i'm staying involved i'm staying active because

we see you know within the first five years of getting out of the military for sf guys when they take that pressure off their back and they don't do anything they're dead five years you know post sf they the pressure comes off they're their lifestyle changes from you know you got a ton of things to do today tomorrow the next day and stuff like that and if you take that pressure off it's just like anything it just explodes you see heart attacks they go brain dead they sleep apnea kicks in and they die and it's like the like what the hell man he was you know a great shape no you took the pressure off we're we're used to a certain amount of pressure on our body and we live because of that pressure if we take that pressure off we're done yeah you know if we don't have a reason

to get up tomorrow if i you know well you know like we guys like i'm i'm i'm trying to jump six foot one my goal you know i'm trying to lift more tomorrow than i did today i've got um the other thing i'm doing is i'm house husbanding we talked about that so being a house husband i'm an sf guy of house husband uh you know like you come home place is clean you know so please fucking house right right at sf level it's like i'm the pressure is on i'm gonna i'm gonna make this place look good you know um but the other thing because we've got some older guys how old were you when you assessed into a one five oh okay let me give you this so let's let's like because like we got 34 year olds we got 36 year olds and i'm like my dad was on a one five when i what'd you get in there

like 36 uh so i got there i was 35 okay five when i got assessed in a one five and did that until i was um 40 and then you went back if you're running if you're think if you're thinking you're you're you're you're you know you're out of your fighting years if you if even remotely if you think no it's a go back to the David Gogg and saying go jump six foot one all right you look how old were you when you did your last combat mission like 45 44 no hang on so last combat mission was i was 50 Jesus yeah so they're they're you're not out you're not out you're not even happy you're not you're you you if you are if you are a military person and what i thought about talking to you about this too is like because i knew this question was going to come up look we

we have a responsibility to to be a to remain a military the man the military age male that yes military if you are military you have a responsibility to maintain them the military age male because the people that if whenever we went after somebody on it we went into a target or something like that we we who did we arrest all the military anybody who even 60 right right anybody who even remotely looked like a threat we captured rolled up and put in there you the what if i was another country if i was a country that wanted to suppress america number one i've got to sit there and make all the military age males weak scared and unwilling to respond and if regardless of the fact as a as a male in the united states or even if you know and keeping with the whole women

too it's like you have a responsibility if you're this is our kingdom this is our team this is you know when we sit there and you know just like the football team so when you sit there and you slap the top of that thing and you go not in my not in my house america is our house okay and and we have to every day we owe it to ourselves and even if even you owe yourself at your own house to sit there and touch that ceiling that that doorway at the top of the doorway every day and go not in my house and maintain that physical and mental ability to protect your house not in my house and that's and you like i'm i'm right now rebuilding my body because i got out of that you know i didn't doggins had to and you you know we talked about pressure you know that i felt from

after hearing what the things you were doing with eric you are not who you used to be you are not you are not being the guy that you are capably capable of being and it's like you have to go back into that mindset of not in my house and maintain that if you have the capability to do that you need to go do that you know if you're okay after something like that you know be as hard you know as hard-ass as you can be but become you know produce that body produce that mindset that you can do it into your thirties your forties your fifties don't listen to a number don't everybody says they're gonna say oh you're 50 years old you can't do that anymore bullshit bullshit okay that's you know go back if you go back a hundred years yeah bullshit 50-year-old

because that was you were you were probably on your death bed at 50 but nobody knows nobody knows what why who who says at 50 you can't be the guy that kicks in that door and be the the number one man in i you know given right now in the shape that i'm getting into right now it's like shit i could go do it again you know it's like and i should you know i don't know i just i find it absolutely hilarious i didn't even think about that when you said that that is a really good point that you said military age male because in the intel world we were looking for anybody between the ages of like 14 15 to 60 like if you're a 60 year old 59 60 year old afghan male we were looking at you with a gun in our hand going that is a plausible threat like yes you or not or completely

not because he didn't he didn't maintain his status as a military exactly like you could be exactly and so i think that is absolutely hilarious that if the ball like the flare were to go up the ball like you know hey we're going it's happening yeah well i encourage every every military guy i encourage every military guy listening to this if you're not go become a military age male again go you you did it before you're capable of doing it you know what it took if you became special forces you know what it's like to become special force you can do that you you remember being that and becoming that strong guy you you have it in you go get it for you for yourself for your family for everybody mostly if anything for you go be that military go become

that warrior that you are be the be warrior if you're you know you be a military age male don't be the somebody that when somebody walks in the house they push they look you outside like nah i'm not where i have be a threat be you you're you can't be there's there's it's like they say it's like you know if you're if you have no fighting capability you're not a peaceful man you're a wussy you're weak nothing the only person who's a peaceful man is a person who's capable of fighting in war all right and they can they can choose to be peaceful but if you're your only opportunity is to be peaceful you're not peaceful you are what you are you choose to be peaceful you have no choice you're not a you're that guy on the target that we completely dismiss is not

hey that that's the Jordan Peterson quote or whatever but it yeah yeah i mean you just made it sound a hundred times better by being like you're not a you're you're not a peaceful man you can't decide between peace and war you're you're a pussy like you don't have you don't you sorry if you're not you're well i get on target and i look at you i'm like no he's out of threat if you take one of your support guys and go cover him you know the the guy who the guy you brought along and you know who's the s1 who is assigned to your team and you decided to take him out on target one time and he's out and he's like the number 27th guy coming through the door you say watch that guy because you know he's ass yeah he's like even though even the paper guy

but hey that that's that's it man that's like a two and a half hour podcast for you the listeners out there um and it's it's out there to the world um usually what we like to do is we like to like take good podcasts like this and go if you want the rest of it subscribe to the page around and pay up mother right but this one's free get the word out that uh you know you're back out there and uh you're doing your thing and people can root for you uh you're in the discord too so if you want um so i've got competitions coming up this fall um they'll be in the text channels training camp so if you join the patreon uh i'll probably have chief in here posting his stuff if he's not posting i will post it to make you feel like shit so if you join the patreon get in the

discord um his stuff's gonna be in here to make you get out there and do something so that uh you know you don't be a pussy you become a threat go be a military hmail so that's it guys uh cheers