Shawn Ryan Show - #14 Alan Cooper - Marine Recon/Green Beret/CIA Contractor

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

On this episode of the Shawn Ryan Show, Alan Cooper a longtime friend of Shawn's who is a Recon Marine, a Green Beret, and a CIA Contractor sits down with Shawn and discusses some of the highlights of his career. Alan Cooper was a Reconnaissance Marine in Operation Desert Storm who was on the mission that helped end the entire war. Please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shawn-ryan-show/id1492492083 Alan Cooper Links: Website: https://www.etsy.com/shop/truegritwooddesigns Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phalanx_concealment_llc https://www.instagram.com/truegritwooddesigns Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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He goes, you got a tripod for that 50 cal? No, but we got a 60, we got a tripod for that, and you know, I'm 16s and stuff like that, grenades and claymores. It's like, well, he goes, I want you to get that 60, I want you to get it up under roof, put a guy up there with him, I want you to get 10 minutes to get on the radio, call back to your rear and tell him you're done. You're not talking to him for the rest of the night because we've been D after we're going to get overrun tonight.

I hope you're enjoying the Sean Ryan show. Let me take a minute to tell you about vigilance elite Patreon. Our Patreon community receives exclusive behind-the-scenes content from the Sean Ryan show. As well, is an extensive library of Vigilance Elite videos not seen anywhere else. I also engage in live video chat with tier 3 members once a month where we discuss a variety of topics. Vigilance Elite Patreon is what makes the Sean Ryan show possible. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support.

And head over to patreon.com. Slash Vigilance Elite and get your subscription today. And what is like to know that the enemy is all around us. The only soldiers can talk of war and the adrenaline and the fear. And what it's like to know that the enemy is all around you and may be coming at you. In a moment some Marines are going to tell us about that. Serving as scouts, they got caught up in the battle for the Saudi Arabian town of Khafji. Nobody expected that Khafffty, to happen. Nobody.

The battle for Coffty was won partly because of what two small U.S. reconnaissance teams did. They were in Coffty as spotters to report on enemy troop movements and to call in air and artillery strikes, but they became trapped behind enemy lines for two days. A whole time that was going on. First time in this life, I was in there about a count of days. In 21.

Yeah, it was scary. Well, what's the contingency if we get overrun? So I won't. And he had a star cluster he is. I'm going to take the star cluster and I'm going to walk up in that yard and I'm going to pop it up and everything around here is going to light up like before it did you light. So there's six of you guys in a small less F-Team in the city, and that's it. Before dawn Friday, scattered bands of Iraqi snipers still roamed the town. They were all that was left of the force of at least one battalion that had attacked Koffji.

The Saudis claimed the Iraqis lost hundreds of dead and wounded, while Allied forces supposedly took only four dead and eight wounded. All kinds of stuff, don't you mind? Remember you got a machine? A police machine? Yes. Do you job, basically? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to SRS. As always, I want to kick things off and say thank you to all the patrons who've given us a tremendous amount of support.

Those of you who have been here since the beginning have noticed the production value just continues to get better every episode. I also want to talk about our new YouTube channel, Sean Ryan Clips. Sometimes these episodes are long and they can be kind of hard to digest in one sitting. So what we've done is we've broken up all the previous episodes and we're releasing them on the YouTube channel, Sean Ryan Clips. So go check that out. And lastly, if you can't support us on Patreon, we would love to get a review from you on iTunes. Click the link below. Please leave us a review on iTunes. All we want is just one word. If that's all you have time for, that's perfect. Thank you. Let's get on with the show. And now for our next guest, 014. He was a reconnaissance marine, a green beret, and a CIA contractor.

He also served in Desert Storm, which was a war in the Middle East over 30 years ago. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome my very good friend, Mr. Allen Cooper. Cooper. What's up? Welcome to the show. Thank you. You're the only one that's been up here

before we actually interview you. Yeah. The only one. Am I? Yeah, what's the Felix that done that chair now that we're not running around? The hot seat, man. Itching.

Nervous. I get nervous every time too. But yeah, you know, you built that bar over there. Yeah. That nice live edge, a tabletop, which I turned into a photo. Which is nice, I like that. Yeah, I wouldn't want that route to myself.

You would have? Yeah, nice. I didn't care for them legs, but I do like a hanging in a wall. And you did the V. You pretty much built half the damn studio, okay. It looks like you beat up the V a little bit, but you know, I broke it, but I glued it back together

when I was putting it up. You told me over to me, you knew what. Well, we'll talk about that. Okay, yeah. Off line, but I got you a little present. Go ahead. It's in the box over there. Present.

Yeah, yeah. Almost everybody gets a present. I didn't get the last couple guys a present because the Star Trek manner was so serious. Oh, look at that man Desert Storm. Yeah, well, you are the only person. I know the Served In Desert Storm. Yeah, that's that effect. Yeah, I guess I'm gummy bears. I Do like your gummy bears.

I'm working on these bears, wow, man. What do we got here? Yeah, you know what that is. Oh, yeah, I know what that is. Just a couple of fat pills. Oh, yeah. Oh my goodness, dude. Wow. Yeah. this is my favorite

And he knows it this is my kryptonite. What is that? That's a peanut butter bucket That's a peanut butter bucket Yeah, you know, there's nothing usually they got like articles or podcasts or YouTube videos or News or something to research the guests. There's nothing to research on you. So I had to get in touch with Lori or Wife. Yeah, my wife. She told you my kryptonite.

She did. She did. Where'd you get these? I think I found them at an antique store. I used to be addicted to antiquing and then I wound up with a house full of shit. I've actually got stacks of these, dude. Really? My dad collected them while I was in the house.

So are you, are you in one of those? I don't believe it. You don't have a trading card. No, I don't. You didn't make the card. No, didn't make the card this time. Well, that's too bad. Oh well.

You probably should have had. That's great, man. Appreciate it. Thanks. Yeah. But, man, I've been trying to get you up here for I don't know how long and you kept putting it off and putting it off and you live like 10 miles down the road.

Well, so let's just go ahead and address the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room? The reason why I was putting it off is, as you can see, I'm missing my front tooth. You got it back and then you... Yeah, I did. I've had two failed implants in that tooth. I've been dealing with this tooth for 42 years. I got it knocked out in a fight with one of the neighbor kids back in the 70s when I was nine. I think it was

nine. He knocked it out with an axe. With a little hatch. That's a serious shit going on. Well, we played rough back then, apparently. It was known, you know, it's going for the jugular on. Hell yeah. So, yeah, I've been dealing with it and just two months, three months ago, it failed again. So I had to get it taken out now.

I got to get a whole bridge, which means I got to shave all of them teeth down like a hockey player and stick it up in there. Nice. So we didn't want to wait for any longer, so we decided to do it without tooth. Yeah, we said the hell with it. We'll just address the elephant in the room.

It was like pulling teeth, trying to get you in here. Yeah, literally. Literally, yeah. But now I kind of want to just talk about, like I said, I don't know anybody or no of anybody that was in Desert Storm. And I think I was eight years old that kicked off from what 90? And yeah, so I was eight years old when that kicked off. I remember buying all those damn trading cards.

And yeah, those was like first grade I think. But so I want to talk a lot about that. I know you had a major part in that war and got some decorations from it And you're also one of the only people I know maybe the only one that was a you know marine reconnaissance marine Special operations then at some point you moved over to Green Beret Army Green Beret another

Green Beret, Army Green Beret, another branch of special operations. And then we wound up meeting at CIA contracting. And yeah, so you got three pretty bad ass titles. CIA, Green Beret, Marine Recon. Am I missing anything here? Nope, that's pretty much it. Do you, that's it? You don't have an overachiever or anything, are you? No.

No. No. No, this was blessed. That one place for me. You know, and another reason I wanted to get you on is because most of the people that come on the shows, they have something that they're trying to promote, whether it's a nonprofit or they have,

they just wanna get their story out. But like I said, no pun intended, it was like pulling teeth, trying to get you in here. And I wanna say that I Can't speak for the entire community obviously, but I think that you are a good representation of the majority of the special operations community. You don't like talking about what you did You don't like letting people know what you did You don't like talking about transition

and all the challenges that you faced. And as I can imagine, you're extremely uncomfortable in that chair right now. Oh yeah, my heart's going like this. Because you're absolutely correct in all that. We don't like talking about it. It just doesn't feel normal to talk about it. Especially, you know, if me and you were sitting here one on one, nobody else was in a room. Yeah, we can sit there and rap all day, but I know it's going out on the waves, you know, the airway, so. Yeah. Yeah, it's unusual.

Be good though, you know. Your kids will hear it. Yeah. Family will hear it. Your wife, parents, siblings, and, you know, we're documenting history here, so it's pretty cool. And the history books, yeah. Hopefully they don't rewrite it. But you grew up in New York.

Yeah, I grew up in a town up in upstate New York called Ilean, New York. If you want a Remington shotgun or rifle, look at the barrel and they'll have Ilean, New York stamp to it. My dad worked at Remamington Arms for 38 years, so that's what I've been raised around guns my entire life. Small town, it was a village, actually called a village when I lived there, because it was so small, but it's since growing up a little bit, and now it's called a town. I went to the school, the town next door, which was called Mohawk, Iliad.

But yeah, that's where I grew. That's in Central New York. What made you want to join the Marine Corps? I knew I was going to join the military when I was eight. As soon as I figured out what the military was, I would actually, when I was a kid, I would get out, you used to be able to get a magazine, there'd be a recruitment ad in the magazines,

and I would pull them out and fill them all out and send them in. And it was an invitation for a recruiter to give you a call, but I was looking for the free headbands and the free wristbands and the signs and stuff like that. They were calling me up when I was like 10 years old going, hey, we're going to talk to Alan Cooper. My mother would answer the phone and she'd go, you're going to have to wait for about another 10 years before he's old enough the go. He's only 10. And also, but I was looking to get the free stuff.

But I knew I was going to the military at a young age. It was absolutely no question. What was it? What inspired you? It was a family history. You know, it wasn't family history. I was actually from my immediate family. I was the first one that ever went in. My dad worked in a factory his whole life, you know. But, you know, I was, I come from

a, I don't want to say poor, but we were a low, medium class family. We got, you know, my mom used to shop for my clothes at the Goodwill and stuff like that. I mean, we were by rich and by no means. I can remember my dad telling me, yeah, we used to go down here and buy French fries at McDonald's for 10 cents. You know, every Thursday it was French fry and I, and still today I still eat McDonald's French fries. But there were 10 cents back then.

And my dad's like, well, I made $2.10 an hour back then too. You know, so they were kind of pricy. But the thing that made me want to come in, I think, was just I liked that war type thing. You know, war, they depict, you know, were they depict, you know, this was a Vietnam war was going on. It was a GI Joe at that time, you know, where all GI Joe was running around and just the country you couldn't turn TV on without seeing a Marine Corps, you know, commercial and stuff like that or the Army. And it was just very appealing to me, very appealing. So how young were you when you joined? I actually joined the delayed entry program, which was, well, I wanted to join when I was

18 or 17, but my mother wouldn't sign the paperwork for me to go in because I was under age. So I actually had to wait until I was 18 before I could sign. Her philosophy behind that was, I'm not gonna sign you into something and then have you hate it and then come back and blame me for it.

So, but actually my last year, my senior year in high school, I was actually enlisted, ready to go. What year was that? I would have been 87, because then 88 I left. 88 you left. Yeah, 1988, August of 88. I actually left two days before my 19th birthday. Damn.

Parasyl. What was your job description? In the Marine Corps? Yeah. Well, I started out. I started out as a tow gunner and the funny thing is is the way I got there was The Marine Corps had started a new program called MCT Marine Combat Training And I was one of the first dudes to go through this entire program and it was basically set up for To teach every marine, regardless of whatever MOSU were to be a rifleman,

or no combat operation type stuff. And I went through that, and it seemed like it was like months, but I'm sure it was only like 30 days or something like that. But it was a road march on that thing. And I got the biggest freaking blisters on my heels. I'm talking they were deep. And when it came to picking out MOSs, they go, what MOS do you want?

I go, I want whatever MOS, they're driving that home V, and I don't have to walk. And it was a tow gunner. So it was actually a tow gunner when I enlisted in the Marine Corps. Okay. And that's kind of part of the infantry.

The infantry's broke up into machine gunner, mortar men, basic infantry men, and then a tow gunner. So I chose a tow gunner because I didn't want to walk no mortar, it was tired of it. Right on. How long were you doing that before? I was a tow gunner for approximately, I think about eight months. I got stationed in Hawaii. Oh, okay.

So I went through tow gunner training, right? And then I got stationed over into Hawaii. I was in Hawaii in the tow gun, tow gunner platoon for, I mean, like three, three, four months maybe. And they came in and they said, we need you guys to take a swimming test. So they threw us all in a pool, gave us this extensive swim test. And only eight of us came up out of the water basically past. And they said, out of you eight right here, no longer in tow gunners or toplatoon, you're now in the special training section. And that's how my career started progressing. It was pretty cool. I didn't write off the bat. You didn't even, they didn't

even give you a choice. It was going into special operations. Now you're going. You're a special training section, and what it was was, it was, there was only eight of us, and then one dude was in charge of it. And they took us and they sent us to Coronado. In Coronado, they taught us over the horizon navigation. You ever hear the, there was a course out there called Caxen Course. So I went through that Coxing course.

It was five weeks long in Coronado. Well, real quick, just for the audience, because I don't know what that is. Over Horizon is those little zodiac, those rubber boats. And basically what you're doing is you're navigating that little boat in the middle of the ocean over the horizon, meaning past where the eye can see. It was the F470s Odeaac and the Boston Whaler, which had twin 70s on it. It was a small craft. But yeah, you're exactly right.

We did it over the horizon, navigation. We did wall deck launches out of a ship and some scout swimming type stuff like that, but the main thing was over the horizon to do amphibious landings. So they sent us there and we did that and then they made us all repel masters. Then they made us all high speed cast and recovery masters. And I don't know if they even do that anymore. Do they do that anymore? They did, but it was more out of tradition when I did that. It was kind of, I want to say worthless training, but it is.

You know, we're never going to do it. I thought I was worthless back then. I'm like, why don't you just stop the damn boat, let them get in. But basically for those of you that don't know, you took it up for a 70 zodiac or rubber craft and you mounted it onto a larger craft, larger boat, and then you would have swimmers out. The whole concept behind it was is you were basically too far out or you're too close to shoreline for a ship to get into pick you up. So you had your scout swimmers that did the mission, came out, went out,

swam out to a depth which this boat could pick you up and they would hold a lasso out basically and flip you up into the back of the boat And then go out to the ship. So You learn that and then we did spider-rigging. They made us all spy masters So once everybody was qualified and all this these disciplines we went ahead and started training the line units on amphibious landings, scout swimming techniques, and stuff like that. Did you know that this was special operations when you were doing it?

No, we didn't look at it like that. You gotta remember back in 1989, the Marine Corps had no special operations. They didn't recognize anything as being special operations. They didn't even consider reconnaissance, force recon or battalion recon as being special ops. It was just the Marine Corps period. Okay. So you got your little designations and other branches where in the Marine Corps, you're just a marine period. You know, it's like, hey, he's SF or he's a combat controller in Air Force or this or that,

Navy SEAL. In the Marine Corps, you're just marine. Back then, I don't know what it's like now. That's probably for the better. Yeah, it was, you know. So we did that and then we basically taught amphibious landings and did a lot of operations with, we trained a lot of brits on it too and Malaysians. I remember doing some Malaysians. We did a lot of Malaysians cross-type training with these. Can you give a brief description on what a scout swimmer is? A scout swimmer is basically an individual who launches either from a small boat. So what we used to do is, and this is one of the pictures I showed you there, it's with

the subs. Back in the early 90s, they were determining on whether or not to get rid of this different class of submarine. They felt that the use for it was no longer, at least this was my understanding. So they use the Marine Corps, they use Recon to go ahead and show that there is still application for the sub. We could still use it. So what we would do is we would get on a sub and we would do dry deck and wet deck launches off the sub. We would take the little zodes that 470 within 500, about 500 meters from the coastline and then deploy scout Swimmers. So the

Scout Swimmer, what you would do is deploy you get in the water with your fins on, all your gear, your weapon, and you would fin all the way into a certain distance from the coast, from the actual hinterland, you know, the coastline, and you would do a series of events, you know, you would also recount the coast, go up and down the coast, prescribe distance. Like, we're going to go a thousand or not a thousand, a hundred yards this way, then we're going to go a hundred yards this way, recounting the coast, seeing if there's anywhere anybody on the coast itself Then we would come in a little bit further a little bit further come up on a coast sneaky, you know sneaky sons of bitches

You get up on up on the land and then do a series of zig-zags looking for A suitable place to hide a boat. Once a suitable place to hide the boat was found. We would go ahead and signal the boat radio or whatever type of light we had. Bring the boats in. They have 47-years of zodiacs. Bring them up in. Take the motors off and we would silently take them all up into the Hentor land. The Hentor land being where the vegetation starts on a beach, hide it, go off, do your mission. Once your mission was complete, come back, recover the boats, and then launch back out. We would take the zoids out to a certain distance or a location where the sub was loitering. the sub would come in, periscope

would go up and we would stretch a line between our Zoads, the periscope would grab us and then pull us out to a suitable distance where it would then surface and then we would get back down in the sub. Just for the... That's a lot. Yeah, just for the audience, when you hear and then we would get back down into sub. Just for the audience. That's a lot. Yeah, just for the audience. When you hear special operations, first ones, then that's basically that's one of the ways what they're saying is a beach insertion like that,

hydro reconnaissance. Sometimes you're calling in, you're looking for a place where more forces can get in or you're just gonna do an operation, get in real quick, do your thing, and get right back out, but this is one of the ways how we as special operators get in to a target before anybody else,

before conventional forces. And that, yeah, you're right. That's one run-reasing. Another reason we did it was to do hydrographic surveys. And we actually did a few hydrographic surveys for LCACs to come in. Well, really. Yeah. All interesting, very interesting, fun. We had a good time, I had a good time at the core. You liked that? I loved it. Man, I was not a fan of Hydro Recon.

I loved it, dude. But, one, did you move into, so one, did you, was there a graduation? Four. From training. When you got your, did you get the designation? For STS, there was nothing this was just something they stood up and that was it man so that you liked the very

first very first recon Murray I even had a I had a Boston weller one of the Boston wellers with my name on it we all had our names on it. It was cool. No shit. So you were like, we're like, for force reconnaissance. No, this was for STS. Okay. Special training section. How I got the recon was through these guys. Okay.

So what happened was, the Gulf War kicked off. Well, it started in, I wanna say August of 90. Yeah. Sometime like that, it was around there. And the eight of us, STS guys, were what they had done is because nobody wanted us anymore as far as paperwork goes.

They didn't wanna take care of us paper wise. So they kind of just folded us into recon. Said, you guys aren't recon, but paper wise you fall into recon because nobody else wants you. We're like the bastard children, right? So we're sitting in the chal-hall all eight of us sitting or eating and we're like, the war just kicked off

and we're like, the hell are they going to use us for? I mean, there's no boats in a desert. You got to remember, we're only, we're 19 years old, 20 year old dudes, man, we didn't know nothing. We're sitting there eating. It's funny because the minute we got done eating and we walked over. They's the recon guy. I believe he was the first sergeant came up to us and said, go get your shit together, get your shit packed. You're now recon, we're going to war. We were like, you got to be kidding me. Were you excited?

Was I excited? Tell you the truth, I don't remember whether I was excited or not. I was more like flabbergasted as to the hell am I gonna do? Because Recon, you know, there's a lot of training involved in becoming a reconnaissance. We they didn't even make us do the damn indoctrination. Wow. They were like based off of what you guys do, and you've been doing it, you're basically doing a lot of the Marine Corps,

or Recon mission now. So you're just recon now. Damn, I would think you would be excited. I mean, eight years old, you're mailing in. Oh yeah. Snip its to the recruiters and having accidents with your buddies. Yeah, I remember I'm 52 years old, I can't remember everything.

We were all like an awe, basically, wow, we're going to combat or go into a war zone. The Gulf War was the first substantial war since Vietnam. You had a little conflict like Don and Grenada and Panama and stuff like that, but nothing at this level. We had enough time to sit there because we didn't deploy until September. To hear all the news and the horror stories. I don't know if you guys have ever heard them, but they were predicting there was going to be like 10,000 US soldiers killed in the first freaking hour, the wave, because Saddam

Hussein had enough time to build up a first defensive belt, which was minefields. And we can talk about that, but minefields all throughout the entire border of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Well, before we get into that, let's take a quick break. And then I just wanna give a quick history lesson to the audience because I was so long ago. Okay. All right.

Operation Desert Storm or the Gulf War happened over 30 years ago. So let's do a quick recap on what happened. On August 2nd, 1990, Saddam Hussein, the Prime Minister of Iraq, sent his army into Kuwait to basically take it over. Now, Kuwait was a major oil supplier to the United States. The eight years prior to this, Iraq was at war with Iran and the US actually backed Iraq. We actually turned them in to the fourth largest military in the world at that time.

Now we have to back Kuwait because they posed a great threat to Saudi Arabia, also another major oil producer. So, if they would have taken Kuwait, if Iraq would have taken Kuwait, then Iraq would have turned itself into the fifth largest oil producing country in the world, so we had to step in.

Now, let's just go over a couple of key facts with the war. Now, George Bush sent over 500,000 US troops to Operation Desert Shield. On January 17th, 1991, Operation Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm after all diplomacy that we tried to do failed. Desert Storm became the largest air campaign at the time since the war in Southeast Asia, Vietnam. The US and 40 Allied nations flew 18,000 combat missions over

116,000 air sortie missions and dropped 88,500 tons of ordinance in that war. The air attacks during this war lasted for a total of six weeks, while the ground war actually only lasted for 100 hours. Iraq tried to split up the US coalition by launching scud missiles at Israel, however, Israel did not respond thanks to its allied partnership with the United States. Desert Storm was the first time that we saw the MIM-104 Charlie missile system used in combat, which is basically a missile system used to intercept the scud missiles that were launched from Iraq. It is also the first war where the

US Air Force utilized space technology and stealth technology in the war. In total, about 697,000 US troops took part in that war with 299 losing their lives. Let's get back to the show. Now, the rest of the story. So yeah, so you're now recon and you're packing your shed, you're going to war. I'm now recon. They said you're going to Kuwait

or we're going to Saudi Arabia because Kuwait was overtaken by Iraq. We're like, where's Kuwait? I didn't know where Kuwait was. Like we actually got our gear ready. They started giving us classes on how to do call for fired stuff like that. It wasn't really much time to do patrolling type stuff. And you know, first of all there wasn't even a second or a third platoon. There was only two platoons in Recon at the time and when they integrated us in there, they stood up a third platoon

and split us up with a bunch of new guys that were coming in. So we called this ourselves third herd as, you know, whenever you're third platoon, you're third herd. So we got in there and we set up, we got ready, we started packing, checking gear, repacking. I mean, you know the loadout, it's just horrendous inspection, inspect this and whatnot. I mean, the rules, and you had the rules, you can take any porn with you, you can take

any booze with you, or any personal firearms. Cause we went all, we all went out and actually bought our own pistols. Oh, really? Yeah, we all went out and bought our own pistols and we're gonna take, take our own pistols over there and they're like, no, you're not. So they squash that.

But good thing though, because I bought a Taurus and the Dan thing broke like the first freaking time I used it. But that's what you want and bought a Taurus. Yeah that's all I could afford I was an E3 man so yeah we got it all ready to go everything was ready to go I think we left in September some somewhere around September from where I remember. We flew there. I believe it was, they don't have anymore. It was a C-141. I believe we flew over there on a C-141

and landed somewhere and saw your area. Well, how long, when they told you, pack your shit, you're going to war, did they give you a time estimate of how long it was gonna be before you were actually- They did, but I kept getting kicked back. We were actually on lockdown. We couldn't go anywhere. We had to stay in the barracks and whatnot, but it was like, okay, we're going and then we went. How long was it? From the time we got the word until the time we left about three weeks.

That's it. So you did call for fire classes. Yeah. And whatever other classes they want. You got to remember, we didn't have all the technology. I had a Prick 77, dude. Yeah, that's true. And Prick 77, a harder use, I mean, just correcting your life. Nowadays, that's like a... We had no GPSs, we had a compass. We got a GPS and when we got over there though, it was actually a GPS out of a helicopter. And there was only one do that, no, how to use it. It was a team leader. Nobody else knew how to use it. He can use it, you know. Night vision goggles were crappy at best,

but know what body armor. Oh, he had was a flat jacket and it got an LBE at the time. Can't teams in a butt pack. Real low key, low, no tech. So there wasn't much to call for fire, man. Yeah. And as a reconnaissance element, you're not involved in direct action and stuff like that.

So room clearing, basic room clearing was all we needed to know. And I think that was just more or less common sense. Wasn't an official class or anything like that. We were very in comparison and would have done into an ASAP and in the agency. This was like grade school, like elementary school level type training. Really? Yeah.

It was just gut, man. Let's go. Let's do it. We're Marines. Was it, were you going to an urban environment or? We didn't know what environment we were going in. You know, it was just going to be desert, urban, nothing. Nothing. We didn't know anything about it. We weren't told anything about it. We were just, knew We were going improvise over come and death. That's a whole Marine Corps motto, you know. And we lived our life like that. We didn't care. Let's go. So you got there. So we got there and it was how to shit. So we got there and it was how to shit. In September. He knows.

We got in there the golf, within the golf. And I remember they put us in these big werehouses on cats and it was just blistering hot man. No way seen, no nothing. We sat there on cats for a good probably two weeks drinking warm coke. I remember they go, hey, you want some coke? Yeah, sure, we put it open it up and it turned into foam as soon as it hit your mouth.

It was just all warm shit, you know? But they had, like I said, they brought in them global preposisting ships. I had all the equipment on it and they started off loading that and we started getting that equipment. You know, as a, as a Lance Corporal, we were even a sergeant in the Marine Corps,

we were all sitting around, and it was basically the higher up, we're doing all the logistics stuff, and then bringing that logistics to us. Only a few people were involved in that, and that wasn't team guy, so to speak, you know. So we just sat around until they figured out where we were going.

Initially they took us to like a military compound. I couldn't even remember where it was. It was actually rooms with AC. Stuck us in there. We stayed there for a little bit just to acclomitize and adapt to the area. We continued to go over training, you know, like area. We continue to go over training, you know, like the 50-cal. No, we had 50-cal, so we did the timing on the headspace and timing for the 50-cal and stuff like that. We went to a few ranges, I believe. One thing they had, and this will play later on, is they had AT-4s, but they only had the 9-millimeter practice stuff. Oh, we never shot an AT-4s, but they only had the 9mm practice stuff. Oh. We never shot an AT-4 before.

Always shot with them practice 9mm. Tracer rounds. Yeah. But anyway, we did a little training on that. We got vehicles at this time. No uparmor. Nothing. Just soft skin. No doors on half of them, humbies that were

somehow they got painted desert, some of them did anyway, desert colors, you know. We stayed there for a while and we did a lot of card playing poker and then we got the word we were going to a place called Manifa Bay which is on eastern side of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf area right up through there. I believe yeah. And then we went to Manifa Bay and that's when we sat down and we started digging holes. They said we were protecting the border and stuff like that but we're just loitering there basically. Is that what these pictures are? Yeah, they're kind of in the same area, living in holes for the most part.

Then they've set up a tent city and we went to a tent city and hung out there. I can remember getting hit by multiple rocket launchers, it was funny funny because you can see them on the horizon. They look like Roman candles. That was the first time we got hit. Rockets went up over us and they ended up hitting a guard shack for MP shack, but they had played that chemical weapon warfare stuff so high, so much that everybody was extremely paranoid over that And we all had gas masks and mop level, you know mop level suits on us

I swear the first time that thing went off. I had dawn and cleared that entire mop suit in about 30 seconds had Don and Cleared that entire mobsuit in about 30 seconds. Yeah. It was like, because they had different alarms, and the mop level alarm went off and we're like, holy shit, man. But that thing, I'm Don and Cleared, and then you just sit there and then you start hyperventilated. Did I do I got any gas? Did I get gas? What's happening?

And then they give the oil a clear, and it's like, wow, man. And that's, you know, that's kind of an effect on you as a kid, you know? Twenty years, twenty-one. A lot of the guys that have gone in, during, say, if you went into Afghanistan, joined the military in like 2014, you've already heard about combat for the last what? Fourteen years. Here we didn't hear nothing about it, you've already heard about combat for the last what 14 years. Here we didn't hear nothing about it.

The mindset wasn't there at all. It was what it is. But yeah, the first time we got hit was like, oh shit. Then after that they kept heading us and heading us and pretty in the soon it's like okay, the alarm went off and you're sitting there and you're ragged on it. Yeah, all right, whatever. Whatever. Did they ever want to use them chemical weapons? No, they didn't. Well, they claim they did after the fact and they try to roll it into the golf war syndrome stuff.

But if I don't think officially, they were ever said that they did use chemical war. I mean, I'm sure the government would never lie to us. All right. I don't know, man. I think the big scare was that we had our artillery unit actually had tactical nukes and if they used any of that they were gonna nuke them a little bit. Just you know a little bit nice but it never came just a little bit huh?

Yeah just a little nuke. Just a little nuke. Nuke of water. Yeah. Chemical. But yeah that was that. This was pretty much like what I refer to the admin phase, just so I was trying to get used to what the surroundings and whatnot.

And people trying to figure out the higher ups trying to figure out how this is all going to unfold. We just did a lot of standing around, sitting around. And like I told people, I said, combat isn't always boom, boom, boom, boom, you're not always going. There's a lot of downtime. We did have a lot of downtime. Now we started moving up a little bit more north

towards Coffey, towards the border, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. And then we started doing more legit type stuff. Like, okay, now we're getting up here, we got a purpose, and we're here now to do reconnaissance. How many of you guys were there? We had, am I particularly team, we had six. Six, how many of you guys were moving towards Coffey?

Just six? Yeah. Oh, shit. We operated just in a six-man element. So you were conducting reconnaissance surveillance for a conventional unit? We were doing the reconnaissance mission. For the whole front, for the 600,000 deployed? Well, no, because it was all spread out long-eyed raccole through there just for our corridor, which was mainly Marine Corps.

They're Marines, I believe, our first Marine Division. And just our little slice of the division and just our little slice of the ale. Shit. Nobody expected that, Coffee, to happen. Nobody. They didn't think they were, I don't believe anybody thought that, said I would have the nuts that come down to there into another country, Saudi Arabia.

So, we started again, missions to go up into Coffty and recon that area. And actually they had hit an oil platform up there, or oil facility, and I'll refine gas, refine right. So that place was smoking and we went up there and investigated that and kind of went through the city. The whole city was abandoned. And the day it abandoned was the day they started the air campaign. Why was it abandoned? Did the population just evacuate? The population just deem out. They all got out of there.

And it was quite the site because as soon as that air campaign started, there was nothing but taillights going south, getting out of there. Damn. I mean, they said they dropped what, 88,500 tons of ordinance out of the sky. They saw living daylights out of them. They were nuts. They pounded the will of fight out of them people. Because none of them really wanted to fight. I got pictures of POWs. We had so many POWs coming south, we couldn't take them all. They were just like, hey, keep going, keep walking. Damn. I want to take a minute to tell you about vigilance elite Patreon. Patreon support is what makes this show possible

and gives me the ability to bring these one-of-a-kind stories to the public. Go to patreon.com, slash Vigilance Elite, and support the Sean Ryan Show today. So we got up in the caftune, we started finding locations to set up our equipment. You remember back then we had the 104 and we had a set up in actual antenna, full-wave dipole or B, different types of antennas to set, tucked back to the rear.

So we had to have enough space in order to do this. So we find suitable locations to go ahead and do this, usually our rooftops and stuff like that. We had been operating up there in Coffty for a couple weeks before the actual event happened. So. What were you looking for? Were you just reporting any activity

that was happening? Just any activity that was going on. Okay. There was some stuff going on there that we weren't aware of. There was a joint, I believe it was a joint operation element that was just right on the border, just north of where we were operating on Kache. And what it was was, it was a combination of, there was a few seals up there, Army Special Forces, a lot of radio battalion type guys, you know, nerds on radios, and they're all sitting up there in a little up in this little house up there. And we came in, we found an SF team in Kaffee, just rolled up on them. Nobody talked to nobody. We didn't know who to hack anybody was, or if there was even anybody up there. We had talked to them. It was funny, I remember we had been eating MREs for like a month and they had like these big pans of nice lasagna and all kinds of stuff, man, we're like with the freak, man,

we're over here eating shit and we're eating good. We ain't take a bath in like a month, man, and they were all cleanly bathed, so we were like, where are you coming from? And we're like, we got a safe house just north of here that we're operating on. So we thought, you know, there was absolutely no guidance. You can go and do whatever the heck you wanted to, you know? So we actually went up to that safe house. And it was like, there was a commander sitting in there, right? He sat in on a couch and I remember typical Haji house, you know, it was just concrete with some

rugs and stuff on the ground and the. He sat in this couch, the TV's playing, and this movie that was playing was Tom Cruise and Cocktails and Dreams. And he sat in there, he looks at us and he goes, go ahead and weapon and dreams. And he's sitting there, he looks at us, and he goes, what kind of weapons you got? We're like, we got AT4s, a 50-cal, and he goes, you got a tripod for that 50-cal? No, but we got a 60, and we got a tripod for that,

and you know, I'm 16s and stuff like that, grenades and claymores. It's like, well, he goes, I want you to get that 60 and want you to get it up under roof, put a guy up there with him. I want you, you got 10 minutes to get on a radio, call back to your rear and tell him you're done. You're not talking to him for the rest of the night

because we've been D after more, I'm gonna get overrun tonight. And we're like, I was like, bbzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Corporal E4, but the thing is as he was a 35 year old E4. And Lentz was his name, but Lentz is like, all right, so he told the radio guy to go out there and get contact with these back to the rear and tell them we were gonna be off the line for a while. And we got the 60 up on top and Lentz was like, what's the contingency if we

get overrun? So I won't. And he had a star cluster. He goes, I'm going to take the star cluster, I'm going to walk up in that yard and I'm going to pop it up and everything around here is going to light up like the 4th of July. It's like this is crap. You can't make this crap. It's like this is crap. You can't make this crap up. I guess he had air support. And it was all stacked up ready at his bidding. Of course, we didn't know any of that, you know? So that was the longest freaking night in my life.

And we sat there and we got one round that came in and hit like in the front yard. And as soon as the sun came up, lint's as like, get your stuff together, we're out of here and we got it, the heck out of there. And we went back down to the city. So that night we positioned ourselves in the city and I remember we got in one place. We're still with the SF team?

Nope, we left. We left the radio ourselves from them. Okay. Because we thought that, you know, they're gonna bring the heat. We don't want to be, we don't want to be, we only got six dudes, remember. We don't need too much heat.

So we went down to do our job again, reestablished comms with the rear and set up in this other place, another house. I remember sitting there, it was at night, and I was sitting up there, and we pulled chefs over watching the city and that was my shift. I looked over and we had a call sign. If we ever saw multiple rocket launchers going off and you know what

they are. They're the ones with a big box on the back of the truck. And we had a call sign or a code word mail call meaning this thing's coming down south and it's going to hit you. I'm sitting up under roof, you know, thinking, whatever. I looked off in the horizon, I can see that thing just going, you can't hear it. But it's like, and I was looking at him,

and they were coming up, and they were coming right at us. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. So I'm, you know, I watched the first like three of them, had the biggest freaking fireballs I've ever seen in my life, and they were kind of walking in to where we were and I ran downstairs yelling you know, mail call, mail call, we got incoming so we all buckered down and everything and that was it. About three or four rockets hit like right there in front of us. The building ran and coming down to what we call the main MSR.

The main area was two MSRs that came down out of Kuwait. They split. One came down on the east side of the city and one on the west side or the east side by the ocean. And then one came a little bit more inland on the western side of the city And I'll say wow, but anyway that happened that night So we called up and told them you know, this is what happened we poured it all that and then we just moved location

Because we didn't know if there was an F.O. in the city or what not people watching us. Yeah, so we just Move the new location we sat up and that night. Is this still the abandoned city? Yep. So what's it like watching? I mean, was there nobody was there? Nobody was there. You just watching nothing all the way? We're going in and out of people's houses. Damn, dude. We had nothing to do. That's aery. No really, no rule other than to go go up and recon and walk around and survey this city. We were up there, we went into the bank, they hit clean the bank out. Was it they rated or do I mean whether? No, I think the people took it. Yeah. The people took it that left. You could find we found a little bit of cash laying around a little

bit of this and that, but pretty much they took everything out of their houses and packed it up on their car and left. Damn. Anything of value? What's the population of the city? I mean, oh, I have no idea, but it was, I was looking at it on Google Maps and it's pretty good size city. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty good size.

And there was nobody there. Damn, that's eerie. All there was there was cats and dogs. You know, we had full rain. We had a pair of bolt cutters that we referred to as the keys of the city. So if we wanted to get anywhere, that was bolt. We just went over. So there's six of you guys and a small less F keys to the city. So if we wanted to get anywhere, that was bolt. We just went there.

So there's six of you guys in a small SF team in this city. And that's it. Pretty much. The SF team was kind of up out of the city. OK. And I can show you that on the map. We had another recon team in there, but they were kind of separated from us.

And this is when it started. So another six people. So there's 12 how many SF guys were there? They were totally out of picture. So there's 12 people in this entire damn city. Yeah. 12 Americans. What happened was as we had small arms fire that night, a lot of illumination going up. Everything was lit up and this was just north of the city and we were like the team leader or CEO in the back of here. I mean they were that close where they could kind of hear this stuff going on and we're like well we got a lot of illumination going off. We got a lot of small arms fire going. It's we uh, we're going to stay. Let's see what happens. So the team leader said, we're going to stay. And then we watched

that whole group that was just north of us on five tons and they all evacuated. They actually gotten a little bit of a firefight with them and then evacuated and left. Totally out of the city, went all the way down north. Let's say we're staying. So we stayed. The night went through the whole night, a little bit of a small, large fire. I don't know what they were doing up there. You know how herbs like to shoot up in the air when they win something or whatever.

They could have very well been doing that. They had excited. Yeah, you know, and a couple clips or a couple of mags. But anyway, so the next morning, once again, I'm on watch again. It's 06 in the morning. And I hear this noise grinding. I'm like, what the heck? I'm like, what the heck?

And I'm like, what the heck? So I got the binos up and I'm watching. And I started seeing people walking down the MSR, the main MSR that came down in front of us or right to the side of us. And they had a RPG pack on. And then I looked over and I heard more grinding. I looked over to the east and I started seeing them M1

111s I believe they are armor personnel carriers. Oh, shit. I was like dude. They're all packed down here like gypsies and I ran down it let you know team leader know and they started getting on radio and started reporting and doing all these reports. So how it worked was is Lens the team leader and the RTO would stay down at the bottom. We would observe and then give them the reports and they were just all reports going out. How many people? We had T-55s come down there. That's an old tank from you know, 55, 1955. T-55s come down. I think I counted like six of them. Then we had the T-72s come down and then more and more people came down. So after it was all said and done, it was like they said there was around 750 to 1000 Iraqis in the city, overtook the city. And we were in the middle of it. How many? About a thousand, 750. They think they were the-

And there are six of you. Well, six of us, plus six of us, so about 12 of us total and there was They believe it was the I rack you to put Republican guard that was coming down to their to the fight These guys in care about nothing man. They're pretty cool chilled, you know, they were just walking down there Of course, you know, they've been in combat too. They just got done one fight in Iran. Yeah. You know, so kind of emboldened you a little bit.

Yeah. So they overtook the city and we're setting in that building, just reporting. And once we reported back that the city was overtaken, that's when they started ramping up the coalition force to come retake it. They weren't going to let any Marines come in there. They tried to portray it as a rescue mission for us. But it's not a rescue mission if you choose to be there. We chose to stay there to report.

It wasn't a rescue mission. Hey, let's get these guys the hell out of here. They're not supposed to be here. So as they were working their plan up, they developed, they could put this coalition together. It was They put this coalition together. It was Cattaris and Saudis. Cattaris were there because they had tanks and Saudis had armor personnel, carriers, and stuff like that, like LABs, and with guns on them and everything like that. The reason the Marines weren't allowed in the city, and the Marines basically set up all around the city on the outskirts of it and provided

fire, but they weren't going to let them in because they didn't want to level the city. They let the Marines, they wanted to keep the collateral damage to a minimum. It's what they really wanted to do. Because if you let the Marines go in, their Marines clear buildings with grenades. Yeah. You know, and they would have leveled the whole day building. It's not going to be any city life. You know, it would have been ex-cats.

Take the gloves off. But they set up this coalition for, and it was mainly guitarries and a couple tanks. And we had Cobra helicopters flying around. We had a couple of heriars come in. I remember the heriars came in and dropped the load. And then a Sagger missile was fired at them. As soon as that Sagger missile, this is a difference. As soon as that Sagger missile was fired at a herior. They stopped all air. No more air came in. Then it was just cobra sitting on the outskirts with toe missiles and hell fires. And that was pretty much it for his first support.

While we had artillery and 12 Marines artillery was supporting that whole number two. Here there's never came back because they shot a second mess so that gets either one lose one. I don't understand that but that's what it was told to me. So I got this fiasco of a coalition together. In my buddy who was in the rear they actually put a team together to come up to try to get us, you know, to meet us as we were coming out. And it was funny because they got in this line. It was the guitarries and the tanks, the Saudis and.V.'s or the L.A.V.'s and then our guys in the Chaplain's Home V because that's all they could get.

And their spearhead and this freaking attack up the freaking road, the MSR, guitarry tank got hit. Boom, blew the freaking top off it and everybody else went like this and they were in the momentum and my buddy with spearhead and the attack and the chaplain's home of the... they actually got up in the city dude and then dismounted and started moving. Starting their fight and... yeah they were starting moving, shooting and communicating and getting in the city while all the coal-issue force said, whoa! And it was kind of comical, because you hear all this over the radio. I remember my buddy, somebody come across the radio,

and the coal-issue was actually being led by an SF guy, who I still remember his coal sign was Coyote. And it was a major. And SF Major was orchestrating these coalition folks to get up there and clear this city. His name was Coyote. And somebody got on a radio and said, hey, Coyote, is it okay if I throw this grenade? And Coyote come across three years at a radio. And he goes, I don't give a shit what you do.

I don't give a shit. What you do? Whatever you want. But it was funny because often the distance you could hear that grenade go off and it all hell broke loose. Oh shit. It was funny. And then they were like, hey, where the hell are you?

You can hear him moving and communicating. They're like on the radio and he's like, one of the guys goes, which location man, we need to know where you are, where your location is. And he's looking around and he's hearing him on the radio. And you can just visualize this. And he says, he goes, I don't know where the hell I am, but it looks like every cat and calf

she took a shit in here. He's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like,

he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like,

he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, they were got to us, but just the comical crap that was happening during this whole, this whole endeavor it was for you. So they finally got the coalition together. Couple things that happened during this whole process. The other team that was more to the western side of the city actually called an artillery strike on top of us. And if you ever heard an artillery round go off over your dam head, it's probably the

loudest thing I've ever heard of my life. And it was time-fused. So it exploded in the air and then through shity rounds or whatever it was all over and you know just for personnel, basically. Well, that happened to pop all the tires in our vehicles and a couple holes in the gas tanks and stuff like that. So we were screwed, they're kind of sorta. And we had one guy, and I don't know why he never sent anything, but there was one dude that was sitting in the building next to us.

And he was actually shooting at us, but he never told anybody else. It was weird. What do you mean? You mean one of the other guys in our ragged shooting at you? We saw him in the building next to us And he was just like picking and he would shoot and that would be it and then a little later he would shoot and then he would go down And we don't come for it. I went out

Well, did you did you shoot him? No We didn't we didn't do it. We didn't respond to him because we didn't want anybody to know us. We had a BTR-50. Oh, you didn't know if he actually saw you or not. You thought he would. Well, he was shooting at us. So, the thing, the weird part is, is why didn't he call him reinforcements and give him an opportunity to wait?

He never did. But we had it. And here's that AT AT4 comes in play. We had a BTR-50 Roll right in front of our paws, right in front of our position and They're all sitting up out of the turrets and everything. They were close enough. We can see their faces and everything And me and my buddy were sitting up in this small little room But at AT4 locked and cocked safety pen out getting ready to put this round through if they had sauce. And they drove right by and never once looked up in there.

And today I even think about it. I'm glad we didn't shoot that thing because it would have blew our freaking air drums out of our heads because after later in life I've gotten a chance to shoot an AT4 and you don't want to shoot an AT4 off with no air and protection, so in a little concrete room. It would have, we would have come out of there bleeding, put it that way, you know. But for some reason this guy never shot. So as it progressed, we were in there for 40 hours, roughly about 40 hours behind totally surrounded by the Iraqis. And finally, the coalition had made it a corridor in which we

were able to drive out. And I got pitches to that vehicle but all our tires were blown out. No doors, all soft-skinned vehicles and we drove out, right around all these arachis and they never shot at us, never saw us and we went right out, popped right out and that was that. And that was, there was 40 hours of that shit. 40 hours. What about the other team?

The other team had a little bit more closer call. They actually, one of the guys, Brown, as his name got hit, friendly fire. Got some shrapnel in his leg. He actually got a purple heart out of it. I don't know if you knew sterling sterling was over there and he was the RTO, but they had people, Iraq, he's actually in the building, same building as they were in. They can hear them coming up. They actually burnt all their crypto. Back then we had cac sheets and everything crypto wise. And they burned it all, destroyed it all and they were ready to go, you know, fist of cuffs. But they never happened. You know,

this guy over here, when we when we pulled out, we shot a saw and about two, two or three grenades up into that building to cover our, our ex-builder. And nothing ever happened. We don't know whether you, we got him or what, it's just went away. Yeah. Well, I mean, that happens a lot, you know. You get an engagement, you don't go. You don't go look at it. Don't always go back to check and see how many batteries are laying there.

But, you know, Or if any at all. It was quite the event about 40 hours worth and our contingency was, if we didn't get out that night, we were gonna walk out because we were relying on Saudis So we're gonna the contingency was hey listen if we don't if they don't make a corridor for us to get out of here tonight We're just gonna go ahead and drop this stuff and we're gonna walk out through the Wadi

and Sneak out because you know we own the night. We had the MVGs we had where it was crap but yeah it was a better one they had. They didn't know. Yeah. You know. Crap to compare to what we have now. Oh yeah. What was it? Was it like the two to ones? It was a box and I think they finally gave us we started out with the box ones with two to Lenses and then they finally got us the one lens But it was the first generation. Yeah, and that first generation you can see nothing man

There's nothing I've never looked through them. Yeah. I don't have that wall. But, you know, we've been up there working, and like I said, the reason I got on CNN after we got back to the rear at some launch was the week's prior that we were up in there. We actually had a watermelon on our team and he wired a bunch of phones up on this abandoned city and we all made collect calls home. So my mom knew I was in that city. Oh, sure. And then the next thing she sees is the city's overrun. You know, and back then, it was smelt snail mail. You had a right letter and she might

have got it in two months. So the quickest way I could get the word back that I was all right. And she was going nuts by the way. Both my parents were going nuts. So you called your parents and your radio men wired the phone so that you could make a collect call back to New York to tell them, hey, we're in Coffee. We're in Coffee. And they flip the news on and Coffee's being over on by the Iraqi Army, which is the fourth largest army

in the world at that time. Holy shit. Yeah. So the quickest way to get the news to her that I was all right was to get on this TV guy Which happened to be CNN Damn and let them all know that I was still alive We focused first on the battle for the Saudi border town of Kaffce. It was captured by the Iraqis on Tuesday and retaken by a combination of Arab and American

units early today. Some fighting continues on the outskirts of the town, located near the Saudi Arabian border with Kuwait. We get a pool report filed today by Brad Willis. It is shortly after 8 o'clock, Friday morning, February 1st. Although the Saudis claimed overnight that they have reclaimed the city, we are seeing a number of armored personnel carriers and Saudi tanks rolling into the city. We have heard some loud explosions and sporadic small weapons fire. Clearly there is still some resistance, some sniper fire and some heavy Iraqi weapons still doing battle in Kakhki.

During the height of the battle, these Marines were trapped for 48 hours inside Compton on a reconnaissance mission. Today, they feel lucky to be alive. Tell me what it was like for you being in the outpouring of battle for Compton. Now I'm gonna turn the screen about what we're talking about. You know, I'm pretty scary. I know whether it's making or not. I'll kind of stuff fall into your mind, you know. What to do. Check your head, keep a level, you know. Remember you got a mission,

complete your mission. Your job basically, what kind of fire did you come under? I had a machine gun. A lot of bullets are going by. I had a small arm. A sniper fire. And we took a sniper fire yesterday. Or not.

This one. Was there a time you thought that you were going to lose your life? We took a sniper fire yesterday or not this month. Was there a time you thought that you were going to lose your life? I'm going to. Panamonium. Damn. Well, let's take a quick break. You okay? Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show.

If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes, and leave the Sean Ryan Show review. We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. All right, we're back from the break. We had one more op. I called it the last op. But you, this op back from the break. We had one more op. I call it the last op.

But this op helped end the war. Pretty much. I think in my opinion it did. So there was this big stank during the entire war about these defensive belts, right? Where were they? They were minefields that were laid out. And Saddam Hussein was trying to prevent anybody from rolling

up in there. So what they did was, as they sent up, B-52s and they did arc like daisy cutters. It's a big, huge bomb that they roll out the back end of it and it kind of creates a creator so to speak, a lane. So they wanted to know where these lanes were. They didn't know exactly where they were. So they sent us. This was pretty much, I guess, our last mission in the whole war. And it was like a 15-click movement patrol on foot. When we went up on foot, we carried a rough sex.

There probably weighed about a hundred pounds. Burlap, we were gonna go up on the first defensive belt, recon it, find the hole that this daisy cutter made, and then go ahead and mark it and then bring the troops up there so they can all go through it. Same six guys. You're one of six guys. We got up there. There was actually two teams again, except this was another team besides the one that was in Coffey. So we got up there. It was a patrol from Hell, man,

because I was a point man. We had them crappy nods. We had found earlier a cache of toe poppers. Toe poppers is a small mine like this is for a guy to step on and blow his foot off. At least spread them things all over the place too. So we had found a cache of that earlier, and so we were real leery about this toe popper.

So as we're walking up, patrolling, I'm the point man looking for these things, plus scanning and horizon and everything and We had to do a lot of stopping the reason being is They like to crush your coke cans and then leave them up in the desert and they're about that big Oh, man, and they look like toe poppers. So it's like We got something up here and I want to just kept that going and going. So we finally got up there just before the sun was coming up and the whole plan was

to take this burlap that we just carried for 15 plus whatever clicks. The dig holes, hide sites, put the burlap over and hide. Just sit there and observe and recound the, the horizon. And once got dark, we're going to go up there and recap of this, uh, break into defensive belt. Well, we got up there and started digging holes. And guess what, when you turn sand over, that's been hot and cold, hot and cold, it starts to turn colors.

So it wasn't the same damn color as when we dug it up. And we would all stuck out like sore thumbs. So we just happened to find a bomb crater. I got a picture of that for you over there. A bomb crater, probably about 15 feet deep, dude. And we all got down in this bomb crater with our burlap over us and we hugged the sides of this bomb crater and just put one dude up and paint pink over the top, you know, and did the pulled security, I guess. And later that night we went out, we found the first offensive belt, we found the minefields

and we found the cut in the belt and annotated that and everything was going pretty smooth, everything, no problem. We were to the point where we were like relaxing now, so we're all in this bomb crater, sleeping, you know, hanging out, eating them RIs, it would not, you know, just hang it out. Well, a fast mover came in. And for some reason, dropped a 500 pound by a bomb on us, or right over next to us. In the Shrapnel, all along the edge of that freaking bomb crater, dude, I had it landing like right here next to my head.

Yeah. And it was someone or nobody got killed. I mean, it was like, what in the world? Well, the rear hurt that and freaked out. So they freaked out. They came up. They pulled us out of there. We got back.

Teams showed them on the map where the cut was. They said, all right, they passed that to the rear. Everybody got untrucks and went through that cut in a defensive belt. Next thing we know we were in Kuwait International. Damn. And that was it. I'd like to highlight what Kuwait just told us because it's a significant event and his humility didn't do this event in any justice. So basically, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the border was one huge minefield with only a few routes in and out, which nobody knew the routes.

Basically, what happened is the mission that Kuwait was on with his unit. They found one of the only routes into Kuwait from the Saudi border, which in turn, as soon as they found that route, US troops were able to take that route and get into Kuwait, which basically led to the end of the war. So what I'm telling you is the mission, success that his unit and him found, led to the end of the war. That's pretty significant. Now let's get back to the show. Yep, that was it for us. Everything

they were all pushed out. Iraq, our Kuwait International was completely of ghost town. No Iraqis, no nothing dude. Wow. It was that was that quick. We went through the all-war, all- oil fields. You know where all the burning is. Burning oil fields were going on. The hierarchies were actually like them on fire as they were retreating. And we went through all that stuff. We got up to Kuwait International and it was it. Damn. We stayed there like for two days, two or three days, and got on trucks and went back south and staged and got ready to leave. It went that quick. I think the reason the war went that quick is because it was well planned and well organized. Really, Schwartz Golf had it, had it shit together, as far as I'm concerned.

You can get there with all your critics and what now, but the damn thing was over at 100 hours. We bombed the living daylights out of him so bad that he didn't want to fight, man. They bombed the fight out of him, they wanted to go home, they didn't want anything to do with this. And then POWs were coming down like 50, 150 at, you know, little sections with their white flags. Who was considered a POW that was at the Iraqis?

Iraq, you aren't me. They were just, I quit. They were quit. Two of their guns down had white flags and they were going south. There were so many of them, we couldn't even, we couldn't take any of them. We just telling the keep walking south, man. Damn. No room for them. So it was, it was good as a whore. I guess it makes sense. I mean, it's, you know, they said when I was researching the war, it said, uh, you know,

88,500 tons of ordinance got dropped and 18,000 air emissions. We sat there in tents for like a month, I think, before we even went out. Yeah. And why, when you can hear them bomb the living daylights out of them, arc lights, all over the horizon at night, all you saw with boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And this one out for what?

A month, maybe more. Yeah. Before we were even actually moved out to go do anything. Well do you know what were they bombing? All their sights, their tanks and all that. It was along the border. They had a big trance line up there on the border too. Yeah. Okay. They're just hitting all their key spots and hitting their tanks. There were some tank battles up on the eastern side, I believe, the army was actually engaged in tanks and stuff like that.

They had an entire fleet out in the ocean, out in the Gulf, and my buddy was on there, using the Marine Corps, he was a tow-batter, but he sat on that ship the entire time, and at the end of the war, Schwartzcoff said, I never planned on using them. They were nothing more than a diversion. You know, how'd you like that? Sit up here forever and just be able to diversion. Yeah, that would suck. I hope you're enjoying the Sean Ryan show. Let me take a minute to tell you about vigilance elite Patreon. Our Patreon community receives exclusive behind-the-scenes content from the Sean Ryan show.

As well as an extensive library of Vigilance Elite videos not seen anywhere else. I also engage in live video chat with tier 3 members once a month where we discuss a variety of topics. Vigilance Elite Patreon is what makes the Sean Ryan show possible. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support. And head over to patreon.com slash Vigilance Elite and get your subscription today. You came back from Operation Desert Storm and you left the Marine Corps.

Yeah, I did about three more years in the Marine Corps. I did a six total of six years in the Marine Corps. Okay. I continued on in the Marine Corps. Did some great stuff, you know. I went to the island of Tonga. It's actually the country of Tonga. We helped them set up their military. They used to be the Tonga National Guard, but they changed it to the Tongan Marine Corps. We helped them set up their little operation out there. I went to dive school, jump school, mountain leaders' course. You know, went to a bunch of schools, had a good time and whatnot.

Why'd you leave? Oh, you know, I got disgruntled. I think the problem my problem for leaving out of the Marine Corps I was stayed in if I had left white I Did the whole five and a half years basically in Hawaii? Yeah I think if I left I probably would have stayed in But I got a little disgruntled Happens and I said okay, I'm out. Yeah, I get it. I mean, so I left. I actually talked to your dad a little bit, did some research.

He started working for Remington Arms for like six months. He couldn't handle it. He couldn't handle our transition. You said, I got to get the hell out of here and then You join the army. Did you know you wanted to be a green beret when you join the army or well? Yep, this is the thing when I was out of the Marine Corps about a month. I knew I made a mistake I was like You know, it's been in me since I was a kid. So once I got out, I was like, this is a big mistake. So I actually lived in Montana for a while because of ex-wife in mind. I lived out there with her.

But anyway, I called it the Navy. I said, hey, I want to go Navy SEAL. And I said, when I take any prior military. What year was this? That would have been 90, 94. They weren't taking any prior military. So I said, all right, dammit. They go, well, we could put you on a list,

but I said, how long's the list gonna be? They said, about two years. Said, I can't wait two years. So they call up the Air Force. I said, hey, I wanna go PJ. years. So I call up the Air Force. I said, hey, I want to go PJ. I want to be a pair of rescue guy. They said, we're not taking any prior military at all period. And I was like, well, I know the army will take anybody. Now keep in mind, I was still got the marine mindset. and the marine hated the army.

Back then. So I was like, all right, the army will take anybody, but I had a lot of buddies that transitioned from the Marine Corps and went straight to SF because they had a program called the SF Baby Program. I forgot what the designation was, but they were going that route. So I said, I'll do that. I called them up and I said, hey, I want to go join the army. He said, come on down.

Sign the paperwork. I said, I want to go SF. He said, you can't. I said, well, my buddy's dead. He said, well, they did away with that program. I said, okay, so what are you going to give me? They go, we're going to give you the infantry. A loving bravo.

I said, all right. What's that? Empantry. Okay. Then he goes, you can choose where you want to go. You can go to Korea, Italy, or Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I said, where's SFAT? They said Fort Bragg. I said, I'm going near I'll go there.

I never been in a line unit, dude. I heard horse stories about him. I'm like, you got to be kidding. So I was dreading this shit. So I got down there, they got a thing called replacement. So you go there to get placed to what unit. And I showed up dude, I had long hair, no uniforms, no nothing.

Ha ha ha. The guy looked at me and I gave him my folder of my stuff and he looked at it and he goes, you want to go to Lurse, which is a long range surveillance, basically recon. Because I had trains and Lurse guys from Hawaii on scout swimming techniques and stuff. I was like, you damn, yeah, I want to go to Lurse. He took me over there, introduced me to the commander. Commander goes, you want to go to Ranger School? And I said, nope. He looked at me, he goes, well, you ain't coming here

if you don't want to go to Ranger School. And I said, well, I guess I'm going to Ranger School. He goes, go get a haircut and get you some uniforms. And be report back. So that got me out of that line, unit crap. So Lurse, long-range surveillance, is considered a stepping stone for SF. Okay. I had to do a couple years in regular army before they would allow me to go SF.

So what better place to go to Lurse? Lurse worked out great. I went to Ranger School, I went to Halo School, and some other stupid schools. And once I gave them the time back for Halo School, I said I'm going SF and I went to Selection in 1999. SF Selection. How did SF Selection compare to in the training now in the training

compared to what you're going? SF selection, believe it or not, was the hardest thing I ever did. Really? Yep. I went totally unprepared out of shape. I said, this is what I'm doing. This is why I came in the Army. I said, I'm going to do it, and I went and did it. It was the old selection process. I don't know what the new one. They had a new one after a few years after I was in, and they keep changing it up. But it was definitely an ass kicker, man. When they said this song, know 100 mental train today and only three will win the Green Beret. It's true. I watch dude.

All the way side. How did it how did it kick off? Well the first thing it's 21 days. The first the first few days is admin days, they give you classes and whatnot what they're doing is, in my opinion, was they're trying to worry you out because you only got a couple hours of sleep. Let me just wanna explain something to the audience. SF training is not 21 days. You go through selection to be picked to go to SF training. That's what's 21 days. 21 days, you go through selection to be picked to go to SF training.

That's what's 21 days. 21 days. So it's a three week course, ASCIC or course, in hopes that you get selected to then go to the next training to become a Green Beret. Right. Okay. I just wanted to clarify that. So what they do is they give you a bunch of classes.

They give you classes on land navigation. Land navigation back when I went through, I don't know if it is, yeah, I can't speak for the guys now, but was real heavy. So you got to figure the way they run it is you got a 65 pound rock sack on your back the entire time. That's minus water and food. You go everywhere with it. Every event is done with it. Everything. And you do this land navigation course, which is called the Starter course. Basic land now. And I believe if you're comb, if you added all the distance up, you did. You do night and day. It's probably about 12 miles a day in distances. And you do that, I think for like five days, five, six days, we were doing that.

And then, you know, they break it up with obstacle courses and other stuff like that, and they're not the process. And then you have what you call team week, which is pretty much the last, they'll during the last week. And that's basically problem solving, you working as a team. They do different events every day as a new event. And once again, you got that 65 pound rucksack on you. And you're doing like, they'll give you a Jeep with tires missing on it. You have to move it 12 clicks.

Oh, shit. So they'll give you a Jeep with missing tires and a couple poles and some lashings. You guys figure it out, and you're pretty much picking a damn thing up and walking 12 clicks with it. That's one of that. Another event was like sand babies.

So they had this, I believe it was like an old rifle range, but they had berms all the way down through it, so it was like this. And you had to get so many sandbags down there, like they had a hundred sandbags. You got to fill the sandbags, put them on your 65-pound Rucksack, carrying 300 yards or 300 meters over drop them off,

come back, get more, and it's an event you gotta do. I don't know whether I don't remember if it was timed or not, but holy cow, you want to talk about what you're back doing this dude, I want our camp walk. I got back problems, you know, so that was one of that. They had a bunch of different events, like the Sandman, they had a seabag full of sand. They gave you steel pipes that were solid. They're almost solid, steel pipes that were like 12 foot long. That probably weighed 150 pounds within themselves. So you figure a 500 pound C bag with all these, there was like four

and plus you got your 65 pound rucksack. You got it set and on the back and you're walking 12 clicks with this thing. You got that and pells of pain, pells of pain. They give you pells with holes in them. They got two versions of it. One's with sand, one's with water. We got the joy of having one with water. So, you know, pales with holes in them don't hold water for long. So you have to carry this fill these pales up at the bottom of this hill with string and the string and then walk up this freaking, you know, 75 yards straight up freaking hill and then dump them in this bucket. You gotta fill this freaking 50 gallon brome up

with holes in, you gotta do it all fast. The thing, I remember that, that sucked for me bad because I don't have a little big gate, long gate. And they put the, they grabbed the tallest dude. He was like six something and put him up front and you gotta stay with him and they can tell him to set the pace. And they're up there whispering in this here

the whole time going, you better go faster. We're gonna drop you if you don't start moving out and he's moving out. Now in a smart individual, it's like, who wants fastest I can, and not buddy fuck up, you behind him with this dude, didn't do it. Oh, about killed me.

But anyway, there was a bunch of events. In the last event of the whole process as a 26 mile road march, four time. Of course they don't tell you what the time is on it. You just go do it. And it's with that 65 pound rock sack plus you got to put all your water and your food to last you however long it does. So I did it 26 miles. I

I seen I seen dudes dude that with broken feet Yeah, I'm trying to get do this. Oh, this is a gut check You just want to see how you're gonna do if it. If you're going to fail, if you're going to win or whatever, I think I did it like seven hours, but this dude had broken feet. They just pulled him out. He made it because they just wanted to check. They got a little bit of compassion over there, you know, but he made it. So I finished that. It was 26 miles. Then they sit out there and start playing more mind games with you and they put you in this group and they call your names off until you all to go over here. Everybody I call your name, you go over here and you know typical mind games and then they

made this crew go all the way over here so we can hear them and they're making it seem like we're the failures, but we were actually the guys that made it. So out of, literally, I'm telling you, hundreds of dudes are maybe 60 something made it. And I'm going to label it was hard training, hard, hard, good trick, good check for me. Well, let's take a quick break and when we come back we'll talk about what you're doing when you got to your team and what those Asian deployments would like. I want to take a minute to tell you about vigilance elite Patreon. Patron support is what makes

this show possible and gives me the ability to bring these one-of-a-kind stories to the public. Go to patreon.com, slash vigilance, elite, and support the Sean Ryan show today. So we just wrapped up selection. What after selection is show up to your team, right? Nope. No. After selection, show up to your team, right? Nope. No. No. After selection, you now start your MOS training.

Okay. So, I was an 18-broadbo weapon sergeant. So that's, that training was a few months. Let's see. We started in April and ended in November. So, whatever that is. Did you know what team you were going to? I knew a group I was going to go to.

I knew I was going to the first group. You find that out after you graduate. I graduated on the November 20th, 2000. That's when I graduated the course, the Bravo course. After the Bravo course, you now go into language school. In language school, depending on your language, is between four and six months. My language was in the region. So you do the four months of that. That was a four month training of everyday language school.

After that, you go to Sears School. Get your ass kicked. So that was three weeks long. I believe it's three weeks. Yeah, three weeks long. Three weeks in Sears School, which is an excellent school. It sucks all the way up and it's not excellent until the last day. The last day is when you figure out serious school

and everything that happens, how everything works. You know, I never want to serious school. No. So let's go into that real quick. So serious school starts out with the first's let's go under that real quick. So serious school style starts out with the first week is class work on how to survive. You go over history on individuals like Nick Rowe. Nick Rowe was a green brand Vietnam that was in a P.O.W. for like five You go over his stuff. You go over different techniques of

how to Tell a story and how to Manipulate and try to get them off of what you're actually doing So you got that for the first week the second week is like survival stuff like how to kill a rabbit how to skin it Stuff like that third week you go on a mission. So your mission is blah blah blah whatever you're gonna go out and do it, they break you up into like a 12 band team, you go out and do it, you end up becoming into a survival situation. So they don't feed you or nothing during this entire week. You're basically living off the land Whatever you can find like we found a deer head and ate it and then we found snakes and rabbits and ate them

We robbed somebody's garden with green tomatoes and we fried them up and had fried fried green tomatoes We ate those, you know some guys got lucky and got came across a pig farm and pulled a pig out of there and ate that. So the like I forget how many days was surviving off the land and then they put you on an any corridor. So you're eating in now. Ian is escaping evasion. So the enemy is on your ass. So you're gonna get caught. So we got caught. They put hoods over our heads through us on the freaking truck took us to a compound. Strip this down naked. Everything goes there. They do not give, you think all they're gonna do that shit. They're gonna do it. They smack the 11 day lights out of me. You stand in there naked and they got a girl down there.

They don't give two crap, man. You're sitting there with your shawing hanging out and she's right there. Look at her. You even making 40 of them. Cool. Cool. Yeah.

They don't care. You think they're gonna pull punches, they ain't. Racism, they don't care. They'll call you any name. If you're that, you're that, you know, and they call you that, whatever. They just constantly trying to manipulate you and get you all to fight amongst each other.

That's what they're doing. And that's about three days. So you don't eat, don't sleep, you're a POW and a jail cell, they let you out to do yard work and chores and stuff like that. And during this whole process of why you're doing that, they'll pull individuals out and put them in a cell

to interrogate. So during the interrogation, this is where you're trying to do the things that you learned in the first week. How do you know you deny everything you know you make counteraccusations, you admit to nothing, you come up with a story that kind of goes along and you fight it. And they are allowed to hit you. I never been smacked by a woman so hard in my life. For laugh and I smiled and she just kicked a little crap. Because one of the guys was in a cell and one of the instructors, you know, they talked into like, hey you, you, you, that, you, Mr. Greenberg, you go over there and get me Captain.

We had one Captain, they know who you are. They go, he goes, I want Pilot Captain because there are some aviation guys in there. And I went over there and I knew who the Captain was and I go, hey, he wants a Captain. They're all looking at me smiling because there was a few captains over there, but there was only one pilot. I go, he wants a pilot and the dude's face dropped. And I started laughing, dude. She saw me laughing.

She come the hell out of there and just smack the living daylight. I thought of me. But anyway, they will smack the sh- not yet. They will give you a black eye and, uh, an anno joke. So, that's like three days of Asbeatons. They got light cells and hard cells. And you have to pass these. A light cell is a guy going,

welcome, welcome, sit down. Well, Max, take it easy. Would you like some cookies? Yeah, you need them in, you know, four or five days. We just like some food. A lot of guys will say, I ain't eating that because they think their buddies are starving, so they're all a team, so he's going to starve. Well, they don't teach it.

If they are for your food, eat it. It's better than you that it is being wasted. So that's a soft sell. And then the hard sell is they get in there, they tie you up and they smack you around a little bit. They punch you in the gut a little bit and stuff like that, and they try to get you to answer the question. The hardest sell to defeat, the hardest interrogator is a soft sell guy.

There was a guy in World War II, a German, I believe it was a German interrogator. He could get anything out of anybody and he never once hit him or mistreated him. Now, sure. Because once you establish rapport with that individual and you're nice, they loosen up and they're willing to talk. Now it may take time, but if you're continually nice to that individual, they'll tell you anything and everything you want to know. So the soft cell is the one you want to, and you don't learn this until after the course.

So the soft cell cell is the hardest one. That's why you go into interrogation. I've been to an interrogation but that the cops go to and you gotta be nice. You gotta get all up and nice and sympathize with the individual and become part of their world. You know, and just don't understand why you murder and rape them three women, you know. They were definitely in the rock. And you just start talking to them like that, and the next thing you know, this dude's opening up. You know, so they teach you all this stuff.

And you have to pass. They're in there actually grading you, and if you don't pass, you keep going in, and you keep going in. That was a little bit thickheaded on the hard cell, and he goes, listen, dude, and he stopped for a minute. And he goes, listen, dude, you need to put more fake in it.

Or something like that. So I was like, ooh, when I started acting like I was being beaten, and stuff. And they took me out, they got a pond out there. They called it the People's Pond. He drug me out there and started dunking me under the water and this and that. And we got through that. But the thing is, is the school is very informative.

It teaches you how to do that to avoid answering questions, how to come up. Like my idea was I had a Marine Corps tattoo. So I was automatically a private, idea was I had a Marine Corps tattoo. So I was automatically a private, a truck driver from the Marine Corps and I knew absolutely nothing and they bought it. They went with it because that's the only pretty much the only tattoo that I had at the time. And they ran with it. They actually see they don't know everything about you but they do know mostly about you and they actually thought I was in a Marine Corps at the time.

And I was just there going through training on his mind. But I was actually a nice eff guy with it and whatnot. Some guys break down. I've seen guys break down. They went lopey. And the guy had to pull out, stop the training, pull out his card and say, I'm staff starting so and so, you're in the United States Army and you're here.

Do you know who I am? Oh, shit. Yeah. It'll get to some dudes. One guy gave up everything. He says, yep, he's an S up dude. He's an E six, he's an 18 Bravo and he speaks this language. Needless to say, that dude wasn't, wasn't very well liked after he did that.

Even when the instructors, they were pissed off that. Damn. Breaking that fast. But after the whole thing's done with, that's when you sit back and you look at it and you learn from it. It was just phenomenal. One of the things you see,

the unfortunate thing is, these terrors aren't gonna give a shit. Yeah. You know, you're going down there with your head locked up. Yeah. Conventional forces like the Iraq, fighting Saddam Hussein, you got a chance. And we did have prisoners of war during that. If you remember Bravo 2-0, they got out. They finally got out. They evaded. They all died of cancer, I think, from drinking some chemical water, but they all made it through there. There was a female girl that became a preoW that we actually think we saw them put her in an armor person

arrow carrier and take her north. It was the one female, if you have research that, you'll see it happened sometime during the battle of Cochie. And we believe we did witness that, taking her up there. That stuff will work. She came back, you know, you go up there, of course they weren't seared trained, but you have a chance of surviving when you're dealing with that type of force.

These animals, now these savages, now they're going to care, man. So is it obsolete? Maybe, maybe not. They're looking to make an example out of us now. Oh yeah. You know, they want the press, they want to just graphic as possible. Yep. But yeah.

So once your school is over with, then you pop pop over to your group whatever group it is you go to You get side of the team. So you want the first group first group and Then you started deploying Yep, you deployed primarily to Asia Southeast Asia help my first team. I was on and what was considered a-sat team in advance special operation technique team. It's basically secret squirrel stuff like we didn't get you to see or the case officers do. Kind of sort of like that you set up SDR's, drops, stuff like that. They teach you all that and my first trip was to Nepal. Catman do. And we were there training military decision

making process because at that time Catman do or Nepal was having issues with a terrorist organization called the Mowest. The Mowest? Yep. The Mowest. And this was during, after 9-11, so every country that had issues with somebody else labeled them as a terrorist, they got US funding to fight those terrorists. And with that, US funding comes United States special forces and we go in

there and we train them. So we went, my first trip was in a poll, we went ahead and trained the Nepalese Army on military decision-making process on how to locate the Ma'amus and plan attacks and stuff like that. That was about five weeks. Every trip we did was about five weeks long. Oh, no kids. So you would deploy for... Oh, yeah.

We were there for a month. And then you were back home? Yep. What's the deployment cycle then? What's that? That's different than normalism. I mean, in the SEAL teams, it's six months, nine months. No, we did like J-Sets, or referred to as J-Sets, joint operation, training, joint with joint countries or friendly countries. I forget with the actual acronym stands for,

but basically J-Sets, we went on and they were roughly between three and five weeks. Okay. And you go out there, it took a signature from the Rumsfeld, was at the time when I was going. So the secretary of defense, he signs off on it and then we punch out and do it. So real world stuff, it's just not combat. Yeah. Yeah. Where else did you have to do? So I've been there, I've been to Thailand. Thailand, we go to Thailand, we were doing a lot of training with the FBI, DEA, Border Patrol type people. And what we were doing is they had a trouble

with narcotics coming across the border out of Burma. So... What kind of narcotics? OPM? OPM. It was opium coming up out of Burma in the golden triangle up there and everybody knows that narcotics is a one of the Moneymakers for terrorist organizations. Yeah, so we were up there. We'd chain them I would train them tactics and shooting skills and stuff like that and medical. They always want in medical and tactics. Working, we worked a little alongside with the American DEA because the American DEA is

over there also to assist them in trying to stop the flow of narcotics coming into Thailand. Them countries over there aren't like here as far as tolerance for narcotics. Malaysian Thailand, you get caught with narcotics, you're dead. Malaysia was publicly hanging yet. No shit. Is it still like that to this day? Probably.

They don't mess around over. What year was that? 94, being 93, 94, or 2003, 2004, time frame. Wrong decade. Yeah, no good. So we're around there, 2004, or 5. I've been up there, 2006.

Thailand, I've been to Thailand probably about five times. We actually did one mission there that lasted three months. Oh really? Yeah, and that was working with the Border Patrol cats. And you went to the PI too? We've been to the PI, I've been to Minnow. Minnow is a prominently Muslim island in the Philippines. And we were working with the DEA, their equivalent DEA and FBI on, once again, terrorist, counter-terrorist operations because we have, Philippines got J.I. coming up out of Indonesia and the MILF, which is more of an anti-government type organization or they were. And I'm talking back then. I don't know what current events is right now on that,

but at that time that's what we were doing. We were training them to handle them. And we've had teams even go further down into the PI at Holo, which is an island even further closer to Indonesia, where they were actively, the Philippines were actually actively engaged with these terrorists. So they were actively, the Philippines were actually actively engaged with these terrorists.

So they were fighting them at night and they had some pretty good firefights from what I heard. Philippines is actually a third area of the global war on terror. So you had Iraq, Afghanistan, and a lot of people don't know that we had the Philippines. That's the number three. Number three. It's not as bad as Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is still. Matter of fact, a lot of these terrorists that have Afghanistan, they found in Thailand. Yeah.

So we were there basically to help them. We actually had a guy killed in Menden now. We had a, there was a small cafe outside the little base that we stayed on, that a motorcycle, due out of motorcycle, had it packed full of explosives, parked outside of that little cafe, touched it off and killed one of our guys and wounded the captain. So there was, there was a little activity down there. And it's a joint effort down there too. The Marine Corps is down there and the Navy is down there too.

I don't know what SEAL group it was, but yeah, they're down there too. Everybody's up great. No, the West Coast guys, work that area. I don't remember which team, but it you know, it's the West Coast. Yeah, it was over there. Although that's all changed now, everybody. Yeah, once the war kicked off, they kind of, uh, restructured everything and, uh, all the specific areas of different teams went to kind of just, they don't want to weigh. But yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, Philippines hot, we actually have been to Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is a big island, huge island matter of fact, right off the coast of India. In their issue, they were having problems with an organization called the Tamel Tigers. Tamel Tigers have since been demolished, killed. But we were there doing a medcap, teaching them how to keep their people alive until they could get to the hospital. Because it was a jungle warfare, They'd have a wounded guy.

They couldn't get the guy back to the hospital for like three or four days. So the whole the whole idea was for us to go there and teach them, you know, we did live tissue and stuff like that to teach them how to keep an individual alive for at least three to four days so they can get them to a hospital, get them a proper treatment. That was actually a pretty good trip. Have you ever done a live tissue training? Yeah, several times. Yeah, it's excellent training.

I think I'm done like three or four times, but it's very beneficial, especially if you're working in that type of job. I mean, you kind of made it awesome. Yeah. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, I know. I mean, it kind of made it, it's awesome. Yeah. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, I know. I mean, it's, you know, just real as a guess

without actually doing the real thing. Yeah, and you learn a lot. I mean, a lot. We had a guy there. He was a Shrinlachan. And we were given a class for the chest tube, right? We're like simulating. We had a guy pretend he was shot

and he lays on the ground. He's like, oh, the guy next to him was sitting next and then he goes, anyway, happens. Then you don't do that. And he goes, yeah, he goes, yeah. And he pulled up his shirt. He had been stitched up the side with an AK-47. And he had three holes in him and he goes, I didn't do that.

It's like, all right, dude. I guess you're the authority on that one because I've never been shot. But yeah, I mean, it was awesome. I mean, I learned so much hanging out with different folks. I really enjoyed being with these endages throughout the world. Malaysia, I went down to Malaysia. We actually did a joint operation that consisted of Malaysia, Australia, and Guam, Cipan. And what it was is a culmination of different organizations, both American and foreign,

and we were looking for a dirty bomb. They actually brought in D-Trip. Have you ever heard of D-Trip? No, I haven't. They're a US organization that has nuclear sniffers. They got things set up. You go down a highway and you see them things where the trucks pass under and this, some of those are actually, I believe, looking for nuclear weapons, nuclear material

possibly coming through. They got them in airports, they got them everywhere. They fly around in a helicopter in New York City with them, especially after 9-11. Yeah. fly around in a helicopter in New York City with them, especially after 9-11. These folks, they actually had sniffers and they allowed us to use them. And they had a small piece of nuclear material that an individual jewel is carrying around. And I think we actually got them in Cipan, where we actually, but we went through Malaysia, you know, all around Australia. It was a good time.

Damn. That was like an eight-month deployment, eight months. Philippines, all over. Oh, so you just bounced around from the outside? Yeah, we bounced all around looking for this dirty bomb. It was a whole scenario. Damn. And you guys got him. Yeah, we got him in a Saipan. I think it was Saipan of Wom. But we had both the ASAP team,

which was the Advanced Special Operation Techniques, the secret dudes. And that's the team I was on. It was all plain clothes. The equipment we had back there was jug. I mean, you had a radio. You know what a Prick 68 was? Yeah. Big freaking thing like this, split up, and had a connector, and we had that on us.

We were down there walking through the old string and zoo with all this junk. Ha ha ha! Ear pieces in, you know, it is just what we had, you know. And walking all around, looking for this dirty bomb and doing little meets with people, individuals. Of course, it was scenario driven, you know, it was like, but it was good training, good time.

I didn't realize that ASAP program was developing. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same.

I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same.

I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. I know that it was the same. you know, had what it took. So, yeah, and I was like, I went through it. I passed everything and they said, we're going to recommend you to go to the level three, which was three months long, dude. Yeah. And I just got the group. And I was like, I don't want to go. They said, they were ticked up.

They were like, all right. Two months later, I was on a halo team. So I spent my time on a halo team, my remaining 10 years on a halo team. Oh, right on. Yeah, no, I was, they started that, man, I don't know what you're, they started it, but I heard about it maybe of four time frames. Yeah, that's about right. There's one though. We started when I started hearing about it in the teams

and then I was gonna go, we did a course with the British MI, with some former MI6 guys, which was actually really, it was one of my favorite courses that I've ever done, never fired a shot, never was actually really, it was one of my favorite courses that I've ever done, never fired a shot, never blew anything up, but it was all about blending in. It was some of the coolest shit I've ever done, winding up on the 18th, 20th story, Bank of America building. Nobody knows who the hell you are.

It's just, what can you infiltrate yourself into and without being detected, what happens when you get questioned? How do you handle all that? I really fucking liked that course. And then whatever I'm getting long wanted, but then I was supposed to go to, I was supposed to go, they'd picked me to go to some course at MI6. Oh, yeah.

And then I got yanked and I want to war one time at the end of the day. That's too bad. Now that I think about it, we actually had seals in my broken axle class. Oh, really? We did. Yeah. You guys.

I don't know looking back, you know, if I would have, I mean, because I would have given up a lot of combat experience, had I wound up going to that course and then eventually getting into the ASOT thing. So I don't necessarily regret it or anything like that. But it was just so different than blowing shit up and shooting and shoot, move, communicate, going in the kill house, doing close quarters combat battle, you know what I mean, taking houses down and then you're doing something that's really permissive and blending in. And it was like, that was the James Bond shit of the, you know what I mean, it was pretty fucking good.

Guys use that a lot. There was a guy I went through the cue course with that actually went Delta Force, and they use that a lot over there and he actually Dressed up like Hodge. Yeah, got on a bike And drove through Fallujah on a bike And he was dark complexion with the beard and everything and mapped out all the positions they had already set up in Fallujah and went back and reported and reported, and then went in and cat-tack them all.

I mean, that stuff is viable. Even when we work with the agency, you're still got the SDR portion and stuff like that, and you know, you're always watching your back, and you learn how to do that, all that kind of work. Oh, yeah, it all came, it all came like when we started, when I started working there, you know,

before I met you at all I like that stuff, man I really like that under the radar you're out there on your own and and it's just It's another it's just a whole other Whatever you want to call it trade craft. I loved it. I love trade craft I love figuring it out things. I even probably, I still do it today

when I drive around. Yeah. It's just something with me. And I just do it just to do it. And I'm always watching, always looking, always trying to, what's he gonna do? Always trying to keep a step. You know, it's funny.

Cause it's just, it's ingrained in you. I guess I have to do it for so long, you know, it's funny because it's just thing-grained, and I guess, happy to do it for so long, you know. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed working for the agency. It was a good time. Working for them, or something like that. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, but let's take a quick break, But let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and wrap this up. Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get really appreciate the support. Thank you.

Let's get back to the show. Alright, and we're back from the break. Kind of covered everything. We're going to talk about transition. I think I'm going to spare you the pain of talking about transition. So let's just talk a little bit about what you're doing now. Now, I know you just launched a new business, but when you left the agency,

you started Fowlings Concealment, and we've been using your products here at Vigilance Elite for what? Five years. Five years now. Called them out on, I don't know, a couple of different videos, and and but

now you're kind of venturing off into into something new. Yeah. So what are you doing now? So I decided to go ahead and try my hand at woodworking. I enjoy doing woodworking I have for a while. The new company's called TrueGrid Wood Designs. I've got an Etsy account, and I believe it'll probably be up and running within the next week. We're focusing right now on cutting boards, butcher block board type. I have a thing for the women called a spa board. Even dabbling in epoxy type art. So wood epoxy type art, charcuttery boards, serving trays. It's sky's a limit with this.

You're stuff's amazing, man. I mean, you made that raw edge bar over there for the other called live edge bar. Live edge bar. You made that. I made that. It's actually a river table and it's made out of the actual stones out of your river, out of your stream and it's got a river table and it's made out of the actual stones out of your river

out of your stream and it's got a trident Yeah, table tops stuff like that the hardest part right now for me is Trying to decide what type of legs to put on a table So that's the big challenge, so they net, I got all of everything set up. It's operational. I'm actually building inventory right now for when I go live in about a week on Etsy. Well, we'll make sure you're live before we release this episode.

So the link to both Phalanx Consulment, if you wanna buy a holster, they're all handmade, custom, that's below, which you're really focusing on nowadays and what you're transitioning into is the woodworking and your work is absolutely fucking infrared. Well, I appreciate it.

Yeah, so that's linked below. And yeah, man, I just, I want to thank you for coming out. I know, like I said, I know it's neurobracancin in that damn chair. Well, I loosened up a little bit. I feel a little a lot better now. You know, initially you don't know what's going to happen. Yeah.

But I thoroughly enjoyed it. And for your viewers, I appreciate you supporting Phalanx failings concealment. We had our five year anniversary last month and not we, me. A lot of people out there and I appreciate your viewers for supporting me throughout the years. Excellent. I mean, tremendous, tremendous support. I really do appreciate you pitching it for me. For those of you out there, he really didn't

know me that well and pitched it for me out of the kindness of his heart. Just vets, supporting vets, and I think that's extremely important. I buy all, most of my material, to make the holsters from vets. So your support in vets and it keeps giving, you know, keeps giving, and I think that's an important thing. Yeah. I just saw you, man, you know, I mean, we did one deployment at the agency together, and I left a couple of years before you did and I can't even remember how we got in touch,

but to be honest, do you? Yeah, my sales were like going bonkers, man. I was like, what in the world's going on? I don't remember how I found out. You were making holes, man. Somebody told me that you were promoting my stuff. Yeah. So I called you up and that's how it started.

I started. Yeah, I found out and are you called me? I just know how fucking hard it is to transition out of Oh yeah. A life of special operations and agency work and go into the business world having to deal with real life. And what I want to do is realize that is endeavor to persevere, just keep going.

But before we do wrap this up, do you have one phone call I need to make? And when I was talking to your dad, he said he had something he wanted to tell you. Is that why he's been waiting for me? What's going on? He's calling me up today. Hello? Alan.

Hello, Sean. How are you? I got, I had a great talk with you yesterday talking about your son and I sitting right in front of me and we kind of talked about you had something that you wanted to say to him. So you're sitting right here. Can you hear it? I'd like to thank you first for having me on your podcast and You have my son sitting there. Yeah, he's there I'd like to just tell him as his father. I am so proud of what he is accomplished when he was in the military

And I've never told him that Sean or Shane John and I've never told him that. Sean or Shane? Sean. Sean. And so it's been a long haul pouring in the military and he stood at the test and he came out of the wearer with his military career. All right, I thank you dad

proud of him and I'm proud to be his dad really and I want him to know one thing in life Is that I love him dear? We usually don't say to each other in a sudden. I love you too, Daddy. Celebrate the Black Friday sales event at Woodhouse Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram in Blair. Step into a new Jeep that you can count on from the awarded new Grand Cherokee to the capable 2022 Jeep Compass that Jeep lineup won't compromise on power, technology or comfort, delivering confidence and convenience for 29 years.

Woodhouse Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram in Blair is your trusted auto partner. Visit us off highway 30 in Blair or online at woodhouse Chrysler Jeep Dodge.com. The Bullwork Podcast focuses on political analysis and reporting without partisan loyalties. Real sense of day job is sprinkled on our PTSD. So things are going well, I guess. Every Monday through Friday, Charlie Sykes speaks with guests about the latest stories from Inside Washington and around the world. You document in a very compelling way.

All of the positive things have come out of this, but it also feels like we have this massive hangover. No shouting or grandstanding. Principles over partisanship. The Bullwalk Podcast. Wherever you listen. or grandstanding. Principles over partisanship, the Bullwork Podcast, wherever you listen.